The In Death Collection Books 26-29 - J.D. Robb [543]
“Okay. Good work. Feeney, progress?”
“I’m going to pass this to the civilian.”
When Eve looked toward Roarke, Feeney shook his head. “Wrong civilian. Brief the lieutenant, Jamie.”
“McNab and I have been putting in some long hours on this, and back with Feeney and Roarke and a couple of the others upstairs. But we just couldn’t figure any way to speed the cleaning process. Not with the extent of the corruption. Then Roarke said something about trying to split another matrix clone on a second JPL and merge texels with the corrupted pixels and stir up the ppi to defuck the bitmapping.”
“Did you say defuck?” Eve asked. “Is that a technical term?”
“Ah, it just sort of expresses the procedure. See, for this particular application, the regions are made up of supixels, and when infected the standard triad—”
“Stop the madness.” She resisted, barely, just slapping her hands over her ears. “I’m begging you.”
“Well, it’s frosty max if you get how it works and why. When Roarke talked about the clone and merge, I started thinking maybe we could go rad and do a merge and ramp, input an HIP to counteract, then extrapolate, do the clone, and restart the defuck from that point.”
“Makes me proud,” Feeney said as Eve pressed her fingers to her eyes.
“Will somebody just give me the progress. In English?”
“Picture’s worth a thousand. Put it up, Jamie,” Feeney ordered.
“Roger that.” Using a remote, Jamie displayed an image on screen.
Eve shifted, stepped back. There, on screen, Darrin Pauley was captured in midstep as he climbed the stairs to the victim’s front door. He wore a cap, which she identified as from Columbia, shades, and a shy smile. Deena, young, pretty, beaming, stood in the open doorway, her hand held out for his.
“Excellent,” Eve murmured.
“Bloody brilliant,” Roarke stated.
“I wouldn’t’ve thought of it if you hadn’t started the ball.” Jamie nodded toward Roarke. “And you were the one who actually did the conversion and—”
Roarke shot a finger at Jamie. “Bloody brilliant.”
“Well.” Though he shrugged, pleasure shone on Jamie’s face. “Yeah.”
“The PA will have to be a complete screwup not to cage this bastard for First Degree. But we have to catch him first. Can you do the same with the SoHo security?”
“Now that we’ve identified the virus, have the process?” Feeney bared his teeth in a smile. “We’ll have all of the MacMasters and the SoHo vids for you before end of shift.”
“Nice work, all of you. Damn nice work. He’s wearing a backpack, handy for holding his supplies. The same shoes the wit ID’d from the park.”
“That brings me to retail,” Peabody put in. “I’ve got a strong lead on the shoes, and the rest. An outlet right on campus, which unfortunately screwed my downtown hunch. The shoes, the sweatshirt, sweatpants, cap, shades, backpack, airboard, several T-shirts, and a windbreaker were purchased there by a Donald Petrie, on March thirty-first.”
“Address?”
“The address that came up is in Ohio, and actually is the home of one Donal Petri, age sixty-eight, who was pretty steamed when he got the charges for a bunch of stuff from a college outlet in New York. He reported the fraud in mid-April upon getting the bill. I’ve got the name of the clerk whose ID number was on the sale. I haven’t yet been able to contact. She’s a student at the university.”
“We’ll run it down. Tomorrow’s memorial,” Eve continued and outlined the plan.
Toward the end of the briefing, Eve received word the Robinses were being escorted into Central. Because she wanted privacy, she directed them to be taken to Interview A. She gathered the case file on Irene Schultz and the mug shot.
She found them