Middle of Nowhere (40 page)

“No calls right now,” he reminded her politely.

“It’s
her,”
she said. “Says it’s ‘important.’“ She drew the quotation marks in the air.

“I’ll have to call her back.”

“I’ll tell her,” Liz said. She seemed to take pleasure in it. She pulled the door shut, wondering why the music was playing so loudly and what it was meant to cover.

The AirTyme Cellular Regional Control Center—”RC-squared,” Osbourne called it—occupied portions of the twenty-first and twenty-second floors of the Columbia Center skyscraper. Normally such real estate would have commanded quite the water view, but RC-squared was a blacked-out control room that stepped down in tiers to a curving wall of projection screens mapping cellular phone traffic over a seven-state area that included portions of Utah, Nevada, and northern California. It looked like something from Mission Control. Daphne counted seventeen people at computers, all wearing telephone headsets. The room was alive with hushed, indistinguishable voices.

“Wow,” Daphne said, sensing that Osbourne expected some kind of reaction.

He checked his wristwatch. “We’re pressed for time. I wanted to show you what I’ve come up with. So, if you’d direct your attention to the last screen on the right, Lieutenant Matthews.

“As I’m sure you’re aware,” he continued, “the U.S. Congress passed a bill requiring us to geographically locate nine-one-one calls placed from cellular telephones, which presented us with a serious task in terms of the older generation analog phones. The new generation digital phones have GPS chips—Global Positioning Systems—inherent in their technology. But the older analog models without the chips have only their signal.

“There are several ways to attempt to locate an analog cellular phone that’s in use, and probably a half dozen companies competing for the best methodology,” he continued. “All of these methods were derived from the military. The two most common are DF, direction finding, and TDOA, time difference of arrival. Both are variations on something called triangulation. We use a company out of Canada that has taken TDOA one step further into something called hyperbolic tri-lateralization. Triangulation and trilateralization work off the same principle: If you have three antennas, all receiving a radio signal from the same source, and you can measure and record the time that a source radio signal arrives at each of those antennas, then you can plot the location of that original source signal. A cell phone signal lights up several towers at a time, sometimes as many as a half dozen or more. These towers pass reception and transmission one to the other in what’s called a hand-off, as they determine which is the closer or more optimal tower. Because trilateralization works at very high speeds, constantly measuring the time to base, as we call it, its method of triangulation is far more accurate than many of its competitors. You with me so far?”

“I think so.”

“The long and the short of it is, the older method of triangulation could take several minutes or even hours to process accurately. This newer method I’m talking about is a real-time system with pinpoint accuracy because it’s measuring a cell phone transmission in nanoseconds and plotting the location accordingly. Your problem is this,” he stated. “Full government compliance is not mandated for another eighteen months. AirTyme has the hyperbolic trilateralization software and, of course, our firmware network of towers and transmission centers, but the two are not yet fully married. Adding to our difficulty—two of the three towers we may be using to measure time to base may belong to one or more competitors. They will gladly provide us the TDOA data, but it takes time to arrange. We estimate full network compatibility in ten months.”

“You’re losing me,” she admitted. “You do, or do not have a way to locate that cell phone number Lieutenant Boldt gave you?”

“With the help of our competitors, we can run the software on data previously gathered. In terms of your needs that means we can . . . if you envision it as laying the TDOA software on top of information we’ve already collected .. . the software then analyzes that data and spits out a location for us, though that data is typically hours old because we’ve had to gather it elsewhere.” He saw her disappointment register. “The only other technology available to us—log-on signals—
is
real-time, but allows no location accuracy whatsoever. To my knowledge no one’s come up with anything for log-ons. But that’s one of the areas we’re looking into for you.”

“You said I might miss him,” Daphne reminded, looking at her own watch, “which implied you had
found
him, or did I misinterpret?”

Osbourne reached forward and tapped the man in front of him on the shoulder. The computer technician danced his fingers across the keyboard. Until that moment, Daphne had not realized this person was a part of their discussion. Osbourne said, “Eyes on the screen to the right.”

The screen was enormous, perhaps a hundred square feet, half the size of a small movie theater screen. On it appeared a color map of the city that Daphne clearly recognized. The dark green to the left she took to be Puget Sound.

Osbourne said, “If the person you’re interested in had been calling on a newer phone, our GPS technology would have done the work for us. The only shortcoming of GPS is line-of-sight interference, which TDOA gets around, and therefore ends up complementing the technology perfectly. But your suspect is calling out on an older model analog, I’m afraid. Each time he placed a call in the last eighteen hours, our network, and our competitors’ networks, recorded those signal transmissions, for his and hundreds of thousands of other phones, all concurrently, twenty-four/seven. A tower receives his signal, and the computers time-stamp that arrival for the sake of billing records. Downtown, his transmission signal might light up six or eight towers, all at fractions-of-a-second differences. We have a record of all of that.” He tapped the man’s shoulder again. “What you see next are the various transmission locations of calls he has made. A red dot means he was standing still. A red line means he was moving. We shade that line pink to burgundy, to indicate direction—pink being the area of origin, burgundy, termination.”

Daphne then saw the screen fill randomly with a half dozen red dots and another dozen lines. Some of the lines were as short as half a block, others as long as a mile or more, turning corners repeatedly.

Fascinated, Daphne studied the graphic. She could quickly identify the areas of town where Flek spent the most time. He seemed to avoid the downtown area near Public Safety altogether.
No surprise there,
she thought.

To the left of the screen she noticed three long pink-to-burgundy lines in the middle of Puget Sound. She turned her head slightly toward these.

“Time of transmission and termination are in parentheses alongside the respective dot or line.”

“So we know exactly when he was in each of these locations.”

Osbourne glanced over at her. “And I can see your interest lies properly in the lines to the left, those over the Sound.”

“What exactly are we looking at there?”

Again, Osbourne tapped the man on the shoulder. He leaned forward and said softly, “Enlargement, please.” A flashing box of dashes surrounded the lines in question and then that area of the Sound filled the screen entirely, so that the three colorful lines were between two and six feet long. The respective transmission times could be clearly read: 10:17.47; 20:36.16; 10:19.38. Osbourne explained, “I thought to understand the technology, to understand the situation and make an objective decision on how you wanted to evaluate the data, you needed to see this, Lieutenant, or I wouldn’t have asked you to come over. But these three transmissions include the only two that occur at like times, offering the only overlap, the only possible site where you might locate the individual in question.”

Daphne shook her head, still not fully seeing what this offered her.

“It so happens,” Osbourne said, “that our digital mapping service uses Alpha Maps, with research by Cape Flattery Map Company, the same maps at the front of the phone books. Small wonder, since we’re a phone company. The point being that the Alpha Maps include all the ferry routes.” Another of those instructive taps on the shoulder. The full screen included the city once again, this time with dashed lines leading from the piers out across the Sound. The dashed lines on the map ran incredibly close to the color transmission lines drawn by the software. Osbourne pointed. “That’s the Bainbridge Island ferry route. The Winslow route. He traveled into the city on the ten-fifteen ferry yesterday morning, back out to the island on the eight-thirty— back in on the ten-fifteen this morning.” He tapped his wrist. “The eight-thirty ferry leaves in twenty minutes. If you hurry, you can make it.”

Daphne shook the man’s hand and took off for the door at a dead run.

Krishevski said to Boldt, “You learn to cut your losses in this job. And that’s what I recommend. Someone taking pot shots at you—I hear this guy you’re after bought a rifle.”

“It’s not him.”

“I don’t want to hear that.”

“It disturbs you?” Boldt asked. “What? That they missed?”

“It isn’t like that.”

“Isn’t it?” Boldt asked.

“Hey, this isn’t my
affair.”
Krishevski leaned on the word. “You know that.”

The emphasis destroyed Boldt. He understood immediately where the conversation was headed.

Krishevski glanced hotly toward the door and lowered his voice, and now Boldt could barely hear him. “They have video, Lou. A security camera from a Denver hotel.” He added, “I’m not party to this.” He didn’t convince Boldt. “I’m here strictly out of a desire to keep your personal life from being dragged through the press. Once this surfaces, not only do the wife and kids suffer but one of you is going to leave CAPers, and it ain’t going to be the psychologist, on account she’s the only one they got. So where’s that leave you? Vice? Traffic?”

His ears whined. He needed names. He needed some chance to stop this from happening. “You’ll go down with them, Krishevski,” he warned.

“Me? Who do you think called you the other night and put you onto Schock and Phillipp’s assault?”

Boldt sat there stunned.

“See? That’s the whole point of my visit. To cut the losses. They’re ready to fry your ass. Don’t let them do this. For once, just walk away. Do everyone a favor. Leave it be.”

Boldt tried to respond in a voice that said he had no intention of bending, that he knew what he was talking about, “You, Chapman, Pendegrass—”

“It’s not what you think.”

“Then someone had better enlighten me.”

Krishevski couldn’t make the recliner sit up. He struggled like a child wanting to be free of a high chair, and finally got it. “Okay, I lied,” he said.

Boldt felt a bubble lodge in his throat.

“No one sent me. I’m here to head off our both being dragged through the mud.” He met eyes with Boldt and said, “I think I can do that. But I’m in as deep as you are, believe me.”

“I don’t.”

Krishevski smiled nervously. “Chapman had a video. These guys will trade you straight across—that video of Chapman’s for the one from the Denver hotel.”

Boldt’s pager and cell phone rang nearly simultaneously. He shut them both off without paying the slightest attention to them, never breaking eye contact with Krishevski.

“I’m to get this video and deliver it to you,” Boldt said calmly. He added sarcastically, “And you’re not connected to this.”

“Don’t go there,” Krishevski said emphatically.

“I’m not left a lot of choice,” Boldt pointed out. “If you came here on your own—if you’re so squeaky clean—then what’s to prevent you from talking?”

“I’m not so squeaky clean,” he admitted. “I’ve been fired. I don’t want to face jail time as well.”

“Uh-huh,” Boldt said knowingly.

“My crime—if you’re going to call it that—is trying to correct stupidity. Other people’s stupidity. Ron Chapman has a video that is trouble for some of my guys. And now I’m jammed because I tried to help. We’re all jammed. That’s as far as I’ll go, as much as I’ll say. Deliver Chapman’s video, it all goes away.”