“I mean the other one, Sam.” Frank impatiently shook his head. Magruder
pointed to the wall beside the bed where a small hole was barely
visible.
Frank nodded. “Cut the section and let the lab boys pull it out. Don’t
screw with it yourself” Twice in the last year ballistics had been
rendered useless because an overzealous uniform had scraped a bullet out
of a wall, ruining the striations.
“Any brass?”
Magruder shook his head. “If the murder weapon ejected any spent shells,
they’ve been picked up.”
He turned to Simon. “Any treasures from the Evac?” The evidence vacuum
was a highly powerful machine that, utilizing a series of filters, was
used to comb the carpet and other materials for fibers, hairs and other
small objects that more often than not turned out big dividends because
if the perps couldn’t see ’em, they weren’t going to try to remove ’em.
Magruder tried to joke. “My carpet should be that clean.”
Frank looked at his CU team. “Did we find any trace, people?” They all
looked at one another not knowing if Frank was kidding or not. They were
still wondering when he walked out of the room and went downstairs.
A representative from the alarm company was talking with a uniformed
officer at the front door. A CU member was packing the plate and wires
in plastic evidence bags. Frank was shown where the paint had been
slightly chipped and an almost microscopic metal shard indicated that
the panel had been removed. On the wiring were small toothlike
indentations. The security rep looked admiringly at the lawbreaker’s
handiwork. Magruder joined them, his color slowly returning The rep was
nodding his head. “Yep, they probably used a counter. Looks that way
anyway.”
Seth looked at him. “What’s that?”
“Computer-assisted method of ramming massive numbers of combinations
into the system’s recognition bank until they hit the right combo. You
know, like they do to bust the ATMs.”
Frank looked at the gutted panel and then back at the man.
“I’m surprised a place like this wouldn’t have a more sophisticated
system.”
“It is a sophisticated system.” The rep sounded defensive.
“Lotta crooks using computers these days.”
“Yeah, but the thing is, this baby has a fifteen-digit base, not a ten,
and a forty-three-second delay. You don’t hit it, the gate comes
crashing down.”
Frank rubbed his nose. He would have to go home and shower. The stench
of death warmed over several days in a hot room left its indelible mark
on your clothes, hair and skin. And sinuses.
“So?” Frank asked.
“So, the portable models you’d most likely have to use on a job like
this can’t crunch enough combos through in thirty seconds or so. Shit,
based on a fifteen-digit configuration you’re looking at over a
trillion-three in possibles. It’s not like the guy’s gonna be lugging
around a PC.”
The OIC piped in. “Why thirty seconds?”
Frank answered. “They needed some time to get the plate off, Sam.” He
turned back to the security man. “So what are you saying?”
“I’m saying that if he knocked this system over with a numbers cruncher
then he had already eliminated some of the possible digits from the
process. Maybe half, maybe more. I mean maybe you got a system that’ll
do it all right, or they inight’ve rigged something up that could pop
this cage. But you’re not talking cheap hardware and you’re not talking
some bozos off the street that walked into a Radio Shack and came out
with a calculator. I mean they’re making computers faster and smaller
every day but you gotta realize that the speed of your hardware doesn’t
solve the problem. You gotta factor in how fast the security system’s
computer will respond back to all the combos flowing in.
It’s probably gonna be a lot slower than your equipment.
And then you gotta big problem. Bottom line if I were these guys I’d
want a nice comfort zone, you know what I’m saying? In their line of
work, you don’t get second chances.”
Frank looked at the man’s uniform and then back at the panel. If the guy
was right he knew what that meant. His line of thinking had already