She did not respond.
I placed my hand on her shoulder. “I may not be the constant presence in your life that I wish I could be, but you are very important to me.”
Erasing a number and brushing rubber particles off the paper, she said, “Are you going to get charged with a crime?”
“Of course not. I haven’t committed any crimes.”
I leaned closer to the monitor.
“What you’re looking at is a hex dump,” she said.
“You were right. It’s hieroglyphics.”
Placing her fingers on the keyboard, Lucy began moving the cursor as she explained, “What I’m doing here is trying to get the exact position of the SID number. That’s the State Identification Number, which is the unique identifier. Every person in the system has a SID nun including you, since your prints are in AFIS, too. Fourth generation language, like SQL, I could a query by a column name. But in hexadecimal the language is technical and mathematical. There are no column names, only positions in the record layout. In other words, if I wanted to go to Miami, in SQL I would simply tell the computer I want to go to Miami. But in hexadecimal, I would have to say that I want to go position that is this many degrees north of the, equator and this many degrees east of the prime meridian. “So to extend the geographical analogy, I’m figuring out the longitude and latitude of the SID number also of the number that indicates the record type. Then I can write a program to search for any SID number wheel the record is a type two, which means a deletion, or y type three, which is an update. I’ll run this program through each journal tape.”
“You’re, assuming that if a record has been tampered with, then, what was changed was the SID?” I asked.
“Let’s just say it would be a whole lot easier to with the SID number than it would be to mess with the actual fingerprint images on the optical disk record, that’s really all you’ve got in AFIS – the SID number the corresponding prints. The person’s name, his and other personal information are in his CCH, Computerized Criminal History, which resides at CCRE, or the Central Criminal Records Exchange:”
“As I understand it the records in CCRE are linked to the prints in AFIS by the SID numbers,” I said.
“Exactly.”
Lucy was still working when I went to bed I fell right to sleep, only to awaken at two A.M. I did not drift off again until five, and my alarm roused me less than an hour later. I drove downtown in the dark and listened as one of the local radio announcers gave a news update. He reported that police had questioned me, and I had refused to disclose information pertaining to my financial records. He went on to remind everyone that Susan Story had deposited thirty five hundred dollars in her checking account just weeks before her murder.
When I got to the office, I had barely taken off my coat when Marino called.
“The damn major can’t keep his mouth shut,” he said right off.
“Obviously.”
“Shit, I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault. I know you have to report to him.”
Marino hesitated. “I need to ask you about your guns. You don’t own a twenty-two, right?”
“You know all about my handguns. I. have a Ruger and a Smith and Wesson. And if you pass that along to Major Cunningham, I’m sure I’ll hear about it on the radio within the hour.”
“Doc, he wants them submitted to the firearms lab.”
For an instant, I thought Marino was joking..
“He thinks you should be willing to submit them for examination,” he added. “He thinks it’s a good idea to show right away that the bullets recovered from Susan, the Heath kid, and Donahue couldn’t have been fired from your guns.”
“Did you tell the major that the revolvers I have are thirty-eights?” I asked, incensed.
“Yes.”
“And he knows that twenty-two slugs were recovered from the bodies?”
“Yeah. I went round and round with him about it.
“Well, ask him for me if he knows of an adapter that would make it possible to use twenty-two rim fire cartridges in a thirty-eight revolver. If he does, tell him he ought to present a paper on it at the next American Academy of Forensic Sciences meeting.”