`So what happened?’ I said after a mile. `Tell me.’
She told me a pretty straightforward story. They’d started work on my alibi late Friday evening. She and Finlay. A dark squad room. A couple of desk lights on. Pads of paper. Cups of coffee. Telephone books. The two of them cradling phones and chewing pencils. Low voices. Patient enquiries. A scene I’d been in myself a thousand times.
They’d called Tampa and Atlanta and by
midnight they’d gotten hold of a passenger from my bus and the ticket clerk at the Tampa depot. Both of them remembered me. Then they got the bus driver as well. He confirmed he’d stopped at the Margrave cloverleaf to let me out, eight o’clock Friday morning. By midnight my alibi was looking rock-solid, just like I’d said it would be.
Saturday morning, a long fax was in from the Pentagon about my service record. Thirteen years of my life, reduced to a few curling fax pages. It felt like somebody else’s life now, but it backed my story. Finlay had been impressed by it. Then my prints came back from the FBI database. They’d been matched by the tireless computer at two-thirty in the morning. US Army, printed on induction, thirteen years ago. My alibi was solid, and my background checked out.
`Finlay was satisfied,’ Roscoe told me. `You are who you say you are, and midnight Thursday you were over four hundred miles away. That was nailed down. He called the medical examiner again just in case he had a new opinion on the time of death, but no, midnight was still about right.’
I shook my head. Finlay was one very cautious guy.
`What about the dead guy?’ I said. `Did you run his prints again?’
She concentrated on passing a farm truck. The first vehicle we’d seen in a quarter-hour. Then she looked across and nodded.
`Finlay told me you wanted me to,’ she said. `But why?’
`They came back too quickly for a negative result,’ I said.
`Too quickly?’ she said.
`You told me there was a pyramid system, right?’
I said. `The top ten, then the top hundred, then the top thousand, all the way down, right?’
She nodded again.
`So take me as an example,’ I said. `I’m in the database, but I’m pretty low down the pyramid. You just said it took fourteen hours to get down to me, right?’
`Right,’ she said. `I sent your prints in about twelve-thirty at lunchtime and they were matched at two-thirty in the morning.’
`OK,’ I said. `Fourteen hours. So if it takes fourteen hours to reach nearly to the bottom of the pyramid, it’s got to take more than fourteen hours to get all the way down to the bottom. That’s logical, right?’
`Right,’ she said.
`But what happened with this dead guy?’ I said. `The body was found at eight o’clock, so the prints went in when? Eight-thirty, earliest. But Baker was already telling me there was no match on file when they were talking to me at two-thirty. I remember the time, because I was looking at the clock. That’s only six hours. If it took fourteen hours to find out that I’m in there, how could it take just six hours to say the dead guy’s not in there?’
`God,’ she said. `You’re right. Baker must have screwed up. Finlay took the prints and Baker sent them. He must have screwed up the scan. You got to be careful, or it doesn’t transmit clearly. If the scan’s not clear, the database tries to decipher it, then it comes back as unreadable. Baker must have thought that meant a null result. The codes are similar. Anyway, I sent them again, first thing. We’ll know soon enough.’
We drove on east and Roscoe told me she’d pushed Finlay to get me out of Warburton right
away yesterday afternoon. Finlay had grunted and agreed, but there was a problem. They’d had to wait until today, because yesterday afternoon Warburton had been just about shut down. They had told Finlay there had been some trouble in a bathroom. One convict was dead, one had lost an eye, and a full-scale riot had started, black and white gangs at war.