provide whatever she required.
She gave him a steno pad. Double rows of currency serial numbers filled
the first ten pages.
“Those are random samplings of the bills in each of the bags of cash
we’re holding for Frank. Can you find out if it’s hot money-stolen,
maybe an extortion or ransom payment?”
Lee quickly paged through the lists.
“No consecutive numbers? That makes it harder. Usually cops don’t have
a record of the serial numbers of stolen money unless it was brand-new
bills, which are still bound in packets, consecutively numbered, right
off the press.”
“Most of this cash is fairly well circulated.”
“There’s an outside chance it might still be from a ransom or extortion
payoff, like you said. The cops would’ve taken down all the numbers
before they let the victim make the drop, just in case the perp made a
clean getaway. It looks bleak, but I’ll try. What else?”
Julie said, “An entire family in Garden Grove, last name Farris, was
murdered last year.”
“Because of me,” Frank said.
Lee propped his elbows on the arms of his chair, leaned back, and
steepled his fingers. He looked like a wise Zen master who had been
forced to don the clothes of an avant-garde artist after getting the
wrong suitcase at the airport.
“No one really dies, Mr. Pollard. They just go on from here. Grief is
good, but guilt is pointless.”
Though she knew too few computer fanatics to be certain, Julie suspected
that not many found a way to combine the hard realities of science and
technology with religion. But in fact, Lee had arrived at a belief in
God through his work with computers and his interest in modern physics.
He once explained to her why a profound understanding of the
dimensionless space inside a computer network, combined with a modern
physicist’s view of the universe, led inevitably to faith in a Creator,
but she hadn’t followed a thing he’d said.
She gave Lee Chen the dates and details of the Farris and Roman murders.
“We think they were all killed by the same man. I haven’t got a clue to
his real name, so I call him Mr. Blue. Considering the savagery of the
murders, we suspect he’s a serial killer with a long list of victims. If
we’re right, the murders have been so widely spread or Mr. Blue has
covered his tracks so well that the press has never made the connections
between the crimes.”
“Otherwise,” Frank said, “they’d have sensationalized it on their front
pages. Especially if this guy regularly bites his victims.”
“But since most police agencies are computer-linked these days,” Julie
said, “they might’ve made the connections across jurisdictions, saw what
the press didn’t. There might be one more quiet, ongoing investigations
between local, state, and federal authorities. We need to know if any
police in California-or the FBI nationally-are on to Mr. Blue, and we
need to know anything they’ve learned about him, no matter how trivial.”
Lee smiled. In the middle of his brass-hued face, his teeth were like
pegs of highly polished ivory.
“That means going through public-access files in their computers. I’ll
have to breech their security, one agency after another, all the way
into the FBI.”
“Difficult?”
“Very. But I’m not without experience.” He pushed his jacket sleeves
farther up on his arms, flexed his fingers, and turned to the terminal
keyboard as if he were a concert pianist about to interpret Mozart. He
hesitated and glanced sideways at Julie.
“I’ll work into their systems indirectly to discourage tracebacks. I
won’t damage any data or breach national security, so I probably won’t
even be noticed. But if someone spys me snooping and puts a tracer on
me that I don’t see or can’t shake, they might pull your PI license for
this.”
“I’ll sacrifice myself, and take the blame. Bobby’s license won’t be
pulled, too, so the agency won’t go down. How long will this take?”
“Four or five hours, maybe more, maybe a lot more. Can somebody bring
me lunch at noon? I’d rather eat here and take a break.”
“Sure. What would you like?”
“Big Mac, double order of fries, vanilla shake.”