“Sachs, call Crime Scene in Queens. We can’t get our hands on the evidence in my cousin’s case. With the trial coming up, all the P.E.’ll be in custody at the prosecutor’s office. But see if anybody at the warehouse can send us the evidence from these earlier crimes-the rape and the coin theft. I want the dust, cardboard and rope. And, Pulaski, you go down to the Big Building. I want you to look through the files of every murder in the past six months.”

“Every murder?”

“The mayor’s cleaned up the city, didn’t you hear? Be thankful we’re not in Detroit or Washington. Flintlock thought of these two cases. I’ll bet there are others. Look for an underlying crime, maybe theft, maybe rape, ending in homicide. Clear class evidence and an anonymous call right after the crime. Oh, and a suspect who swears he’s innocent.”

“Okay, sir.”

“And us?” Mel Cooper asked.

“We wait,” Rhyme muttered, as if the word were an obscenity.

Chapter Nine

A wonderful transaction.

I’m satisfied now. Walking down the street, happy, content. Flipping through the images I’ve just slipped into my collection. Images of Myra 9834. The visual ones are stored in my memory. The digital tape recorder has the others.

Walking down the street, watching sixteens around me.

I see them streaming down sidewalks. In cars, buses, taxis, trucks.

I see them through windows, oblivious to me as I study them.

Sixteens…Ah, I’m not the only one who refers to human beings like this, of course. Not at all. It’s a common shorthand in the industry. But I’m probably the only one who prefers to think of people as sixteens, who feels comforted by the thought.

A sixteen-digit number is far more precise and efficient than a name. Names make me edgy. I don’t like that. It’s not good for me, not good for anybody, when I’m edgy. Names…ah, terrible. For instance, the surnames Jones and Brown each account for roughly.6 percent of the population of the United States. Moore is.3 percent, and as for everyone’s favorite, Smith-a whopping 1 percent. Nearly 3,000,000 of them in the country. (And given names, if you’re interested: John? Nope. It comes in number two-3.2 percent. James is the winner at 3.3 percent.)

So think of the implications: I hear someone say, “James Smith.” Well, which James Smith does he mean when there are hundreds of thousands? And those are just the living ones. Tally up all the James Smiths in history.

Oh, my God.

Drives me crazy just to think about.

Edgy…

And the consequences of mistakes can be serious. Say, it’s 1938 Berlin. Is Herr Wilhelm Frankel the Jewish Wilhelm Frankel or the gentile one? Made a big difference and, whatever else you feel about them, those brown-shirted boys were absolute geniuses at tracking identities (and they used computers to do it!).

Names lead to mistakes. Mistakes are noise. Noise is contamination. Contamination must be eliminated.

There could be dozens of Alice Sandersons, but only one Alice 3895, who sacrificed her life that I might own an American Family painting by dear Mr. Prescott.

Myra Weinburgs? Ah, not many, surely. But more than one. Yet only Myra 9834 sacrificed herself so that I might be satisfied.

I’ll bet there are plenty of DeLeon Williams, but only 6832-5794-8891-0923 is going to jail forever for raping and killing her so that I might remain free to do it all over again.

I’m en route to his house at the moment (technically his girlfriend’s, I’ve learned), carrying enough evidence to make sure the poor man is convicted of the rape/murder in about one hour of deliberation.

DeLeon 6832…

I’ve already called 911, a transaction in which I reported an old beige Dodge-his model of car-speeding away from the scene, a man inside, a black man. “I could see his hands! They were all bloody! Oh, get somebody there now! The screaming was terrible.”

What a perfect suspect you’ll be, DeLeon 6832. About half of the perpetrators commit rape under the influence of alcohol or drugs (he drinks beer in moderation now, but was in AA several years ago). The majority of rape victims know their assailant (DeLeon 6832 had once done some carpentry for the grocery store where the late Myra 9834 regularly shopped so it was logical to assume that they knew each other, though they probably didn’t).

Most rapists are thirty or under (the exact age of DeLeon 6832, as it turns out). Unlike drug dealers and users, they don’t have many prior arrests except for domestic abuse-and my boy has a conviction for assaulting a girlfriend; how perfect is that? Most rapists are from the lower social classes and economically disadvantaged (he’s been out of work for months).