Джеймс Паттерсон - Killer Instinct

“I’m afraid so,” said Elizabeth. “And green is so not my color.”

Doug’s involvement required a delicate dance for us in terms of what we could and couldn’t tell him. We’d already emailed him the hotel surveillance footage of Darvish the night of his death. As far as Doug knew, he was helping the police identify the woman on the professor’s arm. We obviously couldn’t share why we wanted to know who she was or the real reason her face was obscured. If he asked about the glow, I was going to tell him it was the result of the footage being tampered with, but I had the feeling he wasn’t going to ask.

“Okay, walk me through what you’re thinking,” he said, eyeing the shoebox in Elizabeth’s hands. “So to speak.”

“It’s simple,” I said. “While we can’t see the woman’s face, we can see her walk, and everyone has their own unique way of walking. Almost like a fingerprint.”

“Almost, but not exactly,” said Doug.

“Right, but close enough that we might be able to model this woman’s precise gait. Of course, to do that—”

“You’d have to have her precise shoes. Lucky for you, she was wearing Christian Louboutins,” he said.

I nudged Elizabeth. “ See? He knows women’s shoes and there’s no way he’s gay.”

Elizabeth rolled her eyes. “Just ignore him, Doug. That’s what I do.” She took the shoes out of their box and handed them over.

“Yeah, I once dated a girl who was addicted to Louboutins,” said Doug, giving them a look. “She couldn’t afford them and I couldn’t afford her. Are you sure these are the right ones, though? The difference of even a few millimeters in the heel height would throw off every calculation.”

“They’re the right ones,” said Elizabeth, “and the heel is exactly a hundred millimeters. It’s the only way they come.”

Scam or no scam, you don’t get to sell shoes for close to a thousand bucks a pop by making a gazillion different styles. The cross straps and open-toe design with a vamp heel narrowed the field down to just one, and there was no escaping the irony.

Louboutin made shoes with names like Fifi, Bibibop, and Doracandy.

This particular shoe, however, was called the Malefissima.

Latin root word mal, meaning bad.

Or evil.

Chapter 29

ELIZABETH RETURNED from the bathroom after changing into the skintight green leotard that gave new meaning to the word unflattering, even on her.

“You’re right, Doug,” she said, cringing, and not just from her cuts and bruises. “You’re probably not paying Tracy enough.”

Doug quickly lined her legs with the reflective markers otherwise known as “those tiny ping-pong balls.” Her job now was to walk the world’s shortest catwalk, back and forth in front of an elaborate station of cameras, behind which was an even more elaborate console of screens.

“Work it, girl!” I said.

Doug was multitasking at the keyboard, modeling the movement of the woman with Darvish in addition to the measurements he was getting from Elizabeth. The only fixed element was the shoes, so everything else—stride differential, for instance—had to be accounted for and adjusted using multiple algorithms that also took into account things like skin tone and body mass. And that was only for starters. The real math hadn’t even begun.

So much for my having a statistics PhD from MIT. My head was spinning just thinking about it.

“Doug, any sign of the file?” asked Elizabeth.

All the computing in the world couldn’t help us unless we had something to apply it to. That was the file we were waiting on—additional surveillance footage from the hotel covering the days leading up to Darvish’s death. The detectives assigned to the case had acquired it, as per protocol for their investigation, and had even checked to see if there was any sign of Darvish’s mystery woman. But they were searching for someone with the same glow. We weren’t.

An operative or anyone else doing reconnaissance before taking out a mark wouldn’t bother using Halo. She would assume she didn’t need to.

“How the hell can anyone go back and identify her without having seen her face?” asked the detective Elizabeth had called on our way to Bergdorf’s. She’d had him on speaker. He was peeved that she’d interrupted his dinner, especially because the file was only supposed to be viewed on the department’s encrypted server.

“You’re a detective, figure it out, ” snapped Elizabeth. She wasn’t digging the guy’s attitude. “In the meantime, just send the damn file to the following address.”

Doug checked his email again. It hadn’t arrived the first time he looked. Two’s a charm. “There it is,” he said. “Got it.”

But there was still more to do before using it. After filming Elizabeth in the Louboutins, he also had to film her barefoot to create a baseline. After all, it’s not like our mystery woman would’ve worn her Malefissimas while doing her reconnaissance.

She did scout the hotel, right? She had to have done a walk-through before the night she returned with Darvish. Otherwise, we were wasting our time.

A lot of time.

“Are you sure you don’t want to go home and get some sleep?” asked Doug as he began the task of singling out every woman who could be seen in the surveillance footage from the hotel, over a hundred hours’ worth.

We were hardly about to bail on him, though.

“We’ll sleep when you sleep,” I said. It was the least we could do. Or, at least, try to do. By about 3:00 a.m., Elizabeth and I had both dozed off on a couch behind Doug’s console. Had he actually known we were asleep he probably wouldn’t have yelled. But I’d never been so happy in my life to be jolted awake.

Doug had been at his keyboard for six hours straight and looked every minute of it. His eyes were bloodshot, his hair the full-on Johnny Depp from Edward Scissorhands . Yet all I could really see was his smile. It was the same one he’d flashed when we first met him. Only wider. Much wider.

“Well?” I asked.

“Impossible, my ass,” he said.

Chapter 30

IT TRULY was a thing of beauty.

In nerd terms, Doug had overlaid an algorithm onto every single frame of the footage, identifying and measuring all movement against an extrapolation of how the mystery woman would walk in every heel size using the baselines of Elizabeth both in the Louboutins and barefoot.

In non-nerd terms? He crushed it.

From over a thousand possible women, Doug had narrowed the field down to five.

The first two were white, albeit with either slightly darker complexions or tans—most likely the spray-booth variety.

“Is that one Hispanic?” asked Elizabeth, pointing at the third.

“Could be,” I said. “She could also be a Filipina.”

“What about the last two?” Elizabeth leaned toward Doug’s main monitor. “Can we zoom in on them?”

Doug punched some keys. The more he zoomed in, though, the more pixelated the image got.

“Hard to tell,” I said. “She could be South American, Indian, Middle Eastern, none of the above? Take your pick.”

“Not that it makes a difference,” said Elizabeth.

We all could agree on that. Knowing the woman’s ethnicity was a long way from knowing her name and address.

“What now?” asked Doug.

“That depends,” I said. “Porterhouse or bone-in rib eye?”

“Huh?”

“The steak dinner that I’m going to buy you.”

“Thanks, except you still don’t know who your woman is.”

“No, not yet,” I said. “If only she could’ve been your ex-girlfriend with the Louboutin obsession, right?”

He smiled, but it was half-hearted. To say he was now fully vested in the outcome was an understatement. Who could blame him? He’d gotten us so close. Even if he’d narrowed the choice down to one, though, it wasn’t as if we could immediately identify her.