Free Twisted Vine by Toby Neal Page B

times, her fingers twisting in her lap. “I didn’t think you’d approve. I wanted to show you it could work.” She looked back down at her log-in screen. “I thought you’d shut me down if I didn’t prove DAVID’s worth first.”
    Waxman shut his eyes, rubbed them with his forefinger and thumb. “I’m doing something wrong as special agent in charge that you don’t know how much I value you. How much confidence I’ve come to have in your skills and your integrity.”
    “I’m sorry, sir,” Sophie said again, feeling her face heat up. She didn’t know how to respond to Waxman’s praise, his personal disappointment. She’d misread him, and it wasn’t the first time she’d done that. Once again she wished she understood people half as well as computers.
    The SAC sighed, replaced his glasses, sat forward. “From here on out, you get an idea, come to me. Right away. I promise I’ll hear you out and try my best to facilitate your project, whatever it is. The Bureau is getting hammered these days because we’ve created a bureaucratic culture where individual incentive isn’t rewarded. Our best people are leaving for other agencies or the private sector. I’ve tried hard not to be that kind of director, but I see I’ve failed, and that’s for me to correct.” He tapped his laptop. “Now, damage control. This program has to be submitted through the proper channels or defense attorneys will have a field day—we always have to keep the end in mind as we pursue a case, right?”
    “Right,” Sophie agreed.
    “So, if DAVID generated the original lead, what we need to do is come up with another reason we were ‘twigged’ to the Hale case, which is pretty easy—the senator’s high profile. And we need to submit DAVID to the review process. As to you r working with confidential data off-site, that has to stop immediately.”
    “But, sir. I often work at home late at night . . .”
    “I can’t allow that. The premises of your building may not be secure, and if our data were stolen somehow, it’s an unconscionable security breach.”
    Sophie couldn’t tell him she’d replicated her entire lab at home and that everything was networked together. She’d known it was against regulations, but to her mind the efficiency justified the risk, and she had a good alarm system in a high-security building. Sophie had long ago moved to a cloud computing mentality: Individual computers were merely outlets plugging in and out of a seamless information flow rather than individual repositories, which was how the Bureau still operated in many areas.
    “Yes, sir.”
    “So tell me how this program works. Walk me through what you did to come up with the Hale case.”
    Sophie felt herself regaining confidence as she entered her password and broke open DAVID to her boss, explaining how it mined the other criminal databases, including local and state police. She demonstrated how DAVID searched out commonalities depending on variables entered in search parameters and how the confidence ratios worked. She walked Waxman through her process with the suicides, which she’d begun running in DAVID after a news report on an upswing in suicides caught her attention.
    “So this program can basically go hunting for types of crimes nationwide, looking for common MOs and other variables such as weapons, et cetera?” Waxman clarified at last.
    “Yes. But it can work only with what’s been inputted, so the more we digitize criminal records, the more effective DAVID is going to be.”
    “What about DAVID’s unauthorized access to local and state police department records?”
    “I’m sure that’s going to be something to be worked out, sir, but don’t you think the greater good justifies it?”
    “Of course it does. That doesn’t mean we’ll all be able to sit down and play nice in the sandbox.” Waxman sighed, rubbed his eyes again. “Save a copy of the software and deliver it to my office by the end of the day. I’ve got