Free Precious Blood by Jonathan Hayes Page B

privileges.
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    Within minutes, Jenner knew that Whittaker had missed at least one opportunity to humiliate him. A few keystrokes took him onto the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program; his passwords to CODIS and AFIS and even some of the regional databases were still valid. He now had access to investigational records from the country’s most violent murders.
    He began. For search parameters, he guessed at things about Andie that might have appealed to her killer—her age, her occupation, modality of homicide (here, Jenner went with the generic “asphyxia”), and location.
    A three-year record search in VICAP only delivered a handful of consonant cases, homicides that, for all their viciousness, turned out to be disappointingly straightforward.
    Worse, all seemed to have been closed by capture or death of the perpetrator. He printed out short case abstracts on all six anyway.
    Maybe the last killing was too recent to show up in the database? Busy state police officers and detectives pissed and moaned about spending hours inputting data into a federal program they thought of mostly as a research tool for federal showboaters. Despite the Bureau’s offer to install a free, dedicated terminal in any office requesting one, compliance with VICAP was lax, and even in departments where the reports were submitted, the program had low priority. Ac-cordingly, many—maybe even most—murders never made it into the database at all, or if they did, it was often after a delay of months.
    He would have to do it the old-fashioned way. He opened his small black address book and placed it flat on the desktop. As an ME, he had lectured frequently at regional and national meetings and at the NYPD Death School; he was happy talking casework with the cops, whether from big-city precincts or single-man squads in the ass end of nowhere, many of whom had terrible forensic backup. By the time he resigned, he’d almost filled the address book. Now 64
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    he combed through it, culling the names and addresses of detectives, state troopers, criminalists, a cadaver dog trainer, even a couple of undertakers—anyone who’d know about any unusually violent deaths in their area.
    It was close to 5:00 p.m. when he started calling; he’d missed the eight-to-four shift. Many of his contacts had already left, but Jenner found that introducing himself and the reason for his call was all the entrée he needed. Striking out in the five boroughs of New York City, he began calling farther afield.
    By 9:00 p.m. he had burned through his numbers for southern New York and northern New Jersey and had nothing to show for it. He was now on eastern Pennsylvania; he decided he’d give up as soon as he got as far as the midpoint of the Pennsylvania Turnpike.
    Danny Barton had retired from the Ninth Precinct a couple of years back and gone over to the Pennsylvania State Police.
    He was stationed near Romen—halfway to Ohio. This would be his last call for the night.
    No answer, no voice mail. Just as Jenner was hanging up, a state trooper picked up. Barton had left for the day, so Jenner left a message.
    “Wait—Doc Jenner? From the New York ME’s office?”
    “Yes?”
    “Doc! It’s Bobby Dowling! I was in the Ninth with Danny, retired six months ago, Danny brought me on up. You remember me? We had that working girl who went out the window on East Fourth at A, the one who killed the bartender at that bar down the street from Spiral?”
    Jenner did remember him—dark hair, average height, thinning hair, a little soft in the middle, a fast talker. They spoke for a few seconds about life in New York versus life in the country, then Jenner, his stomach starting to growl, said,
    “Bobby, the reason I called, it’s a bit of a long shot, but I’m looking to see if you guys have caught any extremely violent murders recently, anything weird.”
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    Dowling paused. “Doc, you didn’t know we got the Smith