Death Match

Mauchly looked down at the gathered sheets. “No.”

“Look for signs of an isolated existence, no criminal record, possible abuse as a wife or harsh discipline as a child.”

“Never married,” Mauchly went on. “Runs the shop by herself — I see no reports of any employees in the Department of Labor database. No criminal record.”

Lash, watching, could only shake his head. He’d already seen — firsthand — the incredible volume of data Eden assembled on its clients. And yet this ability to peer so deeply into the life of somebody who’d been summarily rejected years before was unsettling.

“Looks like we might have strike two,” Tara a

“The Wilners died Friday night,” Mauchly said. “York’s only a two-hour drive from Larchmont.”

Tara was typing again. “Upon admittance, she was found to have near-toxic levels of fentanyl in her system. The admitting clinician said she’d passed out in the guest lot of the clinic, been asleep for hours.”

“Nobody could commit two murders with a bloodstream full of fentanyl,” Lash said.

Tara sighed.

For a moment, nobody spoke. Then Mauchly put the papers aside and broke open the third and last folder.

“James Albert Groesch,” he began. “Age thirty-one, male Caucasian, no religious affiliation, dropped out of vocational college after two years. Resides in Massapequa, New York. Postal employee. Passed initial screening. Returned for applicant evaluation, failed by the senior evaluator.”

“Reason?” Lash asked.

“Alarming test results. The personality inventory showed defective socialization, ambivalence to close relationships, potential sexual maladjustment, incipient misogynic tendencies.”

“Misogyny? Why would such a person want what Eden has to offer?”

“You tell me, Dr. Lash. Not everybody comes to us with healthy reasons. That’s one of the things our evaluations screen out.” Mauchly sca

“Groesch was hiking in the Grand Canyon prior to the death of the Thorpes,” Tara said, examining the overview. “Spent two nights at Phantom Ranch. Flew from Flagstaff to Phoenix, then back to La Guardia, the day after their bodies were discovered.”

So all three had been in or around Flagstaff at the time of the deaths, Lash thought. No doubt one of the filters Liza had used in assembling the list.

“There’s something else,” Tara said. “Groesch’s evaluation took place on August 2, 2002.”

“And?” said Lash.

“That was also the day of Karen Wilner’s evaluation.”

A chill settled over the room.

“Defective socialization,” Lash murmured. “Sexual maladjustment.”

He turned toward Mauchly. “Anything else there? Anything that says this couldn’t be our boy?”

Mauchly looked back at the overview. He sca

A brief but electric tingle surged through Lash. The weariness he’d felt was gone. There was a color photograph of Groesch lying among the papers, and he picked it up. A burly man with close-cropped blond hair and a huge handlebar moustache glared back at him.

“Let’s break out the picks and axes,” Tara said. “Time for some data mining.”

Wordlessly, Mauchly stood and walked toward the far wall, where the evidence lockers were stacked. He brought three to the table, unsealed the first. Inside, Lash saw credit card statements; telephone records; transcripts of what looked like Internet URLs.

“Tara, would you contact the CCTV group and coordinate?” Mauchly asked. “Have them start ru

“Sure thing.” Tara stood, picked up the telephone.

Mauchly reached into the open locker, pulled out two enormous stacks of papers, and began leafing through them. “It appears Mr. Groesch made numerous calls to his mother in the weeks leading up to the four deaths. We’ll have to pinpoint any calls he made on the two days in question — that could prove instructive. Hmm. He also joined several primitive Internet matchmaking services over the last couple of months. In each case, he seems to have filled out the forms differently, lying about his age, place of residence, interests. He also seems to have visited some rather unusual websites lately: a site that describes how to make poisons, another specializing in graphic photographs of murders and suicides.” He glanced up. “Does this fit with your profile, Dr. Lash?”

It was overwhelming, the level of detail Eden seemed able to pull effortlessly out of the air. “How are you able to do all this?” Lash asked.

Mauchly looked up at him again. “All what?”

“Assemble all this information. I mean, these people didn’t even become your clients.”

Mauchly’s lips thi

“I know. But I’ve never seen anything close to it, even at the Bureau. It’s almost as if you can reconstruct people’s entire lives.”

“People think their daily activities are invisible,” Tara said. “Not so. Every time you surf the Web, software cookies track where you’ve been, every click of your mouse while you were there. Every email you send goes through a dozen hosts before reaching its destination. Spend a day in any large city, and your image is captured by hundreds of closed-circuit television systems. All that’s lacking is an infrastructure robust enough to gather it all. That’s where we come in. We share our information with commercial database providers, selected government agencies, ISP vendors, junk-mail distributors, and—”

“Junk mail?” Lash said in surprise.

“Junk mail outfits have some of the most sophisticated data algorithms around. It isn’t the untargeted bulk people think. Same with telemarketers. Anyway, all this data on you is collected and stored. Stored forever. Our problem isn’t getting enough data: we usually gather too much.”

“It’s like Big Brother.”

“Perhaps it seems that way,” said Mauchly. “But with our help, hundreds of thousands of clients have found happiness. And now we might also stop a murderer.”

There was a knock on the door; Tara rose from the keyboard to open it. A man in a lab coat handed her an ivory-colored folder. Tara thanked him, closed the door, and opened the folder. She stared at the contents a minute.

“Shit,” she said under her breath.

“What is it?” Mauchly asked.

She handed him the folder wordlessly. Mauchly glanced at it a minute. Then he turned to Lash.

“Our team ran a facial recognition search through our archive of surveillance images,” he said. “We already knew Groesch was around Flagstaff when the Thorpes died, so Tara limited the search to his whereabouts the night of the Wilners’ deaths. The search picked up these images.”

He handed some photographs to Lash. “Here he is, at an ATM at 3:12 p.m. And here again, ru