Authors: Rex Burns
Goodman, about my age and a head shorter, had a mustache and goatee that framed pink, fleshy lips. “Hi. You want to see the tapes?”
Bunch answered for both of us, “Yeah, Doc.”
“Certainly. This made a fine project for a couple of my graduate students, by the way. We’ve all learned a lot from it.”
We followed the white lab coat down one aisle between a series of dusty black consoles faced by needle gauges and past a large steel-and-glass rectangle labeled
SOUND BOOTH.
On one end of a cleared bench, a series of paper strips was laid flat and anchored at each curling corner by pieces of stray electronic equipment. “The first set of readouts is voice number one, the second is number two, and—no great surprise—the third voice is three, the control voice. The voice whose identity we know,” he added for my benefit.
“I understand.”
“Fine. The top sheet is the sonograph record; that longer tape on the bottom is the oscillograph. Now you have to remember, all three of these voices were taken over the telephone, so they’re not a hundred percent accurate. The telephone transmitter screens out certain frequencies at both ends of the scale.”
“This sonograph”—Bunch had to show off a little—”it makes a graph of how sound is made in the mouth, right, Doc?”
“Sound production in the entire vocal tract including the larynx, that’s right.”
I looked at the first sheet that was slightly larger than a page of typing paper. Its color was a gray white, and an irregular pattern of dark smudges seemed to be burned into it.
“The relative light and dark etching corresponds to the pitch and intensity of the sound production. Where the sound is weak, we get a light burn. Where it’s strong, the burn is heavy. Now here’s the phrase whose sound production we’ve looked at.” Goodman pointed to lightly penciled letters spread along the lower edge of the sheet. They spelled “Yeah? Who? No. You got the wrong number.”
“That’s the voice from the number I called—the Aegis number.”
“Right,” said Bunch. “And we’re only just beginning.”
“This, you see, is the lingual-velar plosive—the g sound in ‘got.’” He pointed to a smudge. “It’s quite hard, an intensity of production that’s much stronger than many people make, and most likely generated with more force. This pale mark here is another diagnostic mark, the final r in ‘number.’ Or at least it should be. The speaker almost drops it off. My guess is that he substitutes a schwa sound for the retracted r in final position. Instead of making the sound with his tongue lifted like this—’r’—he just does it with his lips: ‘uh.’”
I found my own mouth following Goodman’s demonstrations.
“Show him the oscillograph, Doc.”
“That’s the tape down here.” An ink line traced down the strip of paper in a variety of flowing and spiky patterns. “Any sound production raises the line. This graph doesn’t indicate the locus of production, but it does measure the sound after it’s produced: the volume, duration, aspirations, and any kind of stutter or quirk in the sound itself.”
On the tape a sharp spike of ink marked the g sound and corroborated the explosive quality indicated by the sonograph. Goodman also pointed out the slightly longer duration of the final r sounds, a duration that partially compensated, he said, for the loss of the retracted r. Other critical diagnostic marks were found in the duration of the vowel production in relation to a consonant in the word “wrong,” and in something he called a “slight integrated schwa” that he pointed out on the graph but which I hadn’t heard following the final t in “got.”
“These are the kinds of idiosyncratic things we look for, especially since the voices don’t repeat exactly the same sentences. As I said, my students had a real challenge. So did I.”
“A sound gets changed if the sounds around it change, right, Doc?”
“Usually, yes. Ideally you want the same environment for the sounds you’re comparing. We came pretty close, though.”
“Show him the other tapes. Here, Dev—here’s voice two.”
Another set of papers showed the same kinds of marking, and along their bottom margins, I made out “Hello, Austin, it’s me. I got a tee-off at four on Thursday.” I looked at the graphs that analyzed the sounds but they didn’t tell me much. “Is it the same voice?”
Goodman shook his head. “I can’t be certain from just that. The ‘hello’ is the same. But more indicative is that almost silent schwa behind ‘got’ and the characteristic final r in ‘four.’ If he’d repeated the same phrasing as in voice one, I could be more definite.”
“This here’s voice three, Dev. It ties these two together.”
This set of tapes measured the known control voice saying “Hello? A what? A tee-off? Who is this? Yeah, you got the wrong number!”
“I tried to make him repeat as many key words as possible,” said Bunch proudly. “Doc says I did all right.”
“It wouldn’t stand up in court, but I think it’s adequate to establish a highly probable similarity,” said Goodman.
“So all three voices are probably the same?”
“And all three,” smiled Bunch, “belong to that Aegis number you called. That’s who I called for voice three.”
I remembered the scattered notations in Haas’s appointment book calling for tee-offs and stating various times. “So it wasn’t just golf that Haas was playing.”
Bunch shook his head. “It was footsie.”
A
T THIS TIME
of night, Seventeenth Street was more canyonlike than ever. The orange glare of sodium lights pooled on sidewalks and curbs and empty asphalt, and drained color from the silent store fronts and sharply etched clusters of garbage cans waiting for the morning pickup. A drying streak of wet marked the passage of the street sweeper; from the distance and faint through the narrow slits of side canyons, we heard the occasional moan of a train blowing crossings along the west side of the city. Above, banks of unlit windows rose into darkness and the black pinched together over our heads. Bunch glanced at my watch. “It’s about that time.”
Time for the routine coffee break of the police patrols on a quiet midweek night. Time for the building’s single night watchman to sleep behind his desk or be somewhere on his rounds. Time for me to follow Bunch from the dim recess of the stark patio at the base of the Action West building. During the day—at lunch hour in warm weather, anyway—the concrete walls and benches were softened by people. Empty at night, they loomed unnatural and sterile and emphasized the lifelessness of an area that devoted everything to the pocketbook and nothing to the soul.
Bunch strode quickly to the brightly lit glass doors and probed a thin sensor into the joint between the two panels of glass. A few seconds later I heard him grunt with satisfaction and the man’s large finger began to work with surprising delicacy at the tumblers in the lock.
“Okay, Dev. It’s open. Watch the treadplate.”
We sidled past the heavy door and stepped gingerly around the edges of a large rubber mat that during the day caught the street dirt, and during the night concealed an alarm plate. As Bunch had said earlier when we strolled through the lobby with the workday crowd, “Hell, if we can’t outsmart an alarm system like this, we shouldn’t be in the business.”
The empty observation desk glowed whitely. We darted across the stark space of the lobby before the watchman wandered back to his post, our tennis shoes making occasional squeaks on the fresh wax of the floor. Beyond the rows of elevator doors, we found the fire stairs and started the long, spiraling climb up to the thirty-fifth floor. We reached the last landing and paused in the dull glow of the emergency bulb to catch our breath and let our quivering legs rest a moment. Then I glanced at Bunch who nodded and gently opened the thick metal door. Its latch echoed loudly into the blackness of the corridor and we followed the probe of the flashlight beam to the shiny wooden doors of the Aegis Group offices. I held the light while Bunch tested for any additional electronics.
“I don’t think they have any sensors, but it only takes a minute to check it out. Be damned embarrassing if the president and vice president of Kirk and Associates got busted for breaking and entering.”
When he stepped back, I slid the rippled metal blade of the pick into the lock’s cylinder, my hands pale in the pair of thin, disposable rubber gloves. Carefully, the tumblers nudged into place and a moment later the door swung silently in.
The thin glow of the city filtered through the atrium, showing desks and chairs as shadowy smudges. I led Bunch to the receptionist’s desk, shielding the flashlight lens with my fingers. The drawers were locked, but taped on the retractable writing board under the desktop I found what we came for: the directory of in-house telephone numbers, information that Bunch’s contact in the telephone company had not been able to provide. I began copying down the extensions and the names preceding them from the worn sheet while Bunch prowled silently through the lifeless rooms.
“Is the number there?”
“Yeah. It belongs to a David Neeley.” Good old D.N. from my list of Haas’s contacts. “I’ll be through in a minute.”
Bending close over the sheet that smelled faintly of the secretary’s perfume, I was almost down to the bottom of the column when Bunch said “Uh-oh.”
“What do you mean, ‘uh-oh’?”
“Uh-oh, I just screwed the goose. You about through over there?”
“What’s wrong?”
“I found a door with a silent alarm on it. I just tripped the son-of-a-bitch.”
“A couple seconds—just a few more names.”
Bunch trotted to the hallway doors and peered into the blackness. “Better make it now, Dev—the elevator’s already halfway up.”
I shoved the writing board back and hurried after Bunch. We quickly locked the door behind us and ran past the flicker of numbers above the elevators, our tennis shoes squeaking loudly now. Tumbling into the stairwell, we used the slick steel rails to glide down the flights three and four steps at a time. My pace fell into an urgent rhythm—step, slide, step, thump, turn, step—that made the series of landings a spinning blur in the dim glow of bulbs. At the door marked
GROUND FLOOR,
Bunch slowed to catch his breath and I pulled ahead and motioned him to wait. Carefully I went down a step at a time into the stale air of the basement and unscrewed the light behind the last fire door. Then, easing it open, I felt my way along the concrete wall toward the red glow of the exit sign.
A white light speared me like a moth to the wall and an excited voice yelled “All right—I see you—hold it right there! I’m the watchman and I got a gun—you hold it right there.”
I froze, slowly lifting both hands empty and spread, and blinked into the glare. “No gun—you just take it easy. I’ll stand right here.”
“You better, goddamn it! You better!”
“Take it easy, now. You can see me. No gun. You got me.”
The light and the voice came closer. “Damn right I have. I knew you’d be coming down the fire stairs soon’s I sent that elevator up. How’d you get in here? Put your hands up—higher—higher!”
The flashlight wobbled briefly and canted at an angle. A hand came into the light to pat the front of my dark jacket and from the blackness behind the flashlight an odor of cigarette breath said, “Stand still, now. Don’t you try nothing!”
“You’re supposed to face me to the wall for that.”
“Don’t you tell me what to do! By God, I know what I’m doing—I—”
The voice shifted into a startled yelp and I dropped down as the flashlight spun and caught a massive hand clasped around the guard’s fingers and pistol. Then the light shattered on the floor and, blinking against the lingering red glare in my eyes, I heard Bunch. “Now I got the pistol, old timer. All we want is out. You just sit still and everything will be all right.”
“Don’t hurt me! I got a wife—a sick one—and grandkids. I wouldn’t have this damn job if my wife wasn’t sick!”
“Hell, we don’t want to hurt you. We just don’t want to get caught.”
The tangled shadows of Bunch and the guard disappeared, leaving me to grope blindly toward the fire door. A moment later Bunch was back, his shape a thicker darkness beside me.
“Is the guard okay?”
“Yeah. I tied him up with his pants. He’ll be loose in a couple minutes.”
The push bar had the usual warning:
ALARM SOUNDS IF DOOR OPENED
. Bunch swung his penlight around the margins of the doorframe to locate the wiring. Quickly, he clipped a small copper bridge across the leads. Then pressing the door open, we escaped into the cold air of the dark alley.
“Sorry about that alarm, Dev. They didn’t have one on the hallway doors, so I didn’t figure one for an inside door.”
I drove while Bunch rustled around in a paper bag for a couple of beers and popped the lids. “I didn’t think that guard would come after us. He sent the elevator up empty and then went down to wait for us. Smart old bugger.”
“It took guts, all right.” Bunch, his mouth full, handed me a can. “I always get thirsty after a gig like that.” He swallowed again deeply. “Why do you think they had an alarm door inside?”
“It’s probably their security room for the proprietary stuff. They’ll think someone was after their planning documents.”
“Someone like McAllister.” He ran the flashlight down the list I’d copied. “Does Neeley’s name mean anything to you?”
“Not the name. The initials. There was a D.N. that showed up in Haas’s appointment books. My guess is it’s the same.”
“I’ll give Lewellen a call and see if he’s got anything.”
A small item deep inside the Rocky Mountain News headlined “Guard Assaulted in Action West Building”: and quoted Anthony Crinelli, 62, saying that he had been jumped by three assailants while checking out a silent alarm triggered in the Aegis Group offices on the thirty-fifth floor. One was described as a tall white male in his late twenties or early thirties, medium-length brown hair and blue eyes, and a small vertical scar above the left side of his mouth. There was no description of the other two who had moved up behind Crinelli and overpowered him while he was attempting to arrest the first suspect. A spokesman for the Aegis Group said nothing appeared to be missing and declined further comment. The development company is currently involved in two extensive real-estate ventures in Aurora and unincorporated Jefferson County.