Unlucky 13 (20 page)

Cindy took mental inventory of the Morales situation. She knew that Morales was in San Francisco, which was a jump on every other reporter in the world and also the
FBI. She’d met Morales and knew enough about her to push her buttons. Admittedly, the button-pushing was a two-way street. The inflammatory and scary e-mailed threat from Morales was proof of that.

But, most important, this e-mail had been direct contact between the two of them. I MADE YOU CINDY.

If that wasn’t the first sentence in the lede paragraph of her upcoming career story, she didn’t
know squat about journalism.

Cindy heard the buzz of her cell phone with an incoming text message. She grabbed it. Lindsay.

I’m in a meeting. Later.

She was about to reply when an old greenish Subaru wagon drove past her, heading north on Lake Street. It was almost as if she’d conjured up one of the cars she was looking for—and it was real and right in front of her.

The dusty-green Subaru
Outback cruised through the intersection of Lake and 12th and seemed to slow as it passed Lindsay’s building. Then it continued on, its taillights receding up ahead, already too far away for Cindy to read the plate number.

She tossed her phone onto the passenger seat, strapped in, jerked the car into gear, pulled out into the lane, and jammed on the gas. Thirty seconds later, she was flying east,
past blocks of multicolored Victorian houses, tailing the green all-wheel-drive vehicle that was heading toward the Presidio.

She could make out the silhouette of the driver through the Subaru’s rear window three cars ahead, but she wasn’t close enough to tell if the driver was male or female.

Was Mackie Morales driving that car?

Actually, Cindy had no idea.

CONKLIN AND I
were taking up space in the tech bullpen at Clapper’s forensics lab, peering over the bony shoulders and fuchsia hair of Bo Kellner, a sharp young criminalist who specialized in digital forensics.

The three frames I’d snipped from several days of surveillance footage shot at the Hayes Valley Chuck’s Prime restaurant were getting this kid all excited. Well, the frames
were exciting, but Kellner was already highly enthused about his new facial-recognition program called Hunting Wolf.

He’d just installed it yesterday, and he was already being given a real-life opportunity to run Hunting Wolf through its paces. He was as excited as if he’d won the Instant Scratch-off Lotto.

I only half listened to Kellner talk about his program
because I was juggling anxiety
on two fronts: the upcoming ransom deadline from our friendly mechanical belly bomber and my constant thrumming, live-wire fear for the lives of Yuki and Brady.

Conklin, however, appeared to be in the present, and he wanted to get to know Bo Kellner’s new baby.

“What do you know about facial recognition?” Kellner asked Conklin.

“Pretty much what’s been produced in this lab and what I’ve seen
on cop TV.”

Kellner laughed. “Okay, then. So let’s start with this.”

He inputted one of the faces from the grainy footage I’d sent to the lab twenty-four hours ago. It was a three-quarter view of a thin white man with a full beard who’d been caught on camera ordering from the menu hanging over the counter.

Kellner was saying, “If this was actual footage, Hunting Wolf could read his lips and
tell you what he ordered,” when my phone chirped. I fished it out of my jacket pocket and glanced at the caller ID.

It was Cindy.

I texted her that I couldn’t talk but I’d call her later. Thinking, yes, after I had the belly bomber in my theoretical crosshairs.

Right now Belly Bomber was job one.

Kellner was saying, “So now Hunting Wolf is scanning this gray-and-white image, using algorithms
that look for light and shadow and specific features, relaying that information as a face print—a unique numerical code.”

“I’m more or less following you,” Conklin said.

“Look,” Kellner said. “See the flickering at the top of the frame? The program is scanning pretty fast, but when it reaches the center of the face, the rapid movement will slow down as it tracks the features.”

Kellner rotated
the face from three-quarters to a frontal view. He said, “Now I’m going to mess with the picture a little. I’m going to delete the beard and fill in the lower half of the face with what we call male physiological norms.”

Kellner moved the cursor around, twiddled with the image, and within seconds the guy with the beard was clean-shaven with a nice jawline.

Kellner said, “So now, I enter this
clean face into the database and give him a name: Kellner1SFPD. We’ve gone from facial tracking to facial recognition.”

The software jiggled, locked in, and then flashed through millions of faces already stored in the database, ranging beyond the known criminal database to any matching image that had ever been downloaded onto the Internet, at the fantastic speed of thirty-six million faces a
second.

But for all the cutting-edge pizzazz, there was no match.

I said, “So he’s not a known criminal, and he’s not known, period.”

“That’s right,” said Kellner. “If his image was on Facebook or any database, Hunting Wolf would send up a flare. This guy has a very low, almost nonexistent profile.”

I leaned in and said, “If you input the second face, it could match to the first. It’s still
just a cold hit, but maybe we’d get a better image of this guy, right?”

“Correct,” said Kellner. “Exactly right.”

The second photo from my series was of a skinny guy wearing a dark leather jacket, knit hat, a brushy moustache, and a small soul patch.

Kellner imported it, and technological wizardry recommenced. Images flashed on the screen, stopped on the first skinny guy, now known as Kellner1SFPD,
and flashed “100% MATCH.”

Kellner said, “Let’s go for a triple play.”

Skinny man number three wore a hoodie that threw a shadow over his eyes.

The mouth on number three looked different from the first two, and he had a bulge in his cheek that looked like he had food in his mouth. Kellner explained, “Could be chewing gum. That’s a time-tested method of fooling ID software. Even smiling can throw
off the search function. That’s why you don’t smile for a passport ID. But don’t worry. Hunting Wolf is smarter than the guy chewing gum and wearing a hoodie.

“Watch Hunting Wolf
hunt
.”

AS I WATCHED
the computer screen, the software digested the new input at some unimaginable speed, and when it stopped, I was looking at a composite of our three skinny guys without any facial fur.

Kellner’s program then did a global recognition search, and when no lights blinked and no bells rang, he pushed back his chair and looked up at us.

“I don’t know who he is, but this is a
pretty good representation of what your man looks like.”

I asked Kellner to get up and let me sit close to the monitor, which he did. I stared into the eyes of the composite image, and I swore that face looked familiar to me.

Was that because I recognized him from watching the facial recognition process? Or did I recognize the actual guy?

I knew my brain was fried from viewing too many miles
of gray-and-white surveillance footage, but still, pieces and parts of the man’s face matched a man I’d
seen
but didn’t
know
. Then I pictured him in
action
.

I recalled a barely registered image of a guy like this one stepping down from a Chuck’s refrigerated transport van. He’d been wearing a dark leather jacket and a dark scarf around his neck. No, not a scarf. It was a gray hoodie. He had opened
the cargo doors, his back to the camera, then, head lowered, he’d carried a stack of white cartons to the back door at Chuck’s Hayes Valley location.

My mind saw it now, more vividly than when I’d watched the unending surveillance footage.

The skinny guy had delivered food to Chuck’s.

Then, having handed off a half dozen white cartons to the kitchen, he’d pulled up his hood and gone into the
restaurant. I was staring at his composite image right now.

But even if my sketchy memory was dead-on, this might mean only that the delivery truck driver liked to buy lunch after he made a delivery.

But why hide his face?

If he was a deadbeat dad, or if there was a warrant out for him, and he wasn’t the stupidest person on earth, he might have fooled around with his facial hair to avoid detection
by the security cameras.

Or else this guy, who had the means and the opportunity to deliver preformed frozen hamburger patties to Chuck’s restaurants, was no dead-beat dad.

He was Mr. Ka-boom.

“He works for Chuck’s,” I said to Conklin. “I’m sure of it. Richie? I think we have a suspect.”

BO KELLNER FORWARDED
the composite image of our suspected belly bomber to my phone. I thanked him, said, “Great job, Bo,” and handed my car keys to Conklin.

Once Conklin and I were inside the elevator, I checked the time again and saw that, as if I didn’t already know it, we were edging up on the bomber’s deadline. We had about twelve hours to name, locate, and arrest the man I’d tentatively
identified as Mr. Ka-boom. The sun was down and offices were closed. Catching this guy without a name was a lot to hope for.

We piled into my Explorer and burned rubber in the forensic lab’s lot, then headed out to Emeryville at high speed.

I texted and then called Michael Jansing’s cell.

The phone rang three times and then rolled my call over to Jansing’s voice mail. So I called him at home.

This time a woman answered and identified herself as Emily Jansing. When I said I had to speak with her husband, she complained that he was at dinner and said that he’d call me later.

“Mrs. Jansing. I’ll come to your front door and kick it in if you don’t put your husband on the phone. Now!”

I guess she knew I meant that.

The phone clattered onto a hard surface. I heard raised voices in the
background, then footsteps on hardwood floors, and finally Jansing came on the line.

“We have a suspect,” I said. “I’m sending a photo to your phone.”

“You think I know him?”

“Let’s hope and pray to God that you do,” I said.

I sent the image of a possible Chuck’s delivery man as Conklin took a hard right onto the US 101 North on-ramp. I could see the bridge up ahead, but we were still twenty
minutes away from Chuck’s Prime’s headquarters.

Jansing said, “I don’t know him. He doesn’t look familiar to me at all.”

“He may be one of your truckers. Does that help?”

“I don’t know our truckers,” said Chuck’s CEO. “None of them.”

Traffic slowed as we approached the Powell Street exit, and after an interminable sixty seconds of stop-and-go along Hollis, Richie said, “Hang on.”

He flipped
on the lights and the siren, and while that didn’t exactly blow vehicles out of the road, the noise
meant that I had to shout to communicate with Jansing. “We have to get into your personnel records.”

A volley of yelling back and forth concluded with Jansing’s offer to have his assistant, Caroline Henley, let us into the office so that we could examine the company’s personnel files. “Caroline
lives two blocks from the office,” said Jansing.

Which was a relief.

At half past six and there was no fast way to get a warrant.

By the time Conklin pulled my screaming, flashing car up to Chuck’s cream-colored corporate headquarters, my heart was pounding hard against my rib cage—like it was trying to crash out of jail.

Was I right that the skinny delivery man was the belly bomber?

If so,
could we stop him before he bombed again?

Conklin set the brakes and asked, “You okay?”

“There’s Caroline,” I said, pointing to a brown-haired woman wearing tight jeans and a short tan coat, who was lowering her head against the wind as she came toward us.

We got out of the car and exchanged greetings, then climbed the steps to the Emery Tech Building’s front door. Henley swiped her access
card in the reader, and the locks thunked open. Once we were inside the lobby, I showed her the composite of our one lone suspect.

“Do you know him?” I asked her.

She took my phone in hand and said, “Yeah. I think that’s Walt.”

My hopped-up adrenal glands squirted a little more juice into my bloodstream.
Jansing’s assistant knew the guy
.

“What’s Walt’s last name?” Conklin asked as the elevator
doors slid open.

“Bremmer. Or something like that,” Caroline said. “I only met him once, but I think he’s a very popular guy in our delivery fleet. He’s not in any trouble, is he?”

“How fast can you get into the files?” I asked her.

IN HER OWN
humble opinion, Cindy was a good driver. She kept to the speed limit, slowed at yellow lights, and let moms pushing baby strollers cross the street in their own good time.

So it was against her own rules of the road that Cindy sped up Lake Street at sixty-five, cutting in front of slower cars as she shot through the residential neighborhood.

If only she could be sure that
the taillights up ahead belonged to the green Subaru. She pulled out of line to pass the vehicle in front of her, but she was forced to return to her own lane as an oncoming van leaned furiously on the horn.

It was frightening and embarrassing, and Cindy hunched reflexively, worried that if Mackie was up ahead
and looked into her rearview mirror, she might once again make Cindy.

Still, Cindy
pressed on.

At the moment, she was riding the tailgate of a Ford Escape, flying past the fenced-in, well-cropped lawns of St. Anne’s Home of the Poor. The Subaru was two cars ahead of the Escape, and although Cindy couldn’t identify the driver as Mackie Morales, she thought that the back of the driver’s head definitely looked to be that of a young adult female with short dark hair.

The driver
turned her head to check her mirror, and Cindy saw her face.