They were like the business world’s version of the Elias Sports Bureau. You know, those people who ESPN quote on
Wesley never needed to reorder business cards, because he didn’t get out much; his were still tucked neatly in a bottom drawer, embossed with the company’s previous name, Event Horizon, Inc. The moniker was an astrophysics term for the point of no return where all matter and even light itself cannot escape the gravity of a black hole. It was meant as an analogy for the moment when the interstellar nebula dust of Internet gibberish is pulled together to form actionable intelligence. The name was way too highbrow for the buyers, and people kept on driving past the building, having no idea or concern about what was going on inside. So the name was changed to Big Dipper Data Management. All the new clients liked the mental image of a soup ladle. The founder of the company had thought up both names, because he’d recently purchased a telescope.
Oh, and they had a new client. Law enforcement. Most of the police upper brass was old-school and couldn’t grasp the utility. But the new whiz kids who retrieved deleted files from the laptops of pedophiles—they all sent word up the chain: This is the future.
It started at the beginning of the methamphetamine explosion, back before honest citizens needed a U.S. passport and long-form birth certificate to buy over-the-counter sniffle remedies. At the encouragement of police, state lawmakers hired Wesley’s company and used the supporting data to show an undeniable statistical relationship between pockets of violent street crime and volumes of cold-medication sales, which led to pioneering legislation drying up the basic ingredients for drug labs.
That opened everyone’s eyes. Cold remedies? What about cold
The theory: We’ve got all these electronic files of credit-card purchases, utility bills, tollbooth hits, property taxes, airline tickets, car titles, etc., etc. Obviously too circumstantial to hold up in court, but what if we mashed all those records together, filtering for time and place. In the coldest of cases, it might at least narrow the field and generate a short list of those who deserved a closer look.
For instance: a rash of mystery rapes hit the Pensacola area in the late nineties. Then nothing for years. Police figured the assailant either moved, died, went to prison, or was shipped out with the military.
Then, in 2004, Pensacola authorities noticed a bulletin out of Jacksonville. Serial rapist. As they read, chills. Almost identical details: sliding-glass-door entry, panty-hose mask, one-sided serrated knife, even the exact verbatim instructions to each victim that they had withheld from the press: counting to one hundred, then back down again, before attempting to loosen the same kind of knots.
The Pensacola police got in touch with Jacksonville, and they decided to meet halfway. Literally. Tallahassee. They hovered over Wesley in his cubicle. First, he set the parameters for Pensacola during the six-month period of the first attacks, which pretty much created a list of everyone who had produced personal ID for anything, only about 1,850,000 people. Then he percolated that list through the last month’s info in Jacksonville—looking for those who had been in both places during the two time periods—which brought the number in the overlapping circle down to 2,379.
“Damn,” said the lead investigator. “I though we might have had something.”
“We do,” said Wesley. “That’s a workable number.”
“Workable?” said the detective. “It’s over two thousand.”
“That’s nothing the null sets can’t neutralize.”
“I have no idea what you just said.”
“The null sets are the silver-bullet statistics.” Wesley typed even faster as he spoke. “You say the attacks stopped in Pensacola in ’98 and resumed in Jacksonville in ’04? So what we do is take our list of two-thousand-some-odd suspects, flip the filter, then kick
