Digital Divide

by Spangler, K. B.

  The cameraman, broken, started to talk.

  “A man came up to me a few weeks before I shot the video. He said his name was John Glazer.” Burman opened his wallet and slid a crisp white business card across the table to Zockinski. “He said he worked for Internal Affairs and he needed to get evidence against some cops on the force.”

  The television mounted high on the wall in the interview room burst into life without warning. Zockinski had known it was coming and his colors barely shifted towards the reds at all, but Burman’s collapsed into terror as the screen froze on the face of the man who had sparred with Hill the day the original video had been taken. Jason leaned towards him and hissed: “Is that Glazer?”

  Burman shut his eyes and nodded. Glazer was young and good-looking, but even from a distance it was obvious he had a savage edge to him.

  “And you believed him when he said he was investigating corruption?” Zockinski asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Rachel?”

  “He’s lying.”

  Zockinski took the cue from the Agent and waited.

  Burman’s chin dropped to his chest. “I might have thought something was up,” he admitted. “He told me he was after this one cop, Hill, and he said he’d pay for the tape of Hill beating him. But it had to be just right, no mistakes. I thought…”

  His gray edges flushed red in shame.

  Aw man, Rachel thought.

  Zockinski didn’t need her help. He caught on before the rest of them. “You thought he wanted porn.”

  “Not porn, but…” Burman said with a hurried glance at the mirror, perhaps sensing Hill’s fury boiling behind the glass. “Everybody’s got kinks, you know?”

  “How often did you work for him?”

  “Just that one time.”

  “Rachel?”

  “True.”

  “How did he pay you?”

  “Cash. Two hundred bucks.”

  Santino reached out and bumped her shoulder with an I-told-you-so fist. She rolled her eyes and pretended to pout.

  “Did he say anything else?”

  Burman cradled the stack of papers within his arms. “He said he might have some more work for me at the beginning of October. Um… October 7th. He was really specific about that date.”

  “What kind of work?”

  “He didn’t say. He told me to keep his card on me until then. He, uh, Glazer said his phone wasn’t listed and calling the number on his card was the only way I could reach him.”

  Zockinski picked up the little white card and started to ask Burman something else when Jason leaned over and snatched it out of his hand.

  “Hey!”

  The Agent ignored Zockinski. Jason turned the card over, then held it up to the light, suspicion and curiosity painting his conversational colors. Burman scooted his chair to the side as Jason got up and smacked the business card flat against the one-way mirror. Rachel switched her implant to reading mode and made out Glazer’s name and number an instant before Jason flipped the card to reveal a silver-black pattern covering the reverse side.

  “Ping this,” he said.

  “Whoa!” Rachel reached out and pressed her fingers to the glass, as if touching the paper might confirm what her implant had told her. She turned to Santino and Hill. “It’s got an RFID tag printed on it.”

  “No kidding? Man, what a pretty thing.” Santino smiled at the card; her partner loved new technologies. “I had heard they had developed a specialized ink for printed tags, but I didn’t know it had made it to commercial use.”

  “I don’t think that’s commercial. Somebody download a reader app,” Phil said as he left the room to collect the card from Jason.

  Hill, silent, sat in uncertain yellows.

  “Radio-frequency identification,” Rachel explained. “Most people compare RFID to barcodes. It’s a self-contained data profile. The profile stores information, and when you activate the tag with an RFID reader, the tag sends the information to the reader.”

  Hill nodded. Not confused-yellow, Rachel corrected herself. That’s an oh-right-I’m-surrounded-by-freaks yellow. She needed to make a chart.

  “I know,” he said. “Store security, anti-shoplifting…”

  “They’re everywhere,” Phil said as he shut the door behind him, holding Glazer’s business card lightly by its edges. “If you’ve got three credit cards on you, you’re also carrying at least two tags. They’re even in security badges.” He lifted the MPD visitor’s pass clipped to his lapel and let it drop.

  Santino ran his phone over the card in Phil’s hand. “You can’t read this?”

  “No,” Phil said “Not us. One of the other Agents might have written an RFID reader script but nobody here has it. When I ping it, I get a bunch of meaningless data.”

  The phone chirped. “It’s an address,” Santino said. “405 East Dalton…”

  He stopped, his colors fading to a dull orange-red with a thin gray shiver across them. He turned and knocked on the glass to get Jason and Zockinski’s attention.

  “What?” Rachel asked as he handed her the card and his phone, then retreated to his chair as the last two members of their small task force joined them.

  “The bank where Maria Griffin was murdered?” Santino leaned back and closed his eyes. “That’s its address. There’s also the number of a safe deposit box.”

  Confirmation, she thought wearily as gray flittered across the room. They were finally past the point where coincidence could be explained away by anything other than willful rationalization. She’d still sit on her suspicions that the crimes were targeted at OACET, but there was no longer any doubt they were connected.

  Zockinski left to start the paperwork required to keep Chris Burman in lockup for seventy-two hours; they agreed the cameraman was nothing more than a delivery vehicle to move Glazer’s card from Point A to Point B, but they didn’t want to lose him on the off-chance he was an exceptional actor.

  Nor, they realized after extensive discussion, could they agree that the MPD was Point B. They could safely assume Burman was to hold on to the card until someone came to collect it in the early days of October, (and, as Jason pointed out, this implied there would be a reason someone would come to collect from Burman), but this chore did not necessarily default to the police.

  And Santino, who found it best to err on the side of first-generation equipment failure, proposed that if Burman had been set up to deliver the card to the MPD, he would not be the only one.

  “There’s a design flaw in paper RFID tags.” Santino held up the card in its new protective evidence bag. “They’re not in commercial use because the tags are made from electromagnetic ink, where the ink is the transistor. Burman gets the card wet, or keeps it in the middle of a stack of cards with magnetic stripes? There’s no telling whether it would still work after a few months of pocket abuse. It’s amazing it lasted this long. You can bet Glazer knows that. There are other messenger boys out there, folks.”

  Rachel concurred. Her usual method for storing business cards was to chuck them in her purse and then watch them fall like tattered snowflakes when she upended the whole thing into the garbage eight months later. If Burman committed pocket abuse, she perpetrated handbag genocide; she could have been a messenger herself and would never know it, the card passing unnoticed from hand to purse to trash.

  Zockinski stayed behind to deal with the paperwork as the others set out for the bank. Hill drove, the sickly greens and yellows of his conversational colors pulling him down. Rachel would have sympathized with the detective, stuck in a clown car crammed full of nerdcops and Agents, if he hadn’t brought their number up to five and, as the smallest member of the group, she was thus relegated to riding bitch on the pillion.

  The bank was different, hollow. The lobby was almost surgically spotless, even after an afternoon of foot traffic wet from the summer storms and filthy from the streets. But Maria Griffin’s last moments still lingered; customers could be counted on the fing
ers of one hand and the tellers huddled together for warmth. All ghoulish proclivities from the previous afternoon had disappeared, replaced with some fear, maybe a little embarrassment and shame, for sharing the same space as a murder.

  The bank manager was apologetic: they had missed him.

  “No,” Hill said, annoyed. He was cramped tight in the manager’s shopworn Knoll chair and was not about to work on puzzles. “We’re not here to see anyone. We have a warrant to search a safe deposit box.”

  The manager had a frenetic chipmunky air about him, fast and nervous movements sharpened by the sideways glances he kept sneaking at Rachel. Find your own secret tunnels, she thought, and the next time he looked at her, she winked. He went yellow and did his best to pretend the only other people in the room with him were Santino and Hill.

  Yes,” he said, sliding the warrant back across the table to Hill. “But this box? The owner emptied its contents yesterday afternoon.”

  “And you know this off the top of your head?” Jason asked. A good question, considering the manager had been swarmed under by cops, Forensics, and specialized sanitation for the better part of the day. If this was the level of customer service he offered, Rachel would change banks on the spot. She’d be sure to ask the manager for help in filling out the forms…

  “He said you’d be coming.”

  Rachel could almost feel the temperature in the manager’s office plummet; everyone’s conversational colors had gone white with shock.

  “Who did?” Jason made a grab-hand motion at her and she gave him her tablet. He called up the best image they had of their suspect. “Was it this man?”

  “Yes, yes,” the manager said. He went into the top drawer of his desk and pulled out a file. He pushed the file towards Hill. “Jonathan Glazer. He signed a consent form. No one has ever done that before, signed a form to let the police have access to his personal information or…

  “I don’t think you need that warrant,” the manager said. “I’ll honor one, of course, but I don’t know if you need it. Glazer brought the form in with him, and had our notary sign and seal it. He said it allows my bank to give you full access to his account information, personal data, whatever you need.”

  “We’ve got his home address,” Hill said. He had put on gloves and was carefully turning through the few pages in the thin file. “Let me get Forensics in here to go over the box.” He spread the pages out on the bank manager’s desk and left the room to call his partner.

  Rachel flipped her implant to reading mode and browsed the file over Santino’s shoulder. The notarized consent form, the usual contract from the bank which outlined terms of use, and a fingerprint card with ten squares covered in black made up the sum of the documents.

  “You printed him?” she asked the manager.

  “It’s our policy when we sign a lease for the largest boxes,” the manager said to Santino. “After 9-11.”

  Bingo. Most days, the reason for doing anything and everything could be summed up by those two numbers.

  She had no confidence in the fingerprints and leaned over the ten-card from the file to run a quick scan. “Faked,” she said. “There’s synthetic oils mixed in with the semi-inkless ink.” Santino lifted an eyebrow at her, and she shrugged. “Hey, I don’t make up the product names.”

  “I’m sorry, Agent,” the bank manager’s eyes had found a happy place somewhere in the vicinity of her left ear. Maybe he was a lobe man. “But you’re wrong. I took these prints myself.”

  “Nope,” she said. “There’s barely any squalene in those. No squalene, no fingerprint. Glazer was wearing reproductions of someone else’s prints.”

  The bank manager fell silent and went green in resignation. Rachel was grateful. She wasn’t sure she was up to an organic chemistry lesson more specific than how squalene was part of what made those squiggly patterns show up on clean glass, or to explain how a good set of fake fingerprints could provide better impressions than natural fingertips. An authentic print was like pornography; she knew it when she saw it, and explanations were a fumbling mess.

  She handed the card over to Jason, whose eyes still worked in the usual way. He took the card to a side table to scan it and send the data through IAFIS, the national fingerprint database. It was a cursory search, and one that would never enter the formal record. Jason’s visual scan was as accurate as anything they would perform in the lab, but Agents were not yet classified as part of the official process used to enter data into evidence. Much like how smartphones which captured latent fingerprints still required cross-confirmation for validation, Jason would flag the first search as OACET-enabled, and the task force would later run the same scan all over again when they got back to First District Station. But most fake fingerprints were made from models and Glazer seemed to enjoy hiding his clues in plain sight: Rachel had a gnawing suspicion that these prints would point them towards another body.

  Phil removed his sunglasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “If Glazer made you notarize a consent form and gave you permission to turn over his information to the police,” he said to the manager, “you must have thought that was strange. Why didn’t you call the MPD?”

  “It wasn’t their business,” the manager apologized to his desk blotter, then looked to Santino for help. “You have to understand, this wasn’t the strangest request I’ve ever gotten. I’ve been told to honor wills written to people’s pets! If I called the police whenever a customer does or says something unusual, you’d block my calls.”

  Phil conceded the point.

  Rachel asked the manager if he had actually followed through with those wills. Really, really good customer service, she thought as he told Santino a charming anecdote about a parakeet who now owned a car.

  Hill returned and said they were cleared to go to Glazer’s apartment. As they stood up and gathered their things, the manager asked if they wanted to see the security footage from the vault before they left.

  Their colors rose in a silent orange-red cloud, and Santino, politely, said yes, that would be helpful, thank you.

  “Almost an hour in that shitty little office…” Jason fumed as the manager’s assistant set up the equipment. “…and he had Glazer on tape the entire time.”

  “We’re watching it now, Jason. No harm, no foul.” Phil was making a point of responding to all statements as if they had been spoken aloud. He meant it to be a polite gesture but it was perhaps not coming across as intended, especially as Jason kept setting him up to sound slightly unhinged. The bank manager was starting to panic.

  The video launched. Monochrome footage again, and Rachel took the opportunity to ask: “Your entire security system is in black and white?”

  “Yes,” the manager said, tapping the fast-forward button, his eyes firmly on the screen. The tape showed the interior of the vault. Its heavy steel door was left open during business hours, the room secured by thick shatterproof glass. Behind this glass, digital people hurried about the lobby, the occasional child cupping their hands and peeking in at four times normal speed.

  “It seems like a new system. Why did you decide against color?”

  The brick and brown of walls built themselves around him. “It’s more than adequate for our needs.”

  Translation: We got a good deal on it. She decided her money was safer where it was, stellar customer service be damned.

  “Our policy is that customers can use the vault in privacy,” the manager said. “We go with the customer into the vault, make sure they have what they need, and we secure the glass door behind us when we leave. They have the option of closing the steel door, but most people don’t,” he pointed to the door, nearly twenty inches thick. “I think they’ve seen too many movies about getting locked in. We’ve taken precautions to make sure that doesn’t happen, but…” he shrugged.

  In the video, a woman in business attire escorted a man past the glass barrier. It was John Glazer, but a different John Glazer from the one who had sparred with Hill; the long h
air had been cut and he wore a full three-piece suit in the August heat. She doubted the kid from the convenience store could have picked him out of a lineup. She was sure Glazer was playing another role here, but perhaps one closer to his true self, and so she asked Hill: “Military?”

  “Yeah,” he squinted at the tiny man on the monitor. The details were hard to make out, but not his movements; this version of Glazer was a precision instrument.

  “Wait, wait. I want to see that again,” Jason said, and the video reversed and resumed to show Glazer glide up to the glass.

  The bank manager stood up and walked straight out of his own office.

  “There, in the background. Just a second after Glazer shuts himself in the vault,” the Agent said, and pointed. “Riiiiight…there.”

  Two men walked past the glass door, accompanied by the manager himself. Rachel blinked her implant off and on, hoping it had malfunctioned.

  “Aw hell,” Phil whispered.

  Nope, she thought, not a malfunction, and waited for the explosion.

  “Play that back again!” Santino shouted, and Jason did.

  On the screen, the Glazer from yesterday afternoon closed the glass door of the vault right as Hill and Zockinski entered and exited the camera frame on the other side.

  Hill crossed his arms and said nothing; red with anger, yellow with self-rebuke, his colors twisted violently while his body tensed.

  “How long were you in the bank after Rachel and I left?” Santino asked.

  “To clear the bank and process the tunnel?” Hill said. “Hours.”

  “But there are customers,” Santino pointed at the screen. “If you cleared the bank again, this must have happened before then…”

  Timeline again, she thought. It’s all about the timeline. Glazer must have jumped into action the instant he heard… what? Her best guess was that he had been watching the MPD process Griffin’s murder, just in case they stumbled over the hidden tunnel when they searched the room. When it had been found ahead of schedule, whatever had been left in the safe deposit box was suddenly yanked out of its proper chronology.

  She felt a little flush of pride. I think I just screwed up a killer’s master plan.