in Winter’s coffin. The LA coroner had positively identified the knife found on Winter’s corpse as the weapon used in all fourteen Aztec slayings.
I backed out of the LAPD files and logged onto the other file.
The second data pull consisted of one file: twenty-four hours of data recorded by a household AI.
Ten minutes of random sampling told me what I wanted to know. Still, the data could have been edited. I had the desktop computer run the entire file at a compression ratio of 3600 to 1, verifying each DataNet time code recorded. In twenty-four seconds I had my answer: there were exactly 86,400 seconds worth of sequential time codes. None were missing and there were no extras. That didn’t totally eliminate the possibility that the file had been edited, but it made it damned unlikely.
One thing was clear: on the eighth of February, 2063, an adult male answering to the name of Mike had spent the better part of nine hours in Sonja Winter’s apartment.
Until I could prove that he was Michael Winter, I decided to call him Mr. X.
Since Sonja Winter’s apartment wasn’t equipped with video cameras, there was no identifiable footage of Mr. X.
The man appearing in the security system’s IR imagers could have been anyone of the proper height and weight. A person’s heat patterns are as individual as fingerprints, but Michael Winter had probably never been thermally mapped. Since thermal mapping only works on warm living tissue, it was too late to map Michael now. Without a reference map on file, there was no basis for comparison. Those heat patterns might have belonged to Michael Winter. Then again, they might not have.
So, scratch visual, and scratch infrared. What did that leave? Audio.
There were three voices in the recording, two female and one male. One of the female voices I recognized as Sonja’s. The other female voice was easily attributed to Harmony, Sonja’s AI. The male voice belonged to Mr. X.
I captured three random samples of Mr. X’s voice and compared them to the police file copy of Michael Winter’s suicide recording. The voiceprints matched. The voice in Sonja’s apartment on the day of Christine Clark’s murder belonged to Michael Winter.
The court wouldn’t buy it, of course. The District Attorney would rationalize it away.
No two voiceprints are ever perfectly identical. The DA would call in a half dozen voiceprint experts, all prepared to testify that the minuscule variations between two samples made absolute positive identification impossible. The voice in Ms. Winter’s apartment might belong to Michael Winter. Then again, maybe not.
Or, the DA might be willing to concede the possibility that Michael had an alibi for the murder of Christine Clark. Which didn’t alter the fact that Michael had confessed to the other thirteen killings.
LAPD and the District Attorney’s Office had a solution that made them happy. Fourteen murders were solved and the killer was dealt with. They certainly weren’t going to call a press conference to announce that fourteen murder cases were being reopened and a killer was still running rampant.
According to the case files, before his suicide, Michael hadn’t been a suspect. In fact, the police hadn’t even been aware of his existence. His confession had taken them by surprise. Coming—as it had—complete with the murder weapon and a suspect who knew intimate details of the crime, the whole package must have seemed a Godsend to the police. All of which felt just a little too convenient.
I was a long way from being convinced that Michael Winter hadn’t killed Christine Clark, but—for the sake of argument—what if he hadn’t? What would it mean?
By Sonja’s extension of logic, if he was innocent of one murder, then he hadn’t killed any of them.
I wasn’t ready to make a leap that large. He might very well have killed one or more of the others. I didn’t know yet.
Damn.
I backed out of the LAPD files and logged onto the other file.
The second data pull consisted of one file: twenty-four hours of data recorded by a household AI.
Ten minutes of random sampling told me what I wanted to know. Still, the data could have been edited. I had the desktop computer run the entire file at a compression ratio of 3600 to 1, verifying each DataNet time code recorded. In twenty-four seconds I had my answer: there were exactly 86,400 seconds worth of sequential time codes. None were missing and there were no extras. That didn’t totally eliminate the possibility that the file had been edited, but it made it damned unlikely.
One thing was clear: on the eighth of February, 2063, an adult male answering to the name of Mike had spent the better part of nine hours in Sonja Winter’s apartment.
Until I could prove that he was Michael Winter, I decided to call him Mr. X.
Since Sonja Winter’s apartment wasn’t equipped with video cameras, there was no identifiable footage of Mr. X.
The man appearing in the security system’s IR imagers could have been anyone of the proper height and weight. A person’s heat patterns are as individual as fingerprints, but Michael Winter had probably never been thermally mapped. Since thermal mapping only works on warm living tissue, it was too late to map Michael now. Without a reference map on file, there was no basis for comparison. Those heat patterns might have belonged to Michael Winter. Then again, they might not have.
So, scratch visual, and scratch infrared. What did that leave? Audio.
There were three voices in the recording, two female and one male. One of the female voices I recognized as Sonja’s. The other female voice was easily attributed to Harmony, Sonja’s AI. The male voice belonged to Mr. X.
I captured three random samples of Mr. X’s voice and compared them to the police file copy of Michael Winter’s suicide recording. The voiceprints matched. The voice in Sonja’s apartment on the day of Christine Clark’s murder belonged to Michael Winter.
The court wouldn’t buy it, of course. The District Attorney would rationalize it away.
No two voiceprints are ever perfectly identical. The DA would call in a half dozen voiceprint experts, all prepared to testify that the minuscule variations between two samples made absolute positive identification impossible. The voice in Ms. Winter’s apartment might belong to Michael Winter. Then again, maybe not.
Or, the DA might be willing to concede the possibility that Michael had an alibi for the murder of Christine Clark. Which didn’t alter the fact that Michael had confessed to the other thirteen killings.
LAPD and the District Attorney’s Office had a solution that made them happy. Fourteen murders were solved and the killer was dealt with. They certainly weren’t going to call a press conference to announce that fourteen murder cases were being reopened and a killer was still running rampant.
According to the case files, before his suicide, Michael hadn’t been a suspect. In fact, the police hadn’t even been aware of his existence. His confession had taken them by surprise. Coming—as it had—complete with the murder weapon and a suspect who knew intimate details of the crime, the whole package must have seemed a Godsend to the police. All of which felt just a little too convenient.
I was a long way from being convinced that Michael Winter hadn’t killed Christine Clark, but—for the sake of argument—what if he hadn’t? What would it mean?
By Sonja’s extension of logic, if he was innocent of one murder, then he hadn’t killed any of them.
I wasn’t ready to make a leap that large. He might very well have killed one or more of the others. I didn’t know yet.
Damn.
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