"Yes," Neeka agreed, "someone who preys on defenseless old women is going to have some very messed-up values. We're not going to be able to persuade these people to trade their life of crime for being productive members of society unless we can first convince them that they are miserable failures as criminals."
I said, "And one way to do that is to show them that they can be made into victims, too. Another would be to show them that they are up against something so much tougher and stronger than they are that going straight is the easy way out.
"All of this is fine in theory, but hard to do in practice. As Deputies Murphy and Rosario pointed out to us tonight, crooks can be as hard to find as cops, when you want one. We got lucky tonight. Finding predators is possible when you know whom they prey on and where their prey is going to be found. For crooks that choose their victims randomly, or have a large territory that they work in, it's going to be much harder to track them down. We can't open a bank and wait for it to be robbed. We can't buy a house and wait for it to be burgled. We can't..." An idea came to me and I stopped to think it over.
"Uh, oh," Bambi said. "I hear the wheels turning."
"Well, the gears are grinding, anyway," Neeka said.
"I was about to say what we can't do, but it occurs to me that we haven't tapped all our resources."
Neeka sat down at the desk and started going through the manuals that had been sent over from the Sheriff's Department. While she logged into the databases we needed, I explained to Bambi.
"I was about to say that we can't pin down specific crimes to specific locations, but maybe we can. The local law enforcement agencies will certainly have records of the crimes reported in their jurisdictions. If we can narrow down the area, we might be able to pull our fishing stunt on someone other than purse snatchers."
Neeka was already well into the maze of menus and options. Bambi and I watched over her shoulder. She seemed to be very much at home on a keyboard.
After a few minutes, she said, "There is a general database of all crimes committed locally. It has a crappy Access-based front end, but I can get the information we want. It seems to be pretty current. The problem is that it isn't connected to the GIS."
"GIS?" Bambi asked. I was glad she saved me from asking.
"Geographic Information System," Neeka said. "Basically, a map of the city that will show statistics that you give it. But it doesn't look like they linked the two systems together in any useful way. I think the underlying database is SQL, so maybe I can export the query results and then import it into the GIS."
"Oh," Bambi said. Then she mouthed at me, "sequel?"
I shrugged. "Neeka, are you a nerd?" I asked, half jokingly.
"I think the term you want is Geek," she said. "As in Computer Geek. And I am planning on majoring in Computer Science when I go to college.
"OK, here we go. I've imported my query result into the GIS. The key field is the case number. The mapped value is where the crime was committed. The different types of crimes will show as different colored dots and each type is on a different layer so we can turn them off or on, individually or in any combination. What do you want to see first?"
"Well, let's see it all to start," I said.
Neeka clicked the mouse and the screen came up with a map so covered with colored dots that it was hard to see the streets.
"That's a lot of crime!" Bambi said. "I'm going to stop complaining about paying my taxes."
"Darn!" I said. "That is a lot. How far back does this go?"
"Um, let's see," Neeka said, scrolling through a second window on the screen. "Oh, I see. This is ten years of cumulative data. I guess we need to filter it down. Filter... filter... here it is. Now, what can we leave out?"
"Closed cases, for one," I said. "If the crime has been solved, then presumably the criminal is off the street. No sense looking for them if they're already locked up."
"And misdemeanors," Bambi suggested. "No speeding, littering, public drunkenness, or spitting on the sidewalk."
"And I'll limit it to just the last two years," Neeka said. "We want to be sure we aren't looking for someone who moved on to other things years ago. Now, 'apply' and 'redraw' and here we are."
The new map was much less cluttered than the first one. The dots started to show as groups. Different colors were showing different patterns. The riot of color still made it hard to distinguish a pattern.
"What do the colors mean?" I asked.
"Red is murders. Blue is residential burglaries. Green is robberies. Yellow is auto theft. Magenta is sexual assault. Cyan is arson. Orange is assault with a deadly weapon. Purple is commercial burglaries. I guess burglars specialize in one type or another."
"Lets look at them one at a time, then."
Neeka unchecked all the boxes on the bottom of the screen except for the red one and clicked on redraw. Now that she had done the hard part, I could see how easy the GIS system was to use. When the map came up again, there was a scattering of red dots all over the place, with small clumps in a few places. I studied the map carefully, but I could not see anything useful.
"I'm not getting anything," I said. "Are either of you?"
Bambi and Neeka both shook their heads. Neeka went on to the next category — residential burglaries. This map was more understandable. The dots appeared in residential neighborhoods and tended to cluster in relatively small areas. Bambi traced her finger down the screen, following a street.
"There have been eight burglaries in this neighborhood in the last two years?" she said in an astonished tone. "I'm going to have the alarm service come out and check the system."
"Makes you want to let Brute back in the house, doesn't it?" I asked.
"Almost," Bambi said.
"Let's not forget the dot that's not on this map," Neeka said. "I feel perfectly safe here, even without the dog in the house."
"You're right, honey," Bambi said. She put her arm around my shoulders. "If we do have a burglar to break in here, that will be one less criminal we'll have to worry about!"
"Damn right," I agreed. "But I'd rather not wait for them to come to us. This gives us too big an area. Robberies and auto theft are going to be very spread out, too. Let's look at magenta."
The map of sexual assault was much more interesting. The locations tended to cluster around smaller areas. Certain neighborhoods had some; certain parts of the city; some were very tightly grouped.
"Now that's interesting," I said. "Let's look at some of these small clumps. What's this one?" I pointed to the smallest group of dots I could see and Neeka clicked on it to zoom in.
"Ponce de Leon Park," Neeka said. "Six dots, all together. I had no idea!"
"I remember something on the news about a jogger being abducted in the park," Bambi said. "I never heard how that came out. I didn't know there had been six in the last couple of years!"
Neeka went back to the first screen and typed a new query. When the result came back, she said, "These have all happened in the last five months. There have been three in the last month and a half."
"Whoever it is, is getting bolder," I said. "They're up to one every other week. When did each abduction take place?"
"Let's see," Neeka said, pulling up the reports on each assault and flipping through them. "They run from Friday evening to Sunday afternoon. Looks like someone has a weekend hobby. The victims were all girls, 17 to 21. They were alone at the time, either jogging in the park or just cutting through to go shopping. Heck, I've done that. Lot's of people do. It's easier than taking the shuttle from the parking garage on 10th street. Each victim was sexually assaulted and tortured. Tortured! My God! They were knocked out somehow and blindfolded, then taken somewhere and tortured for several hours before being dumped on the street late at night. The only description is of a man wearing a leather hood. None had any idea where they were held. Eeeeww! Two-thirds of them were sexually mutilated."
"Mutilated?" Bambi said, her voice dripping with revulsion. "How?"
"Doesn't say," Neeka reported. "These are just summaries. If we want the details, we will have to ask to see the active case files."