"Crystal," Paul said. He wasn't sure he believed all that, but he didn't want to test it.
"Good, because I meant every word," Gene said. He gestured forward, then started off on his crutches. "Let's go find the man who hired you, shall we?"
By the time they reached Gene's section, Paul felt like a tiny mouse in a gigantic maze. There were no colored lines on the wall, no friendly and well-lit directories with "You Are Here" printed on them. On this level there weren't even exit signs. Paul knew that wasn't legal and was sure it was intentional.
Gene's section consisted of a large meeting room, three offices, a single-seat unisex bathroom, and a small kitchen complete with a full-sized fridge, coffee pot, and microwave. A short, fat girl in neon-green stretch pants and an oversized Toby Keith T-shirt walked out of the kitchen nook, her brown hair pulled back in a ponytail. She carried a freshly opened pint of Ben and Jerry's Chunky Monkey ice cream, the first spoonful already in her mouth. She stopped and looked Paul over from top to bottom. "I thought you'd be taller," said Sam Greene's familiar voice as she waddled her way to a doorway, swiped a key-card, and disappeared into the darkened room beyond. The door shut behind her.
Paul raised an eyebrow at Gene, who motioned him to the large meeting room. A huge, dark-stained table dominated the room. A single desktop computer sat in the middle with adjustable wheeled office chairs around the outside. Circling the table were nine individual desks against the walls. On each desk sat a large stack of papers, a computer monitor and keyboard, and a folded-paper plaque, each with a separate victim's name.
"Listen up," Sam chirped over the COM. A large projector in the middle of the ceiling lit a wall nearly the size of a movie screen. "Data classification will be complete within the hour and we'll start matching. Each station has physical and digital copies of all data compiled for each victim listed. When you're done with your last bit of data, feel free to start rooting. It goes without saying that all files on a desk stay on that desk. PPD has been combing through this data and will add their findings in real-time.
"Keep an eye on the match lists. The converters won't be done until morning, so you can force priority if you want. There's a link in all this data somewhere. Go find it." Sam's voice cut off.
"Does anyone want to translate that into English for me?" Paul asked no one in particular.
"I will." Carl motioned Paul closer so as not to disturb the rest of the team. "PPD is the VICAP Psychological Profiling Department. They've gone over most of this with a fine-toothed comb, and they'll help us create data matches with what they can figure out about victim correlations and a profile on the guy who hired you.
"As the computer finds information that's the same for other victims, it creates a match which it will display on that projection there. We're looking for high-numbered, irreconcilable matches. That is, matches that aren't automatically explained by another factor.
"For example, we're going to get a Match-7 on males, but that's automatically reconcilable because the other two are by default females. So we know these victims weren't killed because of their sex. Hence, sex will be discarded and will come off the screen. Sam will be poring over matches as the data shows up, flagging them as reconcilable or irreconcilable.
"The converters change non-computer-recognized text into computer-recognized text. That's just a fancy way of saying it turns handwriting into computer-readable text. A separate but similar program converts photos of text. That is, everything we could only get paper copies of and some of the file-types for the electronic stuff doesn't show up like a web page or a word processor document. Imagine having to re-type every one of the documents we scanned yesterday. Yeeesh."
Paul shuddered at the thought. Scanning alone had taken hours. Carl was way too excited about the process.
"Yep," Carl continued. "It's a lot of boring work, but because we did it, what would take weeks or months will be done tomorrow. The really cool thing is that Sam wrote both converters. I don't think your buddies at Langley have anything anywhere near as good. Commercial OCR's have come a long way in the past decade, but they still haven't caught up to her stuff. The really un-cool thing is that she wrote the code on Bureau time, so instead of being able to patent it and sell it, it's proprietary to the FBI.
"Anyway…," Carl moved back to the topic at hand, "forcing priority means you can put something in front of the others for the computer to dig for matches on. So, if we see that five of the nine people went to Rutgers University, we can tell the computer to complete all of the alumni-record conversions first to see if that's our link. It'll drop everything and try that, then go back to what it was doing before.