"The Transgenic Falcon"

I picked up Belinda, but lost Johnny after leaving the hospital complex. If the set of his shoulders was any indication, Round was off to kick the crap out of one of the chief project scientists. It was a bad day to be a senior investigator at G-T.

Being the proactive high-flyer she was, Belinda had not just found me the handheld and information I’d asked for, but had commandeered an office. Someone had worked there, judging from the plants and personal images displayed, but there was no other sign of them now. Did we just make another potential murderer by unceremoniously turfing a middle-manager out of their office? This is why I hate hierarchical organization, above a certain level, no one can let being pushed around go, it’s counter-indicated for career advancement, so every action had a cost. Maybe Otho would send a nice muffin basket to smooth things over, I just knew I wouldn’t be.

I was casually jumping around in the terabyte plus of data Johnny’s people had put together. Lots of history of Dr. Constantine Cho, BS, MS, MBE, PhD, XYZ, PDQ, and OMG for all I could tell with a quick scan. I had to give it to Cho; he was one of the few people who had more degrees than I do. Not that the paper means much, its all about the knowledge you gain as far as I am concerned. Still, even by that measure Cho was right up there.

“Why do you and Chief Round need all that information?” Belinda asked, obviously bored with watching me speed read.

“We probably need more than this,” I said, not looking up.

“More than a terabyte of data?”

“Yeah, maybe a lot more,” I said, looking up at her. I pulled my paperback out of my pocket and put it on the table. “We’re still in chapter two, Clues and Evidence. We’ve got a little evidence, but it will be the clues will lead us to the killer. It’s a question of shifting through enough information to find them.”

Belinda gave the tattered and coverless book a skeptical look, then started to reach for it. I pulled it out of her reach. “That’s mine, thank you. If you want one buy your own.”

I’d never seen anyone actually throw their hands in the air, but my old flame never ceases to surprise. She made the gesture, then folded her arms across her chest.

“So what does your book say?” she asked, dripping acid from every syllable.

“Well, in a nutshell, it says you never really know what clue will put you on the track or bring you closer to the solution, so you have to have as big a pile of data as you can, then you start whittling it down until you find the set of facts that fit.”

“And that’s what you’re doing?”

I rubbed my chin, a little embarrassed, “Actually no. What I am doing it best summed up by three words; Saturate, Incubate and Illuminate.”

“Is it in the Fifteen Steps of a Private Investigation?”

“It should be, but it isn’t. The SII method is from a Prussian physicist, Hermann Von Helmholtz. It’s the way to have an original idea, which is what we need in this case. The technique in the Fifteen Steps is good, but it takes too long, so we have to fall back on Helmholtz.”

“Makes sense. How does it work?” Belinda asked, interested in spite of herself.

“Do exactly what it says, fill your head with information on the topic, let you mind process and then reap the new idea.”

“So, you’re saturating right now, then you, ah, incubate. How long does that take?”

I gave her a wry smile, “That’s the rub, it’s not a controllable process, sometimes it happens quickly, sometimes it takes longer.”

“How much longer?”

“In physics? It could be years, decades.” I told her. It earned me an eye-roll. I had a feeling I’d be seeing that a lot on this case.

“And in solving crimes?” she asked with all the feigned patients of a second grade teacher trying to run down what happened in a playground scuffle.

“Well, it had better be less than seventy-two hours in this case, but I can’t guarantee anything.” I looked back down at the handheld, avoiding her glare. Sometimes discretion really is the better part of valor, besides, my shirt is not made of asbestos and I was pretty sure that glare was so hot it was best described on the stellar brightness scale.

I thought my hide-and-it-will-all-go-away tactic had worked, as there was a moment or two of silence. Then Belinda cleared her throat.

“Right, then” she said with finality, “If we can’t control the incubation or the illumination, we go after inputs. Saturation. Clearly you reading thousands of pages of papers and articles at random is inefficient. You need overviews, not in-depth knowledge to start making connections. What’s our best practice for getting that for you?”

I looked up into a face which showed as much willingness to compromise as twenty metric tonne press. Holy Crap! Belinda had just turned into the equivalent of a Terminator programmed for process improvement, and she was pointed right at me!

“Best practice?” I asked, doubtfully. Belinda was having none of it.

“Don’t divert and don’t get distracted by the terms. There is a,” she held up a finger, “one, optimal way to do anything inside the constraints. We’re going to take the next five minutes to figure out the best practice. The way you think is our biggest constraint at this point, so what do we do to make sure you get stuffed like a Thanksgiving turkey with the right information sets?”

A little tip to all the youngsters out there, if you see someone with a look of determination that reminds you of King Leonidas or Sir Edmond Hillary, or even a fat housewife heading for the last set of fitted sheets at the semi-annual Lincoln’s Birthday White Sale, just go with what they want. It’s way too ugly to contemplate the alternative. Knowing this, I put firmly set myself in cooperation mode, and thought for a second.

On first blush it was a nutty idea. I didn’t know what I needed to know, how could I? Usually I fall back on speed-reading and stay away from cases with a time limit. Still, Belinda, as forcefully as she was doing it, she was asking how she could best help me.

“Well, it’s all about connections, really.” I said, thinking out loud, “Finding where people and things match up, and where they look like they should but don’t. Lists might help with that, at least for a fast overview. Then I could rule out a lot of stuff and focus on the more likely areas faster. But there is a risk. If I give you a bunch of categories to make lists from, and the bit I need isn’t on any of them, then we won’t find it.”

“What do you think the probability of that is?” Belinda asked.

“It’s impossible to make an accurate estimate,” I countered.

Belinda waved her hand, dismissing my objection. “Then take a guess, five percent chance? Twenty? Fifty, you’re the PI, Eamon, so you’re the expert.”

“Call it a twenty percent chance of missing something,”

“Right, so what can we do to lower that, down to ten percent or less?” Belinda pursued ruthlessly.

“Um, well, it’s important to get information in different forms, just reading things isn’t enough. Breaking up the time spent reading with other activities gives incubation a chance to happen.”

“Good, now we’re getting somewhere” She looked down at my copy of the Fifteen Steps; I could see her consider picking it up, but shelving the idea. “So, what are some of the other activities you need to do?”

“I need to do interviews. Murder is mostly a personal thing, but given who Cho was and where he worked it seems unlikely. Still talking to all his team members, particularly the two who found the bodies is a good place to start. But to do that affectively I need to prep for it, have some background information about who they are.”

“HR will have excellent background on everyone,” Belinda said, more making a note to herself than telling me something new.

“Yeah, but it won’t be enough, I really need the gossip too. Their work history is great, but it almost never tells you about the person. I need to find out what is normal for folks, and if anyone is acting differently. The one acting strangely is likely to either be the killer or know something.”

“So, we need to get you lists, we need to get briefings on the people you want to interview, we need gossip, and a schedule to keep you from getting bogged down in any one place. We’ll make sure you have progress reporting time every couple of hours, to keep you on track. This should be enough for a start.” She reached across the desk and snagged my handheld out of my grasp. A few quick commands and she handed it back. The pages I’d been reading were gone and now there was a blank document. “You start on the lists you need, I’m going to arrange for your list makers, briefings and gossip.”

I gave her a blank stare as she fired up her expensive info-communication system with a few twists of her rings. When she noticed me not doing anything, she looked hard at me. I got to work while listening with half an ear to Belinda order up resources.

“Mary-Beth, hi, it’s Belinda Morris, how are you?” she said to the air. “I’m on an A-priority project for the Chairman, and I need some help. Great, thanks. Take this down please. I need Downy and Chatham from Quantitative Analysis assigned right away. They should drop whatever they are doing and head up to Kevin Durant’s office in Main R&D.”

At least now I knew whose office we were squatting in.

“They are going to need full HR database access.” She paused, listening. “Yes, I understand that, but do it anyway, like I said, this is a priority A project straight from Otho Johnson himself.” She fell silent again nodding at what I assumed was Mary-Beth’s cowed agreement. “Finally, I need Lynn Delfore assigned here for the rest of the week. Yes, I know, yes, I know, but she’s who I want and I don’t have time to argue. Are we clear? Good, get it done. Bye”

I looked up from the growing list of lists I thought I’d need. “I get the analysts, but what is a Lynn Delfore?”

Belinda gave me one of her twenty-thousand watt smiles and said, “She is the single biggest gossip you’ll meet in G-T. She lives for knowing dirt, to the point that HR has a marker in her file to keep her away from top secret projects.”

My curiosity scratched, I turned back to my work.