Ambush (Michael Bennett #11)(49)

Of course, if the Alpha had sent someone to tail Kane, it would be someone who could blend in, just like Rooftop Thomas in Mexico. But why bother with a tail? Assuming Kane wasn’t leading a nefarious double life, he would be traveling to and from work and home and going to visit friends or run errands.

Whoever it was, they’d definitely caught Kane’s attention. His gaze was focused.

“We ran the faces of everyone on the platform,” Taft said. “Sixty-seven people. I’ve got our boy genius trying to triangulate and narrow it down. Ah, speak of the devil.”

A man with a beard, his bare arms sheathed in tattoos, stuck his head in the door. He looked all of nineteen as he waved a piece of paper at us. “I got it down to five names.”

Taft took the paper. “Give me a rundown of your process. The condensed version.”

“Sure.” He shrugged. “It’s straightforward trig. From where Kane stood, I extrapolated his line of sight across the platform. That told me which cameras covered the zone where he was looking. Lines of sight from those cameras gave me the three sides of a triangle—the two lines extending from the cameras and a baseline I calculated by walking between them. Then I just determined the angles and extended the lines until they crossed. That narrowed Kane’s view to the five people who appear on both cameras.”

“Remind me not to ask about the math next time,” Taft said. “But I think I followed enough to say you’ve earned your Superman cape.”

“A raise will do.” He winked and disappeared back out the door.

Taft flattened the paper and we looked at the list of names.

Laura Almasi. Sonia Lopez Martinez. Kenneth Riley Napierkowski. Leroy Parker. Thomas Wilson.

“Any of the names mean anything to you?” Taft asked.

“No.” Dammit.

“Not to me, either. I’ll run them and send you photos and profiles if you wish.”

“Yeah, thanks.”

“I’ll get them to Detective Gorman as well.”

We went back to the other monitor, and Taft played Kane’s final moments. The man surging up from the ground, the flash of the knife. Kane turning in what must have been stunned surprise.

Then the final act, which had earned the Pushman his moniker from the press.

I forced myself to keep my eyes open.

“Play the clip again where the guy first gets up,” I said. “Did you see that tattoo?”

“We saw it.” Taft rewound, then froze the image.

What we could see of the Pushman’s face was a rictus of rage. Lips drawn back to expose white teeth, the barely visible forehead wrinkled with his snarl. He had his right arm up, the knife clearly visible in his hand. On the inside of his arm was a tattoo of a star and crescent and below that, Arabic writing.

“The crescent and star. That’s a symbol of Islam,” I said.

“Right. The script is Arabic—the words mean Five Pillars. This sent us off chasing rabbits, thinking this might be a terrorist act. But the theory doesn’t hold. Not so far, anyway. No one has stepped forward to claim the death. And those assholes always step forward. That’s not to say the guy didn’t see himself as the Lone Hassan. But that makes it a hate crime, not an act of terror. Hard to imagine this guy having political or social objectives.”

I studied the tattoos. “The five pillars.”

“You know what it means?”

“They’re the basic tenets of Islam. Faith, prayer, charity, fasting, and pilgrimage.”

Taft folded his arms. “Looks like this dipshit lost out on all of them.”

A woman poked her head through the open doorway. “Chief, you got a call on your landline.”

Taft stood. “Excuse me a minute? Feel free to play with the buttons while I’m gone.”

I took Taft’s seat and replayed the scene over and over. But if I’d been hoping to recognize the guy, to maybe prove to myself that he was just what he appeared to be, I had to admit defeat. I was certain I’d never seen him before.

He could still be a mentally disturbed vagrant.

And I could be a nun.

Aside from the tattoo, the most striking thing about him were his teeth, which were visible when he went after Kane.

They were straight. And perfectly white.

Maybe Dentists Without Borders had come to Denver.

When Taft returned, I vacated his seat and asked if he could give me stills. “Two of the killer, close-up and full body. And another one of the crowd.”

“Sure thing.” More button pushing. The printer on the desk began to whir.

“What do we know from gait analysis?” I asked.

The ability to watch for criminal activity in public places had gotten a huge leg up when someone realized that humans can be identified on surveillance cameras by how they move. A person’s walk was as unique as a fingerprint, and one of several biometric markers used by law enforcement to track suspicious activity. The RTD had sophisticated gait-analysis software built into every camera—a total of ten thousand cameras placed on the RTD’s trains, platforms, and buses.

The system worked by building computer images—avatars—of every person recorded by its cameras. The computer could then use that avatar to find all the locations a person had traveled to within the RTD system.

It was one of the coolest gee-whiz high-tech things to come along. But it was still just software.