The Dark Half(71)

'Okay, we'll wait and see,' Thad agreed. 'And while we're waiting and seeing, I hope you'll go ahead and keep your appointment with my doctor.'

Pangborn was replying, but all of a sudden Thad didn't much care. The acid was percolating up from his stomach again, and this time it was a volcano. Foxy George, he thought. They think they see through him. He wants them to think that. He is watching them see through him, and when they go away, far enough away, foxy old George will arrive in his black Toronado. And what am I going to do to stop him?

He didn't know.

He hung up the telephone, cutting off Alan Pangborn's voice, and went upstairs to help Liz change the twins and dress them for the afternoon.

And he kept thinking about how it had felt, how it had felt to be somehow trapped in a telephone line running beneath the countryside of western Massachusetts, trapped down there in the dark with foxy old George Stark. It had felt like Endsville. 3

Ten minutes later the phone rang again. It stopped halfway through the second ring, and Wes the wireman called Thad to the phone. He went downstairs to take the call.

'Where are the FBI agents?' he asked Wes.

For a moment he really expected Wes to say, FBI agents? I didn't see any FBI agents.

'Them? They left.' Wes gave a big shrug, as if to ask Thad if he had expected anything else.

'They got all these computers, and if someone doesn't play with them, I guess someone else wonders how come there's so much down-time, and they might have to take a budget cut, or something.'

'Do they do anything?'

'Nope,' Wes said simply. 'Not in cases like these. Or if they do, I've never been around when they did it. They write stuff down; they do that. Then they put it in a computer someplace. Like I said.'

'I see.'

Wes looked at his watch. 'Me'n Dave are out of here, too. Equipment'll run on its own. You won't even get a bill.'

'Good,' Thad said, going to the phone. 'And thank you.'

'No problem. Mr Beaumont?'

Thad turned.

'If I was to read one of your books, would you say I'd do better with one you wrote under your own name, or one under the other guy's name?'

'Try the other guy,' Thad said, picking up the phone. 'More action.'

Wes nodded, sketched a salute, and went out.

'Hello?' Thad said. He felt as if he should have a telephone grafted onto the side of his head soon. It would save time and trouble. With recording and traceback equipment attached, of course. He could carry it around in a back-pack..'Hi, Thad. Alan. I'm still at the State Police Barracks. Listen, the news is not so good on the

phone trace. Your friend called from a telephone kiosk in Penn Station.'

Thad remembered what the other wireman, Dave, had said about installing all that expensive high-tech equipment in order to trace a call back to a bank of phones in a shopping mall somewhere. 'Are you surprised?'

'No. Disappointed, but not surprised. We hope for a slip, and believe it or not, we usually get one, sooner or later. I'd like to come over tonight. That okay?'

'Okay,' Thad said, 'why not? If things get dull, we'll play bridge.

'We expect to have voice-prints by this evening.'

'So you get his voice-print. So what?'

'Not print. Prints.'

'I don't - '

'A voice-print is a computer-generated graphic which accurately represents a person's vocal qualities,' Pangborn said. 'It doesn't have anything to do with speech, exactly - we're not interested in accents, impediments, pronunciation, that sort of thing. What the computer synthesizes is pitch and tone - what the experts call head voice - and timbre and resonance, which is known as chest or gut voice. They are verbal fingerprints, and like fingerprints, no one has ever found two which are exactly alike. I'm told that the difference in the voice-prints of identical twins is much wider than the difference in their fingerprints.'

He paused.

'We've sent a high-resolution copy of the tape we got to FOLE in Washington. What we'll get is a comparison of your voice-print and his voice-print. The guys at the state police barracks here wanted to tell me I was crazy. I could see it in their faces, but after the fingerprints and your alibi, no one quite had the nerve to come right out and say it.'

Thad opened his mouth, tried to speak, couldn't, wet his lips, tried again, and still couldn't.

'Thad? Are you hanging up on me again?'

'No,' he said, and all at once there seemed to be a cricket in the middle of his voice. 'Thank you, Alan.'

'No, don't say that. I know what you're thanking me for, and I don't want to niislead you. All I'm trying to do is follow standard investigatory procedure. The procedure is a little odd in this case, granted, because the circumstances are a little odd. That doesn't mean you should make unwarranted assumptions. Get me?'

'Yes. What's FOLE?'

'F - ? Oh. The Federal Office of Law Enforcement. Maybe the only good thing Nixon did the whole damn time he was in the White House. It's mostly made up of computer banks that serve as

a central clearing-house for the local law-enforcement agencies . . . and the program-crunchers who run them, of course. We can access the fingerprints of almost anyone in America convicted of a felony crime since 1969 or so. FOLE also supplies ballistics reports for comparison, blood-typing on felons where available, voice-prints and computer-generated pictures of suspected criminals.'