CHAPTER SIXTEEN
"Jesus, Dallas." Feeney shrugged the shoulder she was leaning over. "Stop breathing down my neck."
"Sorry." She leaned back one stingy inch. "How long does it take to program the print into this thing?"
"Twice as long as it would if you weren't nagging on me."
"Okay, okay." She backed off, stalked to the window of the conference room. "It's sleeting," she said more to herself than him. "Traffic's going to be ugly later."
"Traffic's always ugly this time of year. Too many damn tourists. I tried to do a little shopping last night. Wife wants this sweater thing. People are like wolves on a dead deer out there. I'm not going back."
"Video shopping's easier."
"Yeah, but the fucking circuits are jammed. Everybody and his cousin's on trying to scoop up bargains. I don't come up with a dozen pretty boxes under the tree for her, I'm bunking in the den till spring."
"A dozen?" Mildly horrified, she swung back around. "You have to buy her more than one?"
"Man, Dallas, areyou green in the marriage area." He snorted, working manually on the programming. "One present don't mean dick. Quantity, pal. Think quantity."
"Great, terrific. I'm sunk."
"You got a couple of days left. And here we are."
Her shopping dilemma cleared from her mind as she rushed back. "Run it."
"I'm getting to it. Here's our man on the 'link."
Is Mr. or Mrs. Kates available ?
"I cut out the other voices. That's your pauses," Feeney explained.
Good morning, Ms. Kates. This is Nicholas Claus. I wondered how the work on my necklace is progressing.
"I can run the rest, but that's enough for a match."
"The accent's vague," Eve mused. "He doesn't put a lot on it. That's smart. You got Rudy in there?"
"Coming up. This is from the interview tape. Just him."
We advise all our clients to meet their matches in a public place. Any who agreed to meet him privately subsequent to that were making their own decision.
"Now we got prints. This baby computes everything: pitch, inflection, cadence, tonal quality. Don't matter a damn if you disguise your voice. It's as reliable as fingerprints and DNA. You can't fake it. Shift to Subject A, graft style, on screen and on audio."
Working. ..
Eve listened to the 'link call, watched the lines of color skim and jump along the screen. "Split the screen," she told him, "put the interview blurb up under that one."
"Just hold on." Feeney ordered the function, then pursed his lips. "Got a problem here."
"What? What's wrong with it?"
"Meld prints on screen," he ordered, then sighed as the points and valleys clashed. "They don't match, Dallas. They aren't even close. You got two different voices here."
"Shit." She tunneled her fingers through her hair. Because she could see it for herself, her stomach started to burn. "Let me think. Okay, what if he used a distorter on his end of the 'link?"
"He could mess it up a little, but I'd still get match points. Best I can do is ran a scan, search for any electronic masking, clean it out if I find it. But I've seen enough of these to know when I'm looking at two different guys."
He sighed and sent her one of his mournful looks. "Sorry, Dallas. This sets things back a ways."