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“I was scrubbing through video around Hamilton Court and found a half-second clip of the two of them together. Hale and the woman. I pulled a capture. It wasn’t great, but I enhanced it with Stable Diffusion. You know it?”
“No.”
“It’s an AI—artificial intelligence text-to-image art generator. I loaded in the capture and kept making modifications—like witness artists do. Then I sent the JPG to Domain Awareness to startmatching. I just got a call from them. They had some hits.” He sat at the keyboard and typed. Seconds later they were on a video call—like Zoom, but with higher security—to the control room of the Domain Awareness operation.
Officer Bobby Hancock was a burly man with a beard not forbidden by, but uncharacteristic in, the NYPD.
“Ron.”
“Bobby. Go ahead.”
“Is that Lincoln Rhyme?”
The criminalist offered an impatient punctuation-free: “Yes it is go ahead Officer.”
“Sure. From the image Ron gave us we did a citywide profile and found the subject. That Stable Diffusion thing? We talked to the brass and’re going to be opening an AI-generative operation. Really smart.”
Rhyme and Sachs shared a glance. He again felt a bit of pride for his protégé. He could see Sachs did too.
“Twice we placed her in the company of Hale. And we had a solo of her, West Side—Midtown. Here they are.”
The images came onto the screen. Not high-def, but clear enough. She was in her early thirties, Rhyme guessed. Pretty in a wholesome, not runway model way. Slim, maybe athletic, but her clothes—jeans and a sport team sweatshirt—were concealing. Her blond hair was in a complicated braid.
In the first two, she was walking down the sidewalk beside Hale. In one they were looking around suspiciously. In the other, they were regarding each other.
In the third image she was on the sidewalk in a part of town featuring old brownstones, not unlike Rhyme’s.
“Those’re from videos,” Rhyme said. “Any others worth looking at?”
“Nope. Just more of the same, walking. One, two seconds each.”
Woman X wasn’t holding anything, say, a coffee cup that—byheavy-duty policework—they might’ve found and lifted prints from.
“Thanks, Bobby.”
“Sure.”
Pulaski said, “The one where she was by herself. I’ve been looking at images of neighborhoods. That could be a block in the West Thirties. Bad fire a couple of days ago. Arson. A pro job. Termite and napalm. Maybe a coincidence. But insurance scams don’t use accelerants like that. The army uses accelerants like that. I’ve sent a team to canvass.”
“And be sure—”
Pulaski finished the sentence. “That they know about acid IEDs.”
Sachs studied one of the pictures for a long moment.
From her eyes, he could tell she was onto something.
“What, Sachs?”
“Her face. The second shot, looking at him.”
“Hm.”
Pulaski frowned. “What do you see?”
Neither answered. She asked, “How do we handle it?”
The answer struck him almost immediately. “Thom! Thom!”
