Chapter 32

“OK, so why is it so hard to bust this asshole?” I asked him. “You know who he is, you know what he’s doing, why can’t you tie it together?”

Richard reached into his coat, brought out a small tape recorder, set it on the table, and turned it on.

“You are a no-good slut,” a voice that sounded mechanical, almost as if it was computer-generated, said. “You don’t deserve to live. They won’t be able to protect you for ever. I warned you. If you won’t be mine, then you’ll die.”

“That’s an artificial voice, generated by a computer,” Richard explained. “The cops and I have both had our electronic technicians go over it, but we can’t tell any more about it than that.”

“How’d you get that?” I asked.

“Came off her answering machine,” Richard said. “She gets a message like that every day, sometimes more than once a day. They’re always short, and he makes the calls from different places. Sometimes even from cell phones using stolen access codes.”

“So even in this age of modern electronics, he’s no