The Night Stalker

Fifty-Nine

Hunter made it back to Parker Center in less than half an hour and went straight into the Information Technology Division. Brian Doyle was at his desk, speed-reading through a pile of papers. He was wearing the same clothes as yesterday. His eyes were bloodshot and his face unshaven. An empty pizza box was by the edge of the desk and the coffee percolator in the corner was practically empty.

‘Have you been here all night?’ Hunter asked.

Doyle looked up but said nothing. His stare went straight through Hunter.

‘Are you OK?’

Doyle’s eyes finally focused. ‘Umm? Yeah, sorry, I’m fine.’ He placed the sheet he was reading on the desk. ‘Just understaffed and overworked. Everyone always needs everything ASAP. I’ve got cases piling up everywhere. And this afternoon there’s this huge sting operation going on.’ He leaned back in his chair and studied Hunter for a second. ‘What the hell happened to your face?’ He pointed at the cut above his eyebrow.

Hunter shook his head. ‘Walked into a door.’

‘Of course you did. Just hope the door isn’t gonna sue the department.’

‘She won’t.’

‘She? A woman did that to you?’

‘Long story.’

‘I bet.’ He cleared a space at the edge of his desk and leaned against it. ‘OK, Robert, for you to be here, it’s gotta be something urgent.’

Hunter nodded. ‘But I only need about three minutes of your time, Jack. Then I’m out of here.’

‘Is this about the psycho who killed Doctor Winston with that bomb?’

An almost imperceptible nod. Hunter felt his chest tighten around his heart as he remembered he’d never see his old friend again.

‘He was a good man. I met him a couple of times.’ Doyle checked his watch. ‘What do you need?’

Hunter handed him the high-capacity hard drive and waited while Doyle hooked it up to his PC. Unsurprisingly, all the directories in the hard drive were perfectly organized — first by camera location and then by date.

‘Can these files be uncompressed in bulk?’ Hunter asked.

‘Not simultaneously. They’re massive. It’d be too processor intensive and it’d crash any machine, but. .’ Doyle lifted his index finger, ‘you could line them up inside an application. As soon as one file finishes uncompressing, it’ll automatically move to the next one in the list. That way you don’t even have to be there. Just leave it working and come back when it’s all done.’

‘That’ll work for me.’

Doyle smiled. ‘Please tell me you don’t need all of these files. There’re hundreds of them. This will take days.’

‘No.’ Hunter shook his head. ‘Just a handful of them — to start with.’

‘OK, in that case I’ll tell you the easiest thing to do. Because this is an external drive, I can link it up to an empty laptop instead of clogging up the machine in your office. That way you can work on your machine if you need to and just leave the laptop on the side, as it does its thing. Give me five minutes and I’ll have it all set up for you.’