Killer Instinct - James Patterson Page 0,25

can’t see the woman’s face, we can see her walk, and everyone has their own unique way of walking. Almost like a fingerprint.”

“Almost, but not exactly,” said Doug.

“Right, but close enough that we might be able to model this woman’s precise gait. Of course, to do that—”

“You’d have to have her precise shoes. Lucky for you, she was wearing Christian Louboutins,” he said.

I nudged Elizabeth. “See? He knows women’s shoes and there’s no way he’s gay.”

Elizabeth rolled her eyes. “Just ignore him, Doug. That’s what I do.” She took the shoes out of their box and handed them over.

“Yeah, I once dated a girl who was addicted to Louboutins,” said Doug, giving them a look. “She couldn’t afford them and I couldn’t afford her. Are you sure these are the right ones, though? The difference of even a few millimeters in the heel height would throw off every calculation.”

“They’re the right ones,” said Elizabeth, “and the heel is exactly a hundred millimeters. It’s the only way they come.”

Scam or no scam, you don’t get to sell shoes for close to a thousand bucks a pop by making a gazillion different styles. The cross straps and open-toe design with a vamp heel narrowed the field down to just one, and there was no escaping the irony.

Louboutin made shoes with names like Fifi, Bibibop, and Doracandy.

This particular shoe, however, was called the Malefissima.

Latin root word mal, meaning bad.

Or evil.

CHAPTER 29

ELIZABETH RETURNED from the bathroom after changing into the skintight green leotard that gave new meaning to the word unflattering, even on her.

“You’re right, Doug,” she said, cringing, and not just from her cuts and bruises. “You’re probably not paying Tracy enough.”

Doug quickly lined her legs with the reflective markers otherwise known as “those tiny ping-pong balls.” Her job now was to walk the world’s shortest catwalk, back and forth in front of an elaborate station of cameras, behind which was an even more elaborate console of screens.

“Work it, girl!” I said.

Doug was multitasking at the keyboard, modeling the movement of the woman with Darvish in addition to the measurements he was getting from Elizabeth. The only fixed element was the shoes, so everything else—stride differential, for instance—had to be accounted for and adjusted using multiple algorithms that also took into account things like skin tone and body mass. And that was only for starters. The real math hadn’t even begun.

So much for my having a statistics PhD from MIT. My head was spinning just thinking about it.

“Doug, any sign of the file?” asked Elizabeth.

All the computing in the world couldn’t help us unless we had something to apply it to. That was the file we were waiting on—additional surveillance footage from the hotel covering the days leading up to Darvish’s death. The detectives assigned to the case had acquired it, as per protocol for their investigation, and had even checked to see if there was any sign of Darvish’s mystery woman. But they were searching for someone with the same glow. We weren’t.

An operative or anyone else doing reconnaissance before taking out a mark wouldn’t bother using Halo. She would assume she didn’t need to.

“How the hell can anyone go back and identify her without having seen her face?” asked the detective Elizabeth had called on our way to Bergdorf’s. She’d had him on speaker. He was peeved that she’d interrupted his dinner, especially because the file was only supposed to be viewed on the department’s encrypted server.

“You’re a detective, figure it out,” snapped Elizabeth. She wasn’t digging the guy’s attitude. “In the meantime, just send the damn file to the following address.”

Doug checked his email again. It hadn’t arrived the first time he looked. Two’s a charm. “There it is,” he said. “Got it.”

But there was still more to do before using it. After filming Elizabeth in the Louboutins, he also had to film her barefoot to create a baseline. After all, it’s not like our mystery woman would’ve worn her Malefissimas while doing her reconnaissance.

She did scout the hotel, right? She had to have done a walk-through before the night she returned with Darvish. Otherwise, we were wasting our time.

A lot of time.

“Are you sure you don’t want to go home and get some sleep?” asked Doug as he began the task of singling out every woman who could be seen in the surveillance footage from the hotel, over a hundred hours’ worth.

We were hardly about to bail on him, though.

“We’ll sleep when you sleep,” I said. It was the