them, and even more people saw them take that schoolteacher off Jamaica Avenue, but they didn't leave anything you could use to reel them in. But they did make some phone calls. They made four or five calls to Khoury's house in Bay Ridge."
"There's no way to trace them, is there? After the connection is broken?"
"There ought to be," I said. "I was on the phone yesterday for over an hour with different phone-company personnel. I found out a lot of things about how the phones work. Every call you make is logged."
"Even local calls?"
"Uh-huh. That's how they know how many message units you use in each billing period. It's not like a gas meter where they're just keeping track of the running total. Each call gets recorded and charged to your account."
"How long do they keep that data?"
"Sixty days."
"So you could get a list--"
"Of all the calls made from a particular number. That's how the data is organized. Say I'm Kenan Khoury. I call up, I say I need to know what calls were made from my phone on a given day, and they can give me a printout with the date and time and duration of every call I made."
"But that's not what you want."
"No, it's not. What I want is the calls made to Khoury's phone, but that's not how they log them, because there's no point. They've got the technology to tell you what number's calling you before you even pick up the phone. They can mount a little LED gadget on your phone that'll display the number of the calling party and you can decide whether or not you want to talk."
"That's not available yet, is it?"
"No, not in New York, and it's controversial. It would probably cut down on the nuisance calls and put a lot of telephone perverts out of business, but the police are afraid it'd keep a lot of people from phoning in anonymous tips, because they'd suddenly be a lot less anonymous."
"If it were available now, and if Khoury had had it on his phone--"
"Then we'd know what phones the kidnappers called from. They probably used pay phones, they've been professional enough in other respects, but at least we'd know which pay phones."
"Is that important?"
"I don't know," I admitted. "I don't know what's important. But it doesn't matter because I can't get the information. It seems to me that if the calls are logged somewhere in the computer there ought to be some way to sort them by the called number, but everyone I talked to said it was impossible. That's not the way they're stored, so they can't be accessed that way."
"I don't know anything about computers."
"Neither do I, and it's a pain in the ass. I try to talk to people and I don't understand half the words they use."
"I know what you mean," she said. "That's how I feel when we watch football."
I STAYED over that night, and in the morning I used up some of her message units while she was at the gym. I called a lot of police officers and I told a lot of lies.
Mostly I claimed to be a journalist doing a roundup piece on criminal abductions for a true-crime magazine. I got a lot of cops who had nothing to say or were too busy to talk to me, and I got a fair number who were happy to cooperate but wanted to talk about cases that were years old or ones in which the criminals had been spectacularly stupid, or had been caught through some particularly clever police work.
What I wanted-- well, that was the problem, I didn't really know what I wanted. I was fishing.
Ideally, I would have loved to hook a live one, somebody who had been abducted and survived. It was conceivable that they had worked their way up to murder, that there had been earlier exploits, joint or individual, in which the victim had been released alive. It was also possible that a victim could have somehow escaped. There was a world of difference, though, between postulating the existence of such a woman and finding her.
My pose as a free-lance crime reporter wouldn't do me any good in my search for a live witness. The system is pretty good about shielding rape victims-- at
"There's no way to trace them, is there? After the connection is broken?"
"There ought to be," I said. "I was on the phone yesterday for over an hour with different phone-company personnel. I found out a lot of things about how the phones work. Every call you make is logged."
"Even local calls?"
"Uh-huh. That's how they know how many message units you use in each billing period. It's not like a gas meter where they're just keeping track of the running total. Each call gets recorded and charged to your account."
"How long do they keep that data?"
"Sixty days."
"So you could get a list--"
"Of all the calls made from a particular number. That's how the data is organized. Say I'm Kenan Khoury. I call up, I say I need to know what calls were made from my phone on a given day, and they can give me a printout with the date and time and duration of every call I made."
"But that's not what you want."
"No, it's not. What I want is the calls made to Khoury's phone, but that's not how they log them, because there's no point. They've got the technology to tell you what number's calling you before you even pick up the phone. They can mount a little LED gadget on your phone that'll display the number of the calling party and you can decide whether or not you want to talk."
"That's not available yet, is it?"
"No, not in New York, and it's controversial. It would probably cut down on the nuisance calls and put a lot of telephone perverts out of business, but the police are afraid it'd keep a lot of people from phoning in anonymous tips, because they'd suddenly be a lot less anonymous."
"If it were available now, and if Khoury had had it on his phone--"
"Then we'd know what phones the kidnappers called from. They probably used pay phones, they've been professional enough in other respects, but at least we'd know which pay phones."
"Is that important?"
"I don't know," I admitted. "I don't know what's important. But it doesn't matter because I can't get the information. It seems to me that if the calls are logged somewhere in the computer there ought to be some way to sort them by the called number, but everyone I talked to said it was impossible. That's not the way they're stored, so they can't be accessed that way."
"I don't know anything about computers."
"Neither do I, and it's a pain in the ass. I try to talk to people and I don't understand half the words they use."
"I know what you mean," she said. "That's how I feel when we watch football."
I STAYED over that night, and in the morning I used up some of her message units while she was at the gym. I called a lot of police officers and I told a lot of lies.
Mostly I claimed to be a journalist doing a roundup piece on criminal abductions for a true-crime magazine. I got a lot of cops who had nothing to say or were too busy to talk to me, and I got a fair number who were happy to cooperate but wanted to talk about cases that were years old or ones in which the criminals had been spectacularly stupid, or had been caught through some particularly clever police work.
What I wanted-- well, that was the problem, I didn't really know what I wanted. I was fishing.
Ideally, I would have loved to hook a live one, somebody who had been abducted and survived. It was conceivable that they had worked their way up to murder, that there had been earlier exploits, joint or individual, in which the victim had been released alive. It was also possible that a victim could have somehow escaped. There was a world of difference, though, between postulating the existence of such a woman and finding her.
My pose as a free-lance crime reporter wouldn't do me any good in my search for a live witness. The system is pretty good about shielding rape victims-- at
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