“Was the body in situ, on the ground? Or did you have any sense of motion immediately before the, ah, accident occurred? Such as a body that had fallen from above—jumped or pushed?”
“No,” she blurted.
“Mr. Ingersoll?” Pendergast asked.
The man stared at the agent with red-rimmed eyes. Then he merely shook his head.
“Thank you,” Pendergast said, glancing at Delaplane to signal, once again, that he had nothing more to ask.
Sheldrake asked a few perfunctory questions, and then Delaplane dismissed the couple with the usual warnings. As the door closed behind them, she turned to Pendergast. “May I ask why the interest in the timing of the 911 call?”
“Naturally. And I’d be happy to answer your question—once you’ve checked in with that cell phone specialist of yours.”
This had been another of Pendergast’s bizarre questions. “I’m not sure he’ll have an answer for us yet.”
“Please try him anyway, if you don’t mind.”
“Okay.” Delaplane dialed an internal extension, then turned on the speaker of her desk phone.
“Wrigley here,” came a voice over the speaker.
“Wrigley? It’s Alanna.”
“Oh. Hi, Commander.”
“Any joy?”
“As a matter of fact, I was just about to call you,” the disembodied voice replied. “It turns out I didn’t need to tinker with the microcode after all. Once I knew his location, the model of his phone, and its internal GPS ID, I tried the cell towers in that area, just in case. And I got lucky. The kid has a really old phone, and it pings the network a lot more frequently than today’s models when its flashlight is on or it’s being used as a compass. Some proposed IEEE standard that ultimately was never implemented. Anyway, sure enough, it was pinging the network: once every sixty seconds. Of course, newer phones go dormant much faster in order to save juice, but this—”
“Fascinating, Wrigley, but can we get to the point?”
“There were thirteen pings, each exactly sixty seconds apart. The first was at 3:02, and the last was at 3:14.”
“Excuse me,” Pendergast said. “But what was the exact time of the last ping?”
“Like I said,” the technician replied, “3:14.”
“I asked for the exact time, if you please.”
“Why didn’t you say so?” came the sarcastic response. “Three fourteen, forty seconds, and seventy-one centiseconds. That’s 3:14:40.71. I’d give you the milliseconds, but the ANI/ALI signal doesn’t—”
“Okay, Wrigley,” Delaplane said, trying to keep from smiling. “Good work.” And she hung up. “Now,” she said, turning to Pendergast, “I’m not sure what you’re driving at here.”
“Just one last favor, please,” Pendergast said in his most honeyed tone. “Would you please call your emergency dispatcher and find out when Mrs. Ingersoll dialed 911?”
“Let me guess. Down to the second.”
“If you’d be so kind.”
It took two calls, and about five minutes of waiting as the records were accessed, before Delaplane hung up again. “Three eighteen,” she said. “And, no, they couldn’t tell me how many hundredths of a second.”
“That’s quite all right, thank you,” said Pendergast, sliding the fingers of one hand over the nails of the other in a peculiar gesture. “We can assume both time sources are quite accurate—certainly accurate enough for our needs.”
“What are those needs, exactly?” Delaplane asked. She caught Coldmoon’s eye, and he grinned.
“To provide the variables for the following calculation: The Manning youth dropped his phone just as he started running away from whoever attacked his friend. That means the assault took place at 3:14 and about forty seconds. We also know that Mrs. Ingersoll dialed 911 at 3:18, less than four minutes later. Which means that was the time Brock Custis was dropped.”
“What the hell?” Coldmoon said, stirring behind the conference table, suddenly seeing the craziness of the timeline.
“Dropped?” Delaplane asked.
“My dear colleagues, consider the facts! The injury to the body, and the accounts of the eyewitnesses, make it clear that Custis had just fallen to the sidewalk a moment before Ingersoll tripped over him. Everyone has assumed that Custis fell from a window or off the roof. But that clearly isn’t the case.”
“How’s that?” Delaplane asked.