No, he wanted a practical use for his skills and dropped out of graduate school. At the time there was a huge demand for statisticians and analysts on Wall Street and Tal joined up. In theory the job seemed a perfect fit — numbers, numbers and more numbers, and a practical use for them. But he soon found something else: Wall Street mathematics were fishy mathematics. Tal felt pressured to skew his statistical analysis of certain companies to help his bank sell financial products to the clients. To Tal, 3 was no more nor less than 3. Yet his bosses sometimes wanted 3 to appear to be 2.9999 or 3.12111. There was nothing illegal about this — all the qualifications were disclosed to customers. But statistics, to Tal, helped us understand life; they weren’t smoke screens to help us sneak up on the unwary. Numbers were pure. And the glorious compensation he received didn’t take the shame out of his prostitution.
On the very day he was going to quit, though, the FBI arrived in Tal’s office — not for anything he or the bank had done, but to serve a warrant to examine the accounts of a client who’d been indicted in a stock scam. It turned out the agent looking over the figures was a mathematician and accountant. He and Tal had some fascinating discussions while the man pored over the records, armed with handcuffs, a large automatic pistol and a Texas Instruments calculator.
Here at last was a logical outlet for his love of numbers. He’d always been interested in police work. As a slight, reclusive only child he’d read not only books on logarithms and trigonometry and Einstein’s theories but murder mysteries as well, Agatha Christie and A. Conan Doyle. His analytical mind would often spot the killer early in the story. He called the Bureau’s personnel department. He was disappointed to learn that there was a federal government hiring freeze in effect. But, undeterred, he called the NYPD and other police departments in the metro area — including Westbrook County, where he’d lived with his family for several years before his widower father got a job teaching math at UCLA.
Westbrook, it turned out, needed someone to take over their financial crimes investigations. The only problem, the head of county personnel admitted, was that the officer would also have to be in charge of gathering and compiling statistics. But, to Tal Simms, numbers were numbers and he had no problem with the piggy-backed assignments.
One month later, Tal had kissed Wall Street good-bye and moved into a tiny though pristine Tudor house in Bedford Plains, the county seat.
There was one other glitch, however, which the Westbrook County personnel office had neglected to mention, probably because it was so obvious: To be a member of the sheriff’s department financial crimes unit, he had to become a cop.
The two-month training was rough. Oh, the academic part about criminal law and procedure went fine. The challenge was the physical curriculum at the academy, which was a little like army basic training. Tal Simms, who’d been five-foot-nine and had hovered around 153 pounds since high school, had fiercely avoided all sports except volleyball, tennis and the rifle team, none of which had buffed him up for the Suspect Takedown and Restraint course. Still, he got through it all and graduated in the top 1.4 % of his class. The swearing-in ceremony was attended by a dozen friends from local colleges and Wall Street, as well as his father, who’d flown in from the Midwest, where he was a professor of advanced mathematics at the University of Chicago. The stern man was unable to fathom why his son had taken this route but, having largely abandoned the boy for the world of numbers in his early years, Simms Senior had forfeited all right to nudge Tal’s career in one direction or another.
Financial crimes proved to be rare in Westbrook. Or, more accurately, they tended to be adjunct to federal prosecutions and Tal found himself sidelined as an investigator but in great demand as a statistician.
Finding and analyzing data are more vital than the public thinks. Certainly crime statistics determine budget and staff-hiring strategies. But, more than that, statistics can diagnose a community’s ills. If the national monthly average for murders of teenagers by other teenagers in neighborhoods with a mean annual income of $26,000 is.03, and Kendall Heights in southern Westbrook was home to 1.1 such killings per month, why? And what could be done to fix the problem?
Hence, the infamous questionnaire.
Now, 6:30 p.m., armed with the one he’d just completed, Tal had decided to return to his office from the Benson house. He input the information from the form into his database and placed the questionnaire itself into his to-be-filed basket. He stared at the information on the screen for a moment then began to log off. But he changed his mind and went online and searched some databases.
He jumped when someone walked into his office. “Hey, boss.” Shellee blinked. “Thought you were gone.”
“Just wanted to finish up a few things here.”
“I’ve got that stuff you wanted.”
He glanced at it. The title was, “Adjunct Reports. SEC Case 04-5432.”
“Thanks,” he said absently, staring at his printouts.
“Sure.” She eyed him carefully. “You need anything else?”
“No, go on home…’Night.” When she turned away, though, he glanced at the computer screen once more and said, “Wait, Shell. You ever work in Crime Scene?”
“Never did. Bill watches that TV show. It’s icky.”
“You know what I’d have to do to get Crime Scene to look over the house?”
“House?”
“Where the suicide happened. The Benson house in Greeley.”
“The—”
“Suicides. I want Crime Scene to check it out. But I don’t know what to do.”
“Something funny about it?”
He explained, “Just looked up a few things. The incident profile was out of range.”
“I’ll make a call. Ingrid’s still down there, I think.”
She returned to her desk and Tal rocked back in his chair.
The low April sun shot bars of ruddy light into his office, hitting the large, blank wall and leaving a geometric pattern on the white paint. The image put in mind the blood on the walls and couch and carpet of the Bensons’ house. He pictured, too, the shaky lettering of their note.
Together forever…
Shellee appeared in the doorway. “Sorry, boss. They said it’s too late to twenty-one-twenty-four it.”
“To—?”
“That’s what they said. They said you need to declare a twenty-one-twenty-four to get Crime Scene in. But you can’t do it now.”
“Oh. Why?”
“Something about it being too contaminated now. You have to do it right away or get some special order from the sheriff himself. Anyway, that’s what they told me, boss.”
Even though Shellee worked for three other detectives Tal was the only one who received this title — a true endearment, coming from her. She was formal, or chill, with the other cops in direct proportion to the number of times they asked her to fetch coffee or snuck peeks at her ample breasts.
Outside, a voice from the Real Crimes side of the room called out, “Hey, Bear, you get your questionnaire done?” A chortle followed.
Greg LaTour called back, “Naw, I’m taking mine home. Had front-row Knicks tickets but I figured, fuck, it’d be more fun to fill out paperwork all night.”
More laughter.
Shellee’s face hardened into a furious mask. She started to turn but Tal motioned her to stop.
“Hey, guys, tone it down.” The voice was Captain Dempsey’s. “He’ll hear you.”
“Naw,” LaTour called, “Einstein left already. He’s probably home humping his calculator. Who’s up for Sal’s?”
“I’m for that, Bear.”