Page 15 of Badlands

She spent another moment doing her best to put herself in thewoman’s head, trying to understand what her thought processes might have been. She couldn’t have simply vanished without others reporting it, searching, raising hell. Maybe she was crazy and had committed suicide or been the victim of a crime. Most likely, she was just lost and delusional from heatstroke. There’d been no obvious signs of violence. Nora had been right: the spearpoint had come back negative for any trace residue of blood or human protein—it seemed not to have been involved.

Thinking of the spearpoint led her once again to ponder the two bizarre rocks—lightning stones, Nora had called them—found with the body. Nora had also said such stones were found only in prehistoric kivas, and that the greenish ones were vanishingly rare. She’d wondered if perhaps the woman had stolen them and run off, but a quick check showed no such stones were missing, and indeed the only known set today was the one Nora had mentioned. The woman obviously hadn’t been murdered for them, because they were found by her remains—underneath them, in fact. The woman had discarded all her clothes, which meant she must have been carrying the lightning stones in her hands. Bizarre. Beyond the facial reconstruction, those stones were the only important clue they had.

She roused herself. No matter how or why the woman had disappeared,someonemust have filed a missing person report. She just had to find it. And this digital detection was work she enjoyed: her experience using and misusing computers went as far back as high school, when she’d hacked into the school’s computer system, giving herself straight As and the class bully an assload of Fs.

She preferred doing this kind of hunting at night, when the office was empty and she could slip on her earbuds and listen to Caravan Palace at full volume. She glanced at the clock. Maybe she’d end up doing just that—if the search took long enough.

“So: Do we have our man? Or in this case, woman?”

Corrie looked up to see Agent Sharp in the entrance to her cubicle.

“Sir, the game’s afoot.”

“Good.” He came in and took a seat beside her workstation. “I sent up a second chopper: those badlands cover hundreds of miles, and we want to make sure there isn’t another body out there undiscovered.”

“Thanks.” This was something Corrie couldn’t have authorized on her own. “And if possible, I’d like to assign Bellamy and O’Hara to the case. I have some thoughts on how they’d be useful.”

“It’s your case.”

Corrie, hearing how he left this sentence hanging, hesitated a moment. “I was just logging in to NamUs, if… if you’d like to observe.”

His eyes lit up uncharacteristically. “I’d like that—as long as I won’t be in the way. No doubt you can teach this old dog some new tricks.”

The National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, or NamUs, was a vast repository of data maintained by the Department of Justice to help with cases involving unidentified or missing persons. Released initially in 2009, it was upgraded to 2.0 in 2018 and again more recently to incorporate AI, remarkably useful for investigations like this. Corrie had noticed the more senior agents either shied away from it or used it sparingly. Despite the Bureau’s cutting-edge image, the J. Edgar Hoover mentality of fingerprint cards and paper files was slow to dissipate, especially among the older agents.

Corrie counted Sharp among those tech-challenged older agents, and casually asking him to watch her at work was, in her mind, a favor for putting her in charge. He had a quick andcurious mind, and she felt sure she could in fact show him some new tricks—and that they’d be appreciated.

As Sharp drew up his chair, she brought up her profile on the central NamUs dashboard, showing draft cases currently part of her workflow—less than a dozen, and none of them active. Initiating a new search, she entered the woman’s demographic information on a fresh screen—ethnicity, height, gender, last known location. She was forced to leave some of the most vital data—circumstances, date of last contact—empty, but she filled out a succession of other screens with a physical description and clothing. More blank fields meant a larger dataset, but she couldn’t help that.

“I’m adding a photo of the facial reconstruction,” she explained. “It’s not exactly a photo of the person herself, but I can get around that by relaxing the parameters in case I got something wrong in the reconstruction.”

“How large a net are you casting?”

“I thought it would be best to start with the state where the body was found. Depending on results, we can widen the search to the Southwest, or the entire country, if necessary.”

She had now entered all the data available. Mousing over to the blue search button on the final screen, she clicked it. After a few seconds, a message came back:

1,304 possible results

“Ouch,” Sharp said.

Just to get a sense of what she was dealing with, she widened the search to include all states in the Southwest.

14,937 possible results

“Angels and ministers of grace defend us,” Sharp murmured.

Fifteen thousand results. An image of the past came to Corrie’s mind: a vast room smelling of sweat and desiccated paper, library tables arranged in orderly lines, with slanting sunshine and dust motes hanging in the air, a big photo of President Nixon on one wall—and at every table a Caucasian, male FBI agent in a white short-sleeve shirt, poring over fly-specked reports as they all looked for a needle in a haystack. The FBI had come a long way.

She decided not to bother checking the entire country—not yet, at least. She thought she had an ace up her sleeve that might wipe that laconic expression off Sharp’s face. Closing the results window, she moved the mouse over to a menu that readADVANCED TOOLS.

“What’s this?” Sharp asked.

“We’re going to go see the man behind the curtain,” she replied, holding back a smile.

Given her interest in tech, Corrie had been watching the astonishingly rapid rise in artificial intelligence over the last couple of years. The AI developers were eager to bring their technology from their labs and to the market—while at the same time quelling fears that their AI would become “self-aware” and decide mankind was a parasite to be eliminated… the usual end to so many sci-fi movies. To accomplish this, they had gingerly baked AI tools into familiar apps like word processors and spreadsheets, to help with basic tasks like composing letters or creating tables. But Corrie had been experimenting with release candidates of AI subfunctions included in the NamUs 3.0 betas. Now was a chance to see what they could do—on a real case.

A new window had opened in the center of the screen—anempty window, containing only a blinking cursor. On both sides were narrower windows: the search parameters she’d entered on the left, and a hierarchical list of available databases to the right.

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