Drowning Barbie by Frederick Ramsay Page B

column-inches to the topic and the impending visit, and wondered editorially if storing dental records of criminals was somehow another blatant example of governmental over-reach infringing once again on the right to privacy guaranteed by the Constitution. It was followed by a brief and quite inaccurate recap of the leaks that had dominated the news sometime in the recent past.
    Hannibal bit his tongue and resisted the temptation to quote the amendment to them and point out that the word privacy does not appear in the text at all, and in any case, what his group did was not technically a search, and was most certainly warranted. The staff stayed busy and the piles of requests for matches slowly diminished. The group from across town finished their posturing and was on its way back to the halls of Congress and an early lunch, not to mention the evening news deadline, when a worker signaled to Hannibal that he had a problem.
    â€œThere’s a flag on this one,” he said.
    â€œA flag? What sort of flag?”
    â€œThis guy is dead.”
    â€œOf course he’s dead. That’s why the…” Hannibal glanced at the sheet of paper that accompanied the chart, “…why the coroner for the Picketsville police requested the search.”
    â€œNo, that’s not what I mean. Look, the FBI investigated this murder a bunch of years ago. They filed this chart with a notation that the case was closed, the body accounted for.”
    â€œWait a minute. If the case was closed, why did they send the chart over to us?”
    â€œIt came in a batch. When we set up the NDI/IR they just sent everything they had, old, stuff, new stuff…everything with notations of each case’s status. I guess they figured they didn’t want to waste time culling through them and figured if the case was closed it wouldn’t get a hit and, anyway, it would be our problem.”
    â€œThey punted it to us and now we have a dental chart of a man who’s supposed to have been identified and accounted for eleven years ago. That would mean either we have a dental twin or somebody screwed up over in the big house.”
    â€œI guess.”
    â€œFind out who closed the case and ask them to check in with us. It’s probably just a foul-up or a wrong label on the file.”
    â€œProbably.”

Chapter Fourteen
    Karl Hedrick had been assigned desk duty for more than a month. He wasn’t complaining, but he found shuffling through the old cases of a recently retired agent bordered on the boring. Still, he could catch a quick nap now and then, which he counted as a blessing. With a new baby, sleep in his eight hundred-square-foot apartment had become a rarity. More importantly, Samantha, his wife, was on maternity leave and, between the baby and the gift of free time, she’d discovered just how small their apartment really was. Every Sunday she dragged out the real-estate ads from the paper. The words “Here’s a nice place in Fairfax we could afford” had induced a cold sweat on Karl’s forehead. He greeted Mondays and the need to drive downtown to his office at the FBI with relief, desk job or no desk job.
    His morning had been quiet and, except for inventing excuses for why he couldn’t possibly go look at some properties during lunch, uneventful. As it happened, he had been assigned all the old cases left by retired special agent Tom Phillips. Most of them needed no attention, but he had been instructed to be keep them as active/solved until all parties involved were deceased. Karl had only a quick look at most of them. Some were still on microfiche, waiting to be digitalized. Newer ones had already been processed into the latest technological format which, given the rapidity of technological innovation, would be obsolete in six months. Someday, he thought, he would find the time to sort through them, but not today. The live bad guys and open cases owned his time.
    His phone rang and