Dead Hunt

various landmarks on the face and created an index number. It then looked for faces with similar indexes.
When Clymene was on trial, the DA didn’t bother looking for who she really was. He said he didn’t need to know ancient history to convict her. So a deep background investigation was never done. Diane would correct that error now. She decided to search both American and international databases.
With a second computer Diane sent the mug shot to Colonel Alex Kade. Diane had become acquainted with him when he matched a missing child’s photograph with a facial reconstruction Neva did of a skeleton found in the woods near Rosewood. In his retirement he searched, with the blessing of the FBI, for missing children in a
pornography sites on the
database he created from Web. His daughter disappeared when she was fifteen. They found her years later but not before she had suffered severe abuse and had contracted a fatal disease that took her life. He said if he could have just found her earlier he could have saved her. Now he tried to save other children.
Diane explained to him in an e-mail that this wasn’t a child and it was too late to save her, but that the woman might have been separated from her family as a child and that it was critical for Diane to find out who she was. She didn’t tell him Clymene’s name.
He e-mailed back almost immediately and said he would look. Diane thought that he must be at his computer all the time looking for lost children. He had software whose algorithm could account for the age difference so that an adult Clymene could be matched to a child Clymene or a teenage Clymene. Software just gets more and more clever, she thought.
    Next she called David. He and Neva were on their way back.
‘‘I’d like to use Arachnid,’’ she said.
David didn’t say anything for a long moment. ‘‘I suppose this is what it’s for,’’ he said.

Chapter 37
    Arachnid was David’s baby. He compared it to Rosemary’s Baby.
‘‘It’s essentially evil,’’ he said.
‘‘No,’’ Diane had told him. ‘‘It is not evil. Someone could put it to evil use, but then the evil would reside in the use of it, not in the system itself.’’
Her argument fell on deaf ears because David was paranoid. He admitted it and embraced it. The irony of Arachnid was that David had created what he was afraid of. Big Brother. This was not lost on him, and he felt guilty about it. But there it was, sitting in the basement, the ultimate spider.
Diane wanted carrels in the museum for people to rent and work on scholarly things. The entire basement and subbasement were being renovated for storage vaults and work areas. The DNA lab and David were the first occupants. David rented space for his photography. He occasionally taught classes in photography in the museum, so it made sense that he should have space. He had a darkroom, a workroom, and a study. All very small, but big enough for David’s needs. Arachnid was in the study.
David was the insect and spider expert in the crime lab. If insects needed to be reared to discern time of a victim’s death, David was the one with the rearing chambers. He liked bugs. He didn’t particularly like spiders.
‘‘They just look evil,’’ he told her on many occasions. That is why he named his creation Arachnid— that and its basic function, to search the Web.
David had married search engine algorithms and face recognition algorithms. He thought it a terrible invasion of privacy, but he had done it anyway because he loved algorithms. He swore Diane to secrecy—neither Jin nor Neva knew about Arachnid.
‘‘It’s probably illegal. If it isn’t, it should be,’’ he had told Diane.
Arachnid searched the Web for images, picked out faces, and compared them with the photo to be identified. If the faces of Clymene or her sisters were anywhere on the Web, Arachnid would find them.
‘‘You know, you could make a lot of money with this software,’’ she told him.
‘‘Blood money,’’ he had said.
Diane had rolled her eyes. ‘‘You know someone is going to come up with this. It just makes sense. They probably already have.’’
‘‘I’m sure some black ops have invented it too, but it’s still evil. We can only use it for good.’’
‘‘David, you worry me sometimes,’’ Diane told him.
‘‘I worry myself,’’ he had answered.
Diane walked down to the basement and let herself into David’s space. Arachnid was sitting there looking like a sleeping