With its musty smell and hallowed silence it felt like a library, cataloging crimes and criminals going back for decades. In Horton, tracking down old information on lowlifes could take days, even weeks, and there was little or no cross-referencing between jurisdictions. Up here they’d amassed almost everything you’d want to know in one place, and each year the department spit out voluminous statistical reports with a seemingly endless array of totals on the city’s criminal misbehavior. How many people between the ages of thirty-one and thirty-five had been arrested the year before for felonious assault with a knife? Two hundred eighty-two. How about people between the ages of sixteen and twenty, and arrests for larceny from intoxicated or sleeping persons? Six. Best of all, like an all-night diner the Bureau of Criminal Identification never closed. Impressive. Yet, as with his trip to the Automat, Cain found himself mildly disquieted by such efficiency. Keep it up and eventually you’d be able to find out almost anything about anybody, and by barely lifting a finger.
