In his office, Harry Ribb went through statements his men had brought in from people living on the Overtoom. No one had seen or heard the bird man as most of the detectives were now calling him.
It was as if he was invisible. How someone could move across roofs and break into so many apartments without being seen or heard was a puzzle. Ribb looked up to see Boddin standing in front of his desk.
"How is the investigation moving along?" Boddin asked.
"It's not."
Boddin placed the files in his hands on the edge of Ribb's desk and sat down in front of him.
"We have every available man digging up tons of information, but there is absolutely nothing that gives us a clue as to who is doing this or why."
"Hmmm," Boddin moaned.
"If this was a shooting or any other type of regular murder we would already have suspects down in the interrogation rooms Or at least we would be pointing in the right direction, knowing roughly where to look. But this?" Ribb shook his head and leaned back over in his leather chair and stared up at the ceiling. "Do you know how much of the world's press is onto this right now? And they are all watching us? This morning I got a call from Ellen Klein, our press officer. You know Ellen, right?"
"Yes, I know her," Boddin mumbled.
"She is home sick because she cannot take the pressure. At least two hundred and fifty calls a day from the press called for an interview. TV stations, independent reporters, even the Chinese press want to interview us. We even had psychics calling to say they know who is behind it, and three different people telling us they did it, and will stop if we pay a ransom.
"Could it be any of them?"
"No, we already tracked them down. Two psychiatric nutcases and a Mr. van der Sloot calling us from a prison cell in Lima. He said he will tell us everything if we move him to a Dutch jail. It seems like the world has gone mad and we're sitting in the center of it."
Boddin stared at Ribb. "How's our American friend coming along," he finally asked.
Ribb laughed a little. "He's a clever man, no results yet, but he's already worked one miracle in the short time he's been here."
"Oh?"
"Didn't you see Bakker this morning?"
Boddin did not blink an eye.
"Bakker came in this morning with a new outfit, with no holes, looking neat and tidy and a haircut."
"Hm hm."
"I nearly didn't recognize him." Ribb said. "The American pulled off something spectacular I don't think anyone else could have done."
"You could have," Boddin said.
"I'm his boss, not his mother. If it was really a problem then I would have said something. It was close to that, but not entirely, and everyone is allowed to express themselves, right?"
"Maybe."
"Let's hope he can work some more miracles on this case, I could do with a couple right now."
"Hmm," Boddin murmured once again. There was a slight awkward pause between them.
Ribb looked down at his paperwork then back up at Boddin. "And how are you doing?"
"I'm okay." He opened the folder he had laid out on the desk and turned them towards Ribb. "Sign here please."
As Boddin left the office, Dop and Kaps came in carrying a number of photographs.
"We found a webcam on the Overtoom." Kaps said, as he handed the pictures to Ribb. "These are the sort of images it has been shooting, but they are all of the street below. Nothing on the roofs."
"That doesn't mean to say we cannot look through all the footage." Ribb said.
"What?" Dop shouted, looking shocked, as his overweight frame slumped into the chair that Boddin just left.
"There are megabytes, gigabytes, giganticbytes of material there. It would take us a lifetime."
"Which will be your last day working as a detective if you don't get cracking on it right away Mr. Dop. We have a date for when it happened, and we have a timeframe for when it happened. That is not a great deal of work."
"Oh," Dop muttered.
"So I suggest you get out of that chair and get down to the monitor room and go through it frame by frame. Because if we find material that you have missed later on I'd only be too happy to let you stay home and sit on your sofa all day long, and watch TV for the rest of your life."
"Oh," Dop muttered once again.
Ribb looked at Kaps, whose eyes were now turned towards the map of Amsterdam on the wall.
"And you should know better Mr. Kaps."
"Yes Sir," Kaps said. "I tried to tell him."
"Goodbye, gentleman."
Chapter Twenty-Eight