“Without a history in CCRE, we have no way of knowing who this person is.”

Lucy nodded. “Right. You’ve got someone’s, prints and SID number in AFIS, but there’s no name or other personal identifiers to match him up with. And that would indicate to me that somebody dropped this person’s record from CCRE. In other words, CCRE has been tampered with too.

“Let’s go back to Ronnie Waddell,” I said. “Can you reconstruct what was done to his ?”

“I’ve got, a theory. First, you need to know that the SID number is a unique identifier and has a unique index, meaning the system won’t allow you to enter a duplicate value. So if, for example I wanted to switch SID numbers with you, I’d have to delete your record first. Then after I’ve changed my SID number to yours, I’d, reenter your record, giving you my old SID number.

“And that’s what you think happened?” I asked.

“Such a transaction would explain the TUs I’ve found in the journal tape for December ninth.”

Four days before Waddell’s execution, I thought.

“There’s more,” Lucy said. “On December sixteenth, Waddlels record was deleted from AFIS.”

“How can that be?”

I asked, baffled. “A print from Jennifer Deighton’s house came back to Waddell when Vander ran it through AFIS a little over a week ago.”

‘AFIS crashed on December sixteenth at ten-fifty- six A.M. exactly ninety-eight minutes after Waddell’s record was deleted,” Lucy replied. “The data base was restored with the journal tapes, but you’ve got to keep in mind that a backup is done only once a day, late in the afternoon. Therefore, any changes made to the data base the morning of December sixteenth hadn’t been backed up yet when the system crashed. When the data base was restored, so was Waddell’s record.”

“‘You mean someone tampered with Waddells SID number four days before his execution? Then three days after his execution; someone deleted his record, from AM?”

“That’s the way it looks to me. What I can’t figure is why the person didn’t just delete his, record in the first place. Why go to all the trouble to change the SID number, only to turn around and delete his entire record?”

Neils Vander had a simple answer to that when I called him moments later.

“It’s not unusual far an inmate’s prints to be deleted from AFIS after he’s dead,” Vander said. “In fact, the only reason we wouldn’t delete a deceased inmate’s records would be if it were possible his prints might turn up in any unsolved cases. But Waddell had been in prison for nine, ten years - he’d been out of commission too long to make it worthwhile to keep his prints on line.”