The information, in millions of words, the useless information, the big breaks, the false leads flooded into Folcroft, ostensibly headed for people who never were, for corporations that existed only on paper, for government agencies that never seemed to do government work.

At Folcroft, an army of clerks, most of them thinking they worked for the Internal Revenue Service, recorded the information on business deals, tax returns, agricultural reports, gambling, narcotics, on anything that might be tainted by crime and some of it that couldn't possibly be, they thought.

And the facts were fed into giant computers in one of the many off-limits sections of Folcroft's rolling grounds.

The computers did what no man could. They saw patterns emerging from apparently unrelated facts and through their circuits, the broad picture of crime in America grew before the eyes of the chiefs at Folcroft.