Chapter Fifteen
Bree had spent the last twelve hours filtering through all Elliot Webster’s online data and was barely making a dent in it. The guy was a digital pack rat.
She’d passed the point of exhaustion hours ago. Now she was barely staying a half step above despair. Particularly because the victims, still being broadcasted at the top of every hour, were growing more and more desperate.
Bree was buried under data. It was so bad she’d even agreed to allowing help. Three of the people who worked under Jeremy were currently digging through Elliot’s information also.
Bree had gone through all the critical data herself.
For example, she’d found where Elliot had created a separate identity and credit card and used it to buy the ketamine he’d used to render Jean unconscious.
Hell, she’d even found where he’d worked out the best way to encode and send the transmissions.
How he’d arrived at the plan to use the fractal pattern.
It would all be great if they were trying just to convict Elliot. But it didn’t do them much good in finding the other kidnappers or their victims.
Going through all this was like trying to find a needle in a haystack of needles. And now she needed to report in to Tanner and Penelope again and let them know she wasn’t even a bit closer to finding anything useful.
Nobody cast any blame in her direction when she joined the team sitting around the conference room table fifteen minutes later and told them what was happening. But the frustration level was high.
“Elliot said he met these people online,” Whitaker said.
Bree rubbed a hand across her face. “I’m sure he did considering he’s been a part of roughly four thousand online conversations and has archived every single conversation in his data storage.”
Penelope whistled through her teeth. “We need to get you more help to sort this information. Or maybe get you somewhere quieter to work. Or at least some damn headphones with music.”
Bree shook her head. “No, I don’t like music. I like the bustle of people around me, so I can ignore it. More help would be good, but I’ve already written programs to go through the chat rooms and look for a series of key words. That will be more efficient anyway.”
“What sort of key words?” Tanner asked.
“Anything to do with the police, water, drowning. I put in the dimensions of the boxes they built and polyethylene, in case that would trigger something. I put in Jean Adams’s name, Christina’s name, Betty Neighbors’s. I put in fractal code and matrix grid pattern torus.”
She’d put in every single thing she could think of but so far there had been no results whatsoever.
She turned to Tanner. “I could’ve missed something. I had to have missed something.” But for the life of her, she couldn’t figure out what it was.
Those women were going to drown because she couldn’t figure out how to find the necessary data in all Elliot’s virtual junk.
I don’t think you’re working hard enough, Bethany. Obviously you’re lacking an incentive to do your best work. Maybe this will help you.
“No, Mr. Jeter. I can do better. Please don’t hurt Mom.”
Michael Jeter just shook his head and tsked. “Your brain is stronger than this, Bethany. You just don’t want it badly enough. You’re allowing yourself to be unfocused and overwhelmed by superfluous details. I need you to focus.”
He nodded his head to the man holding her mother. Bethany tried not to vomit at the sickening sound of her mother’s arm being broken, followed immediately by her screams.
“No!” Twelve-year-old Bethany tried to rush to her mother, but Jeter’s heavy hand on her shoulder wouldn’t let her move. He leaned down and whispered in her ear. “Now, are you ready to concentrate, or do you want to continue to make excuses? I need your best, Bethany. Is your best good enough?”
She nodded.
“It’s time to think outside the box. If everything was simple, anyone could do it. The answer isn’t where you expect it.”
“I’m telling you, she’s done. I’m taking her home.”
Tanner was crouched beside her holding both of her hands in his, yelling at Penelope and Whitaker as Bree blinked her eyes open.
What the heck had just happened?
“Tanner?”
“Yeah, freckles, I’m here.” He smiled at her before turning to glare back at the people sitting at the conference table. “You need some rest and to get away from all this.”
She’d been having some sort of flashback. Everyone around the room was staring at her.
“No. I’m okay.”
Tanner shook his head. “No, you’re not okay. This is not your job, and pushing yourself this way isn’t healthy.”
She shook her head, sitting up straighter in the chair. “I can have a breakdown later, then. Right now we need to do whatever we have to do to get these women out.”
“Bree.” Tanner’s brown eyes were right in front of hers. “We all want to do our best, but there’s one thing that we’ve all had to learn the hard way. Sometimes our best isn’t good enough to save the victims.”
“But...”
He trailed a finger down her cheek. “You’re pushing yourself too hard if it’s causing you to black out and have flashbacks.”
“Tanner’s right, Bree,” Whitaker added. “About all of it. But especially about the fact that we can’t always save the victims. None of us like to talk about it, but it’s always a possibility.”
She shook her head. “No. My best is good enough. It’s time to think outside the box.”
As much as she even hated the thought of it, Jeter had been right. He’d been right then and he was right now. Bree was being weak. Not properly motivated.
These women were going to die if she couldn’t figure this out. Much worse than anything Jeter had ever done to her or her mother.
The answer isn’t where you expect it.
But where? Where was it? There was something she was missing. “I haven’t been looking in the right places.”
“What do you mean?” Penelope asked.
“These guys met online, so we’ve been focusing our search in clubs, classes, chat rooms from the last two years. They would’ve had to communicate regularly.”
Tanner stood beside her. “Yes, that’s true.”
“I’ve written half a dozen programs to look for key terms in any of those places. The people helping me have looked over it themselves. But we haven’t found anything. He just left us with so much information. It feels like it’s impossible to wade through it all.”
“That probably means something is there,” Tanner said.
She nodded. “You’re right. And it’s smart of him. It’s the best sort of camouflage he could’ve picked. He’s got hundreds of chat rooms about codes, engineering, patterns... And we haven’t found anything there.”
Penelope let out a sigh. “Maybe we need to talk to Elliot again. We won’t get much because of the lawyer, but maybe I can bring the DA in on this super quick. See if we can strike a deal if Elliot is willing to talk right now.”
Tanner shook his head. “That’s not going to be an easy process even if you have the DA on speed dial.”
“It’s like that little bastard said. It’s a chess game,” Whitaker said. “But we don’t even have all the pieces.”
Something clicked in Bree’s mind. “Elliot said it was like a chess game? Specifically that?”
Tanner nodded. “Yeah. He mentioned chess when we were talking to him. Why?”
“Of course,” she muttered. Elliot was smart. It made sense.
“What?” the other people in the room all asked at the same time.
“There’s a chat room from his middle school chess club. I wanted to kill Elliot when I saw it. Why would anyone keep a chat room from a middle school chess club? We did a preliminary search of it, then immediately filed it as nonessential.”
She turned to Tanner. “I have to go.” It was time to think outside the box.
THE MIDDLE SCHOOL chess club chat room was the key.
It took Bree a few minutes to determine their code words and what they meant, but once she established that baseline, everything about the kidnapping plans was broken open.
“This is definitely it,” she said.
Everyone was huddled around her workstation in a way that would have normally driven her crazy. It drove her a little crazy now, but she forced herself to ignore it. They all just wanted to finally hear some good news.
Bree was happy to be able to give it to them.
When she knew what she was looking for, it wasn’t difficult to find everything they had planned.
They had discussed—using coded terms to make it seem like their discussion was about chess—the particulars about everything from the sizes of the boxes to the dimensions of the rooms where they would be held.
The physics behind exactly how long it would take to fill the water coffins had been discussed at length.
“Damn,” Whitaker muttered. “That’s more details than Noah had building the ark.”
Bree nodded. “Yes, their plans had to be exact. Otherwise we would’ve noticed right away that the boxes or the water levels were different. They know exactly when the victims will drown.”
And it was six and a half hours from now.
“Get it on a timer,” Penelope said. “That’s our countdown clock. I’m going to trust their math.”
Bree agreed. They hadn’t left anything to chance.
There was some talk about victims, but not enough detail to give them positive IDs. That was disappointing for everyone.
But there was good news. The perps had all been checking in to the chat room regularly. They were starting to wonder where Elliot, or Number 3 as they called him, was, but no one was worried enough to panic yet.
“All we need is for one of them to hop in one more time,” Bree said. “Once they do, I’ll be able to decipher their location pretty quickly. I should also be able to clone their username and try to draw the others into coming online so that we can trace them too.”
She felt Tanner’s kiss at the top of her head. “We’ll be ready.”
“It’s important that we move quickly, once I start to trace them. If we move too slowly, they may be able to warn one another.”
“Got it,” Penelope said. “We’ll have to keep this on pretty tight radio silence. If the press gets hold of it they could tip off the killers.”
Bree winced. “If that happens, the killers will go to ground. They would know better than to get back on the chat room.”
And that would be it for the victims.
Everyone dispersed to get ready to go when Bree had a location.
“Why don’t you take a break?” Tanner said. “Someone else can watch for entry into the chat room. I promise we will wake you up immediately if there’s any activity.”
“No, I can do this. I’m okay.” She turned to look at him and could see the worry in his eyes. “Honestly. I know my little blackout incident was bad. Probably scary—”
“Not scary because I think you’re weak. But scary because you shouldn’t be pushing this hard. You were taught to work past your breaking point.”
She reached up and grabbed his hand. “I haven’t reached my breaking point yet. Having you here makes me stronger. I’m okay, I promise.”
He studied her for a long moment, looking like he wanted to say more.
“I’m strong. I want to do this. I can do this.”
He kissed her tenderly on the lips, just the softest of touches. “Good. Then let’s catch these bastards and go home. We’ve got our own lives to get on with.”