“It means that every fourth time there’s something a little bit different with how the killer is transmitting. Those times it’s a self-similar pattern with expanding symmetry.”
Penelope snapped to attention. “Is the woman trying to tell us that by talking about the water.”
Bree shook her head. “No. There’s no way she could know about it. I thought the transmissions were random, but not all of them are. This is something he overlooked, or thought we wouldn’t discover.”
“Okay,” Tanner said. “How does it help us?”
“I can use it to catch him. I don’t have to trackhim, just find the system using the fractal pattern. It’s very specific. But I can only do it every fourth transmission, and it has to be while the transmission is live.”
“But now you know what you’re looking for,” Tanner said.
She reached up and squeezed his bicep. He understood. Tanner always understood. “Yes. Now that I know what it is, it’s just a matter of time. I might not be able to get you to the actual room, but I’ll be able to get you pretty damn close.”
Whitaker walked over and squeezed her shoulder. “You get us close, we’ll do the rest.”
“I can’t do anything for another three hours. That’s when the next transmission that’s using the fractal pattern will go live.”
“How many more footage segments do you need?” Tanner asked.
“The next one will get us close, but I can’t guarantee exactly how close. We’ll need to be ready to move to where that one leads. Then I’ll need at least one more after that to pinpoint.”
“There’s nothing you can do with any of the other footage segments? No clues there?” Penelope asked. “You’re saying we’re at least seven hours and possibly eleven or more before we have actionable intel?”
Bree shrugged. “Yes. I can’t work any faster than the pattern he submits on.”
Penelope shook her head. “That’s too long. The victim might not even be alive at that point.”
Bree blinked a few times and looked over at Tanner. “I haven’t worked out the exact math in my head, but it seems like she should have at least thirty-six more hours before the water covers her. Is my math off?”
His arm slipped back around her waist. “That’s correct, but medical experts are concerned about hypothermia.”
“Unless that water is temperature controlled, she could die,” Whitaker said.
What was Bree supposed to do? She couldn’t magically make the pattern work more quickly. “I’m sorry. This anomaly in how the footage is being transmitted is only occurring every fourth time. I can’t change that or speed it up.”
“If he made an error in whatever he did with every fourth set of footage, maybe he made an error somewhere else,” Penelope said. “We just need to find it. And we need to do it now.”
Translation:Breeneeded to find it.
Bree nodded. “Let me write the pattern recognition program I’ll need to trace him when the next flawed transmission comes in. Then I’ll do my best to see if I can find any mistakes in the other transmissions.”
Without another word, Bree turned away from them all, giving Tanner’s hand a squeeze as she did. She’d been workingon this for twelve hours. She’d already looked for any mistakes the killer might have made and hadn’t found anything.
She wrote the program and had it ready to go, then spent the next two hours searching for another needle in the haystack. At every top of the hour when new footage came in she ran it against the pattern recognition program she’d written, but nothing showed up. She wasn’t surprised. The fractal pattern was damn near brilliant and it was just sheer luck she’d discovered it. If he was using something similar for his other transmissions, Bree couldn’t spot it.
She was also tired, and working at a pace her brain wasn’t used to. At one time, thanks to Jeter threatening physical harm to her or her mom, she’d been able to work at this pace for days at a time.
Not being tortured for the past ten years had caused her brain to get lazy.
She was tired, wanted to rest. Plus, every time she looked over at Tanner, beautiful, blonde Penelope with all her appropriate emotional reactions was next to him. By all accounts Penelope had been here over twenty-four hours. Who looked that good after working twenty-four hours straight?
Bree caught her own reflection in the monitor. She didn’t look good, that was for sure. But she didn’t even try to fix the messy bun she’d piled her hair into. What would be the use. She had a pen resting behind either ear. Both of which she’d been looking for but hadn’t been able to find.
She was a mess. But attempting to fix her hair wasn’t going to change that.
They were twenty minutes from the transmission Bree needed to help pinpoint the killer when she heard a phone buzzing on a desk nearby. She waited for someone to pick it up before she realized it was hers.
When she glanced at the screen and saw it was Gregory Lightfoot, she almost let it go to voice mail. But the lawyer would just call back, and in a few minutes hopefully they would be on the road on the way to catch the killer. She might not be available.
