“It’s complex. But I’m not surprised about this because of Elliot’s engineering background.”
As soon as they made it back to the command area, Bree walked immediately over to the whiteboard. She drew a large square. She wrote Jean Adams at one corner. Then she took a different color and connected the three remaining corners in a triangle.
“The matrix grid pattern torus is a pattern found all over nature. It’s studied in mathematics. Some scientists argue that it will eventually be used to create renewable energy. But for our purposes, it’s important because it’s a pattern based specifically on the number three.”
She was about to go into more about the codes, but Tanner put his hand on her shoulder and rubbed it gently. She needed to get to the main point more quickly.
She closed her eyes and regrouped. Focus just on the victims.
“The voice modulator. That should’ve been our first clue that there was something going on. Jean Adams isn’t famous. Nobody would’ve recognized her face or voice. But we all might’ve recognized that we were looking at four different victims on the footage if we could’ve heard or seen them clearly.”
Whitaker nodded. “That makes more sense than anything else we’ve come up with.”
“Yes,” Bree said. “Like I said before, the footage never stopped coming in even after you rescued Jean. We just weren’t expecting it, so didn’t realize it. And the water in the new footage is still rising at the same rate. We’re still on the same deadline we were with Jean. The dripping water with all four victims started at the same time.”
Tanner looked over at the clock. “So we have what, less than twenty-four hours before these other three victims drown?”
Whitaker nodded. “About that. If you don’t take hypothermia into account.”
“Tell us what you know about these other three victims,” Penelope said.
Bree grimaced. The matrix torus pattern had shown her there were three victims, but it didn’t give the sort of details the detective was going to want to know. “The killers all started at the exact same time and have created rooms to look exactly alike. That’s how they fooled us with the footage.”
Tanner looked around at the screens. “So the pattern helped you distinguish which footage belongs to which victim?”
Bree nodded. “I’ve already got the footage clips lined up so you can look at them together holistically. Once you understand that it’s four different people we’re looking at, you can’t help but see it.”
Bree played the grouped footage for them. She started with the most obvious, and the most heartbreaking: the woman who was crying all the time. They watched it in silence.
“It wasn’t that she was upset sometimes,” Tanner whispered. “This victim is upsetallthe time.”
Bree nodded, then showed them the second grouping of footage—the victim who never tried to communicate with them at all.
“I think maybe she can’t see any indication of the camera,” Whitaker said after they watched the clips all the way through twice. “Everyone else got more hysterical or louder when they knew the camera clicked on, but not her. Maybe she doesn’t even know she’s being recorded at all.”
The rest of the team was trickling back in and Penelope was briefing them as they did. Everyone was now studying the footage in their proper groups. It at least helped make sense out of the behavior of the women.
Fifteen minutes later Whitaker confirmed that they did in fact have multiple victims when he spotted a tiny tattoo on the foot of the second victim they’d given the name Jane B.
“It’s right above her pinkie toe on her left foot,” Whitaker pointed out. “I don’t know how we missed this before.”
“Because we assumed we were looking at the same person,” Tanner said. “We weren’t comparing them to each other.”
Penelope called the chaos to order. “People. I know this is a lot, but we’ve got to get organized and focused.”
Everyone immediately quieted down. Penelope turned to Bree. “Can you track these transmissions the way you did Elliot Webster?”
It was the question Bree had been dreading. “No. The pattern doesn’t have anything to do with how they’re transmitting, just the order and the length of the clips.”
“But they are partners with Elliot, right?” Whitaker asked.
This was a little harder to explain. “I’m not surepartnersis the right word. Obviously this was planned out together to some degree. They all had to have been using the same schematics. To fool us for this long they each had to build the room with the same dimensions, with the cameras set at the exact same angle and height. They had to choose women whose body types were similar enough that we would mistake them for each other.”
“Sounds like partners to me,” someone muttered.
Bree shrugged. “Maybe they are. They all obviously agreed to use the matrix torus pattern for which victim is shown in what order and for how long. But they were left to their own devices for the actual encryption and encoding of the footage.”
“So, not partners,” Tanner said.
