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Failure

By OughtaKnowBetter

The computer-generated voice filled the small room. "I will no longer talk with you. I will only talk to the man in charge." The words were stilted and jerky, translated by the machine into sounds from the demanding keyboard.

Unfortunately, no one knew where that keyboard was located. Whoever was using the keyboard was located somewhere in the Western hemisphere, most likely but not unequivocally in the Los Angeles Basin. And the keyboard userwas most definitely not seated among the recipients of the phone call, in a too small office in the Los Angeles headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Photons streamed in through the window, illuminating the notes that Special Agent Don Eppes was making and bouncing off the silvery surface of Agent David Sinclair's tracing equipment.

"What makes you think that I'm not in charge?" Megan Reeves kept her voice silky smooth, drawing out the caller.

"Many things." It was hard to imagine a computer voice sneering, but the intent came through.

"Like what?"

"You are too stupid."

"Smart enough to have figured out your little clues." Megan got in a jab of her own, trying to see what would shake loose. "Almost caught you this last time. But, of course, that's what you want. Isn't it? You want to be caught. You want to fail."

There was a little pause, then: "I will no longer speak with you. I will only speak with the man who is solving these crimes. Good-bye." Click. The line went dead.

The group seated around the table held their collective breath for nearly a minute before David Sinclair reached over to turn off their own recorder. Light glistened off his head, his arm the only movement around the table while the others contemplated what they had just heard. Even Colby, the most active of them all, the one least likely to sit still, reached for his cold cup of coffee, just to have something to do, and grimaced at the vile taste.

"And that's a wrap," Don Eppes muttered grimly, leaning back in his chair. He tossed his pencil on the table, discouraged. "Nice work, Megan. How did he know that you report up?"

Megan shook her head, her long auburn locks wisping around her shoulders. "I wish I knew. This one isn't behaving the way the profiles say he should."

"Then the profile is wrong." The last member of the group spoke up. "The hypothesis doesn't support the observed facts."

Megan smiled wryly. "This isn't an exact science, Charlie. Sometimes you have to play hunches."

"But that's not what you're doing when you're profiling," Charlie pointed out. His own work, the next clue, sat chicken-scratched onto a half-sheet of paper, waiting to be worked on. "When you profile, you're applying statistical probabilities to determine the most likely characteristics of the suspect. For example, you've already figured out that this guy is white, in his mid-thirties, angry—"

"That's not hard to guess," Don put in. "The anger part, I mean."

Charlie threw him a look of mild exasperation. "—but what you're really doing is reducing uncertainty through the use of statistical research. I've been following your profiling, and each time you posit a characteristic, even though you're improving your search parameters by narrowing the field of suspects, you also reduce your chances of success by a certain quantifiable amount."

Megan frowned. "What do you mean?"

Charlie warmed to his subject. "Let's look at your assumptions: you say there is a ninety-eight percent chance of him being male. Okay, throw away that two percent. Next you say that there's a seventy-three percent chance of him being between the ages of twenty and forty."

"And you're saying that's not correct?"

"No. What I am saying is that you've increased your risk of being incorrect over all. Seventy three percent of ninety eight is only seventy one point five. You now have a twenty eight point five percent chance of being incorrect. Still good odds, but not one hundred percent perfect.

"And let's take it a step further. Suppose, for argument's sake, that statistically there's a sixty percent chance of this guy being blond. Sixty percent of 71.5 is only 42.9. You have now reduced your probability of being correct to less than half, even though the odds say that you're right and that you've improved your chances of apprehending the suspect through focused dedication of resources." Charlie leaned back in his chair, confident that he'd made his point.

He hadn't.

"So you're saying my profile isn't correct." Megan's face admitted to being thoroughly confused.

"No. You said that."

"I did?"

Charlie nodded. "You said, 'this one isn't behaving the way the profiles say he should.' That means that you have an error in your profile. One of the assumptions you made, based on probabilities, is incorrect. This guy is an outlier. He doesn't fit the pattern. He doesn't fit the probabilities. The equation is only as accurate as the assumptions you make."

Light dawned. "So you're saying I have to question each of my assumptions, decide which one doesn't go with the odds."

Charlie grinned. He so loved working with Megan. Even though she worked in a 'soft' science, she always seemed to understand—eventually.

"Right." Don leaned back in his chair. "So what do we say to him next time he calls to taunt us? How does that help us deal with this guy?"

Charlie looked blank. "It doesn't."

"Right," Don repeated. He pushed Charlie's notes toward him, a shot hop into Charlie's grasp. "Why don't you get to work on your part of this mess, and let Megan do her job? She happens to be damn good at it."

"Oh." So help him, Charlie flushed. "Megan, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to imply—"

"It's all right, Charlie," Megan replied, shooting Don an unreadable look. "You're right. That's what profiling is all about. I think I need to look at some of the assumptions I've been making. Anything that will help us catch this guy."

Don waited until Charlie was out of the room before re-convening the meeting. "All right, let's recap. Three crimes: a jewelry store heist, a bank robbery, and a convenience store knock off. What do they all have in common? Let's start there."

"There's the obvious," David said. "All committed by three men, dressed in black ski masks. That kind of stands out in this climate."

"And all preceded by a phone call with a cryptic code to be solved," Colby agreed, "which we solve just in the nick of time to hear the complaints by the victims. 'If you'd only gotten here five minutes ago, you'd have caught them. Can't you move any faster?'" he sing-songed in a whiny tone, mimicking an unhappy public. "Just once I'd like to solve these puzzles in time to catch these goons."

"You and me both," David agreed.

"Which doesn't make sense," Don argued. "Each time, the phone call is made with a computer generated voice. The perpetrator goes to the trouble of creating a code to be cracked to tell us where and what. That says that there's a lot of planning going on. Yet the crimes themselves are fairly simple. Why not use the same care and planning for these crimes? Megan?"

"That's one of the pieces that's puzzling me," the profiler had to admit. "The phone calls, the anger, the jibes, all point to a man who feels hurt by the system. He's out for revenge, out to show the world that he can beat us. That he's smarter than we are."

"Which he's doing," Colby pointed out unhelpfully, collecting some exasperated glares. "Well, he is. These guys have taken off minutes before we arrive, every time. We're looking like idiots out there. And the media is starting to notice."

"Which means we have to goose Charlie to solve these riddles a little faster," Don said. "He keeps saying that they aren't hard, just time-consuming." Don glanced over his shoulder at the door, as if he could see his brother through the walls into the space that Don had given him to work in. "Where do we go from here?"

"Where ever the clues point us," David said, but Don shook his head.

"No. That's futile. We've been taking that route, and coming up short. We need to be pro-active. We need to track this guy down before the next crime. We don't wait for him to hand us another set of Mickey Mouse directions. How do we get ahead of him?"

"We can review the identifying data at the crime scenes." David was grasping at straws, but none of the others could come up with a better plan. "Three men, all in black ski masks. Eye witness accounts are erratic: these guys range anywhere from dwarves to seven foot giants. Everyone's eyes are brown, except when they're blue. Or green. Or even purple, in one case. They all wear latex gloves, and don't leave prints. But wait—one set of gloves was identified as nitrile, not latex. Maybe one of them has a latex allergy." He snorted. "Like that's going to help us."

"But they take the most expensive things there," Megan argued. "These crimes are not off the cuff. They are planned, no matter how random they seem. Look at the jewelry store job: the three men went straight for the most expensive items."

"Which have not yet turned up in any fence's hands that we know about," Don reminded her. "That suggests they're stashing them until they cool off. More planning."

"And the bank robbery occurred while large transfers were taking place," Colby noted. "That tells me that they knew the bank schedules in advance."

"Even the convenience store was planned for when the register was most likely to have the largest sum of money in it," David muttered. "Not one of their more profitable jobs, but it did pay off. The owners think they got away with a few thousand dollars."

"All in all, not giving us any hints on who to tap on the shoulder," Don grumbled. "Okay, let's attack this another way. Any criminals with this M.O.? Like, anyone who just got released? Megan?"

"No one who fits the profile," she said, and then grimaced. "Let me re-phrase that: no one who fits the current profile. I'd like to do a little more working on it before giving up my career."

Don frowned. "Don't let Charlie get to you, Megan. He means well—"

"And he's right, Don. Don't forget that part," Megan told him. "A big piece of profiling is using statistics to come up with the most likely suspects. But 'most likely' doesn't necessarily mean 'guilty'. And, for all Charlie's work with numbers, you can't simply eliminate gut instinct. There are times when going with the odds is not the right thing to do."

Don nodded. "So what does your gut say we should do when this guy calls again?"

Megan shrugged. "Play along, for now. He's decided he doesn't like me. I'm not 'smart enough' for him. You try. Convince him that you're the boss."

"I am the boss."

"Then it won't take much convincing, will it?"

Don kept pondering. "Nope. Let's not. Not yet, anyway. Let's annoy this guy a bit more, shall we? Nothing like a little bit of anger to cause someone to make some mistakes."

"That's what the statistics say," Megan agreed. "How?"

Don smiled. It was not a happy look. "You keep talking to him, Megan. Challenge his superiority. Put it on thick. Annoy him. Annoy him as much as he's annoying us."

Step one: get the code into a workable form, meaning re-write it onto the white board that Don had had tacked onto the wall for him.

No, actually, step one was to put on the headphones that siphoned in music and filtered out the world so that he could work without extraneous noise distracting him. Charlie grabbed the blue marker—the black one had long ago run out of juice—and carefully copied the code onto the white expanse. He stepped back and stared, daring it to pop into clarity faster than usual.

V HVWW QVZTXI WCGADVCF DAGHVWWVBAG

UGPE DNA IAD FNPIIA PT

EXVT FDGAAD

KPC YXT UVTZ NVE XZ

PTA NCTZGAZ DHATDK UPCG RXGDPT XMATCA

Charlie snorted. This wasn't going to take more than twenty minutes, and most of that would by taken up by a bit of trial and error. It was a simple replacement algorithm; one simply had to substitute one letter for another to come up with the correct solution. Here again numbers counted: there were more A's than anything else, and statistically there were more E's used in English than any other letter. Therefore…Charlie started jotting E's underneath the offending A's. And the first letter, V; that had to be either A or I. He tried it as an A, didn't like it, went back and changed all the V's to I's.

Tedious. Megan had said that this guy was smart, but Charlie wasn't so certain. Compared to the work he'd done for the NSA, this was an awfully simple code. As if the man didn't really know much about writing code. Or if he were taunting them.

Well, duh. That also fit with what Megan's profile had said: the guy really was taunting them. Trying to make the FBI look bad.

Not on Charlie's watch. Colby had said they needed faster? Charlie would give them faster. He glanced at his watch. Seventeen minutes. Good.

"You're sure? A kidnapping?" Don stared at the message that Charlie had written onto the whiteboard. It was legible, but just barely.

"Yeah," Charlie affirmed. "Simple replacement algorithm." He waved his hand at the deciphered message. "It's all yours."

V HVWW QVZTXI WCGADVCF DAGHVWWVBAG

I WILL KIDNAP LUCRETIUS TERWILLIGER

UGPE DNA IAD FNPIIA PT

FROM THE PET SHOPPE ON

EXVT FDGAAD

MAIN STREET

KPC YXT UVTZ NVE XZ

YOU CAN FIND HIM AT

PTA NCTZGAZ DHATDK UPCG RXGDPT XMATCA

ONE HUNDRED TWENTY FOUR BARTON AVENUE

"Roll," Don ordered. "David, notify LAPD for back up. Maybe we can catch this guy. Move!"

The pet shop owner stared. "You guys got here fast. I just barely called 911."

"They're gone already?" Don scanned the store. It was noisy, with dogs and cats vying with parrots and similar screeching things all yelling at the top of their lungs, or so it seemed. One large bird in particular, an avian with scarlet feathers and a beak that looked like a broomstick would serve as a breakfast treat, let out a raucous squawk that Don was certain would leave him deaf for the next two years. "Who's Lucretius Terwilliger? Did they get him?"

More staring from the owner. "I take back everything I ever said about the Feds being stupid," he announced loudly. "How'd you know the damn bird's name is Lucretius?"

"Bird?" Don now felt as stupid as the shop owner had thought him to be. "What bird?"

"They stole the other macaw, the one with blue feathers. Worth a couple grand, and a good talker. You gonna catch these guys, right? They got my bird, they got my money!"

"Right," Don echoed, the feeling of not again digging a cavern deep inside him somewhere. In a lesser man, it would be an ulcer, he reflected.

And, right on schedule, his cell phone jangled. He automatically put it to his ear.

"Boss?"

"Go ahead, David." Knowing what was coming.

"Boss, got a bird here at the Barton Avenue location. A big one with a beak like a pair of hedge shears. And nothing else. No furniture, no clothes, no nothing. Just an empty apartment, except this bird. The landlady says that it's been rented out starting next week."

Don ground his teeth. Out-manuevered again! And this one barely qualified as a crime; the suspects had given the bird back before they'd even taken it. The only purpose for this little shenanigan was humiliation for the FBI. At least someone was getting some amusement from these antics. "Have the Crime Lab see what they can find," he finally told Sinclair, knowing that there would be next to nothing. "Maybe they can find something before the renters are due to move in."

These guys were laughing at them, laughing at the FBI, making Don himself dance to their tune. Don hated it. There wouldn't be anything at either the pet shop or the apartment: no fingerprints, no footprints. Even the eye witnesses would only describe three men dressed in black. No names mentioned, no identifying tattoos, not even a lisp. Frustrating didn't begin to cover it.

Nothing to do but to wait for the next call.