Disclaimer: NUMB3RS and its associated characters, etc., belong to the show's creators and to CBS, wonderful people whom I have never met and have no connection to. I hope they don't mind me using them here; no legal infringement intended.
Author's Note: And here we go with Chapter 3. This is just a short one to keep the story going - there'll be more plot in the next one, promise. :) My thanks to everyone who has taken the time to review and comment, both on the yahoogroup and at fanfiction . net. I always read and appreciate it, and I always take constructive criticism seriously.
And as a bonus for those of you who are faithfully following, I promise you that next chapter I'll give you a link where you can see and hear the music box song (I've got it all written out on manuscript paper; I just have to get it computerized, and my midi program keeps eating it.). :)
Pitch Perfect - Chapter 3
by Deichtine
Don gazed blankly at the spreadsheet of transportation expenses, the numbers conveying no information to his tired brain. He and his team had been mired in a fraud investigation for several weeks now, and making no headway. They knew that the financial companies they were investigating were dirty, that they were intimidating their employees - two deaths had occurred which looked suspiciously like object lessons - but they had so far been unable to prove anything, either by the numbers or by the physical evidence. These people were just too good at covering their tracks. He was almost ready to bring Charlie in on the case, though he was reluctant to do so. The AD had quietly let it be known that bringing in Charlie, or any consultant, should only be a method of last resort - they did employ some very good forensic auditors, after all - and Don wanted to give his brother - and himself - a break from their constant collaboration. And, if Don were honest with himself, he'd have to admit that bringing Charlie in likely wouldn't help; the records themselves were faulty, most likely forged. They'd make no headway unless they were able to put their hands on honest records, but with no way to know where they were being kept, if they were being kept, they had nowhere to begin..
"You know, staring at the page isn't going to make the numbers make any more sense."
His partner's voice jolted Don from his preoccupied staring match with the spreadsheet. "Huh?"
Terry sat on the desk, and he leaned back in his chair to look up at her, taking the opportunity to stretch his tired muscles. "You've been distracted all day. Is it that music box thing?" she asked.
He nodded, tossing his pen onto the desk in voiceless acknowledgement that he was getting absolutely nothing done. "Yeah. It's...I don't know. It's like... it's a mystery, you know? I want to be out there, figuring out where it came from, and frankly, this fraud case just does not excite me." He indicated the spreadsheet with an irritated wave of his hand.
Terry ignored the spreadsheet. "Do I detect a note of romanticism underneath that gruff exterior? A yearning for the excitement of the mystery?" she asked, eyebrow arched.
Don furrowed his own brow in answer. "No, it's not that. I'm just worried. I don't know where this thing comes from, or what it represents."
Terry just smiled knowingly, and shook the hair out of her eyes. "I don't believe a word of it. Somewhere in there-" she poked a finger towards his chest "-is a nine-year-old boy, obsessed with mystery stories, who's discovered a trail of footprints and his parents won't let him follow it. Face it, Don, you're a romantic and you know it."
Don looked at her for a moment, ready to object, then shrugged and returned her smile grudgingly. "Okay, maybe that's a part of it. A small part. I admit, I want to be out there with Charlie, asking the questions he won't think of, track down the mystery. But there's this little thing I call my job..." He trailed off and shook his head tiredly.
Terry gave him a sympathetic look. "So Charlie gets to do all the interesting investigative work, while you're stuck here crunching numbers."
"Yeah." Don looked up at her with an ironic laugh. "How did that happen?"
Terry just leaned over, patted him gently on the head, flattening his brush cut, and went back to her desk. Don watched her go, and wondered how it was she always managed to make him feel so silly and so much better at the same time.
Charlie sat at the desk in the solarium, feeling the morning sun on his face, and looked glumly at the list of names the antiquarian had sent him - by email, which surprised Charlie, though he could think of no good reason why it should. At the top of the list were companies who custom-make music boxes - most of them out of the country - and at the bottom, an even shorter list of individuals the man knew or had heard of who had expressed some interest in tinkering with them. The lists were small, but it would take him at least a whole day to call each of these places, and for what? He was unlikely to find out much, with nothing to go on. He could hear the conversation already in his mind:
Hello, this is Dr. Charles Eppes in Los Angeles. Did you by any chance happen to send my brother a systematically depinned music box the other day?
Click.
Charlie sighed and shoved the list aside. It could wait. It was time to start into the pattern analysis, at last. It would be much easier, he thought, if he could get the data set translated into numbers. There were a few ways he could go about that. The tune used seven distinct notes (there was the capacity for eight, but from watching the comb as the movement played, he knew the eight note was never actually played); he could simply assign each a numerical value from one to seven. However, the message, if there was one, could be more complicated than that; he would have to have the sound analyzed in terms of its physical properties, too - frequency, amplitude, wavelength...
Also, there were two patterns to worry about now: the original tune, before the pins had been removed, and the post-pin-removal pattern, for though (he supposed) it was quite possible that the box had been tampered with to destroy its information, it was equally possible that the original pattern had been modified in order to create a new pattern, in which the message lay. No, make that three possibilities - the pattern could be only in the pins which were removed, the zeroes of the binary system. Perhaps they all said something.
Initially, he had used graph paper to represent the pattern of pins on the cylinder, painstakingly filling in a square each time a pin was to hit a tine of the comb, but the representation was imperfect; the pins' placement did not always fall in perfect horizontal lines like his graph paper. Their vertical distance determined their timing, and sometimes, though rarely, a note did not fall exactly on the beat, or was held a little longer. Going through the whole process again, this time with a magnifying glass to see where pins had been removed, was not an appealing idea. He had to allow the whole tune to play each time as he could not pause or "rewind" the movement, and given that the song was just under a full minute long, that was a long and wearying task. He'd have to do it eventually, but he just didn't have the energy for it right now.
He would need to use a different transcription system, he decided – musical notation, perhaps. Charlie could read music, to a basic level, at least, and so it would be a logical choice, but he would need help to get it written out properly. He stood up, grabbed a relatively chalk-free jacket from the back of a chair, and, tucking the box under his arm, set out for the university.
End Chapter 3
Special thanks to AlamoGirl, merryw, sammac, angeleyes46, IceQueen1, SD, pkw, LotRseer3350, sidhe-ranma, and D. Lerious for your reviews! Sammac said it sounds like I know a lot about music boxes, which I guess means I'm a better bluffer than I thought - everything I know I learned from carefully examining my mom's music box and some concentrated web surfing. IceQueen1 asked if it were possible to re-pin the cylinder to get the original melody. Honestly, I'm not sure; I would guess that at this point it would be easier for them to map the points where the pins were and reconstruct the melody through extrapolation, given that they don't have a music-box-mechanic on hand.
