"Repressing it?" Charlie sputtered. "Don't tell me that you fell for that garbage, Don! There's nothing to repress!"

"Getting awfully upset over nothing, are we?" Don couldn't help it; teasing his little brother remained one of the great joys of his life. It usually felt best right after one of their high school teachers had compared the two brothers—and found Don lacking in the math department, even though he did fairly well, to be honest—but now that they were grown he still enjoyed occasionally getting his licks in. 'Keeping the kid's head a normal size' was how he described it to himself. "Oh, wait. I forgot. You have nothing. No aura, no nothing. Is that what has you so upset, Chuck?"

A nonverbal growl was the response, then, as Don had silently predicted to himself, the rationalization began. "There is no scientific evidence that psychic powers exist, Don. Even Houdini himself, a man who desperately wanted to believe, made it his life's work to expose frauds and charlatans. Every year, on Houdini's birthday, his family gathers for a séance to see if he'll come back to talk to them. If anyone would, it would be Houdini. He as much as anyone wanted for it to happen. Face it, Don: The Great Vervette is a fraud."

"But he's a successful fraud," Don pointed out. "He found the kid, Charlie. How do you explain that?"

"I don't have to," Charlie sniffed. "Statistically, what he did was highly unlikely, and I'd hate to have to calculate the odds. The numbers would be astronomical. But that doesn't mean that it's impossible. There's always, statistically, that one chance of success."

"You mean he was lucky."

"That's one possibility."

"There's others?"

"There's always others."

"Such as?"

"I've already told you." Charlie deliberately turned his back on Don, picking up the marker to the white board.

"So tell me again."

"To date, there is no scientifically valid evidence that psychic powers exist. Every instance can be duplicated using sleight of hand and so-called 'cold reading'. Every test of any so-called 'psychic' under controlled circumstances with trained observers has failed to conclusively prove that these 'powers' exist." Charlie crossed his arms. "For example: that scar on your left knee you were talking about, the one that The Great Vervette 'knew' about?"

"Yeah? What about it? How did he know that it was there?"

"Approximately eighty percent of all right-handed people have some sort of scar on their left knee," Charlie quoted. "When you fall, as a right-handed person you put out your right hand to break your fall, and then your left knee for balance. The opposite obtains for left-handed people. Your psychic merely had looked up a few statistics to make himself appear omniscient. He observes that you are right-handed, and then comes forth with a simple conclusion. Voile! He's psychic!"

"So you're saying that there's no such thing as psychic phenomena," Don pushed, trying to see how far he could needle his brother. This was getting more and more fun. If he really worked it, Don would bet that he could rile his brother all through dinner. And if their father ever got into it…? Sometimes cheap entertainment was the best.

"That's not what I'm saying at all."

"So telepathy and stuff like that does exist.'

"It might. It just hasn't been proven."

"But you just said—"

"Logic, Don. I said that psychic powers have not yet been proven to exist. Absence of proof does not imply the negative. Nobody's proven that 'telepathy and stuff' don't exist, only that we haven't proven that they do. Understand?"

Don blinked. "No."

One corner of Charlie's mouth quirked up, and despite the absence of proof, Don had the uncomfortable feeling that Charlie had read his mind about the crack about cheap entertainment. And turned it around onto his older brother.

But Charlie wasn't done yet. "You ever watch the X-Files?"

"Sometimes."

"You ever see the poster on the wall of Mulder's office?"

"Your point?"

"It said: I want to believe. That's what's going on here. It would be nice if we could say that your Great Vervette could find kidnapped kids with the power of his mind, but there's no proof that says that it's actually happening. He's a fraud."

"And back to square one: he's a successful fraud, which is what I said in the first place," Don pointed out. "It doesn't matter if he's a fraud or not. He found the kid. Or I suppose you're going to tell me that he was in on the kidnapping?"

"It's a more probable scenario—"

"Oh, no. You're not getting me to re-open the case, just because you don't believe in psychic powers. We checked him out: Ralph Maurer had absolutely no connection with that kid or her parents, and no links to anyone who did. He got absolutely no benefit from finding the kid except for the satisfaction of seeing the girl returned to her parents. And that's a benefit that everyone of us prayed for." Don suddenly sniffed the air. "Is that garlic bread?"

"And lasagna," Charlie nodded, his attention re-focused on a safer topic. "And that's not psychic powers, just good powers of observation."

"You saw Dad buy the groceries?"

"Nope. Simple logic: you're staying here while your arm gets better. You like Dad's lasagna. Dad wants to please you. Therefore: lasagna. If A, B, and C all obtain, then D occurs. Q.E.D."

Don raised his eyebrows. "Q.E.D.? I thought we were talking logic, not alphabet soup."

"Quod erat demonstrandum. That which has been demonstrated. Simple logic. Simple basic logic."

Don gave up. Baiting Charlie had been a lot easier when they were both kids. "Let's go get some lasagna. Assuming that you're right, and Dad did make it."

"Statistically guaranteed," Charlie assured him.

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At least they gave him a couple of days to get his arm out of the sling before the copycats descended.

It didn't take long. Don walked in that morning, still opening the door with his other hand—just because his left was out of the sling didn't mean it didn't hurt when he asked it to do things—and Colby didn't even let him finish his early cup of coffee before darting into his office. That was all right; under the circumstances, Don would have bawled the junior agent out if he hadn't rushed.

Copycat, it was. Same M.O.: a four year old boy this time, playing in the playground, in the sandbox, his mother said. She had been talking to one of the other mothers, the kid wandered a few steps away and got snatched up by a blond man in a black sedan. License plate had a 'D' or an 'O' or maybe a zero in it. Not a lot of help there. That might cut down the number of vehicles to oh, maybe a million. Mom hadn't really seen the kidnapper, just heard the other kids screeching. It was the other four year olds who said that the kidnapper was tall and blond, a guy, and that was after you persuaded 'em to take their thumbs out of their mouths. Not a good scene, but he learned that David Sinclair was astonishingly good with kids. Just another attribute to lay at the agent's door.

Not helping. Don rounded up his team to talk to the parents, Bart and Rebecca Smithers, well to do but going to have a tough time coming up with the cool million that the ransom note demanded. That note had arrived on the same reporter's desk that the last one had, telling the heartbroken parents that little Bart Jr. was okay and that they should wait for instructions.

It was a nice neighborhood that Don pulled up into, the rest of his team in the Suburban beside him. He could see both David and Colby doing an assessment of the neighborhood: houses worth at least half a million, most of that tied up in mortgages. The landscaping alone had to set these people back a few thousand every year. Not the most expensive neighborhood, though; there was no view of the ocean, off in the distance. Any sea breezes drifting this way would definitely be second hand. No matter; Don had seen plenty of fence-enclosed pools in the back yards. It cut down on the lawns that had to be watered almost daily during the dry season. Wide driveways with two cars in drive, one an SUV to ferry the kids around and the other an upscale Beamer. Clearly the dog did not get into that vehicle, not unless it was a Chihuahua with no hair and no drool. Even the kids would be relegated to the SUV.

Bart Smithers met them at the door, Rebecca on the sofa with a tear-stained face. Don caught a glimpse of an older child, a girl about ten with a frightened expression, peering down at them from the stairs. Don ignored her; Megan would deal with the Smithers' first born if and when it became necessary but as far as Don knew the ten year old had had nothing to do with the crime and had been in school when it occurred. Going some when I have to think about a ten year old committing a crime. What's the world coming to?

Bart Smithers himself was a giant of a man made smaller by circumstances. The broad shoulders, no doubt pride of his high school football team, were bowed and there were enough lines in his face to make a plastic surgeon's retirement dreams come true. The full head of hair looked like hands had slicked it back too many times, terrified over what was happening to his son. His wife Rebecca was no better. Her Hollywood good looks had vanished. Any thoughts that Don had that this might be an inside family matter evaporated in an instant.

Although…

"First marriage?"

"Second, for me," Bart admitted. "Is that important?"

"It might be. How's your relationship with your ex-wife?" Don asked carefully.

"Not the greatest, but I can't see Darlene doing this. Too much work. She'd rather take me back to court a few dozen times more."

How to phrase this delicately? "Your son, biologically…?"

"With Rebecca," Bart Sr. answered, understanding at once, "and so is my daughter Madison. Darlene was unable to carry a child to term. It was part of what broke up my first marriage."

"And you don't think that she might have taken your son to get back you?"

Bart snorted. "Not a chance, Mr. Eppes. If she were going to take anyone, she'd wait until Madison was fourteen and take her shopping. Then she'd bring her home so that she wouldn't have to supervise any homework and hand the bills over to me. Like I said, Darlene is allergic to anything resembling work. I only wish I'd known that before I married her."

"What has all this got to do with my son?" Rebecca wanted to know. "Do you think that Darlene…?"

"Probably not," Don said, "but we'll check it out anyway. You can give me her address, and we'll run it down just to be on the safe side. How about enemies? Either of you?"

"No one that would be capable of this." Bart spread his hands in disgust. "I'm in plumbing parts supply. Yeah, some of the unions can get a little rambunctious, but I'm not in that part of it. I'm not a threat to anyone. And neither is Rebecca; the local PTA doesn't go in for this sort of thing."

"Yeah." It fit the copycat modus operandi: see the case in the papers and take a great big fat hint, right down to sending the ransom note to the helpful newspaper reporter. Same reporter, too, that Kenneth Randall character who kept hanging around, hoping for some late breaking tidbit that he could feed to his readers. Got some, too; The Great Vervette was only too happy to indulge the reporter. Another good thing to say about the psychic: he kept the newsies off of Don's back. Even Charlie couldn't boast about that fact. Score one for the flake. The psychic flake, not the numbers flake.

Don needed to get with his team, to compile all the data and see what pieces would tie together. David was canvassing the playground where the kid had gotten snatched, Megan was doing the computer search for recently released kidnappers, and Colby was spearheading the electronics set up on the Smithers' phone. The original kidnapper had called the first set of distraught parents after they'd gotten the ransom note, and the instructions had been dutifully poured into the article that the reporter put out the next day. Though Don had to be honest with himself: that reporter guy had been the upstanding type, had handed the original note straight over to Don and his team—keeping a copy for himself—and waited until Don himself gave the okay before publishing it. It was sheer luck that someone had spotted the kidnapper and busted up his scheme ahead of time.

Okay, if this copycat dude was going to follow the script, there should be a phone call coming into the Smithers' home sometime tomorrow. Don vowed to be ready.

Of course, they'd been ready the last time. The call had come in, short and sweet and not long enough to be traced, and the FBI had been left staring at their shoes, hoping for a lead to come in. That break had come in the form of a nosy neighbor with an expensive set of binoculars.

"I'm going to leave a man here, just in case," Don promised the parents. "We'll have everything set up; the phone tapping, people canvassing the neighborhood. Everything." Everything except another lucky break. That I can't deliver. Wish I could.

"You'll find him, won't you?" Rebecca Smithers was clearly looking for comfort. Anything, anything to cling to.

"We'll do our best, Mrs. Smithers," Don promised. "Colby, you finished?"

"All I can do for now," Colby nodded. "Mr. and Mrs. Smithers, I'll be back in a couple of hours to complete the set up. You'll be right here?"

"We're not going anywhere," Bart Smithers Sr. promised grimly. He looked at his wife. "Just to the bank. I've got a million dollar loan to arrange."

"I'll have a case to put it in, one with a transmitter," Don said.

Smithers looked him solidly in the eye. "Let's get one thing straight, Eppes: I want your help, but I want my son back no matter what. If it takes a million dollars, he's worth it. Is that clear?"

Don didn't back down. "And once the kidnappers have your money, there's nothing to prevent them from killing your son. I'm sorry to put it that bluntly, but you need to keep as much control as you can. Delay, wait for us to put together clues, let us find your boy. If giving them the ransom is part of that delay, then fine. But work with us."

He felt like a heel walking out at that point, but they all knew that he'd done what he could there in the home. It felt like deja vu, like he'd walked this walk before.

He had. If the copycat stuck to the script, there'd be a phone call tomorrow. Which meant that he had the rest of today and tomorrow morning to come up with a miracle. In the original version, there'd been a nosy neighbor. Don had an uneasy feeling that he'd better not count on that happening again.

He pulled his team together. "What have we got?"

"Description of the kidnapper: Caucasian, probably six foot tall or a little under. Hair: dark blond and short, well-groomed. Wore a beige sweater-like shirt with a logo, although the kids couldn't tell me what logo," David said. "They were too far away. They said that Bart Jr. jumped off the swing and fell in the dirt. He got up, dusted himself off, walked back a few steps toward the road, which was when the kidnapper grabbed him."

Don pursed his lips. "Seem like a planned kidnapping, or a spur of the moment thing?"

"Definitely spur of the moment," David said. "One of the kids thought that the sedan had been cruising the area, said that it made a few circuits. He noticed it because he's into cars, and he thought that he could turn it into the Batmobile."

"Score one for comic strips," Don grunted. "So the kidnapper was just going for whoever he could snatch."

Colby agreed. "A kid old enough to be able to say his name, address, and phone number, so that a ransom note could be given to the papers, but not so old that he'd be able to identify the guy in court. Smooth."

"We may have a little more with the plates," David added. "I worked with the kids, and we think that there's an 'X' and a four in addition to the 'D' or 'O'. I wouldn't count on that too much, though. There was a lot of disagreement between the four year olds and the five year olds, and the first grader had no opinion."

"Best we've got. I'll put Charlie on that angle, see if he can pull anything out of his magic hat."

It was Megan who put into words what they were all thinking: "What about Ralph Maurer?"

"The psychic?" Don gave a tight little smile. "Charlie will throw a tantrum."

"Last time, he simply wandered in offering help," Colby admitted. "Said he'd had a 'vision.' Maybe he won't have a vision this time."

"Mrs. Smithers was asking," Megan pushed. "She's grasping at straws."

Don shrugged. "I'm not about to turn down any help. I won't call him—that's going a little far for the Bureau—but if she wants to talk to him I won't stand in the way. We can even give him what we've got—within reason."

Megan bit her lip. "I'll let Mrs. Smithers know."

"And Charlie?"

Don shrugged again. "What he doesn't know won't hurt him." Or me, he added mentally.

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"Variables," Charlie muttered, pouring through the three foot high print outs stacks that Megan had gotten for him. Headphones covered his ears, though no sound leaked out to suggest what the mathematician was listening to, and the pencil alternated between his fingers and his teeth. "Which variables?" He scrabbled a note in the margins, circling something that caught his attention.

Don watched him for a few moments. "Think he can hear us?"

"I don't think he even needs the headphones to block us out once he's in Charlie-land," Megan replied. "What is he doing?"

"Something about the correlation of variables. He thinks he can narrow down the possibilities of cars using the clues the kids gave us from the license plates and some other factors such as distance from the scene of the crime and location of various neighborhoods. If you can believe it, he had me pull out real estate listings, to see how expensive the houses were in the surrounding neighborhoods."

"Not bad," was Megan's thought. "He may be on to something, Don. Our kidnapper isn't likely to live in an expensive house. The more you own, the less likely you are to risk it for a crime like kidnapping."

"Whatever." Don stared at his brother, the mathematician darting around the table, latching onto this factoid and that, then whirling around to slap another Greek symbol onto the whiteboard. The computer in the corner was already groaning under the weight of all the data that had been entered. "As long as it works. Colby finished at the Smithers' house?"

"All set, and ready to go," Megan confirmed. "When the kidnapper calls in, we'll be able to trace the call. Assuming that he stays on long enough for the equipment to work."

"Charlie says that even with just a general area, he'll be able to narrow down the list of suspects for us. We don't need a complete trace."

"That's good." Megan's eyes roamed with Don's, watching the dark-haired man stop to tap in another set of data points for the computer to chew on.

"The Smithers call in The Great Vervette?"

"Yeah. He spent the night in Bart Jr.'s bedroom, picking up vibrations."

"Don't let Charlie hear you saying that," Don felt obliged to warn.

Megan sighed. "I can't believe that he's so resistant to Ralph. I mean, I know the guy is a little over the top—"

"A little?"

"Well, maybe a lot," Megan conceded. "But, at worst, he's harmless, and at best he's going to locate a child before something horrible happens. What's so wrong about that?"

"Keeps chanting that the guy's fraud. It's almost like a mantra to him, like he has to get me to believe it." Don shook his head. "It's almost like he has a vendetta against him, or something."

"Maybe he does," Megan mused. "Think about it, Don: Charlie's world is numbers. Math. Logic. Things fall into neat patterns. They have reasons for what they do. We may not understand the reasons, but we know that the reasons are out there, waiting to be figured out. These psychic things that Ralph does, they don't fit the pattern. And that's what has Charlie so upset. He can't predict how Ralph behaves, and it frustrates him."

"Maybe." Don stirred himself. "Look, he's coming out."

Charlie emerged from his den, pulling the headphones off with one hand and juggling papers with the other. There was no third hand for the pencil, so that stayed between his teeth. "Don," he tried to say around the yellow coated stick, "I've got a partial for you. It's not ready yet, but it's a start, and when I get more data, I'll be able to more closely pinpoint a location for you."

Megan deftly relieved him of the headphones. "What have you got for us?"

The pencil transferred to the now free hand. "I've been pulling the variables. I started with the search pattern of license plates, using the letters on the license plates and then eliminating those not belonging to black or dark blue sedans. I didn't dare eliminate too much; these are kids, and kids can sometimes get things wrong."

So can adults, Don wanted to add. "And—?"

The pencil went behind the ear so that Charlie could point to something squiggly on the paper. "Then I diminished the sample by eliminating those living in upscale neighborhoods. I used an assumption that neighborhoods with homes worth five hundred thousand and more were unlikely to have kidnappers, based on the additional criteria that you and Megan gave."

"You can probably cut that price tag down a little more," Don muttered.

"I can? Okay, I'll add that in to the next pass. But Don, that still leaves us with more than two thousand sedans to check out," Charlie said worriedly. "There's no way you can do that in a couple of hours."

"Two thousand?" Don winced.

"There's a lot of cars in Los Angeles alone," Charlie told him, cringing as if he personally were responsible for the twice daily traffic jams. "I didn't dare eliminate any cars based on ownership gender. It could be registered in a woman's name, yet with the male kidnapper using it."

"True. But hopefully after the kidnapper call in with his demands, we'll have some fresh data for you. That will cut the number down, won't it?"

"That'll work," Charlie nodded. "We'll get that kid back. Listen, I'll go play with the variables, see if the Parson's Postulate has anything to offer. I'll just head back in," he jerked his thumb toward the cubicle where Don had stashed him. "I'll work some more."

"You do that, buddy," Don said. Two thousand possible suspects? Was the man crazy? At this point, The Great Vervette was sounding better and better.