"He's all that we've got," Colby grumbled. "I say we charge him."

"With what? Bad acting?" David asked. "In this town, that happens all the time."

"He's singing like a canary," Megan added with a sigh. "Don, it looks like Jacob Stashov got duped into making the pick up for the real kidnapper. He's eager to cooperate, and, frankly, the D.A. doesn't think that it's even worth prosecuting this case. Stupidity is not yet illegal. According to our suspect, Stashov took an acting job. He met with a casting agent, who told him that this would be an improvisational job for an independent film. He was told to meet a guy matching Bart Smithers' description, pick up a briefcase, and take the briefcase to the other side of the park. He was told that he was playing the part of Kidnapper Number Two. When he pushed for details, he was told that the 'kidnapper' was from Iowa, and to develop his own thoughts about the role, but to remember that the 'kidnapper' graduated in the lower half of his high school class."

"Does this sound for real?" Don asked. "I mean, how stupid do you have to be to take that on face value? He doesn't meet with the director, no make up, no props?"

"Probably thought it would be his big break." Megan shrugged. "When you're that desperate to succeed in show business, you can overlook a lot of things. He's going through the mug books right now. He describes the man who hired him as six foot two, dark hair, blue eyes, well-built from working out—"

"Which describes half the men in L.A.," Don grumped. "Heck, it could be that reporter guy that keeps writing up The Great Vervette."

"Jacob Stashov doesn't meet the other parameters," Charlie pointed out from behind the desk. The laptop beeped at him; Don could have sworn the beep held a certain amount of affection for the mathematician. "He doesn't drive a black or blue sedan; he doesn't even own a car."

"But the Smithers kid said that someone matching Stashov's description was the one that snatched him," Colby argued. "Tall and blond and grown up. They get the kid calmed down yet?"

"Enough," Megan said. "We took a mug shot of Stashov, and showed it to the victim. Bart Jr. says that it could be the guy who grabbed him, but I think that the little boy didn't get a good look at his kidnapper. His story dances around too much, and he gets upset and starts to cry whenever anyone tries to talk to him about it." She sighed. "I agree, there's an equally good probability that this may not be our man."

"Which means that we still have a copycat kidnapper on the loose," Don pointed out unhappily. "Whoever the guy is that hired Stashov. Anyone care to offer a suggestion on how to proceed?"

There were times when silence was welcome. This was not one of those times, Don reflected, but silence was what he got. His team looked at each other, smiles more than a little weak. Megan even went a miniscule shrug.

Not Charlie. His head was still buried in his laptop.

"Charlie?"

"What?"

"You got something, buddy?"

"Yeah." As if Don should have known better than to ask. Of course Charlie had something. "Like I said before, I've been cross-matching the partials on the license plate with the make of the cars and the addresses of the owners. It's like the spatter diagrams that I've shown you before: the droplets splatter out from a central location, indicating the potential suspects in a large and random population. The difference here is that I've created an artificial covering for certain areas where the likelihood of the suspect being an actual suspect is low. By eliminating certain neighborhoods, I've decreased the number of suspects while increasing the possibility of success." He beamed.

Don thought he followed the logic. Even more, Don knew that Charlie had been right in the past, and that would very likely be correct in the future once again. Don was never one to look a gift horse in the mouth, no matter what it cost in terms of sibling rivalry. "You got the list of suspects? Give."

Charlie handed it over.

Don perused it swiftly. None of the names looked familiar. "Ten potentials. Megan, David: you take the first half. Colby and I'll take the bottom five. Run them through the computer for arrests and warrants, then see if we can talk to them. Look for a connection. There's not enough here to even begin to ask for a search warrant, but that won't stop us from a little judicious snooping around. We've still got a copycat out there, people, that we need to stop. Anything else that we can check out?"

Again, his team looked at each other with blank stares.

"Well, actually, Don: yes."

"Charlie?" His brother, now an FBI investigator? Don swallowed his impatience. "What?"

"Ralph Maurer."

"The Great Vervette? Charlie, he found the kid. Both of 'em, in fact."

"And we know, also for a fact, that he didn't get a dime of the ransom money," Colby added. "That was recovered both times."

"There's no way that he could be the kidnapper," David argued. "I mean, both kids said that the kidnapper was tall, with blond hair. A wig on his head, possibly, but Ralph Maurer is definitely not tall."

"Charlie," Don said gently, "I know that you don't believe in psychic powers, and I'm not going to argue with you over that. We can agree to disagree. But to try to set Ralph Maurer up as a suspect?" He shook his head. "Rule him out, buddy. He doesn't fit."

"Yes, but let's assume that I'm right." Charlie got to his feet, the better to make his point. "Hear me out," he pleaded. "Just for argument's sake, assume that I'm right. Assume that The Great Vervette is a fraud."

"All right, Charlie." Don leaned back in his chair, well accustomed to humoring his little brother. Not to mention that unhappy little scene where he'd had to ask Charlie to leave the Smithers' home; listening now could make up for that. Don could afford to waste five minutes on his brother to keep the peace. "Go ahead. Play Devil's Advocate. The Great Vervette is a fraud. Now what? What's his motive?"

"He's getting great publicity," was Charlie's prompt answer. "People love him. He's in the newspapers, on TV, getting blogged across the Internet."

"And—?"

"And—?" Charlie repeated, a blank look on his face. "And what?"

Megan took pity on the mathematician. Motivation was so not his field. "Charlie, all that means is that Ralph is getting his fifteen minutes of fame. He's doing this for the purpose of feeling good, for helping people. He hasn't asked either set of parents for a dime. If he were a fraud, he'd be out for the money."

Colby snorted. "The only one making money is that reporter guy, Randall. I heard that his paper is paying him big bucks every time he brings in another story on Ralph, especially because that's the only reporter that The Great Vervette will talk to. Sweet deal for him. Being nice to the whacko who turned out not to be quite so whacko really paid off."

Don tried to be gentle. "Charlie, Ralph isn't our guy. He's not tall enough, he doesn't even come close to the description that we have of the kidnapper, either the original or the copycat, and he's not getting a thing out of this except for your fifteen minutes of fame. No motivation, buddy. No reason. No gain." He shrugged helplessly. "Sorry. He's not a suspect."

Charlie cast around. "What if he's in cahoots with someone else?"

"'Cahoots'?" Colby repeated, trying not to laugh. "I didn't know anyone used that word any more."

"Same thing, buddy," Don told Charlie kindly. "The ransom money has gone back to the parents both times. The bad guys lose. The parents win. No payoff for any criminal."

Charlie's face fell, although Don could see the light of determination still burning in those brown orbs. "There's got to be some other reason."

"Or it could be that we've run across the first genuine, scientifically certified psychic. Didn't you say something about being able to reproduce results over and over? Does this qualify?"

Charlie snorted. Then, seeing the looks on the others' faces, set his jaw grimly.

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"We could just mark this case closed," David offered helpfully. "Both kids returned to their parents, no money lost. One kidnapper dead and the other nowhere to be found. No more kids snatched."

"That's the important part," Don agreed. He rubbed his arm gingerly. It still hurt occasionally, even though he'd given up the sling days ago and the pain killers with it. Damn embarrassing, getting shot.

"Charlie? How's he taking this?"

"Let's just say that I haven't been getting my share of my father's lasagna." Don started to shrug, then thought better of it. "I wondered about take out, slipping into the house to steal the leftovers while Charlie's out of the house, but Dad would want to know why." He grunted. "Moved out of the house for almost twenty years, and I'm still asking for food packages from home."

"Which means that Charlie is still on his anti-psychic kick, and you're afraid to meet him at the house," David interpreted. "How long is he going to keep at it?"

"Wish I knew. I'm going through withdrawal. I'm even thinking about taking a cooking class," Don lied. "Where are we with our suspects?"

"Suspects? The ones that Charlie pinned down?" Colby moped. "They're all clean, all ten of 'em. They all have airtight alibis for the time periods in question. One even sold his black sedan a year ago; DMV hadn't kept up when Charlie ran his search thing. Bust, Don."

"We could just close the case as unsolved," Megan offered tentatively. "I mean, the kids are back safely, the media attention has died down, and we have no leads."

David's take was just as unhappy. "And I know that there's that gang shooting that the Area Director wants us to turn our attention to. We could be spinning our wheels for days on this kidnapping thing, getting nowhere. The gang thing could save a lot of people's lives with a quick resolution."

Don sighed. It was the nasty part of being the team leader. The righteous part of him wanted to bull ahead, to find the copycat kidnapper who got his jollies from terrorizing little kids and their parents. But the team leader part, the part that made the tough calls, told him that his team was right. That turning their attention to another case would be a better use of time and resources. That it would save more lives, more money, more…everything. He sighed again. "Close it. We'll call it unsolved."

For now, he added to himself with a sigh.

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Professor Larry Fleinhardt watched his younger colleague pace back and forth, adding a chalk mark here and a scribble there to the incomprehensible equations on the white board. "Charles, I fail to understand just why you feel the need to pursue this line of thought to this degree. No one is arguing with the data that you've presented."

Charlie paused in his deliberations. "Actually, they are, Larry. They're just not saying it." The next scribble had a little more force to it. "They've dropped the case without solving it. They're letting a kidnapper get away."

"They don't have much choice," Larry pointed out. "They don't have any leads to pursue. Everything has come to a dead end."

"Not everything," Charlie said grimly.

"Oh? Which lead have they not pursued? From your discussion, I haven't identified any additional tidbits of information."

"The Scatter Effect," Charlie said, his attention on the white board. "I'm pinpointing the highest probabilities for the location of where the suspect spends the most of his time. But it's not coming together," he added with a frown. "Something's wrong."

"An error in the math?"

"Possibly. I'll have to go through the whole thing, see where a negative should have been positive and vice versa." Charlie sighed. "That may take all night. And I've got a mid-term to administer tomorrow."

"And correct as well," Larry cautioned. "Don't neglect that aspect of it. While I recognize the value of graduate students performing menial labor, oversight is valuable and has become increasingly so as students become more vocal in pursuit of a four point oh average."

A snort was his only reply.

"Seriously, Charles, should you be spending your resources on this problem? Should you succeed in coming up with an answer, would Don and the others pursue it? Didn't you tell me that they closed the case?"

Furious scribblings on the whiteboard was his only answer.

"Are you caught up on your journal readings?" Oh so innocently.

That elicited a snarl.

"I had heard that Jackson Boltmeister published something contradicting the Eppes Convergence."

That earned Professor Fleinhardt a glare. "I don't have to respond to that tripe. There are enough rational mathematicians to do it for me."

"Ah, but will they do it with your flare?"

"They'll do it without my spelling errors."

"Ah, yes, the limitations of spell check." Larry sighed. "Would that it recognized Greek. I heard that Professor Goldstein was planning to take the lead on the rebuttal to Boltmeister's attack."

That brought up the shaggy head. "Elisa Goldstein? She completely screwed up the response to Boltmeister's first attack on Robert Langerton's article! You can't be serious! I'd rather write the response myself!"

"Your choice, Dr. Eppes." Larry spread his hands. "The Spatter Equation, or the article response. I need not remind you which of those has an editorial deadline."

With another snarl, Charlie flung down the marker he was writing with and stabbed the power button to his computer.

"I take it you have elected to write the response yourself?"

"What does it look like I'm doing?" Charlie gave a final glare to the whiteboard. "I just hope that there aren't any more kidnappings until I can get back to it."

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Megan handed her fresh-off-the-printer report to Don for inclusion in the case file. "Another successful case closed. Is mine the last report you needed?"

"You got it." Don inserted it into the binder, closing the book on a short chapter of their lives and the beginning of a long sentence—twenty-five to thirty years—for a group of career criminals that they were all pleased to see off of the street. "The Area Director's pleased. We've got a string of closed cases this past week that the other teams are eying with envy. Feel like a promotion?"

"Not particularly," was Megan's response. "I like being on a winning team much more than heading up my own team that has to compete with you and yours. I'll stick here, thanks. How's Charlie? I haven't seen him for a week."

"We haven't needed him for the last two cases," Don said with a careful shrug. "And after all, he does have a day job at CalSci. It just seems like he's here all the time." He forced a smile. "Shall I tell him you miss him?" Like I've dared to show up on his doorstep?

"Do that," Megan agreed. "When he's consulting for us, I feel like I keep tripping over him, but when he's not here…" She echoed the shrug but with a lot more casualness. "Let's just say that he keeps the place lively. He makes me think." She frowned. "There haven't been any more kidnappings that I missed?"

"Not a one," Don assured her. "They'd have dumped it on us fast." He paused. "Read anything more about Ralph?"

A tiny smile quirked upward. "Now that you mention it, yes. Sounds like he's doing nicely for himself. Not so much any article that I read, but I ran into that reporter that did the articles, what was his name?"

"Randall. Ken Randall." Don had a memory for names. Especially that one. There were a lot things burned into his brain about that case, including ordering a certain mathematician out of a certain house in front of an audience.

"That's it, Randall. Said that Ralph has opened up a small business as a psychic—just for 'entertainment purposes' to keep it legal for the state—and is seeing bereaved mothers and heartbroken long lost loves. Although Randall did mention that Ralph would love to come and 'consult' for us any time we wanted him to. Professional courtesy, you know."

"Right," Don snorted. "I can just see it now: him and Charlie, glaring at each other across the room."

"Like I said," Megan repeated, the corners of her mouth turning upward, "Charlie does keep things lively."