Day Three had brought little more than a shortage of coffee and a flaring of tempers. Megan knew that everyone was working on little sleep and that time was slipping away. The one bright spot had been that the body in the morgue had not born the telltale scar on the left arm. When he'd received the news, Charlie's legs had nearly buckled in relief, and he'd hidden his eyes behind his hand as he sank into a chair, trying to hide the tears of relief Megan knew were forming there.
Her team knew, as she did, that the longer a person remained missing, the more unlikely it became that he would be found alive. If we find him at all, a tiny voice in her mind added. Still, as long as they had not found his body, Megan had to keep her team positive. She had to remind herself that until Don was found, this was a missing persons case, not a homicide. But she really wished her team leader were there to back up these sentiments.
Megan paused in the doorway of the war room, observing Charlie before offering him the sandwich and coffee someone had brought in from the café across the street. The consultant sat at the table staring at the map projected on the screen. Try as he might, Megan knew, he could not reconcile the information LAPD was providing with the set covering deployment or pursuit curve or terrain guarding algorithm or game theory or whatever else he was trying. She approached him quietly and slid the sandwich container in front of him.
"Why?" His eyes were full of pain and doubt as he looked at her.
"Because you need to eat," she replied.
He shook his head. "No, I mean why didn't they do anything to me? They snatched me, hid me, then let you find me? That's not how these things usually work, is it?"
"Charlie," Megan said softly as she took a seat next to him, "they didn't 'let' us find you. There was a price."
Charlie nodded almost imperceptibly. "Don?"
Megan placed a hand on his arm. "Don."
"This has to be related to the weapons case he and David were working when . . ." Charlie's voice trailed off. He seemingly did not want to put into words the time frame during which Don and David had been on their own. "I just can't figure out how." He swallowed. "Don didn't ask me to do any consulting, you know. And I was enjoying getting back to . . . life."
Megan tightened her grip gently. "He doesn't begrudge you that. I'm sure he didn't ask you to consult because he wanted you to get back to teaching. He wanted to distance you from the situation and from the work."
"It messed him up, you know? Confused him, what happened with Colby. Messed with his confidence. But he's really smart. His instincts are good. Excellent, in fact."
"And he was right. About Colby, and about this." Megan opened the food container and turned it toward Charlie, though she refrained from actually putting the sandwich in his hand. "He knows you found me, he knows you found Colby, and he knows you'll find him."
Charlie started to push the box away.
"But you can't do that unless you're thinking clearly, and to do that, you need to eat." She pushed the food toward him more firmly, and he nodded, picking up the sandwich and chewing a bite listlessly.
Without warning, David and Colby came rushing into the room.
"Charlie," David said excitedly as he thrust a file toward the mathematician, "I think we just found the missing data you've been looking for."
Charlie snatched the file and opened it quickly, scanning the pages and entering the new information into his laptop.
"LAPD just raided an auto body shop and found a small cache of weapons. Our own Organized Crime Unit has suspected this place of being a front for Yakuza activity and traced the weapons back to a shipment that was stolen from a rival gang based out of Compton six months ago."
Megan watched as Charlie's fingers flew across the keyboard. "This is more like it," he muttered, and dots of varying colors began popping up on the screen. "The red dots indicate meat packing facilities that have the strongest probability of being connected to Yakuza activity, based on location and chain of ownership." More dots appeared. "The yellow dots indicate locations where Japanese gangs and black gangs have tangled over various things—territory, drugs, retribution—"
"Guns," Colby interjected.
"—guns, whatever." Charlie continued to type. "The blue dots represent the new information, auto body shops suspected of being fronts for any type of organized crime. And . . ." Charlie punched the return key firmly. "The green dots show where each of these elements intersect with known Yakuza activity."
David frowned at the screen. "We don't have enough manpower to put raids together to cover all that territory."
"Which is why," Charlie said, typing quickly again, "I'm running probabilities based on the information gathered by the local canvases." Several green dots dropped off the map. "So my best estimate . . ."
Megan clasped her hands together and nervously rested them on top of her head while she waited for Charlie to work his magic.
"There's an 89.32 percent probability that Don is being held here." Charlie enlarged a section of the map.
"That's an auto shop just down the street from the Kobe Club," David said.
"Damn it," Colby said. "We were three blocks from there three days ago!"
But Megan had no time for self-recrimination. "Let's go, people! Let's move! We roll in five!" As David and Colby left quickly to make preparations, Megan leaned down and gave Charlie a quick kiss on the cheek. "I knew you could do it, Charlie. More importantly, Don knew you could do it."