Weisner spoke up, “Again, Officer Briscoe, what do you take from that prose?”
He chuckled, “As I said before it’s a poem. Gibberish. Makes no sense to me at all. I’m wondering why we’re all here.”
Agent Linda Combs, cryptanalyst with the L.A. Sheriff’s office, sat up in her chair. “Officer Briscoe, it’s a ciphered message, not unusual for societal threats. Have you ever heard of anagrams?”
“Yes, but help my memory.”
“Scrambled letters made into words.”
“Oh. Well I solve the Cryptoquip and Jumble in the Sunday paper every week. Those are anagrams of a sort.”
Agent Combs grinned and spoke, “Yeah. Kinda like that.” She took a deep breath. “It appears this is a mixed cipher poem written in a free quatrain style. We first noticed some of the introductory lines tied to the mention of WMDs on the cover; they were anagrams of particularly disturbing words.”
He knitted his eyebrows and asked, “Like what?” He scanned the poem again.
“We can’t be sure yet, we need the full context of the poem to better understand it, but the title, Poetic Aim, easily anagrams to Atomic Pie, a rather humorous phrase, but tied to WMDs, it sprouts some horns.”
“Think it’s a coded recipe?” he bantered, smiling.
Combs glared at Briscoe, visually admonishing him. “Officer Briscoe, there’s no place for levity here. Please don’t waste our time with irrelevant humor.”
“Yes, ma’am. Sorry, I’m just brainstorming.” He continued, “But why pie? I’m reminded of humble pie. What liars are said to eat when caught in a lie.”
“Interesting, Officer Briscoe. Go on,” said Combs.
“Saying it out loud, it also sounds like pi, a homophone, spelled P-I, the mathematical constant I hated in geometry class; I could never wrap my mind around it. Then once I finally understood it later in life, it awed me.”
“That’s very intuitive of you, Officer Briscoe; almost too much so.” Combs said, frowning.
Eyes directed downward, he admitted, “Must be my Mensa showing. I try to keep it toned down. Excuse me.”
Poole chuckled and interjected, “You mean you’re a genius traffic cop?” Quiet laughter surrounded them.
“I’m a traffic cop because I chose the adventurous life after I left the service. I scuba dive for a hobby and run marathons for my health. I served my country as a master diver in the U.S. Navy at Point Mugu, here in California, and did a damn good job of it. I was one of the navy’s finest. I can’t help that I was given above average intelligence, Lieutenant Poole.” His squinting, glaring eyes hung on her fading laughter.
Poole back stepped and said, “Sorry officer, it’s just a standing joke around the lab. Rare as unicorns, they do exist; you’re living proof.”
Irritated by her debasing comments, he let fly. Still thinking of pi, he looked back to the poem, then Combs. “What about no math clue err? Is he referencing pi?” He was caught up in the brewing puzzle, no longer playing dumb.
“No. Thermonuclear.” Combs shot back.
He quickly matched the letters between the phrases, agreeing with the solution. “Correct. Who’s doing the decoding?” he queried.
Doug Strong, Special Agent with the FBI’s Antiterrorism unit spoke up. “KryptoKnight, our super computer in the Quantico cryptanalysis lab is working on it. So far it’s spewed out thousands of possible solutions, ranging from groupings of one-letter to sixteen-letter words. We must ultimately decide which ones are pertinent to this threat.”
“I see.” He looked back at Combs, probing deeper, “And cursed it’s not?”
“Destructions.” She held up her hand to stop his next reference, “Are you getting it now, Officer Briscoe?”
“Yeah, unfortunately I am. Thermonuclear destructions. Plural. What does the rest of it say?”
Combs scowled and replied, “The next lines are harder to decode. He gave us a few easy ones to lead us in, and who knows, he may have changed the cipher method. The rest of the poem may not be anagrammed. The FBI’s computer is still working on it.”
Squinting into her frown, he asked, “Are you sure it’s a him?”
“No, not really, but Dr. Weisner seems to think a male best fits the profile. We’re hoping you can tell us for sure with your memory.”
“You mean where I’ve been patrolling lately?”
Lieutenant Poole interjected, “Yes, that and more importantly where you’ve been stopping lately.”
He grinned broadly and said, “Well then, you’re in luck today. I do have the memory.” Pulling a flash drive from his khaki jacket, he offered it to Poole. “This morning I remembered that I’ve been part of a new pilot GPS tracking program for cruisers. I don’t like it because it invades my privacy, but maybe it will help in this case. I stopped by this morning and downloaded my last week’s information onto this drive. Should be about forty hours and a thousand miles of data, stops and all. It was a slow week,”
“Excellent!” Poole exclaimed, taking the drive from him. “This is the break we’ve needed.” She wheeled around in her chair and called out the door, “Garcia? Could you come in here please?”
Delores Garcia, one of the sharpest of the forensic computer analysts at the crime lab, appeared at the door within seconds. “Yes, Lieutenant? What can I do for you?”
Reaching out with the drive, Poole answered, “This USB drive contains the GPS coordinates of Officer Briscoe’s patrol route over the past week. Could you please map it with a coordinated time line. We’re looking for stops of a few minutes or longer where someone could have dropped something into his cruiser window. No rush, but we need it yesterday.”
Garcia smiled, said, “No problem,” then took the drive and turned to leave.
He added, “Oh. I generally crack my windows open on stops when the outside temperature is ninety degrees or higher. They’re closed otherwise and the doors are always locked.”
“Good point, Officer Briscoe,” said Poole. She turned back to Garcia and added, “So map his stops with the time and outside temperatures over ninety highlighted. Can you do that?”
“Sure, I’ll just have to coordinate his location data with the hourly temp data at his location. That’s simple. How about the data formatting on the drive. Is it CSV?” She waited for an answer.
“I believe it is,” he replied. “They told me it’s standard CHP location data coding.”
Garcia nodded and left the room to begin her task. It was not a trivial task, but happily, there were no cloak-and-dagger constraints involved; straightforward GPS to mapping conversions were something she performed almost daily for vehicle tracking. The temperature element made it slightly more interesting.
His eyes followed her down the hall. “How long will it take her?”
Poole answered, “Probably several hours. Most other labs would take days but she uses a mapping app she developed. Does it in minutes. The temperature aspect is new, though. Still, she can modify her code on the fly and do miracles, sometimes. I’m never disappointed with her work.”
“So am I done here?” he asked, starting to rise.
“Keep your seat, officer,” Poole said, nodding to Weisner.
Weisner stood at his chair and addressed Briscoe, “Officer Briscoe, you must realize by now that you are our prime suspect in this investigation. And until we prove your innocence or identify the sender, you’ll remain so.”
The hair on his neck bristling, he rose to defend himself. “That’s preposterous! My record is impeccable. I would never do anything like this; ask my wife, Barbara. I’m on your side.” As an afterthought he asked, stuttering, “Wh-what about Juan Moreno? H-his prints are on the envelope.”
“We’ve already cleared him. He came in earlier for printing, then took the same tests we are about to give you. Sailed through with flying colors,” answered Weisner.