Take the Fourth

by Jeffrey Walton

  So as planned, Jorja entered the mud room just off the kitchen, threw her keys onto the table, kicked off her shoes, grabbed the osso and popped the cork on her favorite drink from the god Bacchus and poured a full glass of the red velvet liquid. Then she recorked the bottle and made her way into her office. She grabbed the glass by its stem, just like she always did as to not warm the wine from the temperature of the hands—the way she learned from the Italian waiter in the watery city by the Adriatic. She took her first sip as the monitor flickered. She ran the wine across her tongue, swished it between her gums and teeth and tasted the softness of plum on the finish. It will be even better once it breathes, she always says to herself, and it always was. She put the glass of wine down, logged in and tried to remember where she left off to what seemed like ages ago. Then she remembered the M prompt. She needed to do a bit of research but didn’t know where to begin, so she went to where just about everybody does their research these days, google.com. At the prompt she almost entered just M, but almost immediately she knew her mistake, then entered “m prompt” in quotes and a whole bunch of nothing appeared on the screen, nothing of any real use as she quickly processed the data. Then she tried M> in quotes and got thousands of hits, all from mathematical equations. She then pulled out her pages from the evening and glanced at the directories. She saw the word mumps and thought that was strange. She thought of the childhood disease and why it might pertain to this computer. Was this some sort of biological server and found herself thinking of pure evil along the lines of the Andromeda Strain. She decided to enter mumps in the Google search. As expected, it spat out sites such as WebMD, Wikipedia, doctors, and symptoms sites. She scrolled through a few pages and nothing. She went back to the first page and clicked on the Wikipedia site. She clicked open the one hundred percent relevant link and she read the information on mumps, a glandular problem yada, yada, yada. She went back and clicked a ninety-seven percent relevance link, same thing, then she clicked on the seventy-two percent link and read Massachusetts hospital, she was just about to click back when she read the words, “programming language”. Her interest piqued.

  Here MUMPS, the acronym for Massachusetts General Hospital Utility Multi-Programming System or M Technology, as it is known today is a database language that was developed in the sixties and is still in wide use today by hospitals, financial institutions, including top tier, best in class banks, and the government. Jorja took a moment on that one—the government. Interesting. She had never heard of this language and she was a computer major and on top of that the government used it, her government. She knew Java and HTML and C and C++ and even Pascal. She heard of FORTRAN and COBOL, even Basic and Assembly, although she never studied them but MUMPS, she’d have to do a bit more research. She read the in-depth article on Wikipedia; she clicked on few links that took her to various companies that offered the language in a more robust form. Almost everybody claimed the language as super fast and cheaper to run than its competitors. It sounded too good to be true. She then found a link on SourceForge and downloaded an open source, basically free of charge, version of the language. She also downloaded the documentation including the installation guide. This free version seemed to have all the bells and whistles and later found out that major startup companies opted for this version as opposed to shelling out the big bucks for an Oracle license. In a little over three hours Jorja had a database using M up and running on one of her homemade Unix machines. Where the installation guide failed, and they almost always did, she was able to piece together the rest of the information from newsgroups and forums and even entered an online chat room for some tweaking advice. During her install, Jorja knew she was on the right track by comparing her directory structure to that of the machine ending in 12.168, they were pretty similar.

  The time was now a little before twelve and Jorja had a new language to learn. As with most computer languages the concepts are basically the same only the syntax is different. From what Jorja had gathered so far, there were not that many commands in MUMPS and it seemed fairly easy and straight forward. She learned that commands can be shortened from the word to just the first letter, a real timesaver but makes for reading the code a tad more cryptic. She also learned that MUMPS is both a compiled language and an interpreted language, meaning programs can be written and saved to run at a later date or at the M prompt one could enter a series of commands and execute them immediately by hitting the return key. She also learned how data was stored in the database. It was a strange concept but she caught on rather quickly with the help of an online chat partner aptly named measles2. He helped by saying that everything is stored in arrays or variables and by putting the little hat or carrot character in front of the array or variable it will be saved to the database and becomes a global variable, meaning everyone can use it. Her very first commands that Jorja wrote were in the form of Hello World. Every programmer knows the Hello World example. It usually is the very first piece of code written when learning a new language. It’s usually quite simple and in this case it was no different. Jorja simply wrote

  M>set ^X=“Hello World” write ^X

  Hello World

  She now had a variable called X in the database that was equal to the value of “Hello World” and could retrieve it anytime she wanted to or change it or delete it when she wanted. After a few more hours she was getting quite good at the syntax of the language but what was really difficult to her was seeing the things stored in this database without having to write down the information she created within it. She went back to measles2 and stated her problem. He understood and shipped a small program that would help in her situation. With this program Jorja was able to traverse the database with ease and see what was stored there. There were many nuances to this new language but Jorja had a firm grip on the overall gist of the idea. Over the course of watching the sunlight peek through the shades and feeling her stomach grumble Jorja felt like she was back in school again pulling an all-nighter, only she was deeply engrossed with enjoyment. Once her eyes started to lose focus, Jorja called it quits. She hadn’t even entered the President’s machine or taken another sip from her wine glass. She left her computer on but locked it out of habit then picked up her leftover Amarone and went into the kitchen. She pulled a used bottle of wine from the cabinet over the stove, removed the corked, grabbed a funnel and poured her remaining wine into the bottle. Any wine left over, which is pretty rare in this household, she saves to use as red wine vinegar. Adding different grapes and vintages makes for a highly complex and tasty vinegar to be used as salad dressings and whatnot. She placed the bottle back in the cabinet, went to the fridge and poured herself a glass of cranberry juice which she used to wash down a piece of multi-grain bread and a hand full of vitamins. From the kitchen it was to the master bedroom where she closed her blinds to remove most of the sunlight for it was closing in on eight a.m. She sought comfort between the sheets long before the notion of brushing her teeth ever entered her mind. She adjusted her alarm clock and tried to remember when Greg was coming over, she didn’t quite remember but assumed it was the typical picking up the date time, between seven and eight. She rustled a bit with her pillow, tossed and turned looking for the perfect spot and was soon asleep. She was up just before twelve and felt sort of refreshed after her shower. Then she made her way outdoors to do a few errands before Greg arrived.

  . . .

  Chapter 20

  Orlando and Charles worked most of the night solidifying their case. It was more than a hunch, now that all four of these cases were connected and there was indeed a common thread that was woven through each of these missing little girls—the color of that common thread was indeed blonde. The first missing girl was Orlando’s case—Tanya Drake, yes the case was still open but no one, not even the parents, expected her to return to a normal life. Every law officer knows the first twenty-four hours are the most critical in any missing person’s case and both Orlando and Charles knew they were fast approaching that time constra
int with Ripley. It was like waiting for the guards to unlock the cell and bring the prisoner to the gas chamber. Each time the secondhand hit twelve it was one step closer to the inevitable, one step closer to meeting the creator, and one step closer to lights out forever. The clock on Lynch’s desk read 4:37, just a mere seven hours until the… . until the… . neither one of them wanted to think about that… . there was still a chance and that’s what they were going to hold onto—a chance. They were getting closer, they could feel it. There was still much hope left for Ripley Newenberg. Yes, there was still hope for Tanya Drake but it was a superficial hope, not a hope to finding her alive, just a hope that one day they would find the body, give her a final resting place before god and officially close that chapter of her life.

  Tanya was three days away from her sixth birthday on the day she vanished from the park oh so very close to home. She was cute as a button and was the only child to the Drakes. She was their miracle child for they tried every natural method of conception under the sun before they chose one of the many medical treatments. Almost sixty-five thousand dollars and four years later Tanya came into their lives. She was the world to them. Although they could have easily given her the world, the parents were well grounded and did not spoil their daughter. She was well mannered, well behaved, and loved her parents. She always had an ear to ear grin, she was always happy, like she already knew how difficult it was to get here, so she enjoyed it as best she could, always making her parents proud no matter what she did . . It was heart wrenching three days after her disappearance when the doorbell rang and Mrs. Drake answered it. There stood before her was Alicia, a classmate of Tanya’s, dressed in the most adorable white taffeta dress holding a present for Tanya’s birthday. She was on vacation with her parents and did not hear the news. She didn’t understand the tearful response she received from Mrs. Drake and she too started to cry. The motherly instinct took over in Mrs. Drake; she opened the door and hugged Alicia like she was her found loving daughter. She wouldn’t let go. Alicia’s mother had to get out of the car and come to the rescue. She herself didn’t understand the situation until Mr. Drake came to the door, took her aside and explained things. Mrs. Drake was never the same after that and still to this day lives on prescription medication.

  Colleen Rhinehardt was the second little one missing from a playground also close to her home. She was from a family of five, excluding her natural father. It was Colleen, her mother, her elder brother, and two smaller sisters that made up the household. The mother barely made ends meet but she did manage somehow to put one decent meal on the table each day, be it breakfast, lunch or dinner, though most of the time it was breakfast just because it was the cheapest to make—pancake batter can go a long way. After calling the officer in charge of the case at a little after one in the morning, Garfield and Lynch learned there were no witnesses and he had the sense that the mother had an unnatural feeling of relief—basically saying that was one less mouth to feed. She was at the playground on September 23rd, unsupervised by an adult, her older brother age eight accompanying her to the park but failed to bring her home. It wasn’t until the next day the mother called the police about her missing Colleen, age 5. She was almost identical to the other girls, shoulder length blonde hair, cute as a button as well, and vanished from a playground within the seventy-five mile radius of Ripley’s hometown. The case was still marked open but no one wasted much time on this one for all intents and purpose it was a cold case, a closed case, there were just no leads to follow.

  Becky Timberstone was the youngest of the little girls at age four. Her case was still very hot being only a few months old, though hope of finding her safe return had diminished as well. The officer in charge of this case was away on a much needed vacation. He worked himself to the bone on this one because he played the “what if” game, what if it was his little girl, age five, he could not even imagine. He worked so hard on trying to find Becky that his family life was in jeopardy, he actually was neglecting his fatherly responsibilities, his little girl. His partner finally helped him see the light. His partner Josh Cerrito was due in Lynch’s office any minute now. Josh thought about picking up the phone and calling his partner but didn’t want to give him any false sense of hope; he’d better go investigate this new lead until proven otherwise. And so as it was, Officer Cerrito hopped in his car and at 6:36 am he pulled into a visitor’s space just outside Detective Charles Lynch’s building. Lynch was waiting for him outside with a cigarette between his lips.

  “Officer Cerrito?”

  “Yes, Detective Lynch?”

  “Yes, come on up, we’re just about to do a press release,” with that, Lynch did a deep drag on his last bit of smoke to the point it glowed almost bright red and before exhaling, flipped it onto the ground and squashed it with his black shoe. “Coffee,” as trails of smoke followed his question?

  “No thanks, don’t drink the vile stuff, I had my morning can of Coke to get my caffeine fix.”

  “Suit yourself,” and they made their way to Lynch’s office without another word.

  Garfield looked as tired as Lynch and did the normal exchange of introductions and pleasantries, funny thing was he had yet to do this with Lynch; from the moment he walked into the door it has been all business.

  “Okay now what about this press release?”

  “We found four cases, yours included, that fit the same exact mold all within a year’s time frame. We are coming up on the twenty-four hour marker with the Newenberg case and you know what that means, we now need as much help as possible, so we’ll ask the help of the public—the more eyes looking for… .”

  “The sick twisted bastard,” interjected by Orlando

  “Perpetrator,” Lynch said with a smile, “the better we’ll be… and now that we have a serial kidnapper on our hands the public will go ape shit and that’s just what we need, an angry mob with eyes. By the evening news tonight this will be a national story for sure with all kinds of clips on how to protect your children. What I’m most concerned is for all the households that lie within that highlighted circle there, to keep their eyes open.”

  “Okay, I’m with you but our descriptions aren’t even close. In Becky’s case we are searching for a kid in his late teens to early twenties in a red Mustang.”

  “That was what Orlando here calls the three card monte, same thing happened on our case but it was a 74 Camaro and a twenty-two year kid behind the wheel. There are not that many cars like that so finding the needle in the haystack was a so called piece of cake. Turns out he was paid by our guy to basically sit and wait. I’m sure the same thing happened on your end.”

  “That’s your theory?”

  “Sticking to it until we see otherwise.”

  “Alright I’ll roll with it… . for now.”

  The release went out on the AP wire just two minutes prior to seven and it wasn’t five minutes later that the phone call came in from one of the major networks… just so happens CNN is located a stone’s throw away in Atlanta. The first interview was with the local station WXIA, they were the first to cover Ripley’s disappearance and never left… they knew the first twenty-four hours hadn’t elapsed as well. At fifteen past the hour, two out three local news segments within the national daily morning shows covered what they were now calling the serial kidnappings, within a half hour the third and fourth were on board. CNN followed suit but their broadcast was national. People already in their daily commute who were tuned into “all news all the time” heard the description as well. Even people bouncing around the dial or glued to their visionless porn and dirty talk stations heard a glimpse of the serial kidnapper, described as medium build, white male, thirty-five to forty-five and walks with a limp. Ripley’s case was no longer just a missing person’s report. Ripley’s case was no longer just a local story. More importantly Ripley’s case was no longer just a local case. The mere mention of kidnapping is enough to wake the dead. Couple this with the word serial and the three letter acronym most co
mmonly seen on cheap t-shirts signifying “female body inspector,” the FBI, was already on route from their Atlanta based office.

  While the media whipped the case into a frenzy, the Forest Park police, with the help of the GBI, prepared for the arrival of the men in blue. Lynch waited for them outside and just before he lit another non-filtered Pall Mall, two nondescript dark blue sedans with government plates pulled into the station’s parking lot. He was expecting each of the g-men to be wearing some sort of dark sunglasses to invoke that mystique he has heard so much about—none of them wore any shades. He let them walk right past him without saying a word. He knew there would be hell to pay but he didn’t want to pay it just yet. He also yearned for just going home and trying to get some rest, he wasn’t as young as he used to be and this working through the night shift was for the birds—mainly the owls, but he decided to have yet another smoke hoping to get his fourth wind from the nicotine fix, besides, he was a cop at heart and he needed to find this sick twisted bastard and find him fast. With that need in mind, he extinguished his Pall Mall and decided to pay the piper. He expected the non-shade wearing FBI guys to have commandeered his office—that was not the case but no sooner did he sit down in his chair, Orlando summoned him to the conference room on the second floor. He grabbed his lukewarm cup of coffee, his yellow note pad and away he went. Upon entering the conference room he quickly noticed it looked like these guys already made themselves at home. Maps, folders, laptops, various forms, and paper were scattered on the table, everyone had a cup of coffee except Josh who was holding his third can of red and white, there were a few pastries at one end of the table, and two seats that were open for he and Orlando at the other. It seemed Josh brought the feds up to speed and they were already planning their first move; that move being to focus on the man with a limp.