Chapter 101

The smellof stale coffee and failing deodorant greeted Dana when she stepped into the FBI lab turned BAU command center. Hartwell and Richter were already there, bent over a laptop watching something.

"Are those Dvita's recordings?" Dana asked, joining them.

"Yeah, lot of good they're doing us," Hartwell grumbled.

"What do you mean?" she asked.

"The faces of his patients are blurred out, and he used a voice distortion, so we have no way of knowing who's who," Richter explained.

"How are the sessions labeled?" Dana asked.

"That's even harder to crack," Hartwell said, pausing the video and backing out to the drive.

Dana saw what he meant. There were hundreds of files, each named with a sequence of numbers.

"We've ruled out time, dates, social security numbers, and bank accounts," Agent Walsh interjected.

"That's why he offered it up so freely," Hartwell muttered. "Bastard knew he was handing us a needle in a haystack."

"Then maybe we stop looking for the needle," Dana said, excitement coursing through her.

"Huh?" Hartwell grunted.

Richter scratched his head. "I don't follow, Dr. Gray."

"Hartwell's right. Dvita gave this to us knowing we'd spend all our time trying to crack his code. But the answers we're looking for are still here, in the footage."

"There's days' worth of recordings here," Hartwell argued. "We'll never get through it all."

"We don't have to." Dana turned to Walsh. "Can you search for keywords in these recordings?"

"Yeah, I can write a program for that right now if you've got the words."

Dana grinned. "Lead the way."

It took Walsh less than twenty minutes to write the program, then five more to extract all the keywords from the report Dana had compiled at the Smithsonian last night. It spanned the entirety of her library's collection on Grim Reaper history from inception to modern personification, referencing any culture or religion where the legend of the Seven Sleepers coincided.

Dana had Walsh extract the non-essential interrogative and demonstrative words, organizing what was left by repetition. Dana helped eliminate anything unnecessary, narrowing the target further. Walsh plugged those words into the program, then began uploading the video files.

"Alright, we're up and running," Walsh announced as lines of code began filling the screen.

"How long is this going to take?" Hartwell asked.

"As long as it takes," Walsh replied.

"Great," Hartwell grumbled on his way to refill his coffee.

"The words we're searching for aren't in the average vocabulary," Dana said. "In theory, the program should pick them up, and narrow our search field significantly."

"I've had enough of theories, Dr. Gray," Hartwell said. "I've got dead bodies and a murderer at large in my city. We need cold hard evidence or heads are gonna roll. Literally, people!"