“We’ll figure this out. I promise.”
Quinn stepped back, tapping the marker on his lips as he stared at what he drew. “There are a lot of repeating images here. Even the one where you got only a partial, it looks like the prick was using the same images, so I think it’s safe to guess that the first four images of the message from Dom’s door are the same as the others.” Quinn quickly filled in the missing images and stepped back again.
“So, where do we begin?” Shane asked.
“Well, all words have vowels, so they are a good starting point,” Gidget said.
“Hey Gidget, I’ve got that—oh! Sorry!”
Everyone looked up to see a flustered young man standing in the open doorway. Dark glasses framed light brown eyes. He was actually wearing a suit and tie, carrying several files in his hand. Abe couldn’t recall ever seeing anyone at Ward Security wearing a suit, not even the CEO.
“Sorry, I didn’t know you were busy,” he mumbled, starting to backpedal out of the room.
“No, wait! Daniel, you’re good with puzzles,” Gidget quickly said, waving him into the room. She turned to Abe and gave a little smile. “Daniel works in our accounting department, but he’s got some experience in financial forensics and fraud. Lots of decoding strange things.”
“I’m good with numbers,” Daniel said a bit stiffly as he walked over to the table. He looked up at the whiteboard they were all facing, and his mouth fell open a little. “Oohhh…you’re cracking a code. Looks like it’s just a simple substitution cipher rather than a Vigenère, so it shouldn’t be too hard.”
“A what?” Abe asked.
“How can you tell?” Cole added.
“By the letter frequencies. You can see by the distribution of characters on the board that some characters appear more often than others. With a Vigenère cipher, you actually have two or more ciphers for a single letter, resulting in less repetition.”
“Here,” Quinn said, already walking toward Daniel with the marker held out. “It’s obvious you know more than we do on this. You start and we’ll help.”
Daniel took a step backward, clutching the files to his chest and shaking his head. “No, really. I’m not an expert. It’s just something that I’ve played with…for fun. I just do numbers.”
“Please,” Abe said, pushing to his feet. “Dom’s in trouble. Cracking this code could help us find him.”
Blinking wide eyes behind his glasses, Daniel’s mouth bobbed open for a second. “Dom’s in trouble?” He looked back at the board, nodding once. Snatching up the marker and putting his files on Quinn’s desk, he stepped up to the board.
“Should we start by listing the entire alphabet and then marking letters off?” Gidget suggested.
Daniel shook his head. “That would leave us wasting time on letters that have a low chance of showing up. The best place to start is always with etaoin shrdlu.”
“That was not English,” Quinn muttered, dropping into an open seat next to Shane with a pad of paper in front of him.
“No, it’s actually the most commonly used letters in plain English,” Daniel said, looking over his shoulder with a small smile. He wrote the twelve letters on the board to the side. “We start by matching the letter ‘e’ with the most commonly appearing symbol and then seeing if it looks like it makes sense. If not, we continue down the list.”
Cole suddenly laughed. “You know, we could feed this into the computer.”
“I can’t believe you didn’t do that first,” Shane murmured, gazing at his boyfriend. “It’s usually technology first with you, babe.”
“Well in this case,” Quinn responded, pushing up his glasses. “Our brains may be faster. Like Daniel said, this looks to be a simple cipher. Something kids would make up.”
“Kids or not, we’re starting from scratch,” Gidget said as she continued to try out the main twelve letters against the symbols until words started to appear.
It didn’t happen nearly as fast as Abe would have liked. He got up and paced a few times, and Cole left once to get them all coffee. Noises from the first floor after about an hour made Abe wonder if there was a cage fight going on. Quinn only smiled and said something about a bet between two of the bodyguards involving the superiority of Jeet Kune Do versus Muay Thai.
At two hours, Quinn suddenly made a noise as all the color bled from his face. He looked at Abe. “I know what these say.”
Gidget was nodding and jumping out of her chair to leave the room.
“Where is she going?” Abe asked, the alarm that had been simmering all day roiling to a full boil.
“Probably to get Rowe,” Cole murmured.
Abe looked up to see a very pale Daniel already filling in the last of the letters they’d been missing.
DEAD MAN WALKS
DEAD MAN DATES
DEAD MAN CHOOSES
DEAD MAN’S LOVER – THE JOINT NOON