Constant Risk. Janie Crouch

jeans and a thin sweater—detective badge clipped on her belt—walked over to them.

      “Whit,” the beautiful woman said in, of course, a gorgeous smoky voice to match her perfect face and body. “Glad you’re back. It’s almost time.”

      The woman turned to Bree and Tanner, offering her hand. “Captain Dempsey, Miss Daniels, I’m Penelope Brickman, lead detective on this case. Thanks so much for coming.”

      Tanner shook her hand. “Hope we can help. Please, call me Tanner. Especially since I’m not here in any sort of official capacity.”

      Bree force herself to shake the woman’s hand too. “Bree, please.”

      She was a little bit proud of herself for saying something appropriate rather than shoving all five feet eight inches of the woman’s gorgeousness into a closet far away from Tanner.

      “Did you catch them up?” Penelope asked Whitaker.

      “Mostly. The footage... I figured that was just something they had to see for themselves.”

      Penelope nodded. “Yeah, explaining wouldn’t do much good.”

      “How often does the footage arrive?” Bree asked. “Is it live or prerecorded? I’m assuming it’s been rerouted through multiple channels or you wouldn’t need me here.”

      “I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not any sort of computer expert.” Penelope gave them both a rueful smile. “I can get around and do the basics with computers, but I tend more toward old-fashioned methods of solving crime and police work. Hitting the pavement and talking to people.”

      “I’m the same,” Tanner said. “People tend to give up their secrets a lot more easily—”

      “—than machines.” They both finished together, then smiled.

      Bree barely refrained from rolling her eyes. These two should just go get married and make a bunch of crime-fighting babies together. Babies, of course, who would never deign to touch the keys of a computer.

      A yell at the front of the room caught their attention. The people at the computers were getting more frantic.

      “What’s going on?” Tanner asked.

      “Everybody’s on edge,” Whitaker said. “It’s almost time for the message. Every hour on the hour the bastard sends us some footage.”

      Every hour on the hour. That was the first completely useful bit of information Bree had received.

      Without waiting to hear anything else, Bree walked over to the computers. The people surrounding them were still talking all over each other, arguing about the best way to track the message that was coming in.

      Bree just listened. Nothing coming out of their mouths was particularly complicated in terms of ideas on how to track the killer.

      “Listen, people,” the guy sitting at the main console said. “If we could catch this guy with any of those methods we would’ve damn well done so long before now. If you don’t have something intelligent to say, then stand here quietly.”

      The group grumbled but quieted. Bree might not like how the guy was talking to everyone else but she definitely had to admit he was right. None of the ways they were suggesting were particularly inspiring.

      The guy pointed at Bree. “Who are you?”

      “I’m just observing for the moment.”

      “Great. Another useless person taking up space.”

      Bree ignored him. She might be pretty hesitant when it came to a lot of things—beautiful blondes included—but her confidence in her knowledge of computers was secure. She could probably do more than everyone in this room combined. But she had no need to prove that to anyone.

       Yet.

      “How long do you think it will be this time?” the young woman next to her asked another woman sitting at a console.

      “It was three and a half minutes last time. That was the longest so far. Maybe they will keep getting longer.”

      “But the time before that was only fifteen seconds,” the first responded. “There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to his methods.”

      A large digital clock on the wall beeped loudly and started counting down from thirty. Evidently the killer was punctual enough for them to set a clock to his transmissions.

      Another good piece of information. That meant the footage was being sent on a computerized schedule, not just when the killer felt like it.

      “Look alive, people,” Mean Guy said as he sat down at the main computer terminal. “Remember we’re still running all possible scenarios and solutions. Just because it didn’t work one time doesn’t mean it won’t work this time. Everybody do your job.”

      Sure enough, right as the clock reached zero, every screen on the wall of monitors lit up.

      The picture was just slightly blurry, enough to make it a little hazy. Bree wanted to ask if that was always the case, but didn’t want to interrupt anyone from the jobs they were trying to do. The broadcasting window was limited. She could ask questions later.

      The picture wasn’t so blurry that you couldn’t see what was going on. There was a woman restrained in a long, thin box. It looked almost like a clear coffin. The woman in the box was shown from the neck down. Her head was completely out of the shot. There was nothing distinguishing about the box itself.

      Water was dripping into the box at the woman’s feet in a regular, timed pattern. It had already filled a few inches of the container, but not enough to be very noticeable.

      Something caught the woman’s attention because she immediately began sobbing.

      “Please! Help me please. Can you hear me? Please help me!”

      Bree realized Tanner was next to her when he muttered a curse under his breath.

      Bree’s eyebrows furrowed. “Why does her voice sound funny?” she whispered to him.

      “Bastard is using some sort of voice modulator.”

      That didn’t make any sense to her, but neither did trapping a woman in some sort of coffin and slowly filling it up with water.

      They had exactly twenty-three more seconds of the woman’s hysterical crying before the feed completely cut off.

      Bree looked over at Tanner, who looked as stunned as she felt, then glanced back around her. “I should’ve been watching what they were doing rather than the screen.” She pointed to the dozen people huddled around the multiple computers.

      “It’s hard to look away from something like that.” Tanner reached over and squeezed her elbow. “And from what I understand, you only have to wait another fifty-nine minutes to get your chance and do it all over again. No wonder everyone here is such a mess.”

      Not having to wait long was a good thing. Footage coming in once an hour meant more opportunities for them to catch this guy.

      “All right, people, sound off,” Mean Guy said, like some NASA mission control simulation. “Tell me we got something.”

      “IP address was rerouted through multiple VPNs once again.”

      “Jumped to at least one public Wi-Fi, but not the same one as last time, so no triangulation.”

      “Top level was definitely utilizing a proxy server again. Encrypted coding.”

      With every announcement of unsuccessful attempts to home in on the killer, the group became more despondent. Mean Guy got shorter and shorter in his responses.

      The blonde, Penelope, walked to the front of the room. She erased the number twelve from the whiteboard and wrote down thirteen, then turned to the people around her.

      “I know you’re