Sharing Afflictions

Ironic

"I'll Call Ripley and Pixie and see if they want to come over and help," Rogue offered.

They did and they brought McDonald's for lunch. They even remembered to get me the Artisan Chicken sandwich.

The tension caused by our relationship problems took a back seat to our efforts to help Jean. We dove right in examining the material even as we ate. I emailed everyone copies of everything I had captured on my phone from the crime scene. Rogue focused on the photographs. I was hoping her fresh eyes might find something I had missed. I focused on his calendar. Ripley and Pixie each took half of his address book.

Pixie was studying the address book pages on her phone and eating a French fry when she asked, "Did you notice that some of these entries in the address book just seem like random letters, numbers, and symbols?"

"Yeah, I think he must have had some sort of code he used for entries he wanted to keep private. That is probably where the stuff we really want to know is lurking," Ripley surmised.

"You are our resident codebreaker Ripley. Can you do anything with it?" I asked.

"Maybe I can. I'm thinking Ortiz was lazy like most of us so his code won't be very sophisticated. Chuck, when you have to create a safe combination how do you do it?"

"Like everyone else I pick a six-letter word I can remember and then use the numbers from the telephone dial that correspond to each letter and make that my combination."

"So, you use a substitution code that maps each letter to a number. And you use the, phone dial as your readily available look up table. My guess is Ortiz used a substitution code. We just have to find his look up table," Ripley explained. Did you see anything like that in his office? Maybe a calendar with random letters on it, or a chart like a periodic table or something?"

"Not that I remember. Rogue can you see anything on his desk in the pictures?" I asked.

"The only thing on his desk that I'm not sure of is that colorful rock on the desk. Is it a paperweight and why aren't there any papers under it?"

"It's coprolite, it's a symbolic statement of how he viewed his work at NARA."

"What is coprolite?"

"It is a polished fossilized dinosaur turd."

"I get it. He viewed his job as polishing turds." She shook her head in disgust. "The only other thing I can see on his desk is his computer."

"That's it!" Pixie exclaimed.

"You are thinking he used some letter to letter mapping readily apparent on the computer's keyboard?" Ripley surmised.

"Yes. If it were me, I would simply replace each letter with the letter that appears above or below it on the keyboard. Easy to do and nowadays, keyboards are almost as readily available as phone dials," Pixie suggested."

"A modern variation of the Caesar shift cipher," Ripley concluded.

"That explains the odd occurrences of punctuation marks."

"He could have gone left or right as well. Or even two or three keys in any direction. A lot of possibilities," Rogue pointed out.

"Let's assume Simon was lazy and only shifted by one key. On normal keyboards, the keys are staggered so there are six possibilities. The most likely are the shifts up and sideways. We'll start with those. I'll start with left d to s. Ripley, you take up to the left d to e. Pixie, you take up to the right d to r. Rogue, you take right d to f. Everyone, take some coded text from the address book and see if your shift produces anything that makes sense. If you think you have a dead end go ahead and try the lower right and left shifts."