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Saturday - J & A Inc. Part II - Jacob Martinez

“Can you believe it? We’re actual detectives now!” Edward exclaimed
“Well I think J & A are the detectives, we’re just helping hands, and besides, the world of private eyes you see in movies and T.V. is a heavy dramatization, most of our work is probably going to be of the paper kind, handing out subpoenas and working for big corporations trying to see if their employees stole from the company.” I responded, since I had gotten the job I took the liberty upon myself to do a litte research into what real private investigation is like. Just as the acceptance of the facts I had stated was sinking into the poor Edward, did the male counterpart of our employer arrive, a newspaper under his arm.
“Linda, Mr Jones, we have our first case!” he exclaimed excitedly, “Addison, come here please, you’ll be interested in this one.”
“We have a client?” I asked,
“No, we have a murderer, and a mystery to solve,” was his response.
A arrived from the T.V. room, which from here on out I will refer to as the parlour.
“There was a murder here a few nights ago, a stabbing, but the body was only found yesterday. The lady in question lie in an abandoned warehouse near her place of employment and on her walk home, all signs indicate that it was a standard mugging gone awry, save for the fact that her eyes were missing from the rest of her body and that the miss had no business being in that warehouse in the first place. I’ve already contacted a friend at the department, he told me that there was more at the scene than the papers are reporting, and that fax that my office is getting right now, is it.”, the drone and sigh of the fax machine could be heard from the lobby, and when it finished J went to receive the evidence. We gathered in the parlour and sat around the coffee table, where J laid the sheet out so everyone could see.
“What is it?” asked Edward,
“It seems as though the killer left their calling card, Mr Jones.”


“I’m going to go out to track some leads, Mr Jones come with me. Linda, stay here and work with Addison on figuring out this design.”, and so Edward and J left the building.
“What do you think these numbers mean?” asked Addison.
“I don’t know, maybe dates?” I responded.
“Maybe. But that is an unusual way of writing a date isn’t it, with the day first and then the month? And why the same date twice here at the bottom?”
“It isn’t unusual for someone from another country to write their dates that way, in fact that’s the most common form of writing them.” I enlightened her. For some reason whenever I pull out the trivia like that I always feel sort of bad, like I’m showing up whoever I’m telling it to. Even though this was literally a case of life and death, I still felt embarrassed.
“OK fine, use the computer and look up the dates— anniversaries, natural disasters, notable arrests, both here and all over the world if you think that the killer is across the way, anything that catches your eye that might be what the killer is referring to.”, I went over to the computer and started searching. Meanwhile Addison went back to the couch and took out a pad of paper in which she started writing, scribbling and sketching over and over the elements of the design. Obviously she thought that it was more than just an eye in a diamond.
After about 15 minutes of coming up with nothing obvious in the way of the dates Addison called out to me,
“Linda, you can stop, they aren’t dates.”
“You figured it out?” I exclaimed, “Let me see.” and I went over to the parlour.
“Look here.” she handed me a sheet from her pad, on it a redrawn version of the picture, this time instead of numbers on each side of the diamond, there were the letters (clockwise) S-E-E-U.
“S-E-E-U?” I wondered out loud
“No, ‘eye see u’,” Addison spoke “This isn’t a message. It’s a taunt. A taunt meant for us.”
“How did you figure it out?” I asked., and she handed me the rest of her pad filled with digits and letters.
“The numbers weren’t just numbers but orders and the slash marks a symbol for ‘or’, 19 or 8; 21 or 6; 22 or 5. From there it was child’s play, what is twenty-second when read one way and fifth when read another? The letter E, twenty-second if you start from Z and fifth when starting from A. The killer didn’t want to stump us with this little puzzle, he just wanted to make us work a little bit.”