3:18 p.m.
4 hours 42 minutes until Cassandra’s deadline After twenty-five minutes of reviewing the video, we’d come up with only four observations that seemed potentially helpful.
Ralph noticed that the video had been edited in several places-right after the close-up of the shackle around Cassandra’s ankle, and then ten seconds from the end when the handwritten words appeared, just before panning back to the final image of her sitting in the water. “This creep took his time to shoot it, edit it, splice it,” he said.
“He’s patient,” Lien-hua said, echoing my thoughts. “Self-con-trolled. Back when I was a detective in DC, I worked a similar case of a man who filmed his murders. The care that killers like this take in making their videos speaks to the seriousness of their intentions.
Our man doesn’t just want to blackmail Hunter, he also wants to kill Cassandra. And he’s going to do it.”
During our third viewing, I saw that Cassandra’s body cast a faint shadow across the water to her right. The shadow’s size shifted after each of the videos edits, which led me to surmise that the light source was natural rather than artificial, and the change in the length of the shadow marked a change in time as the sun rose higher in the sky.
“Terry told me the video was sent to Austin Hunter at 8:51 a.m.,”
I said. “Taking into account Cassandra’s height and her shadows in relationship to the sun’s position in the sky-”
“We’re not looking at a garage,” said Ralph.
“No,” I said. “The light source at the filming site would need to be higher. Windows on the second or third story. So, she’s probably in a warehouse.” Ralph called the SDPD to have them start canvassing the warehouse districts of the city, but I knew there wouldn’t be enough time to check them all.
Beyond that, we didn’t have much to go on.
FBI Director Rodale notified Ralph that he was personally reassigning seven agents from the field office to help us find Cassandra, as long as we kept Lieutenant Graysmith in the loop.
Ralph agreed and we adjourned for fifteen minutes so he could coordinate the efforts of the FBI with the San Diego Police Department. Lien-hua went to a quiet room to work on developing her profile of the abductor, and I headed for the door to get some fresh air and call Tessa to see how she was doing.