spotter's got one white male in his 50s in the front living room, and there's no sign of anyone else. all right, let's get everyone in position. tell david. can i help you? ( caribbean accent ): yes, i have a package here for erica logan. erica's not here. ah, well, maybe you can sign for her? well, sure, okay. fbi. quiet. okay, okay. who else is in the house? no one, no one's here but me. fbi! fbi! fbi! clear! clear! clear! what? what's going on? you the registered owner of a 2001 saturn ion? yes, it's my daughter's car. your daughter? erica, but she isn't here right now. she's at school. what, she's a student? no, a teacher. kindergarten.

your daughter's a kindergarten teacher? why? what's going on? is this her? yes. where is she? where's erica?! it's the super rooty tooty fresh n' fruityt, starting at $4.99. it's value, covered with fruit and whipped topping. ihop. come hungry. leave happy. >> woman: libman's new freedom mop has a microfiber, machine-washable pad to free you from expensive disposable pads-- another reason libman makes good, clean sense.

this doesn't make any sense. she can't be dead. you must have the wrong girl. uh, sir, i'm sorry, we don't. my wife died when erica was 12.

her brother remy was six. erica kept us going, kept us together. how could someone like that ever be involved in a robbery? when was the last time you saw or spoke to her? this morning. she lives here with you? well... my health hasn't been so great. erica moved back in about a year ago to look after me. what about a boyfriend? someone who might be able to explain what happened today. well, truth is, taking care of me and her brother didn't give her much time to live her own life, but... ( cell phone rings ) ...tell you this. whatever did happen, there's got to be more to it. don. they found the wife's car. ( unintelligible radio transmission ) it's mrs. rausch's car. last time she and her daughter were seen was this morning pulling out of the house. kid's school is about three blocks from here, so obviously they knew a route. kidnapped in broad daylight? looks like they were rear-ended.

now, make sure we get some paint scrapings here, huh? that's got to be how they were grabbed. get hit from behind, hop out to swap insurance information. i got a shoe here. it matches what rausch said the little girl was wearing this morning thanks. so looks like it happened fast, right? i mean, it was well-planned, well-executed, they knew her routine. got a freeway right around the corner. not dealing with amateurs here. nah, there's no question these guys were pros. yeah, who used a kindergarten teacher as their bag man. and no word, no contact, in almost seven hours. what the hell are they after? megan: i still think erica logan has to be the key. this kind of radical shift in behavior? there has to be some sort of trigger. trigger. like what? i can tell you what a textbook would say. statistically, it's things like a near-death experience. a person can exhibit an extreme shift in behavior

if they survived a plane crash. another could be a person who's told they only have a month to live, may act on fantasies of an alter ego. doesn't fit, though, in this case-- the autopsy would have flagged that. all right, so what else? uh, parental instinct-- the perception of a serious threat to a child. that also doesn't fit. i mean, her father said she doesn't have kids, right? but there was a brother-- right-- the old man said she practically raised him. yeah. a younger sibling could be the trigger, if they had developed that kind of relationship. younger brothers can definitely be a trigger, trust me. go talk to the old man, see if we can get an address on the son-- i want to get everything we can on this kid, right? ( soft jazz playing ) charlie: so, by the way, i wanted to, uh, thank you so much for earlier, for helping me. honestly, i think i would have stared at those boards all day if you hadn't come up with the cellular automaton angle, so... you rock. ( chuckles ) it was one of those weird inspiration things, you know? coming at it with fresh eyes. it's funny, 'cause my first thought

was the universal conductor approach, but then i realized... then you what? we're doing it again, charlie. we're talking about work. we said we weren't gonna talk about work, remember? yeah... i remember. okay. this is ridiculous. it's ridiculous. we have to be able to talk about something not work related. we can have a normal conversation, right? we can have a conversation. what's wrong with us? i don't know. pressure... pressure, maybe. yeah. maybe it's pressure.

thanks. okay, thanks, thanks a lot. whoa. look at this. see that? it's romanesque broccoli. i've actually only ever seen pictures of it, and there's... there's a fractal pattern in here that's... amazing. how cool is it there's a vegetable that grows in the ground that has fractals, and at the same time, we're discovering their importance in astrophysics? ( chuckles ) it really makes you wonder... yeah. ( clears throat ) bon appétit. you were right. brother's name is remy logan, got a sheet goes back to when he was a juvie. oh, yeah, look at this: petty theft, narcotics, gambling charges... ooh. just the kind of little brother that could complicate a sister's life. we know where he is? yeah, david just called with that address. all right, go pick him up.

( rock music playing ) wow. what do you suppose the rent is on a place like this? i don't know... like, two grand, $2,500. you looking to move? the place i'm in doesn't have a pool. i'm just kind of thinking here i am, moved all the way to l.a. should have a pool, you know? absolutely, man, a pool's a birthright around here. here it is. six. his car's in the garage. there's someone in there. ( knocking ) remy logan! fbi. open up! he's going out the back. fbi. stop!

fbi! stop, or i'll shoot you! hey! i don't have a gun! get down! okay, just don't shoot me. we're not gonna shoot you. just did not feel like chasing you today. oh, sorry... we're sharing. excuse me... can i borrow her? [ male announcer ] applebee's 2 for 20 is now stuffed with more flavor. like florentine ravioli with chicken. one app. two entrees. twenty bucks. get to applebee's today. open until midnight or later. rheumatoid arthritis going? they're discovering the first self-injectable ra medicine you take just once a month. it's simponi™, and taken with methotrexate, it helps relieve the pain, stiffness, and swelling of ra with one dose a month.

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looks like somebody's been packing, gettin' ready to leave. who you running from, remy? i'm just taking a little time away, that's all. there's nothing illegal about that, right? no. you weren't planning on sticking around to bury your sister? yeah, we know all about the whole jewelry store robbery thing. and the kidnapping of the little girl and her mother. i don't know what you're talking about. remy, i read your file. i talked with your old man. i know the whole story. you're the screw-up little brother. and erica-- well, she was the caring big sister who always got stuck bailing you out. now, the problem is... erica was just killed during the commission of a robbery. and if you're involved,

that puts you on the hook for felony murder. but the kidnapping-- if you're involved in that, might just land you strapped to a gurney. remy... listen. talk to us. where are they? where's this mother and her little girl? i don't know. david, check this out. you run a book operation? hey, who's your bank? i don't work for anyone. that's funny-- you know, i never met an independent bookie who didn't have a safe, two armed guards, and at least three dead bolts on the front door. you don't work for anybody, huh? here's all the bets he pushed through. alan: oh, come on, charlie, it couldn't have been that bad. actually, i truly can't explain how awful it was. oh, i don't understand it. you and amita-- you always got along so well.

i'm just as confused as you are. yeah, well, maybe it'll be better next time, hmm? yeah, i don't think there's going to be a "next time" in my future. no, no, you do not give up. you never give up. who's giving up what? charlie. he blew his first date with amita. i wouldn't say that i-i "blew it," dad. i mean, that's... yeah, maybe i blew it. wait, what happened, buddy? it's just we found out that we really don't have much to talk about... outside math. oh, man. yeah, i know about that. maybe it's an eppes thing. when terry and i started dating, the first thing we said was we weren't going to talk about work, right? you know, not a word. so, how'd you work it out? well... i mean, she's back with her ex. that's really very encouraging. don: well, i didn't mean it like that. i'm sorry. it's different with you guys. you'll work it out. meanwhile, i'm hitting a wall with this case. you haven't found them yet? found whom? a mother and her eight-year-old daughter, kidnapped. that's horrible. who took them? i don't... we don't know yet. i mean, we got this one suspects who's a bookie,

and we think there's some connection, but we got these files off his computer, and they're impossible to analyze. what are you looking for in there? well, i mean, the people who financed the operation. this guy's been running bets through a web site called "statzwire" that dead-ends at a url in china. with all the money he's pulling in and paying out, we can't tell the difference between the backers and bettors. well, these abbreviations may be names and dates, but the numbers in this column here-- 35-17-11, 23-17-5, 24-12-three and a half? yeah. i'm assuming that they're part of some sort of odds-making, but they just appear to be at random, and they can't be. you're right. they're not random. what are you talking about? where's that paper? this weekend's football scores. let me see. 35-17-11 here. the packers beat the vikings 35-17, and the spread was 11. whoa. 23-17-5. that...

here, niners in san diego, five- point spread, right? 24 to 12 was the jaguars over the colts. huh? let me see that. three and a half was a ridiculous spread. i took the jaguars and made a hundred bucks. what, you have a bookie? should i have a lawyer present? no, i'll let you slide. charlie: wait a minute. if this column is the point spread, i can use it to calculate the ratio of winners to losers, and potentially trace the payouts and the money flow. a surprising amount of math applies itself to gambling. the most important application-- at least for the bookie-- is determining the point spread, which is this column right here. now, ideally... a bookie wants to take equal amounts of money on each side of a game. however... sometimes one team is obviously better than another. he has to adjust the point spread. he has to draw bets to the weak side... and keep the balance. see, he keeps the balance,

and he doesn't have pay the winners out of his own pocket. they get paid with the losers' money. so what's in it for the bookie? the "juice." you got it. for every dollar lost... the bookie takes about a dime. with his balanced spread, he's making a four-and-a-half percent profit on all the action he's taking, which means for a bettor to simply break even, he's got to be right more than 50% the time. 52.38% of the time. good deal for the book; not so good for the bettors. now, once i figured out the profit stream, it was fairly easy for me to separate out the juice, and that led me to this bank account. the bank number puts us at pacific world bank in santa monica. that has to be the backers. charlie: the kidnappers? colby, track down the bank manager, the president-- i don't care-- just wake them up, get the name on that account. all right? good job, charlie. this list of names-- where did you get these? i-i took them straight from the books themselves. they're a list of the suspect's clients. why? what's wrong? can you put this page on the screen?

sure can. now scroll down about halfway. stop. right there. rausch, the store owner? he's one of remy logan's gambling clients? these numbers indicate he's lost substantial amounts of money. well, how substantial? charlie: $180,000. that ties rausch to remy, and through remy, right to the kidnappers. wait... rausch is right in the middle of all this?

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...and get tested. announcer: screening saves lives. colby: don, rausch is in the wind. what do you mean? what happened to our surveillance? they were on him, and they lost him in traffic. now he's not answering his cell phone. i mean, he's waiting on the biggest call of his life. you know, maybe he's already gotten the call. no. we're monitoring his phone, and there's nothing. well, maybe he's got another cell phone, right? call all the locals and have them issue an alert, all right? all right. i got through on the account charlie gave us for remy's backers. traced back to these two. brian and chris reynolds. brothers. they cleaned out the account less than an hour after the robbery went bad. 'cause they knew it was only a matter of time till we would find remy and connect it to them. oh, yeah, look at this-- these are definitely our kidnappers. extortion, extortion, conspiracy... older one had a grade-fixing charge while he was at sc. younger one's got a violent streak. goes back to juvie. any idea how we can find them? the address on the bank account was traced to a p.o. box-- this little mail center in san pedro-- but the owner hasn't seen anyone, not in weeks.

these guys could be anywhere right now. yeah, well, i mean, you got to figure the kid and the mother are slowing them down, right? hey, look, until we find dead bodies, this is still a search-and-rescue. ready? yeah. where are they? i never seen either one of them. oh, no? i know you've been pushing bets through their wire to the tune of five figures a week, you hear me? we know about martin rausch. we know he's your client. i'll make it clear as possible. we got a line between them and the kidnapping. know who's in the middle of it? so if you know where these guys are, this would be the time to tell us. i don't. i swear i don't. oh, i believe you. ( sighs ): look... rausch got way behind. chris and brian said if i couldn't collect, it was coming out of me, one way or the other. so then you got your sister to pull the robbery for you? no, it was supposed to be no big deal. you just take the diamonds, and you show the picture, and you come out, and i go to the parking lot. she did what she did to help me, to save my life.

don: so, martin rausch is a gambler. megan: mm-hmm. right? he's a bad one. he gets himself in debt to remy. which puts remy in trouble with his backers. that kind of cash, i'm surprised that they didn't just kill rausch. but dead guys don't pay. ultimately, they just want their money. so they find out he owns a jewelry store... so they kidnap his family and make remy pull the robbery? it's not a bad plan. no. it's a damn good plan. i mean, they get their money, probably more, and they can count on him to keep his mouth shut because of his gambling. only thing they didn't count on was the security guard. rausch's phone records. three hours ago, there's a call from his wife's cell phone to a number we don't have. they called rausch on her phone? i guess. no way to trace it back to reynolds, then. the thing is, what does he have to give them at this point? we know he doesn't have any money. claudia: yeah, martin was here a little earlier. i told him it was silly, that he didn't need to be here while all this was still going on. was he near any of the jewelry? could he have stolen anything? steal? why would he steal from his own store? was he near any of the jewelry?

no. the insurance company's locked up all the merchandise since the robbery. they need to do a full inventory before we reopen. okay, think about it. is there anything else the insurance company didn't lock? no. you do repairs here? claudia: yeah. and they're not part of the inventory, are they? no. show us. oh, my god. they're... they're all gone. how much was in here? i don't know; if i had to guess, 50, 60,000 at the most. megan: that's rausch leaving with the repaired jewelry. it's not even close to what he owes. yeah, but he's desperate, don. he's going to do anything he can if he thinks it's going to save his family. you know, there's an entrance for the 101 south right there. even if we know he headed south, that's an half an hour ago. it's not going to help us much. sure it is. this is pems: the freeway performance evaluation monitoring system.

okay? grad students at cal-sci actually consulted on this. i ran the system. caltrans has sensors embedded in the roads. they count cars, trucks. they monitor traffic patterns, and that information is sent to a uc berkley computer about twice a minute. pems is designed to predict optimal traffic routes and travel time, but here, it can give us an idea of the speed and movement of traffic at the time that rausch got on the freeway. projecting from that information, as well as the time elapsed... oh, this is the part of the s.a.t.s that kept me out of harvard. the train is leaving the station at 5:00, right? i'm applying constructal theory: point-area and point-volume flows. see, traffic moves like any other fluid system. there are imperfections, obstacles that force the system to optimize performance by reducing its resistance... now, martin rausch knows this area pretty well, and if he's like any of the rest of us, he'll reduce his resistance by choosing the least congested route to arrive at his destination.

still not seeing how you can tell us where he's at. i can't exactly. well, at least not yet, not right now. but what i can do... you say this is the 101 south? yes. what i can do is give you a bounded area. wait a minute. isn't this the area where remy said he was supposed to make the drop after the robbery? yeah. don: right. at this parking lot. don, that's rausch's car. yeah. this is special agent don eppes with the fbi. i need lapd to cordon off a one block area running south from temple, north to second street. copy that. i think he's still in there. mr. rausch? what are you doing here? they didn't bring my family back.

just step out of the car, please. who didn't bring them? i thought if i... if i at least paid them something... but it wasn't enough. they... they want more. and i haven't... i haven't got any more. did they show you proof they have your family? it's different from the jewelry store, different location. i've lost them, haven't i? we don't know that, okay? don: they call you on this? yes. this is all my fault. i... it wasn't supposed to go like this. hold... what are you talking about? they were just supposed to be held for a couple of hours... driven around until they got the diamonds, then they said they'd let them go. wait a minute. are you saying that... that you knew all about this? they were going to kill me. you understand? this was a way out. it was a way out for all of us.

rausch is useless. he has no idea where they are. i was actually starting to feel sorry for the son of a bitch. yeah, he played us something, huh? okay, i understand the robbery. how do you involve your family in a kidnapping? well, it's just like you said, so we'd feel sorry for him. it gives him deniability. 'cause no one's going to suspect a guy whose whole family's missing. we just counted him as another victim. good news is, as of about a half an hour ago, the mother and the kid are still alive, so...

how are you so sure? the picture was taken at a different location. if they were going to kill them, they wouldn't be moving them around. yeah, but now they know they've gotten everything they possibly can out of rausch. i mean, he even tapped out his credit cards with the whole gambling thing. wait a minute. that's it. that's what? the credit cards. remy accepts credit cards but he doesn't process them. he sends them through to the reynolds' web site. yeah, but we checked the web site and it was a dead end. yeah, well, i'll believe that when charlie hits it. hey, uh, thank you for doing this. i hope it's not, um, too uncomfortable for you. amazingly enough, it isn't. well, the fbi techs were right. the route ends at a server in china. yeah, but... i know, but they're not in china. and they're not accessing the internet through china. that's their... this is just a disguise. disguise or not, charlie, that's where the trail ends. ( sighs ) all right, all right, all right. wait a minute. just wait a minute. um, every time someone visits a web site,

they rewrite some of the code, don't they? yeah. yeah. so, can't we trace that back to the computer that created the site? well, we have to have some specific data stream to follow them. i mean, there are hundreds, maybe thousands of visitors to this site. but only the two men we're looking for are setting odds. still... i mean, we need some sort of unique data to isolate them. fractions. specifically a farey sequence. farey sequence... let's say we begin slicing oranges... a lot of oranges. but the rule is we can never repeat a cut. in other words, we cut the first orange in half; the next orange, we take out a third; the next, one-fourth; then, one-fifth and so on. in the end, we're left with many orange slices of varying size. when they're arranged from smallest to largest,

they form a farey sequence. and yes, it's a fairly esoteric pattern of fractions. however, the one place they often tend to show up: bookmaking. and there's our unique data stream. so, one-eighth is seven-to-one odds, one-seventh is six-to-one and two-thirds is two-to-one. exactly. right. so all the fractions are betting lines. right. and they led us to an internet account billed to a marine repair business in san pedro. wait, you say san pedro? that's the same place the reynolds' brothers have their mail drop.

fbi! fbi! fbi! hands up! get them up! get those hands up! don't move! you, get your hands up there! where are they? where are they? i got no idea what you're talking about! neither does my brother. they're not here, don. no sign of them. guys, i think we may be too late. no, we're not. we're going to check the docks, the boats, everything. let's go. all right... petey, up there. sam, mikey, this way. you guys come with me. whoa... hold on. shhh. quiet. quiet. i hear it. get me something to pry this open with. my name is don eppes! i'm with the fbi. can you hear me? woman: please, hurry.

just relax, ma'am. we're coming right in. it's okay. it's over. you all right? anyone hurt? no? you all right, sweetie? it's okay. you're going home now. daddy... it's okay, sweetie. everything's going to be all right. oh, martin, thank god. what... what's going on? you can tell them or i can. tell me what? martin? julia, why don't we go get some food and let mommy and daddy talk.

the morose and pensive expression of the romantically confounded. you know, it wasn't like i was thrilled when our date bombed out, you know, and i can accept the fact that we're not compatible. you experiment, it doesn't work, you move on. yeah, a cornerstone of scientific inquiry. right, but... thing is is, like... when we're working together, we talk and we laugh. and there's an energy. and i don't understand why that doesn't work outside the office. why don't we have anything else to talk about? you know, you're making an underlying assumption here that i question. what's that? that there's something else you have to talk about. see, where you see two people unable to talk about politics or movies...

hey, movies. i can... i can talk about... i just saw the penguin movie. i see two extraordinary minds that can communicate on the purest level a man and woman can interface on. okay, second purest. geek love. hey, no better kind. first one to ten points? larry, man, i... i play this game a lot. hey, i'm no stranger to the student union. come on-- my physics versus your geometry. captioning sponsored by cbs and paramount network television captioned by media access group at wgbh access.wgbh.org

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