Invasion of Privacy: A Deep Web Thriller #1 (Deep Web Thriller Series)

by Ian Sutherland

  “You said ‘tenants’. What do you mean by ‘tenants’?”

  “The companies that rent office space within this building. Customers of Flexbase, the owner of this building.”

  Jenny thought of all the logos behind reception. “So this Flexbase just rents office space then?”

  Evans paused. “Well no, there’s a lot more to it than that. Many of our clients are small companies who can’t afford to lease their own permanent office, what with the multi-year contracts and all of the infrastructure costs required. Even if they signed a lease somewhere, they’d need to furnish it, install the IT infrastructure, staff a reception desk or switchboard … It all adds up, you know. Thousands, if not tens of thousands just in setup costs alone.”

  Jenny guessed that Evans had probably given this sales pitch many times before. His hands motioned animatedly as they walked. “That’s where Flexbase comes in. We provide ready to use offices with no upfront costs and no long-term lease. Our switchboard even answers the phone in their company’s name, presenting the illusion of a much larger company. And we take care of everything. From printers and photocopiers right through to AV equipment and meeting rooms.”

  Jenny looked around. The long corridor was sparsely decorated, just two inoffensive pastel shades of green, the lighter tone on top. Door after door broke the monotony, with the odd framed print in between, each one showcasing more swathes of pastel colours. Not proper pictures. None of the offices had windows onto the corridor and the doors were solid wood. Anything could go on behind them. They rounded a corner and Jenny saw the crime scene tape three doors down.

  “So really, you’re like a hotel with concierge and room service facilities, but for companies instead of people.”

  Evans spluttered at her deliberately crass comparison.

  “Is WMA Associates one of your tenants?”

  “Yes, they’re on the third floor. Been with us for about five years.”

  She changed tack. “Who found the body? You?”

  “No, Barry Pitman from Trendal. They’re located on the tenth floor.”

  Jenny halted just before the door to the crime scene.

  “Okay, thanks, Mr Evans. No need for you to come any further.”

  “Uh, sure,” he said hesitantly and then, looking relieved, said, “Yes, I’ll leave you to it then.” He turned back the way they’d come.

  She had attended numerous murder scenes, all of them hideous. Even when the victims were criminals themselves, falling foul of their own kind, the sight and stench of lifeless, mutilated bodies always shook Jenny’s view of the world. Murder wrenched someone’s life away unnaturally. It stole their future. In a way, it was a theft of the most grievous kind.

  Jenny steeled herself and stepped around the tape into the room.

  A surreal sight confronted her. Not the photographer flashing his camera every few seconds. Not the three-man SOCO team kneeling down in their white, hooded bodysuits, scraping trace evidence into envelopes and plastic bags. Not the pathologist taking rectal temperature readings from the body of a young girl, naked from the waist down, lying face down under a nearby table. Not even the blood that had spewed from beneath the poor girl’s neck, spread into a vast dark stain before being soaked up by the carpet tiles. No, all of these details were normal. Well, for a murder scene. What was surreal was the cello in the centre of the room, neatly balanced on its endpin and leaning against an office chair.

  In the sterile surroundings of the corporate meeting room, the large musical instrument was completely out of place. Fifteen or so desks were joined together in one long, extended curve around three sides of the room, surrounding the upright cello in the centre. Together with the bow lying on the floor next to it, Jenny had the impression of some kind of musical recital gone terminally wrong; the audience long since departed.

  One of the crime scene investigators was examining the legs of the table that the dead girl lay under. He looked up, noticing Jenny. The bright blue eyes between the hood and the respiratory mask narrowed. Jenny recognised Jason Edmonds, a crime scene manager well known for feistily protecting the integrity of crime scenes.

  Edmonds signalled Jenny to stay where she was and came over to her. “DI Price, if it wasn’t for your fucking boss and all his bollocks about . . .” he lowered his voice and put on a Brummie accent in an impression of Da Silva, “‘needing your feminine insights’, the nearest you’d have got to my crime scene would have been the reception downstairs.”

  “You’re softening up, Jason. I’m just surprised you haven’t emptied all eighteen floors and kicked everyone outside in the rain.”

  “Don’t think it didn’t cross my mind. You know I can’t have all and sundry traipsing through here like it’s some macabre fairground sideshow. It’s the integrity of the evidence we gather here that will be used to convict someone.”

  “I’m sure that’s true, but only if we catch him first. And for that to happen we need some insights into the how and the why of it. That’s where me and my weird, womanly ways come in.”

  Reluctantly, Edmonds removed his mask, revealing a slight smirk. His eyes sparkled with humour. “Alright, alright. Let me tell you what we know so far and then you can piss off more quickly.”

  “Only if I can come in.”

  “Bloody hell, Jenny. Okay, but be careful and don’t step on anything.”

  Jenny made her way towards the centre of the room, donning a pair of latex gloves she retrieved from her coat pocket. Edmonds followed her, watching her every step.

  “Where is the DCI anyway?”

  “He’s gone off to interview the bloke who found the body.”

  She paused by the cello.

  “Don’t . . .” warned Edmonds.

  Jenny had been tempted to touch it. It was the way it was so finely balanced that enticed her. Instead, she walked around to the rear of the chair, out of its way. She knelt down on one knee, to get her eye-line closer to the victim’s. Edmonds stood to one side of her. The pathologist finished up and retreated to Jenny’s other side. Edmonds introduced him as Dr Gorski.

  He nodded his head in a formal manner, as if meeting royalty, and stated, “I am pleased to make your acquaintance, DI Price.” The pathologist’s accent was Eastern European and shed some light on his uncustomary social graces. Unlike Edmonds and the other crime scene officers who all wore standard white over suits, Gorski’s mauve suit was unconventional.

  Jenny returned the pleasantry and then turned to Edmonds. “Her name’s Anna Parker?”

  “Yes. In her handbag we found a student photo ID.”

  Gorski said, “I believe she was struck over the head with a solid object and she fell to the floor there.” He pointed to the front of the chair, where a dark spot stained the flooring.

  “We’ve not found anything that fits the bill,” said Edmonds.

  “I will present some theories later when I carry out a detailed examination of the head wound at the morgue,” Gorski continued, pointing at some dark streaks running from the chair towards where the body now lay. “Her hands were tied in front, like this.” He held his wrists together by his thighs. “Then she was dragged to the table there and forcibly positioned across it, face down, and very likely sexually assaulted from behind. I will determine that for sure after the post-mortem. He cut through the clothes, right up her back. As you can see, the blouse is sliced in half from behind and the panties and skirt have been thrown in the corner over there. There is a run of cuts from her left buttock up to her neck, indicating he used a blade with two sharp edges, like a dagger or some other kind of double-edged knife.”

  Jenny saw Anna had self-consciously held on tight to the front of the sliced apart blouse right through to the end. She had been a pretty girl, not tall, but slender, with wavy, long brown hair. Her eyes were dark and lifeless. Tear-tracks had dried on her cheeks.

  “Once he was done, he pulled her head back with one hand, probably by her hair, and sliced her throat with the other. Mos
t likely the same knife, but I will confirm later.”

  On the table and splattered all over the floor and walls beyond was more blood than Jenny had ever seen. She closed her eyes momentarily. She needed to feel, but not let the feelings get the better of her. The violence was overwhelming, but it had a controlled air about it. The way the cello had been stood upright leaning on the chair. That would have to have been done after she’d been killed.

  Jenny’s eyes blinked open again. Her imaginary shields needed to stay up for her to function and be useful.

  “Then her lifeless body slid down to the floor where it is now,” concluded Dr Gorski.

  They stayed silent for a few moments, standing side by side, each lost in thought. At the rear of the room, the photographers and two other SOCOs had stopped what they had been doing. They’d listened respectfully to the pathologist’s dispassionate interpretation of Anna Parker’s terrible last few minutes of life.

  “She was here as a visitor. I think he made her play the cello for him first,” said Jenny. She made a mental note to check whether anyone had heard music on Friday evening. It would have been memorable in such bureaucratic surroundings. “He would have sat over there to listen.” She pointed at the head of the room where there was an absence of plastic yellow numbered evidence markers. “He may have sat behind that desk or on the edge of it. There may be prints or trace evidence.”

  “Hmm,” Edmonds said, doubtfully, “Okay, we’ll check.”

  “Then, as she got into the piece, he moved behind her. Perhaps she closed her eyes while playing. Then he struck.”

  “But why?” asked Gorski.

  “One step at a time,” said Jenny. “There’s a far more pragmatic question to be answered first.”

  “What is that, then?”

  Jenny looked around. Her mind’s eye passed beyond the walls of the meeting room, expanded to take in the whole top floor, the lifts and then the seventeen floors below full of businessmen and women, ties, shirts, blouses, pin-stripes, hands shaking on deals done; the formality and etiquette of commerce, pound signs and spreadsheets, stocks and shares, managers and secretaries, printers and photocopiers, computers and graphs, and desks with the token family photo from real life.

  Music had no role in this sober and dreary environment.

  “Why here?”

  CHAPTER 3

  Brody slowed to a stop in the middle of Upper Street and indicated right. He was adjacent to an empty residents-only parking space outside his apartment block. Cars backed up behind him as he waited for a gap to appear in the oncoming traffic. He recalled how drunk his flatmate had been last night, and it dawned on Brody that Leroy would be up by now, grumpy and belligerent. He glanced over to his left and noticed a small gap between parked cars outside Bruno’s Coffee House, located directly across the road from his flat. It was as if fate was telling him something.

  After all, having completed the Atlas Brands job that morning, it wasn’t like he had a load of other jobs lined up. Especially as the message he’d read earlier had announced that Crooner42 had awarded the pentest job to someone else. Brody had to admit to himself that he’d only wanted to win the job in order to further reinforce his elite status in the global hacker community. He didn’t actually need a week’s worth of anyone’s coding services. The real prize would have been to make sure that Crooner42 let everyone on the forums know that he had selected Brody for the job. It was the online equivalent of word-of-mouth, one of the few forms of publicity available within the hacker community. Brody had taken years to be recognised as elite and little wins like this reinforced his status in the minds of his fellow hackers. Not being a malicious ‘black hat’ hacker, Brody didn’t have access to the other main form of publicity available to the most notorious in that field, which was to see their codenames on the front page of the news after breaking into a famous website, an approach that certainly achieved infamy but ran the risk of being hunted down vigorously by law enforcement agencies.

  The message he’d received from Crooner42 had only told him he’d been unsuccessful, without announcing to whom he’d awarded the work instead. Although Brody’s ego was a little bruised, he felt compelled to add insult to injury by trying to find out the identity of the chosen hacker. He would log on from Bruno’s.

  Brody swapped the indicator to point left and drove directly into the space outside Bruno’s, parking his Smart car with the front bumper facing towards the kerb in the way only a Smart car can park. From behind, Brody heard the screeching of rubber on wet tarmac as the car behind impatiently accelerated away.

  At the very least the coffee would be good; better than having turned right and ending up facing Leroy in the throes of the morning after. Earlier, Brody had been woken by Leroy and Danny returning from their first night out as a couple in over a fortnight. He had listened to Danny slur loudly that he needed to be up early for a business meeting and then heard his footsteps rebound off the parquet flooring as he made his way to the guest bedroom. Leroy called out that he’d make them both a nightcap and then proceeded to bash his way around the kitchen, slamming cupboard doors while swearing profusely at the kettle boiling noisily, before eventually settling himself in front of the television, volume on maximum, playing his beloved Xbox, Danny apparently forgotten.

  When the snoring began a few minutes later, Brody forced himself out of bed to find Leroy sprawled asleep on the sofa, an untouched mug of steaming tea on the glass coffee table. Brody half-cajoled, half-carried Leroy to his room and dumped him unceremoniously on his bed, next to his neatly tucked-in partner, who failed to stir at the commotion. Brody turned off the Xbox and returned to his own room, now completely awake. It had taken at least twenty pages on his Kindle before Brody’s eyelids became heavy enough to drop off again … only for his alarm to go off a couple of hours later for the drive up to Atlas Brands in Birmingham. As he left, he heard another alarm sound in Leroy’s room and placed a silent bet with himself against Danny making it to his business meeting on time.

  Brody entered Bruno’s, shaking the rain from his leather jacket. He loved that the independent cosmopolitan coffee lounge wasn’t one of the coffee chains that had taken over every busy street in London where baristas operated in little more than factory lines, giving minimal thought to the quality or style of their craft. He particularly loved that, in Bruno’s, they waited the tables European style, bringing the coffee to you. But most of all he loved it for being located opposite his home.

  “Mr Brody! Welcome. Welcome.” It was Stefan the head barista. Brody had never met the eponymous Bruno, assuming he even existed. Stefan, who was at least a foot shorter than Brody’s six foot two, wore an immaculately clean black apron over a white shirt and black trousers. His black hair was slicked back with wax. He whipped the white cloth from his shoulder and wiped the already clean table in the window recess by the front door. “Look, your favourite seat is free. The gods are being kind today, no?”

  Stefan indicated the scratched, studded leather high-back chair next to the now sparkling table. Brody thanked him and sat down. Bruno’s boasted a collection of colourful, worn leather chairs and sofas, randomly arranged in groups around plain brown tables. It was about half full, a few small groups talking quietly and five or six loners reading newspapers or swiping their tablet devices. Italian accordion music piped discreetly from ceiling speakers.

  “What will Mr Brody have today? No! Don’t tell me . . . ” He stared intently at Brody as if trying to read his mind. Brody smiled. It was their usual game. “It’s cold and raining out there, so nothing iced I think. Hmm . . . and it’s before lunch so nothing filling . . . I know – a caffè macchiato!”

  Brody stroked his stubbled chin, as if considering.

  “I have it now,” said Stefan, “A double macchiato. Am I right, Mr Brody?”

  “Spot on, Stefan. You’re like an Italian version of Sherlock Holmes.”

  A few minutes later the barista brought Brody a perfect double caffè macchiat
o, accompanied by a tall glass of tap water. Brody complimented him on the coffee. The barista, his job done, left him. Brody knew that he could spend hours here without feeling the need to order again. Stefan would occasionally stop by and refill his glass with iced water from a jug.

  The shop offered wireless Internet access, but Brody only connected to public Wi-Fi hotspots when desperate. They were completely unsafe. Instead, he’d installed a directional Wi-Fi antenna by his living room window, pointing across the road towards the coffee shop. It boosted the signal of his own private wireless network so that he could securely connect to the Internet and drink high-quality coffee at the same time. The seat by the front window was his favourite because it gave him the strongest signal, not that Stefan was aware of this.

  He’d masked his home wireless network from broadcasting its presence to discourage other casual coffee drinkers from picking it up on their devices. However, a literate computer user could easily overcome that so he had also enabled full WPA-Enterprise security to give him the highest levels of authentication and encryption.

  Brody opened his tablet PC, connected to his private network and logged in.

  The browser was conveniently displaying the CrackerHack forum from when he’d closed the computer in the Atlas Brands meeting earlier. He skim-read the chat logs to see what had been posted since Crooner42 had awarded the pentest work earlier.

  Soon enough, Brody spotted a relevant discussion thread. The counter in the top corner showed thirty-two members of the forum were currently online. The actual conversation thread had been started by Matt_The_Hatter and was now between seven or eight of them collectively trying to deduce who had been awarded the job. That meant the rest of them, Brody included, were passively listening in without declaring their presence. Of course, like Brody, no one was admitting to having registered an interest in carrying out the pentest, in order to avoid being shown up as not having been selected by Crooner42. New posts appeared in real time.