Deadly Web

by Michael Omer

  The four detectives sat in front of him, blinking.

  “Well?” Bailey said. “What are you waiting for?”

  “What… now?” Jacob asked.

  “Of course now!”

  “Fred, it’s kinda late—”

  “Leads are getting cold! Witnesses are forgetting what they saw!” Captain Bailey said loudly. “Evidence is being destroyed and criminals are making their escape! The least we can do is sit down and read some e-mails, right?”

  The mood in the room dampened considerably.

  “I’ll buy us all pizza,” Bailey said in a cheerful voice. “And I’ll make some coffee.”

  Searching a crime scene, as far as Mitchell’s experience went, was a finite endeavor. One knew when and where it started, and where it ended. Sure, you could be more diligent when searching for fingerprints, and it always seemed like there were more fibers to collect, but generally you knew that in an hour or two, or four, you’d be done.

  Searching a man’s online history was different. For one, it was potentially endless. Did you search the profiles of the man’s friends? Did you check out their shared friends? Reconstruct the social network structure completely? How far back do you check his browsing history, or his e-mail archive? Is the image of him drunk at a party waving a bottle of beer evidence or a distraction? Should you check who the other guys in the image are? Two of them are tagged, the third isn’t. Why not?

  It never stopped. A detective could get lost for years, trying to find anything relevant in the muck. In the end, one had to guess how deep to dig. And when it came down to online data, Mitchell’s hunches were better than most.

  He took a bite from his slice of pizza. Red’s Pizza was just across the street, and was probably the most popular pizza place among policemen. Red gave a twenty percent discount if you showed your badge, and on Fridays he’d give you free garlic bread with every order. Mitchell felt like he had to be glad for the small things in life, because the big things were an ex-girlfriend who’d broken his heart and a dead man who had angered a lot of people when he was alive.

  “Coffee, anyone?” Jacob asked.

  It was the third time he’d gone for coffee. Mitchell guessed that his partner suffered the most from this kind of work.

  “I’ll have another cup, thanks,” Mitchell said.

  Hannah grunted something as well. She was staring at her screen angrily, sifting through Frank’s e-mails. She would carry on until she dropped.

  Mitchell looked at her for several seconds. She seemed to notice, and turned toward him. Their eyes locked for a second, then she abruptly broke eye contact and resumed scanning her screen.

  He sighed and turned his stare back to his own monitor. He was looking at Frank’s Facebook profile, scanning his timeline, looking for anything interesting Frank might have posted. He was already six months back, and it seemed most of Frank’s posts were selfies with other people—mostly women—and terrible memes. There was nothing there. He clicked the Friends tab and started scanning the friends list, trying to find a link.

  “Find anything?” Hannah asked. She was standing behind him, looking at his screen.

  “Not really,” Mitchell muttered.

  “What’s this?” she asked, pointing at the chart on his screen.

  “I’m trying to match Twitter and Facebook accounts of people Frank knew,” Mitchell explained. “See? This is Melanie’s Twitter and Facebook accounts. And these are Tarp’s accounts. But it’s tricky.”

  “Why?”

  “Well… sometimes it’s hard to figure out if someone doesn’t have a Twitter account, or if it’s just hidden well. And apparently Frank didn’t follow, on Twitter, all of the people who were his friends on Facebook. I’ve managed to match one hundred forty-six of his Facebook friends so far. Out of those, twelve were harassed on Twitter by Frank’s accounts…” Mitchell paused and frowned.

  “What?” Hannah asked.

  “Look here,” Mitchell pointed at his screen. Hannah bent a bit, looking closer at the screen. He could feel her warm breath by his ear. “Uh… see those twelve I marked? Those are Twitter accounts that have been harassed, and this column here shows the Twitter handles that harassed them. That way we can see who was targeted the most.”

  “Right,” Hannah said softly.

  “But this one here, Annie_Bardr, was targeted by only one handle: @youreugly12. Here’s the weird thing, though. I am absolutely certain this is not one of the Twitter handles we found in Frank’s e-mail account.”

  “So… maybe he erased the e-mails?” Hannah suggested. “Does the handle harass anyone else?”

  “Let’s see,” Mitchell said. He double clicked the Chrome shortcut on his desktop. While waiting for the slow computer to react, Mitchell turned to Hannah, suddenly realizing how close their faces were. They both froze for a moment and then Hannah drew back, clearing her throat. Mitchell turned to his computer, feeling his face flush, and browsed to the Twitter handle @youreugly12.

  It had only three messages.

  you’re fatter than a hippo, @Annie_Bardr

  your breath stinks, @Annie_Bardr, it kills anyone who gets near you

  how are your zits, @Annie_Bardr?

  “Those don’t look like the rest of Frank’s messages,” Hannah said. “They aren’t sexual, and they’re kinda lame.”

  “Right,” Mitchell agreed. “It’s like the kindergarten version of an internet troll.”

  Mitchell opened Annie’s Facebook account. Her name was Annie Bardera, and she was friends with Frank. Mitchell checked their mutual friends. There were three. One of them was Jerome Piet. He entered Jerome’s profile, scanned backward. He didn’t have to look far.

  A month before, Jerome had been photographed with Annie Bardera, hugging her waist tightly.

  “Hey,” Mitchell said. “Does Jerome have a girlfriend?”

  “I don’t know. Wait. No, he had just broken up with her. That’s why they went out. Frank was cheering him up or something.”

  “I think Frank did more than just cheering Jerome up,” Mitchell said. “I think he was teaching him.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Hannah sat down at her kitchen counter, a bowl of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese in her hand. It was after one in the morning. They had scanned Frank’s online history thoroughly, collecting a vast pile of information, most of which was probably completely useless. Mitchell was the only one who’d found anything worthwhile—an indication that Jerome Piet was trolling his ex-girlfriend. Not very enlightening by itself, but it did lead to some theories.

  Bernard thought it was possible Frank had threatened to blow the whistle on Jerome, and Jerome decided to kill him. Hannah didn’t think that was likely; they hadn’t found the murder weapon, and she didn’t think he’d had enough time to hide it. Besides, Frank had bigger skeletons in his own closet. But it merited further inspection, and Bernard and Hannah had decided to interrogate Jerome more thoroughly in the station the following day.

  She shoveled some pasta into her mouth and chewed it, staring at the counter, thinking. Shifting the macaroni in her bowl a bit, she frowned, then set one piece on the counter. Say this was Frank. The salt shaker was his door. One theory was that someone had hidden in the corridor, waiting for Jerome to leave.

  She positioned another piece of macaroni on the opposite side of the salt shaker. Jerome left the apartment… She stuck her fork in another piece of pasta, and started marching it past the salt shaker and along the counter. The lurking pasta knocked on the door…

  With her finger, she moved the mystery macaroni attacker toward the salt shaker door. Frank opened the door… she prodded Frank toward the salt shaker as well.Then she grabbed her knife. Stab stab stab! The mystery pasta ran away across the counter, past Jerome, outside, where the taxi driver—a blob of cheese—saw him enter a red Toyota Corolla. Jerome, assisted by the fork, ran back up, opened the salt shaker door, and screamed.

  The other option was that there was no lurking pasta.
She popped the escaping macaroni into her mouth. Jerome decided to kill Frank. He’d probably gone out just as he said he did, and then returned, as it was unlikely Frank would change into a bathrobe in front of his friend. Or maybe he would—who knew? In any case, he stabbed Frank to death—

  She stuck her knife in the unhappy Frank macaroni several more times.

  Then Jerome hid the knife somewhere, maybe even under his shirt. He screamed, and Petal ran out to meet him. Hannah located a spoon to represent Petal.

  Petal took him to her apartment… and maybe he got rid of the knife there? Hannah made a mental note to call Petal in the morning, ask if she’d encountered an unknown knife. Maybe ask for permission to look for it there. And in that case, who was it that the cheese—the taxi driver—had seen running out of the building? Just some random guy? Maybe.

  So what was more likely? She looked at the counter. It was a mess. Cheese everywhere, macaroni Frank shredded to bits, the salt shaker sticky…

  Hannah sighed. Normal people did not reenact murders with their Kraft dinners. A traditional Jewish dinner, such as the one she had eaten with her mother on Friday, would have fit this purpose much better. The slices of challah would have left less of a mess everywhere.

  She finished the bowl of pasta amidst the carnage, then cleaned the counter. She considered going for a drink, maybe finding someone to have some fun with. Then she glanced at her watch. It was almost two o’clock.

  Too late for fun. It was time to sleep.

  The city was quiet when Mitchell reached his home; the roads were mostly empty, the dog walkers and the joggers in their beds, the restaurants and coffee shops closed. But he was not misled. As a young patrol cop, he had spent more than a year on the graveyard shift, between midnight and eight, and he knew well that this silence hid the worst types of violence, the most heinous crimes. Rapes, pointless drug-induced murders, assaults fueled by rage and alcohol in equal amounts. The city wasn’t peaceful. It was merely less noisy.

  He unlocked the door, walked inside, locked the door behind him, and latched it for good measure. He put his wallet, keys and gun on the table, a small wooden thing his brother and sister had bought for him after Pauline left and took the previous table with her. It was one of the furniture pieces she’d originally owned, as about two thirds of the apartment’s contents had been.

  Now that she’d left, taking her things with her, the apartment was abysmally empty. Mitchell hadn’t found the will to go buy new things. His living room had one couch, the aforementioned table, and a television set. His laptop stood on the floor, by the couch. The rest was vacant, the floor bare. He told himself it made cleaning easier.

  He got his mobile phone from his pocket and called Tanessa.

  She answered almost immediately. “Hey, why are you calling me during my shift?”

  “When else can I call you?” he asked. “You’re asleep during the day.”

  “God forbid you call me in the evening,” she said. “Maybe buy your sister dinner once in a while.”

  “Yeah, whatever,” he said. “How’s your shift?”

  “Quiet so far. I heard you got that guy, Grimes.”

  “Yeah, Bernard arrested him.”

  “Noel told me it got violent,” Tanessa said.

  “Yeah. Grimes was packing, and fried out of his mind. I’m glad he didn’t show up when you were watching the house.”

  There was a moment of silence. “I would have been fine,” Tanessa finally said. “This is my job, Mitchell.”

  “I know.”

  “You can’t protect me from—”

  “I know, Tanessa, okay?” he said. It was becoming an old argument.

  “Yeah, okay. Go to sleep, Mitchell. It’s really late for regular people.”

  “Hang on. You used to date a guy who played Dragonworld, right?” Mitchell asked. He vaguely remembered making fun of Tanessa about it.

  “This is what you called to ask me after one o’clock?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re weird, Mitchy. Yeah, I did, but only for a few weeks.”

  “Any chance you can introduce us tomorrow morning after your shift?”

  “Well… you do realize that we broke up, right? I wasn’t really into him. And he has a job, and I’ll be really tired—”

  “It’s for a murder investigation, Tanessa.”

  “Who was murdered? A goblin?”

  “No. A young woman.”

  “Seriously? Yeah, okay, sure, I’ll talk to him in the morning, see what I can do. I can’t promise anything, though.”

  “Thanks, sis.”

  “Goodnight, Mitchell.”

  He hung up, got a beer from the fridge and sat on the couch, lifting the laptop from the floor. He browsed to his Facebook page, read some bland posts about politics and babies, telling himself he’d just shut off the thing, go to sleep.

  He didn’t. Instead, he browsed to Pauline’s Instagram profile.

  She was an avid Instagram user, and she posted two or three times every day. Lately, those images contained a lot of pictures of a man named Paul. Paul! This made them “Pauline and Paul.” Hadn’t she thought about that when she’d hooked up with this guy?

  Pauline and Paul had posed for a selfie in a pub today as well. They looked disgustingly happy. Paul was so clearly not Pauline’s type. Mitchell realized he was grinding his teeth, his fist clenching the beer can hard enough to dent it. He felt angry and lonely.

  He glanced at his phone, wavering. For a crazy minute he considered calling Hannah, asking if she wanted to go for a late-night drink. But no, that would be dumb in epic proportions. They worked together all the time. Making things weird between them because he felt momentarily lonely was probably the stupidest thing he could possibly do.

  Eventually he turned off the laptop, his nightly self-torture complete. He went to bed promising himself he wouldn’t check Pauline’s profile ever again, knowing already that his resolve wouldn’t hold.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Brian Hale was surprised when Tanessa called. He hadn’t heard from her in more than eight months. He was embarrassed at how flustered he was when he answered the phone, stuttering, fumbling at the most basic small talk, his voice high-pitched. She quickly explained that the police needed his help with a murder investigation. It flattered him, though he knew it made sense. He had recently finished his Geology bachelor of science degree and his expertise could be of great use to—

  They wanted him because he played Dragonworld, Tanessa explained.

  An hour later he was at the police station. In the room with him were Tanessa, who was even more stunning than he had remembered, her brother, who was a detective, and some old bald guy, who seemed a bit dumb and introduced himself as Detective Jacob Cooper.

  “This is the computer belonging to the murder victim,” Mitchell explained. “We know she played Dragonworld, and we want to talk to some people she played with. Can we do that?”

  “Was she in a guild?” Brian asked.

  “We don’t know,” Mitchell said.

  “They’re completely clueless,” Tanessa told him. “They could really use your help.”

  Brian nodded, his throat dry. He noticed that Tanessa seemed a bit tired. Perhaps police work was wearing her thin.

  The computer was already on, the Dragonworld shortcut on the desktop. He double-clicked it, and they waited together for the game to load.

  “So… How have you been?” he asked Tanessa.

  “Oh, you know,” she said, shrugging. “Really busy. The graveyard shifts are a killer.”

  “I can imagine,” Brian said, having no idea what she was talking about. “What are you doing later?”

  “The game’s up,” Mitchell said.

  Brian began to dislike him. He glanced at the screen. The login prompt said the character’s name was Willow Hannigan. Brian smiled.

  “Willow Hannigan,” he said. “Clever.”

  “Why is that clever?” Jacob asked.

>   “Well, because she used the first name of Willow from Buffy and the last name of…” Brian realized the three cops were staring at him. “Anyway, it’s a nice name,” he ended lamely.

  “So she played under a different name? Was she hiding her identity?” Jacob asked, frowning.

  “No, no. That’s just her character’s name,” Brian said.

  “So why didn’t she name her character Dona?”

  “Most people don’t name their characters after their own name,” Brian said. “It’s kind of tacky.”

  “Why?”

  “That’s just the way it is,” Brian said, curbing his impatience. “Okay, do you know her password?”

  “Doesn’t the game remember her password?” Jacob asked.

  “Uh… You see the checkbox that says Remember Password?” Brian asked.

  “Yes,” Jacob said after a second.

  “It’s unchecked.”

  “So it doesn’t remember her password?”

  Brian decided the detective was an absolute moron. How had he been promoted to detective? Could Brian himself become a detective? Well, if this guy was, probably anyone could.

  “Without her password, we can’t log into her account,” Brian said, talking a bit more slowly.

  “So there’s no way to find the people she was playing with?” Mitchell asked.

  “Well, if she’s in a guild, it’s in her public profile,” Brian explained. He opened the browser and entered the URL of the Dragonworld home page, then browsed to the Characters page, and searched for Willow Hannigan.

  “There,” he said, as her character appeared on screen. She was a human witch, and was listed in a guild. “See? The Black Arrow guild.”

  “So how do we talk to these guys? Do you have their e-mails here?” Mitchell asked.