Chapter 43
Forty-Three
Gina
Garth entered the incident room, laptop in hand. ‘I’m in.’ He began hitting the buttons on the laptop after getting no response. ‘Damn, battery’s dead. I need the lead. I’ll just be a minute.’ He left the room.
Gina remained by the boards while waiting for Garth to come back and take centre stage. Excitement welled in her stomach as she dared to hope he had something big for them.
O’Connor entered first and took a seat after finishing up the interview with Ursula. Jacob and Wyre, fresh back from the post-mortem, sat at the back and Kapoor leaned against the wall, biting her nails.
Gina cleared her throat. ‘While we wait for Garth, can you quickly update us with how the post-mortem went and is there anything from the lab yet?’
Jacob nodded and opened up his notebook.
‘There wasn’t much that we don’t already know.
Mindy was indeed killed at the scene and she died from the stab wound to her back.
The blade went straight through and pierced her heart, and it was long.
As for how she got there, Bernard and the team found some partial footprints around the back.
It looked like the perp had gathered up leaves to try to cover them up which is why they hadn’t been spotted when you arrived on the scene.
There were drag marks next to the footprints.
It looks like the perp dragged Mindy, on foot.
This suggests she might have been drugged as there seemed to be a lack of resistance or commotion.
There were no injuries that would have caused impairment such as a blow to the head, and it’ll be ages before we get any toxicology results, possibly weeks.
The photo found in her mouth had no fingerprints on it at all. ’
‘Do we have a foot size?’
‘Nine or ten.’
Wyre sat and blew out a breath. ‘I have an update, too. I’ve caught up with the door-to-door team and we have a witness report. Someone saw a white van on the road behind where Mindy’s body was found.’
‘The white van again.’ Gina tensed up, ready to hear what Wyre had to say. ‘Did they get a registration number or a description of the driver?’
‘No to the reg, they couldn’t even tell us what make of van it was, only that it was a larger type of van with a side door.
The witness said it stood out as the driver momentarily mounted the kerb and he thought they were trying to placate a bouncy dog.
They jumped to that conclusion that it was a dog with it being a dog walking area. ’
‘Did the witness see the van pull over?’
‘No, he lives much further down the road. He went into his house and thought no more about it until the appeal went out.’
‘It could have been Mindy in the back of the van, impaired and struggling to fight her kidnapper.’
Wyre nodded. ‘It sounds like it. It’s just such a shame we didn’t get a reg number. So frustrating.’
‘How about the driver?’
‘Ah, the description isn’t much to go on but we’re looking for someone wearing a dark hoodie with maybe a coat with a collar over the top.
They wore the hood up and the witness couldn’t see their face.
The windscreen was a little dirty and it was getting dark.
All they saw was vague movement that could have been someone batting something away that came from behind. ’
‘What time was this?’
‘The witness couldn’t remember. Sometime after five p.m. He’d been asleep and just popped out to his car to get something before going back in and going to sleep again. He was due to start work that night at the hospital. He said it was all a bit vague for him.’
Garth burst back in, plugged his lead in and inserted the connector into the back of his laptop. It lit up and after clicking a few buttons. He opened PowerPoint and clicked on the first slide – the OpenMeSmiler home page. ‘We’re on. Gather round.’
They all sat and pulled their chairs in around the table.
Garth clicked through the slides. ‘As you can see, this is what we’ve been faced with.
There’s no account set up, no way in unless you’ve been checked out and approved.
My fake account has profiles everywhere on social media and my AI family look convincing.
I look like a normal upstanding guy. I’m Clarke who works as an accountant.
What isn’t there to trust?’ Garth let out a laugh.
‘So, you got in?’ Gina asked.
‘Sort of. I know for sure that whoever is behind the site ran checks on all my social media, my so-called fake firm – Number Crunching by Clarke – and soon after I had an enquiry through my website contact form, asking how confidential my services were. When I tried to trace the enquirer, nothing came back. It’s like they don’t exist and they’re definitely using a VPN to hide their online location and persona. ’
‘What did you do then?’
‘I answered the message saying that client confidentiality was at the core of my ethos and that I’d never breach that under any circumstances.
They then asked if I could advise on how to work money into a business.
I threw in a little spiel about how I could help them hide it or clean it.
I wanted to seem a little dodgy. Give them something to hold against me from the start.
I think this’ll be how it all works so I threw the dog a bone. ’ He flicked to the next slide.
‘So, are you in, in? What does “sort of” mean?’ Gina raised her brows.
‘Okay, I’ll explain. I was given a login to the main user page.
The login worked. As soon as our messages had gone back and forth, the perp let me in, so here we are.
’ He clicked over the next three slides.
‘As you can see, there are multiple victims. It looks like any users can upload camera feeds onto the site, normally people’s own personal cameras at home for security purposes and public cameras.
You just need their logins and passwords, and then you’re good to go with remote viewing and the victims have no idea.
Site users can then spy on people all over the world, all day long.
As you can see in the last slide, these are the feeds uploaded directly by OpenMeSmiler.
These are the ones we are most concerned with because if you look, you can see the first is pre-recordings of Mindy going about her business at home.
You can see her in bed, getting changed, doing everything someone does at home when they think no one’s watching.
There are a couple of different vantage points of the same scene and they match where you found the cameras in Mindy’s bedroom. ’
Gina looked away. It felt ugly to watch their murder victim being violated like that, the abuse continuing after her death. She wondered how many people had downloaded the clips and spread videos of her having sex with Spencer.
Garth swallowed. ‘There are some of Dustin, walking around his bedroom, working out, getting changed, sleeping. It looks like there was just the one feed which suggests that the perp never gained physical access to his bedroom. Control was gained through his laptop.’ He flicked to the next slide, one of Dustin flexing his muscles in a mirror.
The clip continued and Dustin’s expressions changed.
He began to look at himself before hitting the mirror, clearly unhappy by his own self-image.
Gina shivered at the thought of the watchers getting off on Dustin’s misery. ‘Can you delve any further?’
He shook his head. ‘I need permission to take what OpenMeSmiler calls the dark path. I’m waiting but I’m not sure how it’s going to go.
This is the last message I received through the site.
’ He clicked onto another slide and read the caption.
‘I need to see you. I need to hear you. Remove what is covering your camera and let me in, only then will I let you in.’
‘Damn.’ Gina banged her hand on the table. ‘Being a dodgy accountant wasn’t enough. They want something to blackmail you with. So have we reached a dead end for now?’
‘Not necessarily. I’m working on it. I have Dustin’s laptop on my desk and the password let me in so that made my life easier. Hooray for people that use their pets’ names, tell their mum what their passwords are and never update them.’
Gina sat up. ‘Did you find something on there?’
He closed the laptop and unplugged it. ‘Everything has been wiped. It looks like OpenMeSmiler gains control of the user’s device and then they erase their presence after they have their victims. The laptop I used to login has had the sound disabled and the camera covered.
I’ll allow them to start taking control but there is nothing much to find.
I have a load of dummy profit and loss accounts and balance sheets for makeshift businesses so it looks like it’s just used for work.
I suspect that they send a file that the user has to click on and OpenMeSmiler takes full control, like I mentioned when I spoke about Dustin’s surveillance.
If I compare that to Mindy’s work computer, it looks like the perp got slack.
After managing to salvage some more from her smashed up personal laptop from her house, I can see that OpenMeSmiler extracted itself from the computer, leaving nothing but Mindy’s personal files.
The perp, or perps, fell short with the work computer, which is why we found the video.
They hadn’t gained control of that one, probably because Mindy would have been more wary of clicking on links on a device that didn’t belong to her.
If we go back to Dustin’s laptop, Dustin took a screenshot and hid it in his university assignment files, a place where the perp probably didn’t think to look. ’
‘What was on it?’
‘A threat sent just before Dustin disappeared last night. It said…’ Garth picked up his notepad and read it out.
‘Leave your house right now. Tell Mummy you’re getting something from your car and walk to the end of the road, by the trees, and wait.
If you don’t, I will press the button. All your contacts, your friends, neighbours, lecturers, fellow students and, of course, Mummy, will see that video. ’
‘And he hasn’t been seen since.’ Gina swallowed. ‘He’s next to die.’