Chapter 42 – Mitchell
MITCHELL
This morning I picked up the new locking mechanisms, then went straight home to install them on the front and back doors.
After, Charlie and CJ took turns testing them out, even coming up with a secret knock to let the other know who was on the other side of the door, until Charlotte got bored of it and they decided to kick the ball around instead.
As they race through the house, the ball tucked securely under CJ’s arm, Charlie pauses at the back door, looking back at me and gestures to the stairs before he turns and disappears outside.
I let out a relived breath, grateful for the reprieve he’s giving me.
Charlotte is a really curious kid and doesn’t hesitate to ask how something works.
She had a lot of questions, and I was more than happy to answer every single one of them, I always am.
But I’ve been itching to get upstairs so I can start my search for to find who betrayed our girl by helping that monster who called himself her husband inflict pain on her.
Our girl.
I smile as I sit down at my desk and boot up my PC. I wanted to do this yesterday, but Charlie was right, Marissa needed all of us and so did Jace. After cleaning the RV, I literally threw Jace over my shoulder to get him to go back to bed and get the sleep he needed.
We let him sleep until dinner was ready, then we spent the night playing games and puzzles, just relaxing and enjoying each other’s company until Charlotte fell asleep.
By the end of the night, everyone was feeling less stressed, and I had to agree with Charlie, we needed it.
The screen goes dark, and I quickly type my password into it. To anyone else, it’s just a blank screen during the boot up process, there’s no prompts for a password, no blinking cursor and nothing appears when you hit keys.
It’s just a black screen that will continue onto the regular startup screens after a couple of seconds if the password isn’t typed in, but when I hit enter, the alternative boot up pathway I built into the PC initiates.
Similar to the way you initiate safe mode; a state of the computer’s operating system without all the bells and whistles that is used for diagnostics.
As the computer finishes loading, the house’s security system opens up, and the live camera feeds appear on one of my monitors.
Before I start my research, I pull up the overnight footage and sift through the files. They’re each only a couple of minutes long, triggered to record by movement and will continue recording until all motion stops for a full minute.
I play through multiple videos at 8x speed, confirming the presence of possums, koalas, and other sorts of wildlife until I come across one where I can’t tell what triggered the sensor.
The hairs on the back of my neck stand up and I lower the speed to 1x before restarting the video.
An odd shadow casts on the grass in front of the camera; from the angle I can’t make out what animal it belongs to.
Likely a kangaroo, they’re not exactly uncommon in this area, but after yesterday I make sure.
With a frown, I restart the video again, going frame by frame until the shadow fills the entire screen. Sitting back, I try to work out what it is, but for the life of me, I can’t figure it out.
Frustrated, I go into the camera’s settings, switching over to the thermal recording and watch it over, trying to spot any hint of an animal but it never steps into the camera’s field of view.
Determined, I pull up the surrounding cameras, going through all of the recordings around that time. Sure enough, there’s a kangaroo grazing on the grass nearby.
“Hm” I hum, my chin in my hand as I move closer to the screen. The shadow casted by the roo could very well be the same shadow just at a different angle, they’re close enough that on any other day I wouldn’t question it.
But you could say that yesterday has me a little on edge, so I pull up the cameras lining the road in both directions. These cameras aren’t set to record only when triggered by movement, rather they record continuously and pin times when motion is detected.
I skip ahead to one thirty in the morning and speed through the video, but not a single vehicle drives by in either direction.
Quickly saving the files between one thirty and two o’clock, just in case, I pull up the remaining files and finish going through it.
When I’m done, I switch to live feed, watching as Charlotte happily kicks the ball to Jace who then kicks it to Charlie.
I can’t be Bonnie again…Not if they’re out there.
If she wants to be Bonnie again, I’ll make that possible for her. Even if I have to kill this bastard.
I start with a general search of her ex and the information that was made public about the investigation six years ago.
Reading through it all, I take down a few notes before switching to the Federal Database using the backdoor I built into the system when I was hired to identify any holes in their security.
Ironic, I know.
But what I do can’t exactly be declared to the ATO, so my legal income involves testing systems of secured facilities, ranging from scientific to governmental, commercial, federal and even military, and report back on the holes in their security with suggestions on how to improve it.
Again, ironic. I know.
Once I’m in, it doesn’t take me too long to pull up the case file and I spend time going through each detail carefully. When I’m done there, I start my own search, digging deeper and deeper into the life of Michael Towers until I stumble across a deleted image he was tagged in on social media.
It's a young girl, similar looking to Marissa, holding up her left hand to the camera, showing off her ring with the caption, ‘I said yes.’
I scroll through her profile, trying to find anything else she’s tagged him in but there are no posts before this one involving him, and there are no other posts regarding him after this deleted one.
But the blood in my veins freezes when I see the only other thing posted in her timeline.
Rest in Peace, Jasmine. Lost but not forgotten.
The date was less than a year after her engagement post and when I go back to the file I’ve made on Michael, confirming he had no previous marriages. I look again, but unless he had every trace of it digitally erased, they never went through with the marriage.
Following a hunch, I pull up any information I can find about her death. There’s almost nothing online, only an archived article from a website that got shut down not long after.
The last thing they shared? An article about a young nineteen-year-old girl who died in a house fire not even a month after leaving her fiancé at the altar.
The police ruled him out as a suspect, because he was speaking at a seminar a couple of hundred kilometres away, but the article still ran with the theory that the timing was too much of a coincidence.
They speculate on their relationship and the circumstances that led her to leave him, especially when they received an image from the same friend who made the rest in peace post.
In the image, she’s severely underweight and there’s a haunted look in her eyes that I’m all to familiar with. Below it, the friend talks about how she flinches at any noise or fast movement but refuses to speak about anything regarding her ex, including why she left him.
I find it pretty suspicious myself, and rather convenient he had a very public alibi, so I decide to look into the investigation surrounding her death.
The police report is as you would expect. They mention the damage caused by the fire, that there’s no sign of forced entry. There’s a few statements from the neighbours before the fire started and it mentions Michaels alibi. No suggestions of foul play.
Still, a coronial report is automatically be required in a death like this so I pull up the autopsy report, frowning when I see it was conducted by the coroner himself.
I exit out of the report when I read its date, going through everything I can find, looking for the final autopsy report only to find there is none. This is suppoedly it.
“That’s…not possible.”
“What’s not possible?” I jump, spinning around in my seat to see Marissa standing in the doorway, just as surprised as I am.
“Well, that’s a first.” Her words are teasing; her tone is not. It’s full of concern and I mentally chastise myself for getting so engrossed in this that I allowed someone, even Marissa, to sneak up on me.
She walks further into the room, stopping beside my chair and looking down at me with a worried expression. Her eyes flick to the screen, but they don’t linger. She knows what I’m doing, even gave me permission to turn over any rock necessary to find the person who could have put the IUD in.
“What did you find?” she asks a little nervously but there’s a determined look in her eye.
“Are you aware that he nearly married another girl before he met you?” I don’t specify who, and she doesn’t need me to.
“He did?”
“Nearly three years before he met you. She left him at the altar, died less than a month later in a house fire. She was nineteen.”
“The same age I was when we got married.” The shaky breath she lets out has me pulling her into my lap, my arms wrapping around. “He killed her, didn’t he?”
“The Coroner didn’t seem to think so. It was ruled an accident, the fire caused by faulty wiring due to damage from the storm the night before.”
“But?”
“But the autopsy is…suspicious.”
“Why?”
“Well, if someone dies in say…a house fire, the coroner is notified and a coronial investigation is conducted. Now, it’s definitely unusual but not unheard of that the coroner himself conducted the autopsy, given he was a forensic pathologist.
“But what is impossible is that the full autopsy was signed off in less than six weeks. That’s just not doable. Toxicology alone can take months. And yet, cause of death was signed off as smoke inhalation and burns sustained during the fire.
"That's not all either.” Shaking my head, I highlight the first line under external examination and read it aloud. “The body is that of a nineteen-year-old, well developed, well-nourished female.”
“Okay?”
Pulling up the deleted article I found earlier, I scroll to the picture her friend took.
“This photo was taken just after she left him. Does that look like a well-nourished nineteen-year-old?” Even if she was on a diet designed to help her put on weight, or even hospitalised, there’s no way she would go from severely underweight and obviously malnourished to that in a month.
Rissa gasps, her hand covering her mouth. “She’s skin and bones.” My arms tighten around her, trying to offer her comfort at the sorrow in her voice. “You think he covered it up?”
“I think it’s very suspicious.” Were quiet after that, Rissa resting her head on my shoulder as she watches me sift through the financial records of former Coroner Adam Peterson.
“Huh,” I say, furrowing my brows before I print off what I’ve found, grabbing a highlighter and highlighting several lines.
“What are you seeing?”
“Winnings.”
“He’s a gambling addict?”
“Sure looks that way, doesn’t it?” I hum, highlighting another line before I choose one at random, searching the club’s information. “He gets paid, he goes to the club and gambles it at the pokies.”
A few minutes later, I’ve got the club’s membership list and select one of their top tier members, pulling their bankstatement up and printing it off.
I highlight all of her winnings in a three-month period and lay them out next to Adam’s and sit back.
“Looks similar, yes?”
“I mean, she’s won more than he has, but yeah.”
“There’s a reason for that and I’m pretty sure it has nothing to do with luck.” She leans closer, examining the two bank statements. “Look how much she withdraws and how much she loses before she wins. She wins big, but she loses hard.
“Meanwhile, he makes a small withdrawal every time – one to two hundred dollars – and wins every single time across dozens of clubs. They're not winnings. They're payments."
"Mitchell bribed him to cover her death? Do you think he used him to-" her voice cuts off and she clears her throat, trying again. "-with me.?"
"There's nothing in Michael's financials that would suggest it but he could have an offshore account in someone else's name."
“So, there’s no way to tell.”
“Not necessarily.” But it would take too long. Instead, I pull up Adam’s details, finding his driver’s licence and enlarging the image. “Do you recognise him?”
She shakes her head. “No, but I never met any of his friends or colleagues or whatever.”
“What if,” her voice trails off after several long seconds of silence and she chews on her lip, her brows furrowed. “Do you think the IUD could be used to trace the doctor who put it in?”
“I don’t know.” Minimising what I’m doing, I pull up the encrypted messaging server I use and send a message to Mark.
Me
Is it possible to trace the doctor or nurse who inserted an IUD?
Mark
IUDs have serial numbers so in theory it could be, if the doctor who inserted it is the one who prescribed it.
I show her his reply, not wanting to get her hopes up. “It’s a long shot.” There’s a pretty good chance that whoever inserted it, didn’t obtain it legally.
“I want it out. I don’t even know when he had it put in.
There were so many times he knocked me out from the things he did…
It feels like a piece of him is inside me and-” she clears her throat, blinking rapidly in an attempt not to let her tears fall.
“If removing it can help find this bastard than great.
If not, then I don't care. I want it out.”