Invasion of Privacy: A Deep Web Thriller #1 (Deep Web Thriller Series) (34 page)

It said,
Knock, knock :-)

She jumped out of bed and looked out the window onto the street. Damn, his car was parked outside. He was here.

She opened the window and called, “Two minutes, Patrick,” closing it immediately.

She tied her thick towelling dressing gown tight, ran into the bathroom and examined her reflection in the mirror. She was shocked to see how red and blotchy her eyes were from all the crying. She splashed water over her face, dried it and painted on some mascara and lipstick. It would have to do. What did he expect anyway? Her best friend had been murdered.

A minute later, she opened the front door and let him in.

“I had to check you were all right, Kimmy. I just had to. I’ve been worried sick.”

“I’m fine.” But she wasn’t, and there was a catch in her voice.

He pulled her into his arms. She resisted briefly and then allowed herself to be hugged. It felt good. He kissed her on the top of the head. She resisted the urge to cry again.

“There, there.”

A few minutes later, resigned to having company and feeling guilty for being so ungrateful, she asked him to make them both some tea. She felt the need to keep herself busy. Kim recalled that her flatmates were returning from Greece later on today and would probably take over the washing machine for the next few days. She went upstairs and filled her laundry basket with every item of clothing strewn across her floor. Back in the kitchen, she began loading the machine. 

Patrick made idle chitchat as the tea brewed, talking about his university lecturers being unable to keep up with the fast pace of IT; about how he wasn’t looking forward to returning to Imperial College after his placement with the television company’s IT department; about how the recent
Star Trek
sequel had lost its way from Gene Roddenberry’s humanist philosophies (who Gene Roddenberry was, Kim hadn’t the faintest idea); about perhaps going for lunch somewhere nearby. 

Kim had zoned out and was staring into space. She sensed that he was waiting for her to say something. 

“Sorry?” she said, and resumed loading the washing machine.

“Lunch. I thought it might be good for you to get out of here for a bit.” He waved his hands around. “There’s this nice Thai café in Blackheath that does a fantastic lunch menu.”

“I can’t, Patrick.” She checked the pockets of her dirty jeans for tissues.

“Come on Kimmy, it will do you good. Trust me. A bit of fresh air. It’s even stopped raining.”

Kim pulled something out of the pocket.

“What’s that?” asked Patrick.

She looked at what was in her hand. It was the strange component from the wall light she had broken by accident last night. She had stuffed it into her pocket when the fuse box had tripped and forgotten all about it until now.

“I’m not sure.” She explained about accidentally breaking the wall light and the odd device, although made up an excuse about tripping over rather than telling him the truth.

“Can I see it?” 

Kim handed it over to him. He turned it over in his hands, studying it.

“I’m no electrician,” he mused, “but isn’t this the transformer that makes the light dimmable?”

“But there’s no dimmer switch in Anna’s room.”

“Yeah, but if one was fitted it would work with the wall light.”

“Oh, I didn’t realise you had to have special lights for dimming.”

“Yeah, I think that’s all it is.”

Patrick pressed the pedal on the rubbish bin and threw the device into it.

“Now, what about that Thai lunch?”

* * *

Jenny parked her car by the corner green opposite the Saxton house, exactly where Brody had been parked the morning before, although facing away from the house. Brody looked in the passenger wing-mirror. The towering Saxton household filled it completely, both sets of double-gates securely shut.

The journey had taken just under two hours, over double the satnav’s original prediction back in Docklands.

As she opened the car door, Brody said, “Hold on a second, DI Price. I’ve got an idea.”

She sat back in her seat and waited patiently as Brody fumbled in his satchel and withdrew his tablet PC.

“Why don’t we take a peek at what’s going on before going in?”

“Because the words ‘police officer’ and ‘breaking the law’ should never go in the same sentence, that’s why.”

“Which laws?”

“You don’t get it, do you? That site of yours is probably breaking hundreds of privacy laws and you’re perpetuating it.”

“But it’s in the public domain! How is browsing a public website breaking the law?” He continued to click through to the website.

Jenny folded her arms.

Brody persevered, “And it might be interesting. You might learn something about Derek’s guilt.”

“Or innocence,” she countered. “And anyway, I’m not sure if anything I see on there could be used as evidence. Whenever we mount any covert surveillance operation we have to get  all sorts of authorisations and permissions beforehand.”

“But this isn’t surveillance. It’s a website displaying feeds from webcams that the Saxtons are completely aware of being mounted throughout their home.”

Brody clicked through to the
Au Pair Affair
location. He could see movement on the kitchen-cam. Before Jenny could say anything else, he clicked on it, turning up the volume.

“I don’t get it, Derek. There’s got to be more to it. Why would they arrest
you
?”

On the screen, Hilary Saxton was pouring water from the kettle into two mugs. Derek sat cross-legged on the floor, holding Izzy’s hands as she bounced excitedly up and down in an elastic harness suspended from the doorframe. 

“Because there’s some evidence they found at the scene which gave the impression that I had invited Anna to the office.”

“But it wasn’t even your office.”

“I know. That’s what I told the bloody police.”

“So why does this
evidence
link to you?”

“I don’t know the specific details.”

Jenny growled, “He bloody well does. He’s just trying to avoid his wife finding out about his affair with Audri.”

“Well, there’s definitely something fishy going on,” said Hilary Saxton.

“Definitely,” agreed Derek Saxton. “And anyway, some other girl was murdered the other day somewhere else. They think it was the same killer.”

“Which brings me back to my original question. Why were
you
arrested? What aren’t you telling me Derek?”

“Da-da!” exclaimed Izzy brightly. “Da-da!”

“Yes, it’s your daddy, Izzy-Wizzy,” said Saxton, in a silly voice. “Who’s a clever girl?”

“Derek. Don’t ignore me,” instructed Hilary. “And don’t call her Izzy-Wizzy.”

Still sitting on the floor, Derek turned his attention to Hilary, leaving his daughter to her bouncing. “Listen to me, Hilary. I have no idea why they arrested me. But it’s all over now.”

“It’s not over for Audri’s mother,” sighed Hilary Saxton. She handed her husband a mug of tea. “It’s just beginning for her. I talked to her earlier. She hasn’t seen Audri in over a year, no contact or anything. And now she’s flying over to collect her dead body.”

“That’s terrible. She’s not staying here, is she?”

“I did offer, but no, she doesn’t want to. She’s staying in a hotel in Watford. But she’ll pop over to pick up some of Audri’s things though.” Hilary sat down next to her husband and cooed at their daughter. After a moment she remarked, “You know, she said she knew something terrible would happen the day she watched Audri leave Sweden on the ferry. Imagine if it was our Izzy.”

Saxton reached his arm around his wife and pulled her to him. She leaned her head on his shoulder. They sat there quietly. Brody thought he could hear sobbing.

Brody looked up from the computer and caught Jenny’s eye. Her brows were furrowed in confusion. 

“We shouldn’t be watching this,” she said. “It’s not right.”

Brody put the PC into sleep mode.

“Let’s give them a couple of minutes before we ring the bell,” he suggested.

After a few moments, the silence in the car became uncomfortable. Brody broke the silence. “What evidence was Derek talking about?”

Jenny hesitated and then brought him up to speed, giving him the bare facts. Brody learned how Audri had received a hand-delivered typed letter in Derek’s name, deceiving her into going to what she thought was his office to continue their affair. How she had followed the instructions and left the Saxton household by taxi in little more than an overcoat. How more instructions awaited her in the meeting room getting her to strip naked and effectively immobilise herself. How she had been brutally raped and killed. How Derek Saxton admitted to the affair and the sex games, but that he had an alibi for the evening. And how the DNA of the recovered semen did not match the DNA taken from Derek’s cheek.

Brody tried to make sense of these events. It was all so alien to someone who lived mostly in cyberspace. Life and death were not concepts Brody ever thought too much about. As he listened to Jenny, he began to appreciate how disengaged he was from reality. This was a life cut short of a beautiful, sexy young woman that he had only yesterday witnessed full of verve. It was difficult to comprehend.

Brody mentally pulled himself together and forced his analytical brain to take over. He asked about the first murder and received a similar set of bare facts. This time the victim had been another pretty young woman. She was called Anna Parker and was a nineteen year-old cellist in a music school. She too had been lured to a Flexbase meeting room — although in a different building — on false pretences, this time exploiting her lifelong dream to play in an orchestra. She had thought she was attending an important audition, but was raped and killed in the same way as Audri. DNA proved that the same perpetrator had committed both crimes.

“Can’t you just match the DNA to some big brother police database?”

“He’s not on file. Which means he’s not been arrested before.”

“What about a familial search?” Brody was aware that it was possible to use DNA to search for close biological relatives as the genetic data from family members has more in common.

Jenny raised her eyebrows in surprise. “Watch a lot of detective shows do you Brody? I’m impressed. We’ve kicked one off, but I’m not expecting a result. We only have 5% of the UK population in the database.”

Brody thought about the two murders. The common factors. There was something they were missing. His brain was closing in on
something
; he could sense it, just out of reach. He needed to tease it out.

He went back to basics, hoping to find his way to the missing link. “So, your priority is to identify a connection between the two victims. Someone both of them knew . . .”

“Yes, go on.”

“But there isn’t anyone obvious.” He stopped his line of thought and asked a specific question. “I take it you’ve not found a direct link between the first victim and Derek Saxton?”

“Correct.”

“But it has to be someone who knew an awful lot of personal information about both victims in order to set up such convincing charades. Like a psychiatrist or counsellor or something?”

“We haven’t come across anyone like that. Not yet anyway.”

“A lecturer would know Anna’s dreams. Did Audri go to school or University? Maybe a teacher working more than one school?”

“No.”

Damn, this was difficult.

But then it occurred to him that, in a way, both girls had been
social engineered
to do something they wouldn’t have done otherwise, just like he did all the time. Although in his case, he usually only tricked his targets into divulging information he could use for another purpose. But the principle was similar. Someone had used privileged information, in this case about both girls’ individual hopes and dreams, to make them walk willingly into a situation where they would be alone with their killer. Like lambs to the slaughter. He needed to approach this as if it were one of his own social engineering attacks. How would he go about finding out if someone was having an affair that involved over-the-top sex games? Or find out about someone’s personal ambition to play in an orchestra?

“You’ve checked out all the social media sites both girls used? Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, that kind of thing?”

“Yes, we have. No obvious links between them.”

“No, that’s not what I mean. What about if they shared information about their hopes and dreams? You know, Anna’s desire to play in an orchestra? Something that the killer could use to make the scam work.”

“Yes, we’ve checked. And there’s nothing like that so far. And anyway, Audri was hardly likely to talk about her sex games with an older man on Facebook.”

“You’d be surprised what people put on Facebook.”

“Perhaps, but no, we’ve found nothing.”

Brody continued his line of thought. He was sure he was onto something. 

And then it clicked into place. It was staring him in the face. There was something he would need to check, but — 

“This is harassment, this is!” a booming voice shouted. 

Brody looked up startled. Derek Saxton’s face was leaning down to the driver side window. Jenny visibly jumped but recovered quickly, opening the door and stepping outside. 

“We were just coming in, Mr Saxton,” she said coolly. “We have a few more questions for you.”

“Well, you can stick your questions where the sun don’t shine. I’ve had enough of you lot.” He turned and walked off in the direction of his now open gate.

“Are you sure you want to walk away, Mr Saxton?” shouted Brody, also climbing out of the car. 

Saxton halted and looked back. “Who the fuck are you?”

“I’m just someone who spends far too much time on the Internet,” Brody retorted. Saxton doubled-back a few steps and loomed over Brody. He was massive. 

“What are you on about, mate?” Saxton’s teeth were bared. Brody was suddenly convinced this was going to get ugly, but he stood his ground. The adrenaline coursed through his bloodstream. He could hear his own blood flowing inside his ears. Everything slowed down.