Jeff Carson - Foreign Deceit

“Why?”

“Well, you haven’t had the computer on at all since you got here? Obviously not…never mind.”

“No, I haven’t. It was closed when I found it in my brother’s room and tried to hack into it last night. Well, I tried a couple passwords and gave up, then just left it to charge.”

“Okay, okay. Well, there are messages on Skype from a person on Tuesday.”

“Okay,” Wolf said expectantly, “and what does that mean? I really have little experience with Skype. My brother was always trying to get me to use it, but I just ended up talking to him on the phone.”

“Well, okay. Look here.” He pointed towards the little logo on the bottom of the screen. “If there was someone who was trying to get hold of your brother with some messaging on Skype, say, on Tuesday…then I would have just logged into his account and a bubble would have shown up on the icon showing how many messages he had missed since he last logged in.”

“Okay.”

“But there was no bubble that popped up on the icon.” Paolo was tilting his head with wide eyes. “But, if I go into his account and look at his recent conversations here on the left, look what someone is saying to him.”

— Hey man, you there? 09/18/12 9:12 PM

— What’s happening? Are we doing this interview or what? Let me know… 09/18/12 9:53 PM

— You okay? You there? 09/18/12 10:09 PM

Wolf felt his face getting red. He couldn’t see the significance of what Paulo was saying to him, and Paulo sensed it.

“So, the most important part is here. Look at the date these messages were sent. This was Tuesday, September, 18th, three days after your brother’s death, at 9:12 PM local time…or, how many hours behind is Colorado?”

“Eight.”

“Okay, so that means between 1 and 2 PM in the afternoon your time, someone was trying to get hold of him, looks like for an interview. But he wasn’t answering. However, Skype is telling us these messages have already been looked at , because there was no indication on the icon that there were unread messages!”

“Which means someone was on the computer looking at these messages at some point before we just looked at them, otherwise there would have been unread messages.” Wolf was finally getting the significance. He sat back hard in his chair, putting his hands on his head, Paulo following his gesture.

“Exactly,” Paulo said. “Someone has opened this computer and looked at Skype in the last few days, after your brother’s death. So, what do you think they were looking for on this computer?”

“I honestly have no clue,” Wolf said. “Can you somehow tell? Can you see what they did on it?”

“No, not unless I had pre-loaded key-stroke recognition software on his computer. But, we can infer some things, just like we did now.”

“They probably got on the computer to erase something, right?”

Paulo raised an eyebrow and nodded. “Okay, let me check. It’s actually more difficult than people think to erase all evidence of a file off of a computer. We’ll see if this hacker knew more than just the log-on-trick, which is actually very basic.” He rolled his eyes as he dove back onto the keyboard in a flurry.

Paulo’s fingers were a blur entering commands on the screen. Wolf marveled at the strange sequence of letters, numbers and punctuation this wunderkind was commanding at mach speed.

“Ahhhh.” Paulo had a pained expression. “Well, either they cleaned it completely, or they simply didn’t erase anything. There’s no trace of any files that were recently erased to be found. It’s more likely they didn’t erase anything.”

Lia came around the corner and walked to the desk. She looked pained, avoiding eye contact with Wolf. “So, any luck?”

Wolf gestured to the laptop “We’re in, and we’ve seen that someone else has been looking at the computer in the last couple days.”

“Really?” She leaned forward with interest.

“Yeah. According to Paulo, these Skype messages tell us that someone was on the computer sometime Tuesday night or later.”

She came around and looked at the screen from behind. “ Ma-donna. What else?”

“Well, we can’t find any indication that anyone erased anything. We have to get online and do some work. Your brother was what, a blogger?”

“Yes,” Wolf answered.

“Okay, he probably did things more online than off. What’s his email address? A gmail account?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Good. Give me a few things, and I’ll do some work. I want your email address, his email address, his blog name, your Facebook account login…you do have a Facebook account, right?”

“Uh, yeah.” He squirmed. “I don’t remember how I log in, though.”

Lia smiled at his obvious discomfort.

Paulo ended up just shooing them away after he got the blog URL.

“How was your talk with Marino?” Wolf asked quietly.

She avoided eye contact. “It was fine.”

“Is everything okay?”

“Yes. It’s fine.”

“Okay,” he said. They stood in silence, Lia obviously in deep thought about something.

Wolf left her to her thoughts and went to the window. Leafing through the police report, his stomach sank a few inches. It was all in Italian. Of course . There was going to be a lot of translating. And things were always lost in translation.

“Twitter! Haha!”

Wolf looked to Paulo who was holding up his arms in triumph.

Wolf shoved the papers back in the folder and joined Lia at Paulo’s desk.

“I went into your brother’s gmail account. It was simple enough, all you have to do is type the first letter of his email address and the web browser remembers his username and password. Good for us, but the bad news is someone else already did this. Looks like someone from your brother’s IP address logged into his gmail account and erased a few messages on Tuesday night at 11:37 PM.

“So, the question is, what is this guy erasing on his gmail account? So I went onto your brother’s blog, thinking there might be a hint there. I didn’t see anything of any use on his blog. It looks like he hasn’t done a blog post in a couple weeks. He has a different contact email address on his blog. He runs it through gmail as well, so I checked that email account. Nothing there either. They could have erased some stuff there. I could probably hack into his blog, but…well, let me move on.

“I checked his Facebook account through his blog. It looks like there wasn’t any activity on there. But, that could have been erased also. The login and password information was, again, stored in the browser settings.

“But, Twitter!” His eyes lit up. “It looks like he tweets a lot. A lot. Your brother was a pretty big deal online I take it. He has 72,839 followers on his account and he’s following 320 people.”

Wolf shook his head with eyebrows raised.

“Right. Well, the point is, that shows that he has a pretty popular Twitter account with a lot of clout. Basically, he has 72,000 fans listening to his every word. So anyways, I logged into his Twitter account at ‘JohnWolf12345,’ again with the browser settings. Again, someone did the same thing removing some Tweets.

“But you can’t just erase Tweets from the web. Especially if you have 72k followers! Because, when he Tweets things, 72,839 people see it. Some of those people will ‘re-tweet’ those things to their followers, or reply to his tweets. And on the night of your brother’s death, it looks like he tweeted a couple things that people re-tweeted immediately and replied to. So, whoever logged into his Twitter account undoubtedly realized they couldn’t erase all evidence of his tweets that night.”