Peter James - Looking Good Dead

Jon had always been interested in technology and in gadgets, and when the use of computers had started to explode a decade back, he had seen the massive new opportunities for criminals they would bring, and how ill-equipped the police were at that time to deal with computer crime. He decided the best job security in the force would be in computer crime, and that after he retired from the police, with his background in the field, getting a well-paid job in the civilian world would be easy.

He had given up trying to convince his wife Nadine that this crazy job was only temporary and would not go on for ever; or maybe she had given up listening when he told her. He glanced around at some of the other members of his team who were also in today, and wondered how many of them had domestic grief over being here.

The simple fact was that they were overrun. They currently had a nine-month backlog of seized computers waiting to be forensically examined; as usual, it came down to resources. He suspected that the chiefs preferred to spend their money on making the police more visible – putting them out on the streets, nicking burglars, muggers, drug dealers, making the crime statistics look good – and that they regarded the High Tech Crime Unit as necessary but not something which won Sussex Police many brownie points.

Quite a few of his team were real geeks, recruited from outside the police – a couple straight from university, others from IT departments in industry and local government. At the workstation right behind him he watched the geekiest of all, Andy Gidney.

Gidney, who was twenty-eight, was just plain weird. Almost pitifully thin, with a complexion that did not look as if it had ever seen fresh air, hair that he surely cut himself, clothes and glasses that looked like they had come from a closing-down sale at a charity shop and a generally antisocial demeanour, the man was nonetheless utterly brilliant at his work – by far the cleverest member of his team. He spoke seven languages fluently, including Russian, and had never yet been defeated by a password.

They did not need passwords to actually get into a computer, because the software they used took them in through a back door, but some password-protected zipped files gave them grief. Andy had been working for most of the past week on a particularly intransigent file seized from a suspect in a massive phishing scam in which online banking websites were being cloned. He was refusing to give up and allow the machine to be sent to a specialist decryption facility.

Jon did not care for Gidney, but he admired his tenacity and respected his abilities. He had long come to accept that the people in this unit were very different to the petrol-head cops he used to work with on Traffic, where he had spent nearly ten of his twenty years to date with the force. In Traffic you saw mostly grim sights, and sometimes heart-rending tragedy. But here in High Tech Crime, you saw the true dark side of human nature.

He started as he did on every case, by carrying the computer through into the locked Evidence Room, where the walls were lined with wooden racks stacked with seized computers, all regarded as crime scenes and all bagged in shiny, translucent plastic evidence bags and tagged. Some of them had been here a long while. Several large plastic bins on the floor, piled high with more bagged computer equipment, carried the overspill.

Rye put Tom Bryce’s laptop down on a work surface, unscrewed the casing and removed the hard drive, which he carefully connected to a tall, rectangular steel box with a glass front. This contained a write-blocking device, the Fastbloc, which would make a byte-by-byte forensic copy of the disk.

When that was completed, he reassembled the computer, carried it back to his desk, then plugged it in and began work. Out of habit, the first search command he entered was Buffy . Nothing came up. The second was Star Trek. Again nothing came up. Not proof, but a useful indicator that Tom Bryce was not a paedophile. The department had discovered a curious fact over recent years: a high percentage of paedophiles were simultaneously Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans and Trekkies. If you found both of those on a computer, you had your first alert.

Jon worked quickly and methodically. He scanned through the photograph album, with its many pictures of an attractive woman with wavy blonde hair and two kids, a boy and a girl, their development charted from the time each was a few days old, if even that, to now when the girl was about four and the boy about seven. Normal family pictures. Nothing to ring any alarms.

Then he started on Bryce’s website bookmarks, but there was nothing remarkable there. He went back, following the man’s footprints over the past year, looking at every website address he had visited. There were dozens of porn sites, as there were on just about any man’s computer he had ever looked at, but apart from a few lesbian sites nothing to suggest the man was kinky.

Then he came across something that puzzled him. At first he thought it was traces of a virus, but then he realized it was source code for some self-installing spyware. The design of it rang a bell, but he could not immediately fathom why. He followed it carefully, allowing himself to be led through the links. And he saw that the software had recently generated a user name and password; he entered them but they had been invalidated, and he found his progress blocked.

He turned round. Andy Gidney, behind him, iPod plugged into his ears, was concentrating hard, his fingers moving over his keyboard with the speed and grace of a concert pianist. The Detective Sergeant got up, walked over to his colleague and tapped him on the shoulder.

‘I need some help, Andy. Can you drop what you are doing for a few minutes and see if you can find a password and user name to get me through a firewall?’

Without saying a word, the geek huffily went over and sat down at Rye’s desk. Jon went and got himself a coffee, and when he returned five minutes later Andy was back at work at his own desk.

‘Did you manage it?’ Rye asked.

‘It’s an eight-digit password, for God’s sake,’ Gidney said to Rye, as if the man was an idiot. ‘Could take me days.’

The head of the High Tech Crime Unit sat back down at his desk, unpeeled the plastic lid of his coffee cup and set the cup down a safe distance from the computer. He went back through the footprints of the spyware and then, suddenly, he realized why the design of it had rung a bell.

He remembered exactly!

Moments later he was back in the Evidence Room, carefully removing the opaque plastic, marked police evidence bag, that encased a desktop computer and server tower which had been brought in just a few weeks ago.

‘Come on! Jesus, we are so incredibly late! Jessica, get back into bed right now !’ Tom Bryce yelled at his daughter, who had come running downstairs in her pink dressing gown for the third, or maybe fourth, time.

His nerves were all shot to hell and back.

Upstairs, Max yelled out, ‘Daddeeeeeeeee!’

‘Max, shut up! Go to sleep!’

‘Noooo!’

Tom, dressed up and ready to go out in a black Armani jacket, white shirt, blue chinos and his suede Gucci loafers, was pacing around the living room gulping down a massive vodka martini. ‘Kellie! What the hell are you doing? And where the hell is the babysitter?’

‘She’ll be here any moment!’ she yelled back. ‘I’m coming.’ Then, louder, she shouted, ‘Jessica, come back up here at once!’

‘Daddy, I don’t like Mandy. Why can’t we have Holly?’

‘Jessica! Come back up here!’

‘Holly was already booked up,’ Tom said to his daughter. ‘OK? Anyhow, Mandy is nice; what’s your problem with her?’