Death in the Black Wood, Oliver Davies [short story to read TXT] 📗

Everything the killer managed to do out there from this night onwards could only happen because the system I’d managed to cobble together hadn’t been good enough to keep track of him.

Alright, you could equally argue that we’d be even worse off if we hadn’t tried it out at all, but that really wasn’t making me feel any better.

Looking into the owners of the two cars our killer had used soon told me they were both out of the country on family holidays. I sent off my emails to Conall and McKinnon and set a few searches running. I was absolutely sure that when he emerged again, our man would be wearing different clothes and carrying a different bag, or no bag at all. I had no chance of spotting him amongst the early morning commuters, even if I did send the drones out again later. It would be a total waste of time to do that and the risk of him, or anyone else, spotting one of them wasn’t worth taking. I might as well catch a few hours sleep myself while those searches were running.

I had no doubt that McKinnon, and Conall, would think to look into the airport connection for those car owners but what about the parents’ places of work and the kids’ schools? People often talked about upcoming holidays with their co-workers. Then there were the social media accounts too. Hopefully, my searches might throw up a connection there somewhere.

After a good four hours sleep, I woke up from a horrible dream where the head on the pole had been Conall’s. When I’d turned away from the sight of it, there’d been another one there too, Uncle Danny’s. My heart was pounding madly as I jerked upright and I was covered in a slick of sweat. It’s all very well to rationalise dreams as part of the memory sorting process when you’re awake but I hadn’t figured out a way to ignore them while they were happening. There’s nothing like a dose of fully immersive emotional overload to really shock you awake in a state of absolute panic. I bloody well hated having nightmares. Machine intelligences didn’t have to deal with shit like that.

After a shower and a breakfast smoothie I settled down at my laptop with a nice cup of my favourite tea and started checking through my search results. None of the four parents even worked for the same company, let alone in the same building, and the kids’ schools were a negative too. Not even a substitute teacher in common over the past few months. There was one item of interest though. The Millers’ eldest son and the Dawsons’ middle kid, a daughter, were both members of an under sixteen online coding club. They’d been teamed up with four other kids developing a game together for the past two months.

Everyone has a right to their privacy, and I didn’t like to snoop but I couldn’t ignore a link like that once it had come to my attention. I hacked their chat history.

For a bunch of fourteen-year-olds they weren’t doing too badly, but I didn’t see any aspiring stars of the coding world among them. The stuff they were working on was pretty basic beginner’s stuff, coded in Python for use on different platforms. They’d all friended each other on Facebook, so I hacked those accounts too.

Yeah, they’d talked about their holiday plans and how great it was to be getting some extra time off school during term time. Monday and yesterday had been school holidays in Inverness, anyway. The Miller boy would miss five days of school and the Dawson girl only three. Her family was only away for a week. They’d left on Friday evening, the Millers had flown off to America three days earlier.

I went back to the club website and found links to a forum where anyone running into problems with their projects could ask for advice. You wouldn’t need to be even half as good as I was to hack into the site, gather IP addresses and send out feelers to the kids who posted questions on there. Did I think our killer had the coding skills to do that? Or that, if he did, he’d be careless enough to use them this way? Well, the odds against him having the skills were quite high to begin with, apart from which, if he did possess them, it would make more sense to hack into booking sites and look for airline and hotel reservations.

Right, scrap that. I was looking for complex solutions when I should be looking for simple ones. I returned my attention to the Facebook accounts and pulled both kids’ friends list to cross check. Apart from the other four coders working on their game, they only had one other ‘friend’ in common.

According to the information on that person’s page, Brad MacRoberts was a fifteen-year-old amateur coder living in Dundee. Well, that was easily checked. I soon discovered that there was nobody of that age with that name living there. All the information on the account was fake. Well, there were plenty like that out there, some set up by different law enforcement agencies and others by even less scrupulous people.

My phone beeped at that point. Conall’s team had found the house our killer had holed up in last night. Could I come down and do my SOCO thing? Everyone else was busy. I fired off a quick reply, packed up my laptop and got moving. This could wait and that job couldn’t. The sooner we got everything to forensics, the sooner we might get some answers.

Conall and Caitlin were in his car when I pulled up behind them in Uncle Danny’s Toyota. I climbed out and walked over to his window. “Stuffing your faces again?” I asked as he opened the door.

“Late breakfast, courtesy of my thoughtful cousin.” He popped a last bite into his mouth and climbed out as I moved back to give him