Murder, She Wrote--A Date with Murder Page 11

  “You just saw me check my e-mails and text messages to see if the station was trying to contact me.”

  “Figure of speech.”

  Mort worked the phone free from his pocket. “What would you like me to do with it?”

  “Bring up the LOVEISYOURS site on your browser.”

  He started to do just that. “There’s a free app here for it, too.”

  “I want to see what’s on the Web. I want to see exactly what Hal saw when he registered on the site.”

  Mort whistled at what he saw displayed on his screen, drawing the attention of the tables nearest us. “Thirty-nine ninety-five per month fee. Wow! And that’s for the basic package. For that much, you better fall in love.”

  “Me?”

  “Figure of speech.”

  “Ah,” I said, taking the phone from him.

  I fiddled with it briefly as I figured out how to work the screen, but ultimately located “FAQ,” for Frequently Asked Questions. Then I scrolled down until I found the question I was looking for.

  “Mort, it says here that a client can delete his or her profile whenever they choose.”

  “But as far we know, Hal Wirth didn’t delete his profile. According to Booker, he never created one in the first place. And even if he created an alias, a straw man, his credit card confirmation would still have to be his own.”

  “Which never existed in the system either.” I nodded.

  “So what’s your point, Jessica?”

  “What happened to it? A question, not a point. If we take Hal at his word in his memoir, he registered on the site, went on one date, and then realized he’d made a terrible mistake, at which time he then would’ve likely deleted his account.”

  “Which, according to Booker, never happened because he never had one,” Mort elaborated, then thought for a moment, while I sipped my iced tea. “Since Booker also claimed there was no credit card for Hal on file either, on the chance he used an alias, maybe we should have a look at his credit card statements to see if there’s a charge or not. One of us may have to ask Babs for help there.”

  “You want my guess?” I asked him.

  “I’ve got a feeling I’m going to hear it anyway.”

  “We won’t find anything on the credit card statement. I’m thinking it, too, would’ve been erased online, maybe at the same time someone wiped Hal Wirth from the LOVEISYOURS database, before a paper statement could be generated. Beyond that, there’s another reason I wanted to check the LOVEISYOURS Web site. It says here the first month is free. So Hal would’ve needed to enter his billing information even though he wouldn’t start paying until the second month.”

  “But he likely deleted his account, or it was deleted for him, before that first month was up.”

  “Meaning the charge won’t show up on any credit card statement period.”

  “Damn,” Mort said.

  “Exactly.”

  “So where does that leave us, Jessica?”

  Precisely what I’d been pondering. “The issue here isn’t just Hal—it’s this Naomi, or Nan, as she preferred to be called. It’s one thing for Hal’s profile to have never existed. It’s quite another when the profile of the woman he was matched up with also never existed.”

  “And then he conveniently dies.”

  I hardened my stare involuntarily. “I don’t think it was a convenience at all, Mort.”

  “You’ve got that look, Jessica. . . .”

  And I continued to use it on him.

  “Need I remind you that Seth Hazlitt’s reading of Hal’s blood work and toxicology results suggested nothing nefarious?” Mort followed.

  “I wouldn’t expect it to. If Hal was murdered, whoever did it knew exactly what they were doing.”

  “Whoa, hold on there. Getting a bit in front of yourself, aren’t you?”

  “I think, maybe, he was poisoned.”

  “When?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know that either.”

  “By who?”

  “Whom, Mort,” I corrected.

  “Don’t hide behind a grammar lesson, Jessica.”

  “Then, no to that one, too.”

  He gazed about as if wondering where our pizza was. “So you’re discounting your own theory?”

  “It’s not a theory, not yet anyway.”

  “So what is it?”

  “A possibility, given what else we know.”

  “And what’s that?” Mort asked me, seeming to enjoy his role as my inquisitor.

  “That Hal Wirth used a dating site that has no record of his ever having registered, and arranged a date with a woman from that site who doesn’t exist.”

  Mort crossed his arms and nodded. “He could just as easily have made the whole thing up to spice up his memoir a bit. Writers do that all the time, don’t you?”

  “Do what?”

  “Embellish.”

  “Fiction writers, yes. Nonfiction writers, or biographers, not so much.”

  “But Hal wasn’t really a writer, hadn’t published anything before. So maybe he just tired of trying to make his life sound interesting and decided to make stuff up instead.”

  “Or embellish.”

  “I already said that, Jessica.”

  I leaned forward to narrow the distance across the table between us. “And it’s possible. You know what else is possible? Drugs that can cause a heart attack almost immediately.”

  “Like potassium chloride. Only even an old country doctor like Seth would’ve noticed elevated levels of that in the blood work. And if he missed it, any decent pathologist certainly won’t, because potassium chloride stops the heart; it doesn’t cause an actual heart attack, which is what killed Hal.” Mort checked his watch. “We should have the autopsy results any minute.”

  “Assume there’s another drug, or drug cocktail, that can cause a heart attack.”

  “For argument’s sake?”

  “For argument’s sake,” I agreed. “And, also for argument’s sake, we’re going about this the wrong way.”

  Mort feigned disinterest, turning his gaze to the floor again. “Where’s that pizza? . . .”

  “Forget how the heart attack was induced, if it was induced, for now. Let’s focus instead on the timing.”

  “The Wirths’ Labor Day party?”

  I nodded. “Somebody would’ve needed to get close enough to him to slip something in his drink, even give him some kind of injection.”

  “That’s pretty close.” Mort hesitated. “You were there. How many guests are we talking about? Just a ballpark figure.”

  “Two hundred. Given all the comings and goings, maybe as many as three hundred. There must’ve been an invite list Babs can provide.”

  Mort shook his head. “So my department can interview all three hundred. . . .”

  “Maybe closer to two hundred. Interview them to find out if anyone saw something, or someone, they didn’t recognize and didn’t seem to belong,” I suggested. “Seth and I were there for several hours and didn’t see a single person who didn’t at least look familiar. It was all Cabot Cove residents, with a few of Hal’s business associates sprinkled in.”

  “But not his former business partner, who, at least, had motive.”

  “That’s the point.”

  “It is?” Mort asked, as the waitress set our pizza down between us.

  “Hal’s ex–business partner was murdered because he knew something. I was almost killed because the murderer must’ve thought I was getting close to the same thing. We were both seen as threats. And that makes no sense, unless Hal was murdered, too.”

  “Can we eat now?”

  I spun the pizza around so the spinach-and-mushroom side was closer to him. “And all this is somehow conn
ected to that dating service, LOVEISYOURS. It must be.”

  Mort laid his first slice down on the plate set before him. “Good luck proving that without a place to start.”

  “Who said I didn’t have a place to start?” I asked, easing the first slice onto my plate.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Five hours later, I was seated at Babs’s kitchen table next to Chad, with Alyssa on his other side. Chad had his laptop open and fired it up.

  “Is this for a book?” he asked me.

  “Assume that it is,” I told him. “Do you have a consultant’s fee?”

  Chad flashed his boyish grin. “Just put me on the acknowledgments page. And tell me what you need.”

  Seconds later he had the LOVEISYOURS Web site up on his screen, awaiting further instructions.

  “So, what now, Jessica?” He smirked, clearly comfortable in his element.

  “I want you to create a fake profile and then make it disappear.”

  “You mean, like, delete it?”

  “No, I mean make it like it never existed in the first place, no record whatsoever. And that would include billing data.”

  “Why not just use an existing customer? That’s what you want to get at, isn’t it?”

  I nodded, not yet considering the ramifications of actually wiping a member of LOVEISYOURS off their listings altogether. “If we can find someone, say, who hasn’t visited their page in a while.”

  “You mean a dead man walking.”

  “What’s that?”

  “A man who opens a page on social media, then neglects it entirely. How about we use three years as a filter?” Chad suggested, fingers already clacking away atop the keyboard.

  “Sounds good to me.”

  His fingers danced and flew some more, and the start of a long listing with picture click-throughs appeared on-screen. “There you go. All the clients on LOVEISYOURS whose accounts have been inactive for three or more years, but who’ve continued to pay their monthly fee, probably because they never bother checking the contents of their credit card statements.” His expression wrinkled the way it might if he’d tasted something sour. “Who uses a site like this anyway?”

  “Desperate people,” Alyssa suggested.

  “You mean like us, if we hadn’t found each other?”

  That earned Chad a kiss from Alyssa, making me glad Babs was currently in her upstairs office working on the final preparations for Hal’s funeral tomorrow.

  “Want to pick one?” he asked me.

  “No, you do it.”

  He clicked on the profile of a man whose first name was Mark and began working the keys in a blinding blur, pausing on occasion to check on the progress of whatever he was doing, before resuming. It seemed like a long time had passed, when it was probably only about five minutes.

  “Okay,” he pronounced after a final keystroke, “we’re in.”

  “You found his password?”

  “Not exactly. It’s easier in these cases for hackers like me to just give him a new one. I’ll spare you the details.”

  “I wouldn’t understand them anyway,” I told him. “What’s next?”

  “Let me show you what happens when I just delete the profile.”

  Chad’s fingers flew across the keyboard again until he pressed Enter in majestic fashion. “Gone!” he pronounced, adding, “Voilà!”

  I peered at the screen. The man named Mark’s profile was indeed gone.

  “Now,” Chad resumed, “I want to show you something.”

  He worked the keys some more, before he angled his laptop toward me and entered the name “Mark” in the search bar, then hit Enter again.

  “This is a list of everyone named Mark currently registered on the site next to their profile picture. Notice anything?” he asked me, scrolling down the screen slowly.

  “Stop!” I said, almost yelling. “There’s our Mark, the one we deleted.”

  “Exactly. And look what happens when I click on his picture.”

  File not found appeared on-screen.

  More keystrokes, followed by clicking on a Restore icon, and Mark’s profile was displayed on-screen again.

  “Okay, Mark’s back.”

  “Not for long. What I just did was delete his profile. Now I’m going to wipe it.”

  “There’s a difference?”

  “A huge one. Deleting the profile means it’s still there, but the software can no longer find it. Wiping the profile makes it vanish altogether from the server. Like magic. Watch.”

  His fingers danced across the keys longer this time, with only a few pauses. It looked as if he was on the clock, never letting more than a second or so elapse between clicks. Then he repeated the search process and this time Mark’s profile picture didn’t appear as it had before.

  “That’s amazing,” I said, meaning it.

  “The bad news is that I can’t restore Mark’s profile again, because it’s gone, like it was never there in the first place.”

  Which had been exactly my reason for requesting this demonstration. “What about Mark’s payment information, his credit card or something? Would that be gone, too?”

  “Because it’s part of his profile, absolutely.”

  “And the site would have no record he’d ever paid them, even if he’d been archived?” I wondered, recalling what I’d learned from Sean Booker.

  Chad nodded, a bit noncommittally. “Well, they’d still have whatever money he paid them—that doesn’t go away. But there’d be nothing to archive—no trail, paper or otherwise, of where it actually came from, as there would still be if his account was just deleted.”

  I looked back at his computer screen, amazed by what I’d just witnessed. “You made that look easy.”

  “Because it is. Sites like this, LOVEISYOURS, operate on a binary system to be user-friendly. But the more user-friendly a site is, the more susceptible it is to intrusion from people like me.”

  “Hackers.”

  “I prefer the term cyber ghosts.”

  “Whatever you say. But you’re really telling me it’s that easy to make someone, like this Mark, disappear?”

  Chad nodded and whipped the hair from his face with a snap of his head. I watched Alyssa reach over and fan it back into place, Chad first pretending to fight off her hand before taking it in his.

  “The answer is yes,” he said, without missing a beat. “And it’s only from a single site. Virtually all of them are based off the same platform, and learning the ins and outs of how that platform operates allows someone like me to use their operating systems against them. It’s a question of finding the vulnerabilities. They’re always there, Jessica. You just have to know where to look for them.”

  I decided to grasp at a straw. “Any chance of reconstructing a file that somebody else has made disappear?”

  Chad shook his head, suddenly looking glum over having disappointed me. “No. Sorry, Jessica . . .”

  I glanced toward Alyssa, careful of my words. “Even if you had a name or additional personal information?”

  He shrugged. “Once it’s gone, it’s gone.”

  * * *

  • • •

  I stepped outside to call Mort and update him on what I’d learned from Chad. I’d uncovered the means by which both Hal’s and this Nan’s profiles had vanished from LOVEISYOURS, along with Hal’s billing information. In spite of all we’d learned at the dating site’s corporate headquarters, we’d come to a proverbial dead end.

  I felt guilty as I explained it to Mort, guilty that I’d let myself be consumed by this mystery instead of helping Babs finalize the arrangements for Hal’s funeral tomorrow. Any clues leading to the truth behind his death, at least the sudden insolvency he’d suffered, would have to come from another source.

  Eugene Labine’s murder perhaps. Or the dark sed
an that had forced me into the intersection yesterday and nearly killed me.

  The problem was Cabot Cove had no traffic cameras—any more than Hill House had security cameras. I had to figure that solving all manner of crimes in big cities was infinitely easier than this.

  “Has the autopsy report on Hal come in yet?” I asked Mort, remembering it had been due today.

  “I didn’t want to spoil your night, Jessica. He died of a heart attack with no signs or indications of anything pointing to foul play whatsoever.”

  I thanked Mort and said good night, discouraged but far from ready to give up. Despite lacking evidence to that effect, I still believed Hal Wirth was murdered at his Labor Day party. I could see no way to prove it, though, my efforts stymied on all fronts.

  After hanging up with Mort, I remained outside to ponder what I had left to pursue. There was the guest list from the Labor Day party to consider. A lot of guests for Mort and his deputies to interview, yes, but if one of them had seen something, anything, even remotely out of place in the hours leading up to Hal’s death, then it would be well worth the effort.

  I just couldn’t let it go. Maybe the problem was I wasn’t writing at present. Maybe this was my mind’s way of telling me it was time to plunge into my next book, to channel my overactive imagination onto the page. Solve a crime in fiction, when I clearly wasn’t going to be able to solve this one in fact, assuming a crime had even been committed. Eugene Labine, after all, seemed the sort who left no shortage of enemies in his wake. And it wasn’t too much of a stretch to imagine that one of them followed him to Cabot Cove and murdered him for reasons entirely unrelated to Hal’s death or his misadventures on a dating site.

  But I had to know, had to be as sure as I possibly could, and so I resolved that tomorrow, after the funeral, I would suggest that Mort indeed interview all the guests who’d attended Hal and Babs’s Labor Day party, that being the only way—

  I froze in midthought, my quivering hand snatching the phone from my bag and redialing Mort’s number, willing him to pick up fast.

  “Already? Please don’t tell me someone tried to kill you again.”

  “Not yet anyway. I think there’s a way we can figure out if Hal was murdered or not.”