Foreign Deceit

“Do you think you can do it?”

“Yes, no problem.”

Lia looked satisfied. “Paulo can do anything with computers, and programming, and the internet, and, all things that confuse the rest of us.”

Paulo was blushing ferociously but tilting his head back proudly. He opened the computer and pushed a few buttons simultaneously, his attention unwavering from Lia.

“He’ll take care of you,” she said slapping his back. “I have to go talk to Marino, I will be back, hopefully soon.”

Wolf looked around. “Okay, sounds good. I’ll be here.”

Lia walked away back across the room and down the hall. Wolf caught himself staring and turned quickly to what was happening with Paulo, who was now standing at his desk staring intently at Lia leaving the room.

“Mmmmmadonna.” Paulo breathed the words, turning to Wolf with a conspiratorial look. “She is beautiful, eh?”

“Yes, she is,” Wolf agreed with a resigned smile. “Okay, what’s happening?”

“Oh, yes, you can pull up that chair there. I am going to create another administrator account on the computer. It takes a few minutes. Then I can go in and access all the files.”

“Okay, sounds good.”

Wolf waited and watched Paulo work his magic with the computer. The computer screen looked to be displaying lines of code — a site Wolf was completely unfamiliar with. He felt proficient enough with a computer, but he was watching a master mechanic rip the hood off of a car and dig into the engine. A tweak here, a command there, and a few minutes later they were inside the computer with a normal view Wolf was more accustomed to.

“Okay, I’ve created a new admin account, and changed the password to your brother’s account, allowing me to log in as him. I’m going to fire up a few of his programs. Otherwise, what would you like to do?”

“I’d like to look at his documents, I guess.”

Paulo worked for a few minutes, opening windows and programs. “Well, wait a minute, this is interesting.” Paulo was looking in the Skype program.

“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