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The chances of coming across her cellphone were practically zero. Any organized offender would know to destroy the phone and dispose of it far away from the crime scene. Some of them might even keep it as a trophy, but they’d never turn it on.
“We’re gonna have to use the next best thing. Social media.” Ella grabbed her laptop and clicked around. She search queried the victims’ names alongside Hicksberg and quickly found they both had active profiles. Ella grabbed her phone and scrolled through her contacts. She found a woman named Kathy Mansfield, one of the IT techs back at HQ and called her number.
“Hello? Ella?” the voice said after four rings.
“Hey, Kathy, I need you to work your magic.”
“I can try. What is it?”
“I need access to two people’s social media accounts. Can you get me in?”
“This is for an active case I hope?”
“Case W227, Maryland.”
“I’d love to get you in but I need a PWA form sent over. Can you do that?”
Ella didn’t have time to fill in any paperwork. Lives were at stake. “Come on Kathy, please. I’ll send it when I get back. You have my word.”
“You’ve said that before.”
“And I always keep my word!” Ella said.
“Alright, alright. What do you want access to exactly?”
Ella opened up her email tab and sent across the URLs. “Done. Can I see their messages? Or the meta data? What profiles they visited the most?”
“Give me a second. Just taking a look now.” Kathy idly hummed while she worked her magic. “Messages are a no-go, not without consent from the service provider.”
Ella expected it. Accessing people’s personal conversations like that was getting harder, and understandably so. Online privacy had progressed leaps and bounds in just a few years.
“Alright, what about her activity? Surely there are no rules against that? It must be embedded into the site’s algorithm anyway.”
“You’re in luck Ella. I can do that. Give me a minute and it’ll be over.”
“Thanks Kathy. I’ll fill those forms out ASAP.”
Ella ended the call and checked if Ben had replied. Nothing yet. Strange. He was usually quick on the draw. She prayed he was doing alright and made a mental note to call him once she had a moment.
“If Eliza was meeting someone on the sly then she might have communicated with him online. That’s all the rage these days, apparently.”
Ripley sipped her coffee then wiped her foam mustache. “Meta data? Algorithm? Another reason I need to hang up my boots. I haven’t got a clue what they mean.”
Ella frantically refreshed her email. The new lead on Tobias had awoken a newfound energy in her. She had the urge to run, jump, try one of those backflips she used to be able to do. “So when you call it quits, what are you going to do, exactly? I don’t mean to make assumptions but I never pegged you as someone who could just sit on their porch all day.”
“Ha. I probably couldn’t do that, but I’ve got no shortage of things I want to do. But really, I just want to see what little family I’ve got left. Probably persuade my grandkids to never get into this job. Apart from that, just do the things I never got chance to. See Australia, build a model ship of the Titanic. Things that I’ve been telling myself I’ll do later for thirty years.”
Ella’s email pinged. Kathy’s message had come through. She extracted the attached files and found 96 pages of text.
“Got it,” she said. “This is the raw data of Cheryl and Eliza’s online account. There must be something in here that tells me what these girls got up to.”
She tried to figure out the data and how to read it properly but it was like reading a foreign language. The text was interspersed with alien characters used in coding. She zoned out into research mode, no longer a part of the material world. It was just Ella and the data in front of her. Nothing else existed for now.
RECURRENT VISITS: 34. PROFILE; USER ID:771245 ERIC MARTIN.
“Eric Martin,” Ella said.
“Who?” her partner asked.
