The Caller

Sixty-Seven

In seeing what Garcia had achieved from searching the social-media sites, an idea came to Hunter. He returned to his computer and called up his browser before reaching for the phone on his desk and dialing an internal extension.

‘Dennis Baxter, Computer Crimes Unit.’ A tired-sounding voice answered after the third ring.

‘Dennis, it’s Robert from the UVC Unit.’

Baxter coughed to clear his throat. He knew that when Hunter called him on his work line, something serious was either going down, or about to. ‘Hey, man, what’s up?’

‘Listen,’ Hunter said, ‘does the LAPD have some kind of bogus social media account? Something I can use without having to create a whole bunch of accounts myself?’

Garcia’s brow creased as he leaned sideways on his chair to look at Hunter past their computer screens.

‘You mean a bogus personal account,’ Baxter questioned back. ‘Not a business one. Something with which you could send out friend requests, and messages, and join conversations and all that?’

‘Exactly,’ Hunter replied. ‘Does the LAPD have anything like that?’

‘Yeah, we’ve got a few of those. Why? Do you need one?’

‘By yesterday.’

‘Sure. No problem. What do you need, Facebook?’

‘I need everything you can get — Facebook, Instagram, Twitter — whatever it is that people are using the most these days.’

‘OK. Do you need the same email account to be the primary account across the board here? For legitimacy?’

‘Not really necessary,’ Hunter answered. ‘All I want to be able to do is browse through a few pages, but I understand that I can’t really do that without an account.’

‘Yes, that’s right. So you mean to tell me that you don’t have a Facebook or a Twitter account?’

‘I don’t have any social media accounts.’

‘You’re a caveman,’ Baxter laughed. ‘OK, any particular look or gender you’d rather have or be? I can give you any sort of profile you need — hot chick, super nerd, naive little girl, badass motherfucker, old, young, black, white — when it comes to cyberspace profiles, I provide a God service.’

Hunter thought about it for a second or two. ‘Can I get two identities? One male, one female. Just average people will do.’

‘Sure,’ Baxter replied. ‘Give me a couple of minutes and I’ll email you back.’

‘What’s going on, Robert?’ Garcia asked once Hunter had put his phone down. ‘What do you have in mind?’

‘I’m not really sure, myself. But it looks like our killer spends a lot of time on social media sites. That could be how he got his insight into his victims’ lives. If that really is how he does it, then I need to do the same.’

The phone on Hunter’s desk rang twice before Hunter picked it up.

‘Sending the email with your new identities to you now,’ Baxter said.

Hunter called up his email application and his eyebrows arched — lolitasmokinghot@gruntmail.com and pipethepiper@gruntmail.com? ‘Nice,’ he said. ‘Swift.’

‘Wait until you see their profile pictures I gave you,’ Baxter said. ‘The passwords to the accounts are in the email.’

‘Thanks, Dennis.’

‘No problem. Let me know if you need anything else.’

‘Will do.’

Hunter ended the call and used his new cyber-identities to log into several different social media sites at the same time.

‘OK,’ he said to himself. ‘Let’s start digging.’