The Night Stalker

Thirty

The first thing Hunter did when he and Garcia got back to Parker Center was get a copy of all the photographs taken at Laura Mitchell’s exhibition to Brian Doyle, the IT Unit supervisor at ITD. Hunter knew that potentially every single person in those pictures was a suspect, but his immediate interest was in identifying the stranger who’d swapped phone numbers with Laura. The photograph Hunter had flagged showed a clear enough image of the stranger’s face to allow Doyle to blow it up and run it against the unified police database.

‘That laptop you called about earlier,’ Doyle said as he transferred all of the pictures to his hard drive, ‘the one that was sent to us by Missing Persons about two weeks ago, belonging to. .’ He started searching his messy desk.

‘Laura Mitchell,’ Hunter confirmed. ‘That’s her in those pictures.’

‘Oh, OK. Anyway, we bypassed her password.’

‘What? Already?’

‘We’re fantastic, what can I say?’ Doyle smiled and Hunter pulled a face. ‘We ran a simple algorithm application against it. Her password was just a combination of the first few letters of her family name and her date of birth. Now, you said you needed to have a look at her emails?’

‘That’s right. Her mother said she’d received a few fan emails that’d scared her.’

‘Well, that won’t be easy, I’m afraid. The email application on her computer was never used,’ Doyle explained, ‘which means she didn’t download emails, she simply read them online. We checked the computer registry, and at least there she was smart. She never said “yes” when the operating system asked her if she wanted the computer to remember her password every time she logged onto her email online. Her Internet history was also automatically deleted every ten days.’

‘Her email password ain’t the same as her computer’s?’

A quick headshake.

‘How about this algorithm application you ran on her PC?’

‘It won’t work online. Internet security against email account attacks has gotten a lot tougher over the years. All the major email service providers lock you out for several hours, sometimes indefinitely if you try a certain number of incorrect passwords.’ Doyle shook his head again. ‘Also, if she didn’t keep these emails in her account, I mean, if she deleted them after she read them, which is probable since you said they scared her, then the chances of retrieving the full message is basically zero. Unless you find the email provider where the message originated from, the best you gonna get are fragments. And you’ll have to go straight to her provider — Autonet. We can’t do shit from here. You know what that means, right? Warrants and court orders and what have you. Plus, you can be searching for days, weeks. . who knows. . and still get zip.’

Hunter ran a hand over his face.

‘I have people going over the rest of the files on her hard drive now. I’ll let you know if we come across anything.’