Greg’s phone emitted a discreet chime: notification that there was a new addition to a comments section he had flagged a few hours earlier. The section was attached to an obscure column in an obscurer German newspaper. Greg was stretched out on his couch with a Russian-language edition of Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. The Russian title, Desyat Negrityat, did not match the English even remotely. Greg had no trouble picturing the scandalized reaction in the faculty lounge if he were to translate it back into English. And maybe one day he would: just for the entertainment value. He put the book down with a certain reluctance.
The comment, Greg guessed, would have nothing to do with the subject matter of the column, looking instead like the interjection of some random troll.
‘Stimme für Veränderung,’ it said. ‘Stimmen Sie für die Dialogos-Party.’
Greg, who neither read nor spoke German, had no idea what the message said. But he didn’t need to. It contained the one word he was looking for: ‘Dialogos’.
TORquil was ready for him.
Desyat Negrityat forgotten, Greg seized his laptop and plunged into the dark web. Knowing full well that TORquil wouldn’t be in his chatroom, Greg didn’t bother with it, heading instead to a virtual drop box. He entered the required password and opened it up.
It was loaded with gigabytes of data. An almost random mess of documentary files, executable programs, and cookies – emails, texts, and social media posts. The data went on and on, pouring across Greg’s screen in a torrent of mostly meaningless file names.
The contents of Lindsay Delcade’s phone.
With a sigh, Greg downloaded the contents. This was work for nerds, not one-eyed, middle-aged has-beens. It would take months to read through everything on the woman’s phone. Months he didn’t have. He scrolled through page after page of file titles, looking for something he could recognize – and that could be opened with accessible software. A few things caught his eye. But even then, it still took him the best part of an hour to track down the various apps he needed to read them.
Lindsay Delcade, it turned out, was an inveterate poster on social media. Much of it was political and to the right of the spectrum: a lot of stuff about the evils of unrestricted immigration; the threat to civil liberty posed by gun control; and, on the morning of her death, a long post about defeating the gay agenda. What wasn’t political was mostly about her family. Or rather, about her daughter. The male Delcades featured hardly at all. Vicki Delcade, on the other hand, was everywhere. Onstage at a downtown theater, helping out at Habitat for Humanity, standing with her mother on the imposing steps of the Stayard College library. This last picture provoked a raised eyebrow from Greg Abimbola. There was Vicki, with her mother’s arm draped over her shoulder, the two of them smiling at the camera, the redbrick temple of the Stayard Library as stately background. Mother and daughter on a college tour.
But if you looked closely at Vicki’s waist, you could just about make out a hand that belonged to neither mother nor daughter. The hand of a man who must have been standing on Vicki’s other side, embracing her with equal affection.
Lindsay Delcade had made the conscious effort to crop her husband out of the shot.
Filing the observation away, Greg moved on to Lindsay Delcade’s texts, of which there were literally thousands. Greg scanned only those from the previous Monday. Swamped in garbage characters, they were difficult to figure out. And even when he did, the texts turned out to be mostly short and often incomprehensible: continuations of conversations being conducted by other means. The last one, a text to her daughter about tutoring, took place at seven thirty-seven p.m. A time frame that didn’t help Andrea Velasquez at all. It had been sent forty-two minutes before the assistant custodian had been filmed leaving the building. More than enough time to stab Lindsay Delcade to death with an oversized screwdriver.
Tiring from the effort of plowing through so much electronic data, Greg skipped what looked to be a mountain of emails and dipped into Lindsay Delcade’s rideshare accounts instead.
‘Gotcha.’ He said the word aloud and in English.
Lindsay Delcade’s phone contained a last rideshare receipt. ‘Jamal’, the proud owner of a 2021 Ford Escape SUV, license number KGB 91076, had picked Lindsay Delcade up from her home in Fox Chapel at seven fifty-six on Monday evening. He had dropped her off at the back of the school, in Dean Close, at eight twenty-seven p.m.
A full eight minutes after Andrea Velasquez’s departure.