65 #BalTaMoore

Tom O’Neill @DerryDude1887

Coffee time?

Connor was about to give April a quick call when he received a DM from Tom O’Neill asking if he fancied a coffee since they were both in town. Connor immediately replied how he’d rather it was a beer, but since they still had work to do they arranged to meet at a city centre Starbucks.

Tom was no longer the fresh-faced lad Connor remembered from their brief time working together in London. In the intervening decade he had aged badly. He looked old beyond his years, with a grey complexion to match his greying hair.

‘Good to see you, Tom,’ Connor said truthfully.

Tom gave him an equally warm welcome. ‘Bloody hell, Elvis, I didn’t think the next time we met would be in Baltimore,’ Tom replied, with the word ‘Baltimore’ sounding more like ‘Bal-ta-moore’ in his thick Northern Irish accent, which had lost none of its strength over the years.

‘Yeah, of all the places Bryce could have ended up dead.’ Connor’s remark rendered them both silent for a moment.

‘I know. What a way to go. Someone certainly wanted him gone, that’s for sure.’

‘Do you know why he was here?’

‘No, not yet. No one does. We’ve got the IT guys at the network going through all his old emails. But Bryce did most of his really private communications by DMs,’ Tom said in hushed conspiratorial tones. ‘Have you met the detective in charge yet? A real hard ass, but a little bit of a plod. Slow on the uptake, I reckon,’ Tom added a little arrogantly – a trait that had probably rubbed off from his former boss.

Tom was right about Sorrell being a hard ass, but Connor would never have described the police captain as slow, even if he spoke in a lazy drawl. He decided to keep his own counsel about Sorrell.

‘You okay if I do this up as a story? “TV bosses baffled by Bryce’s trip to Baltimore”, “Urgent email trawl”, that kind of thing? It’s not great, but it justifies me being here.’ Connor was asking out of politeness as he would have written and filed his copy even without O’Neill’s approval.

‘Sure, just keep my name out of it for now though, will you?’ Tom pleaded. ‘I am technically still employed by ABT News and I can’t be seen to be briefing the press.’

‘No problem,’ Connor said, meaning it this time. ‘How long are you hanging around?’

‘A few days, max. Probably until they release his body. Or what’s left of it. Definitely won’t be an open casket,’ O’Neill said glumly. Again the mention of Bryce’s death left them momentarily silent.

‘Have they been able to track who posted the crime scene pictures yet?’ Connor asked.

‘Nope. They haven’t even traced all the death threats, either,’ O’Neill revealed, before leaning closer to speak quietly again. There was hardly any need as normal talking voices struggled to be heard above the din of coffee machines and constant chatter from customers. ‘That’s where they’ll find the killer. You got to have seen the shit – literally – that used to get posted through the mail to the office. He had the fire-and-brimstone religious nuts on his case. But it was the pro-life lot who were making subtle enquiries about Bryce’s whereabouts, where he lived, where he liked to eat and drink. They were the really scary ones. Put it this way, it spooked Bryce enough that he actually started changing his habits in the last month. He would take a different route home. Never go to the same restaurant twice. And as you know, Bryce didn’t spook easily.’ Connor made a mental note to include that nugget of information in his copy, too.

‘Any names I should check out?’ Connor asked.

‘Bloody hell, where do I begin? I’d say there were about half a dozen that we were keeping a close eye on.’ O’Neill checked his iPhone, then jotted down some names on a piece of paper. The last on his list was @GeoffreySchroeder.

‘That should keep you busy,’ O’Neill beamed.

‘Did you give these to Captain Sorrell?’ Connor asked.

‘Nah, we reporters have to keep some info to ourselves, don’t we?’

Connor thought O’Neill’s response was strange. Every reporter may be hungry for an exclusive, but most wouldn’t withhold crucial information from a murder enquiry.

‘Look, Elvis, I shouldn’t be telling you this and you have to promise me you won’t print this. Promise?’

‘Promise,’ Connor said reassuringly.

‘Bryce’s Twitter account was hacked a few weeks before his death. He only found out when one of his DMs had been read when he knew he definitely hadn’t clicked on it.’

‘Did he report it?’ Connor asked.

‘Only to me. He said somebody was spying on him, I told him to change his password. He was hopeless at Internet security. He’d always use the same password if he could get away with it. His office system made him change it every month and he’d write the new one down on a piece of paper in his top drawer, for Christ’s sake. Figured it was safe because he was the only one with keys to his office, which was true. But Twitter and Facebook don’t keep asking you to change passwords. So he never did until his account had been compromised.’

‘Did you set up his new password?’ Connor asked.

‘No, he wasn’t that stupid. He loved his Twitter account – he had a string of women on the go, sending him DMs all the time. He wouldn’t trust anyone with that information. I reckon if someone wanted to find out where Bryce was going to be – in order to bump him off – all the clues would be in those DMs.’ O’Neill leaned up straight again to finish the last sip of his skinny caffè mocha.

‘Or in order to set him up? But that would have had to come from someone he knew.’ Connor mulled it over, finishing his latte.

‘His murderer is in those tweets, Elvis. Just ignore the obvious “I’m going to kill you” ones and concentrate on those who were looking for Bryce’s whereabouts. That’ll lead to your man,’ O’Neill said before settling the bill with a smile. ‘I’ll pay while I still have an expense account.’ They agreed they’d meet later on for a beer.

But before he went Connor suddenly had a thought. ‘Is his body being repatriated to Scotland?’ he asked, knowing a picture of the coffin leaving for home would make the front page.

O’Neill gave a wry smile. ‘Yeah, it will be, eventually. I’ll tip you off. For fuck’s sake Elvis, you never switch off, do you?’

Connor smiled back. ‘Bryce would have done the exact same thing.’

Now the talking was over, Connor had some serious Twitter trawling to do.