Read Online The Man of Maybe Half-a-Dozen Faces by Ray Vukcevich - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Ray Vukcevich
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chose next), so he could get up now and skip number 2.
He got up and walked over and sat down behind computer number 3. Now the information we needed would be on computer number 1.
He got up and walked out to the front office and sat down behind number 1. He switched on the computer and started in on the files.
A half an hour later, we decided the universe had not been fooled by our little game of musical chairs. There was nothing but routine day-to-day outer office stuff on the hard drive of computer number 1. Dennis turned if off and walked back into the inner office.
Just pick one, we told him, and he walked to the computer on the right (number 3) without further debate.
There was some interesting stuff on this oneâGerald Moffittâs machine as it turned out, technical stuff and personal stuff. Dennis had a lot of experience looking at the organization of information on hard drives, and it soon became clear to him that there were some holes in Geraldâs stuffâsections ripped out. Hastily ripped out as if someone were scanning files, maybe copying stuff, and then erasing what theyâd read. For instance, Gerald had kept a directory for important e-mail organized by date. But there were dates missing, and some of the existing subdirectories were empty.
My Sky side popped up and offered the theory that the big guy in the foreign shoes had been in the process of searching and trashing Geraldâs hard drive when weâd surprised him.
So what had he missed? Well, there was no e-mail subdirectory for the day of the murder. None for the day before either. And so on back to five days before the murder. But there was a place for e-mail six days before the murder. Dennis opened it up. There were three messages. Dennis figured that meant the big guy had been here, too. Who gets just three pieces of e-mail a day? No one. So Mr. Cheap Suit may well have been poking around in that very directory when we interrupted him.
Dennis jumped into the mail program so he could see e-mail by sender address and subject line, switched over to the day in question and spotted something interesting right away.
The subject of the middle message of the three messages received six days before the murder was WARNING! The sender was [email protected].
We opened it up.
The message read, âThis is your next to last warning, Gerald Moffitt!â It was signed SOAPY.
It was from the loose screw who claimed to have posted a picture of Geraldâs body on the Web.
If SOAPY had been threatening Gerald before the murder, it made his claims a lot more plausible. But there was still something screwy about the warning. Then we got it. How did SOAPY know this would be the ânext to last warning?â Didnât people just say âThis is your last warning!â Even if they had to say it a dozen times? Had SOAPY planned to issue a fixed number of warnings and then kill Gerald anyway? And what was he warning Gerald about? And where was his last warning? Maybe heâd killed Gerald with no last warning.
Also puzzling was the fact that if the police had this information why were they still so hot to grab Pablo? Could they have missed this? Unlikely. Another puzzle for our list of puzzles in this case.
Dennis copied the letter onto a floppy. The only other interesting thing on Geraldâs machine was a file called DATAPANTS. Besides the name, of course, the neat thing about this file was that it was encrypted. Dennis loved encrypted files. He copied the DATAPANTS file onto the floppy with the warning from SOAPY and put the floppy in his shirt pocket. Then he erased both the warning from SOAPY and the DATAPANTS file. Why make things easy for Mr. Sucker Punch if he decided to come back to finish up?
Dennis turned off Geraldâs computer and switched over to the one on the other desk.
We were making progress!
That sudden burst of enthusiasm was a flash in the pan. Even with this new information, I felt an old
He got up and walked over and sat down behind computer number 3. Now the information we needed would be on computer number 1.
He got up and walked out to the front office and sat down behind number 1. He switched on the computer and started in on the files.
A half an hour later, we decided the universe had not been fooled by our little game of musical chairs. There was nothing but routine day-to-day outer office stuff on the hard drive of computer number 1. Dennis turned if off and walked back into the inner office.
Just pick one, we told him, and he walked to the computer on the right (number 3) without further debate.
There was some interesting stuff on this oneâGerald Moffittâs machine as it turned out, technical stuff and personal stuff. Dennis had a lot of experience looking at the organization of information on hard drives, and it soon became clear to him that there were some holes in Geraldâs stuffâsections ripped out. Hastily ripped out as if someone were scanning files, maybe copying stuff, and then erasing what theyâd read. For instance, Gerald had kept a directory for important e-mail organized by date. But there were dates missing, and some of the existing subdirectories were empty.
My Sky side popped up and offered the theory that the big guy in the foreign shoes had been in the process of searching and trashing Geraldâs hard drive when weâd surprised him.
So what had he missed? Well, there was no e-mail subdirectory for the day of the murder. None for the day before either. And so on back to five days before the murder. But there was a place for e-mail six days before the murder. Dennis opened it up. There were three messages. Dennis figured that meant the big guy had been here, too. Who gets just three pieces of e-mail a day? No one. So Mr. Cheap Suit may well have been poking around in that very directory when we interrupted him.
Dennis jumped into the mail program so he could see e-mail by sender address and subject line, switched over to the day in question and spotted something interesting right away.
The subject of the middle message of the three messages received six days before the murder was WARNING! The sender was [email protected].
We opened it up.
The message read, âThis is your next to last warning, Gerald Moffitt!â It was signed SOAPY.
It was from the loose screw who claimed to have posted a picture of Geraldâs body on the Web.
If SOAPY had been threatening Gerald before the murder, it made his claims a lot more plausible. But there was still something screwy about the warning. Then we got it. How did SOAPY know this would be the ânext to last warning?â Didnât people just say âThis is your last warning!â Even if they had to say it a dozen times? Had SOAPY planned to issue a fixed number of warnings and then kill Gerald anyway? And what was he warning Gerald about? And where was his last warning? Maybe heâd killed Gerald with no last warning.
Also puzzling was the fact that if the police had this information why were they still so hot to grab Pablo? Could they have missed this? Unlikely. Another puzzle for our list of puzzles in this case.
Dennis copied the letter onto a floppy. The only other interesting thing on Geraldâs machine was a file called DATAPANTS. Besides the name, of course, the neat thing about this file was that it was encrypted. Dennis loved encrypted files. He copied the DATAPANTS file onto the floppy with the warning from SOAPY and put the floppy in his shirt pocket. Then he erased both the warning from SOAPY and the DATAPANTS file. Why make things easy for Mr. Sucker Punch if he decided to come back to finish up?
Dennis turned off Geraldâs computer and switched over to the one on the other desk.
We were making progress!
That sudden burst of enthusiasm was a flash in the pan. Even with this new information, I felt an old
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