DM for Murder

by Matt Bendoris

  The first inkling Geoffrey had that there was something wrong was when the local sheriff pulled up outside his home just after 7am the next morning.

  ‘Are you Geoffrey Schroeder?’ the sheriff asked in a slow drawl.

  ‘Yeah, what appears to be the problem, sir?’ Geoffrey replied respectfully, as he had never been in trouble with the law before nor ever intended to be.

  ‘You mind if I come inside, Geoffrey?’ the cop said in his most soothing manner.

  The sheriff had remained standing as he delivered the news: Carol-Ann was dead. But there was more, she had died in mysterious circumstances in a motel room.

  ‘Was ma girl having an affair?’ he asked the cop.

  ‘No, Geoffrey, she was having an abortion,’ the sheriff replied grimly.

  Geoffrey felt like he’d been kicked in the stomach. He hadn’t even known she was pregnant and that he was to be a first-time dad. He’d thought she was just putting on weight and used to gently tease her about it. He slumped down on the couch, his head spinning, before vomiting on the floor.

  ‘There’s more, Geoffrey. The procedure was carried out by a doctor. You may or may not know that late-term abortions are illegal in the state of Missouri – and she was very late.’

  ‘How late?’ Geoffrey asked in a daze.

  ‘Almost eight months,’ the cop said, lowering his eyes to the ground.

  ‘What was the “procedure”?’ Geoffrey asked, drawing out the word as if it was poison.

  ‘I don’t know if you should hear this part,’ the sheriff replied, before Geoffrey urged him to continue. ‘The doctor had stuck a needle into Carol-Ann’s belly to inject a drug directly into the baby’s heart to stop it beating. After that, she was supposed to give a stillbirth delivery over the weekend. But something went wrong, Geoffrey. Very wrong.’

  The cop kept talking, but Geoffrey could barely concentrate, hearing only the odd key word like, ‘morgue’, ‘autopsy’ and ‘identification’.

  Eventually the sheriff drove off, leaving Geoffrey with only grief that soon turned to anger. That had been just over a decade ago. Over the years, Geoffrey had joined various pro-life protest groups. He had picketed the abortion clinic where the doctor worked and harassed the man he considered had murdered his wife-to-be and unborn son.

  Under Missouri law, aborting a viable foetus – i.e. one that is capable of surviving outside the womb – is only permissible when two independent medical experts agree that the mother’s health could be impaired. The doctor had escaped all charges relating to Carol-Ann’s death and the illegal abortion after another complicit medic, who happened to be a fellow director at the same practice, had countersigned all the necessary forms.

  While the doctor walked free, Geoffrey was left to brandish gruesome placards outside the clinic depicting dissected foetuses. He would sometimes vandalise staff cars or glue the locks on gates and doors. But it all seemed so futile. For every day the clinic would continue to operate its business of mass infanticide no matter how uncomfortable he made life for the medics. Geoffrey began to drift away from the pro-life groups. He became tired of their constant chanting and talking. He had never been much of a talker. He was more of a doer.

  However, one man would become the new focus of Geoffrey’s obsessions – Bryce Horrigan. Geoffrey would watch the TV host with the plummy British accent talking about his pro-choice views – how all women should have the right for late terminations. Well, Carol-Ann had made her choice. She chose to get rid of his unborn child without telling him. It turned out she planned to leave him for another man. Her ‘choice’ had cost Carol-Ann her life. People needed to know that with choice came great responsibilities. Or repercussions.

  Geoffrey had already caught the attention of law enforcement agencies. Then there were the explosives that had once been found in his car. He had dodged that rap on a legal technicality. But intelligence reports branded him as a dangerous loner, and ‘one to watch’.

  The authorities had kept tabs on him. But three weeks before Bryce Horrigan was shot dead, Geoffrey Schroeder went completely off the radar.

  8 #MysteryCaller

  BBC News @BBCNews

  US police confirm they are treating the sudden death of television presenter @BryceTripleB as homicide.

  ‘Who is this?’ Captain Sorrell demanded as he answered Horrigan’s iPhone, which he held in his latex-gloved hand to make sure he didn’t contaminate a potentially important exhibit. Bryce had long since ditched Connor’s contact details so it was just a random phone number that flashed up on the screen.

  ‘It’s Connor Presley. I’m a reporter from Scotland.’

  ‘Well, this is Captain Sorrell of Baltimore Homicide. Call my press department. I’m trying to run an investigation here,’ the irritated detective responded.

  ‘So it’s true, then?’ Connor asked.

  ‘Yeah, it’s true, and now your time is up,’ Sorrell said abruptly, wrapping up the call.

  ‘Of course. But you have my number on Bryce’s phone now if I can be of help,’ Connor said, trying to keep the cop on line as long as possible.

  ‘Yeah, you and every other person who’s called.’

  Connor detected a slight softening in the weary detective’s tone. ‘If you don’t mind me asking, why did you answer my call?’ he asked politely.

  Sorrell sighed heavily. ‘Because your name didn’t flash up. Just a number. Yours and two others.’

  ‘Who were the others, captain?’ Connor asked, sensing he was onto something.

  ‘Wouldn’t I love to know. They hung up,’ Sorrell snorted.

  ‘Listen, I worked with Bryce back on his first paper in Scotland. So if there’s anything you need to know…’ Connor said helpfully.

  ‘We’ll see,’ Sorrell drawled, before the line went dead.

  9 #FacingTheMusic

  ABT News @ABTNews

  Baltimore Police Dept. will give press conference over the homicide of TV star @BryceTripleB @ 11am EST.

  Captain Sorrell was already dog tired when he was told he would be facing the world’s media just six hours after he’d first been to the crime scene.

  The corpse was at the city morgue, where, just as in life, Bryce received the VIP treatment, jumping to the head of the autopsy queue in front of the other suspicious deaths from the previous night.

  Sorrell felt he hadn’t even begun his investigation proper yet. Media outlets were already flagging up the numerous death threats Horrigan had received via his Twitter account. Many had been so serious in the past that Bryce’s employers had called in the authorities. This concerned Sorrell’s boss, Colonel Cowan, immensely.

  ‘We need to get a team ploughing through these threats right now,’ Cowan said. ‘We also need to find out the ones who have been questioned before by police. This is going to be a logistical nightmare.’

  Sorrell wasn’t sure. Even stranger killers didn’t normally notify their victims first. Mark Chapman gave little away when in 1980 he asked for John Lennon’s autograph before he shot him dead a few hours later outside the Dakota building in New York. Sorrell decided to keep his own counsel on the matter.

  He took his place at the press conference next to Colonel Cowan. His boss was a natural in front of the camera and clearly enjoyed it. Rumour was, Cowan had aspirations to run for office. Sorrell, on the other hand, would be a policeman until the day he died or retired, whichever came first. He didn’t like dealing with the press. As far as he was concerned, journalists were a nuisance who got in the way of his job.

  Most of the questions were about Twitter. It all sounded like French to Sorrell. Retweets. Favourites. Were there any DMs – direct messages?

  Did they know how the crime scene photo had been posted from Bryce Horrigan’s own account?

  Had his account been hacked?

  Had it been sent from his own iPhone
?

  Was it a real crime scene photo?

  Were police investigating the thousands of Twitter-related death threats?

  Why had Bryce been in town?

  Sorrell sat bored, staring into the middle distance while his boss partially answered and deflected the questions as he saw fit before reluctantly calling a halt to the conference – no performer likes to step off the stage.

  Afterwards Colonel Cowan warned Sorrell in private, ‘We better get answers to those questions soon.’ By ‘we’, Sorrell knew Cowan meant ‘he’ had to get the answers soon.

  ‘Haye, get in here,’ Sorrell said, summoning his lieutenant into his office. ‘Right, explain to me how a dead man tweets his own murder scene.’

  10 #BluePill

  Bryce Horrigan’s New York office was almost in complete silence – except for the muffled sounds from the city below – when his computer screen flickered into life. The gentle hum of the cooling fans began to whirr on the late presenter’s PC as its processors kicked into life. Moments later, the monitor lit up with the log in screen. The username ‘BHorrigan’ was typed in followed by the password in the space below.

  But there was no one tapping on his keyboard, or anyone even in Horrigan’s office. The PC was being accessed remotely, via a securely connected tunnel that had been proxied through half a dozen ‘zombie’ machines from North Korea, Russia, Georgia and North Africa before accessing Bryce’s office computer. It was a complicated procedure used by hackers and government agencies across the globe. But these days at least 200 ‘off the shelf’ programs, with zany names such as ‘I Spy’ and ‘Hide My Ass’, are instantly available to download for free, meaning you no longer have to be a computer whizz-kid to become a hacker.

  All that’s required is a ‘Trojan’ application inadvertently opened by an unsuspecting user receiving a phishing email, usually enticing them with the offer of free porn. Once accessed, the program is hidden deep within their computer. Although the zombie machines need to be switched on and connected to the Internet to be used by the hacker’s command and control program, there are so many hidden Trojans undetected by anti-virus software on computers that the program just bounces around until it finds a ‘live’ machine. Then it hops to the next country and the next before ending up at its intended target. The process leaves the hacker’s IP address 100 per cent masked.

  Bryce Horrigan’s infected PC had been powered up remotely using a ‘Wake-on-LAN’ application. Normally, the rogue software would almost instantly be detected by the daily anti-virus sweep carried out automatically by the IT department at ABT News. However, a nearly undetectable root kit called the ‘blue pill’ – a hacker’s geeky reference to The Matrix film – had been installed on Bryce’s computer, rendering it completely and inconspicuously at the hacker’s disposal. It meant that the hacker could not only power it up, usually in the early hours of the morning when they knew the office was likely to be empty, but could use the system as fully as if they were sitting at Horrigan’s keyboard.

  After successfully logging on to Horrigan’s computer, the mysterious user accessed his Twitter account then tapped out another tweet:

  Bryce Horrigan @BryceTripleB

  Hello everyone. This is what the baby killer looks like begging for his life. #TerrorFace

  The cursor then moved to the camera icon and uploaded one of the crime scene photos that had been stored earlier on the desktop of Bryce’s PC. Moments later, the picture was attached to the tweet and sent. His ten million followers instantly received a new post – with the picture showing Bryce Horrigan’s expression of abject horror right before he was shot at almost point-blank range.

  11 #RoundTwo

  Daily Chronicle @DailyChronicle

  BREAKING NEWS Gruesome pic of murdered TV host’s last moments posted from HIS Twitter account.

  By staff reporter

  A PHOTO thought to be taken moments before Bryce Horrigan was shot dead has been posted from the murdered TV star’s Twitter account.

  The gruesome image shows the Scots-born presenter clearly in distress.

  It appears to be from his Baltimore hotel room, where he was found dead from multiple gunshot wounds.

  But in a chilling new twist, the photo was posted from Horrigan’s own Twitter account – possibly by his murderer.

  It read: ‘Hello everyone. This is what the baby killer looks like begging for his life. #TerrorFace’

  Authorities in America are trying to establish whether the 45-year-old broadcaster’s Twitter account was hacked – or if his password was known to his killer.

  An insider said: ‘This tweet has been a bombshell to the homicide investigation.

  ‘It’s as if the hacker is goading the police and they appear to be powerless to stop it.’

  ***

  ‘Sorrell,’ Colonel Cowan shouted almost at the top of his voice, sending the heads of staff ducking down beneath their computer screens for cover.

  The captain appeared, falling in behind Cowan as he marched to his private office, before the door was slammed behind them. It was the quickest anyone had seen Sorrell move in years.

  The colonel threw his weight into his chair and tapped on his keyboard, bringing up the tweet sent from Bryce Horrigan’s account.

  ‘This is the second picture from MY crime scene. Are we no closer to finding out how it’s being sent?’

  ‘We’re trying to work out how, colonel. The killer could have hacked his Twitter account.’

  ‘I am fed up hearing “could have” done this, “might have” done that. Answers, Captain Sorrell. That’s what I’m after. Get every IT expert we have to find out how he’s doing it.’

  The colonel returned to his screen without saying another word. Sorrell headed for the door thinking to himself, I guess the meeting’s over.

  12 #DeadManTalking

  Bryce Horrigan @BryceTripleB

  Thanks for all your tweets folks, but don’t act so surprised. #IDeservedIt

  It was followed a minute later by:

  Bryce Horrigan @BryceTripleB

  Someone needs to protect the innocents. #BabyKiller

  Connor showed the tweets to April, who adopted the fixed smile that he knew only too well, which meant she didn’t have the slightest idea what was going on.

  ‘It’s so weird to read tweets from a dead man,’ Connor said, returning to his keyboard to rattle out the Bryce Horrigan ‘copy’ for what would appear online for the Daily Chronicle in a matter of minutes and form the basis for the next day’s newsprint splash.

  ‘It’s not really Bryce. He’s dead, of course,’ Connor added, seeing that April’s fixed smile expression was starting to morph into one of total confusion. ‘Someone has hacked his account and is sending tweets and photos. It’s cocky as hell. A bit like the real Bryce.’

  ‘How on earth can they do that?’ April asked in genuine amazement.

  ‘I honestly don’t know. But it’s a safe bet the US authorities will be trying to work that out right now. However the hacker’s doing it, they’re confident enough they won’t get caught,’ Connor explained.

  ‘And what’s all this “baby killer” stuff? What am I missing?’ April asked.

  ‘About six months ago Bryce started banging the drum for the pro-choice groups in America. It’s totally alien to us, but in the States abortion is still a big issue. He clearly liked the publicity, so he really ramped it up, getting anti-abortion lobbyists on his show and basically shouting at them.

  ‘The liberal showbiz lot loved him for it. All the actors he got on his talk show at night would praise him for his stance – without going as far as endorsing his view, of course, in case it wrecked their careers. It gave Bryce huge kudos. And as you’ll remember, Bryce liked kudos. But it also earned him some serious death threats. He was taking one hell of a risk. Which is weird because, for all his fault
s, he was one smart bastard. But he was almost goading the nutters to take a pot shot at him.’

  ‘Which they duly obliged,’ April replied glibly.

  ‘Yeah, so it would seem. Anyway, the newsdesk already has someone hitting his folks’ house; why don’t you try Pasty? Remember her?’

  ‘No,’ April said truthfully.

  ‘Pasty Tolan. Bryce’s girlfriend. She’d always turn up at our nights out,’ Connor said, dropping in the clues until he saw that familiar flicker of recognition.

  ‘Ah, Pasty – the very pale girl. Posh voice. Torn-faced,’ April said, pleased with her powers of recall.

  ‘Yeah, she was in public relations. Went out with Bryce for years. Moved to London with him until… well, his head was turned. She’s back in Scotland now with her own firm,’ Connor explained.

  ‘Pasty Public Relations has a certain ring to it,’ April said, giggling at her own joke.

  ‘She’s probably used her actual name, Patricia Tolan, I think you’ll find. Right, go and clear it with Big Fergie.’

  Big Fergie was the acting news editor after the sudden departure of their last boss, the Weasel. He was named Big Fergie as he looked uncannily like a fat version of Manchester United’s legendary manager, Alex Ferguson.

  ‘Pasty will be a great hit. Might be a good one to get in the bag for a day two follow-up. All that “I’ve lost the love of my life” crap you’re good at,’ Connor added, thinking in headlines. Like many journalists he had been taught to work a story backwards with the belief that a decent headline was the foundation to every good article.

  Connor was buzzing with the adrenalin that came with working on a big, breaking news story. And they didn’t get much bigger than this.

  13 #Taunting

  Bryce Horrigan @BryceTripleB

  Have the Keystone Cops caught my killer yet? #CluelessCops

  ‘So we still don’t know even which country these tweets are being sent from?’ Sorrell was exasperated, trying to grasp this new tech.