by Inger Wolf
Ten minutes later, she needed a cup of coffee. She was worried; nothing had shown up from the .pst file. Either there were no emails, or else the folders had been compressed.
It was time for a plan B. She fished around in a drawer and brought out an old, badly fragmented hard drive. If she couldn't figure this out, they would need outside help, which would be expensive. They'd sent data too difficult for them to recover out of the country before, and usually, it took a week to get it back. She'd have to discuss that with her boss if necessary. Again, she stared at the screen; intuition told her something had been there. She installed the hard drive, started the recovery program to search for a range of data, and crossed her fingers.
She stood up to clear her head, then she walked over to Forensics to talk to Kurt Tønnies.
"Have you found anything?"
Normally, all evidence was sent to Forensics in Copenhagen, which was a part of the NIC, National Investigations Center. They had more than enough nerds there to find new creative ways of extracting information from evidence.
"Nothing important. The bastard must've used a nail brush on her. Maybe even a vacuum cleaner, that's how little we found. We did find a few fibers, but we can't know if they're from the clothes she was wearing. Her friend and the woman in the apartment above her said she usually ran in a T-shirt and bicycle shorts, nothing special. We also found two cigarette butts not far from her, two yellow Kings. They couldn't find any DNA on them though, so at the moment they're not much use to us. You'd hope they came from the killer, but it doesn't make sense. He does all that work setting up and practically sterilizing the crime scene, then he smokes a few cigarettes and leaves the butts behind?"
"He wouldn't be the first to do it," Lisa said. "People aren't even aware they're smoking a cigarette."
She thought about Tony Hansen. He rolled his own. Tønnies sighed and rubbed his eyes. Lisa guessed he hadn't slept last night. The techs were work addicts; they could run for days on black coffee. "What about the hair Trokic found on the necklace?"
"We put it under the microscope; it's definitely not Anna Kiehl's. So, we sent it out for a DNA analysis, which could easily be a waste of money. It could have come from anybody."
"And the apartment?"
"Nothing there either. Most of the fingerprints were from the boy."
Lisa thought about the three-year-old boy in the apartment, how he had woken up alone. Was he still in shock?
"And, of course, her fingerprints are there too," he said. "And a few others. My guess is they belong to the manager, the woman above, her friend, others who visited her sometimes."
Lisa shook her head. "Thanks. I'd better get back to the computer."
He squeezed her arm and gently nudged her out the door.
While the recovery program worked in the background, she had a look at the websites that had been visited on the computer. Hundreds of sites in the program folders showed her internet habits: Google, Danish television stations, net radio, district government pages, library, daycare, weather, net doctor, a few bands, anthropology organizations both foreign and domestic, research results in English and French from foreign universities in a number of disciplines. Anthropology, ethnology, archaeology, microbiology, neurochemistry, cultural history, sociology.
Lisa sighed and grabbed a bag of Brazil nuts from out of a drawer. Flossy's favorite nuts. Hers too. They crunched when she bit into them, and they were filling.
Nothing on the computer looked helpful. Apart from the empty trash and an empty email program, Anna Kiehl appeared to be a very normal human being.
"Find anything?" Jasper pulled up a chair and sat beside her.
"No. That's the strange thing about it."
"Nothing in the trash?"
"No." She briefly explained the Outlook procedure. "Since I can't find the emails that way, I have to search for text fragments."
She pointed at the program on the screen, which had finished now. "Computers store data, which isn't used again until needed. That goes for emails and everything else written on them. So, it's only the shortcut to a file that gets deleted at first, you could say. But if it was deleted a long time ago, and with a tiny old hard drive like this one, it might have been overwritten and is gone forever. And it's like someone tossed a bomb in her hard drive, it's that fragmented."
She pulled her chair closer to the screen. "Okay, so the recovery program has gone through all the data on her hard drive. Let's see if we can find any emails. I'll search for her address, that would be part of any email."
She typed it in a search bar. "Now, it'll find everything deleted that has the address."
It took only a fraction of a second for the machine to find one hundred and two results.
"Aha!"
"That's a lot.”
“Not really. The last time I searched my own computer, just out of curiosity, I found over eleven thousand fragments with my email address. But this shows she actually did use her address on this computer."
She clicked on the first result.
