TUNA LIFE (31 page)

Andrew grabbed the car keys, and left the office. There was no point staying. He wouldn’t find Frank there.

The trip to Nimbin had been waste of time, but he couldn’t give up. If Frank was still in Australia, then he was most likely in Nimbin. Andrew was sure of it. But how was he going to be able to find him? He only had one opportunity left. He needed to figure out why Frank had used the Tuna Life app to spy on that journalist from the Gold Coast Times, the colleague of the one who was now in the hospital with life-threatening injuries from a mugging. If Fabian was right, the app had also been used to access the mobile phone of that girl – Marissa Soo, he remembered her name was, of whom an arm and a foot had washed up on the beach at the Spit a few months back.

There had to be a connection.

Andrew had also witnessed something strange the last time he went to Nimbin to search for Frank. He had recognised a person entering the Hemp Embassy, and he had followed him. The person had met up with what looked like some pretty shady people, people you wouldn’t expect him to associate with.

The person had been Scott Davis, Mark Moss’ colleague, the arrogant prick who had dumped Andrew at the restaurant when they were supposed to do an interview.

It couldn’t be a coincidence that Scott had been in Nimbin at the same time as he.

Was Scott Davis also looking for Frank?

Was he having the same suspicions as Andrew? That Frank could be involved in the disappearance of all these girls?

Andrew keyed in the number to the Gold Coast Times, and asked for Scott Davis’ mobile number.

67

Scott was still sitting in front of the computer in his wife’s old home office when the first sunrays hit his face. He had fallen asleep in the office chair. He rose, and stretched his arms. His entire body hurt. He pulled off his shirt, and tossed it in one of the corners of the office. His trousers and socks soon followed. He walked out into the kitchen and poured a big glass of cold water from the tap. It was emptied in one drink.

When he five minutes later was standing in the shower, cold water pelting his face, it all became clear to him. If Heidi Voog had been Roman’s first victim, then there could have been something more than an accidental meeting in a psychologist’s waiting room that triggered the murder. Scott had done a thorough investigation of serial killers a couple of years back. He was writing a piece about Ivan Milat, one of Australia’s worst serial killers. What he had realised was that although Ivan Milat had picked random backpackers as his victims, he had been the exception rather than the rule. It was a general characteristic with serial killers that their first kill had some significance, that it was more important than the others. Sometimes it was someone they had known, someone they had had a relation to, that triggered their blood-thirst.

Scott needed to find out more about Heidi Voog. Who had she been? What had she been doing on the Gold Coast? How had she come in contact with Roman Bezhrev?

Scott had already checked the contact information the Gold Coast Police had. They had an email address and a phone number. Heidi’s mother was dead, and there was no information available about the father or any other blood relatives. Google searches had proven unsuccessful, and Scott felt unsure how he was going to make any progress.

Scott logged into Facebook. It appeared that Heidi Voog still had an active Facebook page. There had of course not been any activity on it since she went missing, but if he found a way to view her private profile, he would also be able to look at any pictures she had uploaded before disappearing. She had disappeared in December 2008, and according to the public profile she had been a member of the social network for five months before being reported missing.

Scott considered his options. He had managed to confirm that Heidi Voog had had a Facebook account when she went missing, but there wasn’t a lot he could do about that now. He couldn’t very well send a friend request to a presumed dead person. And he couldn’t approach Facebook. The company was notorious for the way it protected its users’ data. Scott’s brother, Wayne, had complained that even in murder cases Facebook would attempt to stall and delay any requests for user information.

Scott realised he needed a computer expert. Someone who could hack into Heidi Voog’s Facebook page and extract all the pictures and messages she had uploaded before going missing. The problem was that he didn’t know any computer experts, not anymore. He had worked for thirty-five years on the crime desk of the paper; the few people he knew who were computer-literate were either locked-up or dead.

He looked over at Mark’s mobile phone. Mark had briefly mentioned in conversation that one of his friends was quite good with computers. What was his name again? Pre…Pra…?” It was something Indian. Pradya! Scott grabbed Mark’s phone and started to go through his contacts. But he found no one with the name Pradya. Scott opened up the call log instead. If Pradya was one of Mark’s best friends, then his name should show up in the log as one of the numbers frequently called.

Scott scrolled down the log. He quickly rejected random numbers, without any name assigned to the caller. But all the saved contacts seemed to have nicknames or shorts instead of proper first and last names.

JC, Smiley, Donnie.

Scott scrolled back. Smiley. He was almost certain that Mark had called Pradya for Smiley when they spoke on the phone. He pressed the call button.

Pradya answered the call on the first ring, and agreed to meet at the hospital two hours later.

Scott had just finished the call when his phone rang. It was Andrew Engels, Tuna Life’s CEO. He wanted to catch up for an informal chat, off the record. Scott Davis thought the conversation was strange, but he did have time, so he agreed to meet later in the afternoon.

When Scott spoke to Pradya, he realised the phone call had been bad timing. Scott had initially planned to ask for a favour straight away, but the guy seemed so sad that Scott hadn’t had the heart to ask him over the phone. Instead he had asked if they could meet up at Mark’s room at the hospital. He would ask then, because he desperately needed access to that Facebook account. He had preciously few other leads.

One of those other leads was his wife’s patient journals. Someone had obviously gone through the trouble of removing Heidi Voog’s file from the filing cabinet. They had also ripped out three pages from her day planner: The day she committed suicide, and the previous two days. Had Scott’s wife met Heidi Voog’s killer on one of those days? Was it possible that her suicide was staged, that someone had murdered his wife? Scott Davis had never before entertained the thought. He knew his wife had been struggling with depression. She had told him about her dark thoughts, about the days she just wanted to end it all, to never wake up. He had just presumed that it all had gotten too much one day. That the dark thoughts had finally consumed her, and made her take her own life before remembering all the good things she had in her life – a husband who loved her, a nephew who adored her, patients who were reliant on her.

Those were the thoughts Scott had comforted himself with the first few years. That she hadn’t known what she was doing. That she hadn’t understood how many people she would hurt with her action. If she had written a letter, it would have made her action conscious. A so egoistical action that he didn’t know if he would have ever been able to forgive her.

He could accept that she in a moment of weakness, in a moment of insanity, did what she did. But not conscious. Never conscious.

He had gone through her desk. There was no point going through her computer. That was one of the first things he had done after she died. Trawling her files and folders. Searching for a suicide note, a farewell letter, something.

The thought of going through her day planner had never even crossed his mind.

Pradya Dhagum sat slumped over in a chair next to Mark’s bed. Mark’s parents were down in the cafeteria, getting some food. Scott nodded as he entered the room. Pradya’s bloodshot eyes looked up at him.

“Have you heard anything more from the police? Do they know who did it?”

Scott slowly shook his head. “They don’t have any suspects yet. They say he was just at the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“How long will they keep him in this induced coma?”

“A couple more weeks. They want him to get as much rest as possible before they wake him up.”

“Is he going to be fine?” Pradya asked.

“We won’t know until they wake him. The doctors say it’s fifty-fifty at the moment. It’s impossible to say whether he’s received any permanent brain damage until he wakes up.”

Pradya stared at Scott with the bloodshot eyes. Scott didn’t really know why, but he felt he already knew Pradya. Mark had mentioned his name several times in casual conversation, but that wasn’t it. There was something more. Maybe it was the fact that Pradya reminded Scott of his wife’s cousin. The cousin who worked as a doctor in Canada. The cousin who always worked so hard that he fell asleep in family gatherings.

“I need to ask you a favour,” Scott said. “It’s got to do with the assault on Mark, but I can’t tell you much more at this point in time.”

Pradya’s bloodshot eyes seemed to liven up. “What do you mean? Do you know who did this?”

Scott moved in closer. “I have a theory. At his stage it is just a theory though.”

Pradya looked like he was digesting what Scott had just told him. “You have a theory of who did this to Mark? You need to go to the police, tell them about your theory.”

“I can’t do that yet, Pradya. You saw what happened to Mark when he published his article. I need to confirm that I am on the right track before I approach the police. And in order to do that I need to break the law. If I contact the police now, nothing will happen.”

Pradya nodded. “What do you need me to do?”

“I need you to hack someone’s Facebook account.”

“Is that all? Give me the name and I’ll get it done today.”

Scott studied the Indian, genuinely surprised. His brother, Wayne, had told how he could be waiting for weeks to get access to various social media accounts. This young Indian claimed to be able to get the information in mere hours.

Scott glanced at his phone. He had a missed call from Andrew Engels, the CEO of Tuna Life whom he had agreed to catch up with later in the afternoon. Scott listened to the message, but became no wiser. Andrew Engels had left a rambling message. Something about not being able to make the appointment. But maybe they could catch up later in the week – to discuss Tuna Life’s former Chief Technology Officer, Frank Geitner.

Why would Andrew Engels, the CEO of Tuna Life, want to discuss one of his former employees with Scott?

68

The ginger-haired woman blinked, and then she stared at the laptop in front of her for another second. Then she covered her breasts.

She was just in her panties, checking her Facebook account.

Had the laptop camera just snapped a picture of her? She walked over to her closet, and fished out a T-shirt. She closed the internet browser and found the restart icon from the start menu.

But the laptop wouldn’t restart.

A message popped up on the screen.

Programs still open. Do you wish to turn off Acer video camera? Do you wish to turn off Tuna Life?

A wave of panic rushed through her body. She hadn’t used the Tuna Life app for days. Why was it still open? And why was the camera on?

She opened up the pictures folder, fearing that there would be a picture of her, topless, without make-up on, sitting in her panties in front of her laptop.

To her relief there were no pictures from today’s date.

Maybe she had been wrong? Maybe she had just imagined it? She couldn’t relax though. She opened up the browser again, and in Google’s search field she wrote: Tuna Life took picture without permission.

With fear in her eyes she looked at the thousands of hits the search had returned.

They were all from today’s date.

She clicked on the first search result. It was from a New York woman posing the exact same question. She had been sitting in front of her computer when the camera had suddenly turned on, and without any warning snapped a picture. There were more than thirty replies to the question she had posed. A string of people had experienced the exact same.

There was no point contacting Tuna Life, apparently. It was impossible to get through on their support line. But it was evident that they had a problem.

The cameras of hundreds, maybe thousands of computers, had turned on automatically and snapped pictures of the app’s users. Laptops, tablets, mobile phones. Any device with a camera, and the Tuna Life app installed, had been affected.

The ginger-haired woman closed her laptop. She was petrified, more scared than she had ever before been in her thirty-two years of living. She had always been so careful, never posted any indecent pictures on Facebook or Instagram, always been a good girl. Now her laptop had just taken a picture of her, without her bra on.

Where was the picture? It wasn’t on her laptop. Was it possible that it could already have been spread on the internet? That somewhere out there on the vast internet, some dirty man was looking at the picture of her naked breasts?

She started crying.

Then she called her best friend.

Andrew had almost driven off the road when he got the phone. Thousands of emails to Tuna Life’s customer service and support lines, and all in less than an hour. There were reports that the Tuna Life app had turned itself on, and had taken pictures and videos of its unsuspecting users.

Rumours had already started to circulate on the internet. Some claimed that the app’s actions had not been a malfunction of the software, but a deliberate act from Tuna Life’s management. That what had just happened had been the reason the management had changed the user agreements for the app not long ago. That Tuna Life’s management had planned to take and sell pictures of its users from the very beginning. Other theories were a bit more far-fetched. Despite the gravity of the situation, he had laughed when he read that some believed that Tuna Life had been experimenting with artificial intelligence for the app, and that the technology had somehow achieved self-awareness. That, like Skynet in the old classic Terminator, the Tuna Life software had achieved self-awareness and taken over the internet. They feared it was only a matter of time before the software would realise that humans posed a threat to its existence, and would make first strike.