There were also suspicions that the clubs were used to recruit women to the internet porn industry. One of the informants, his name had been blacked out, had said that the clubs offered girls to go on expensive trips to Europe, only to force them into making movies once they got to some dodgy hotel in an East European city. As with the suspicion of drug dealing though, the police had been unable to prove any connections.
Scott Davis closed the folder, and handed it back to his brother.
“Did you find anything interesting?”
“I don’t know,” Scott said. “It’s as you said. This isn’t a gang of idiots riding around on Harley Davidsons. These guys grew up with organised crime in the former Soviet Union. Some of them have KGB background. These are professionals.”
Wayne nodded. “What are you looking for, though, and why do you believe Roman was behind what happened to your colleague? Is it related to what he wrote? This crazy piece about a serial killer on the coast?”
“God no,” Scott shook his head. “We were working on some other cases too. Mark and I were attempting to find out who was behind many of these new tech companies on the coast. And Roman’s name seemed to pop up quite often.”
“Roman, a white-collar criminal? I won’t believe it until I see it. Someone like him never changes. He is a thug.”
“An old dog can learn new tricks,” Scott replied.
“Not dogs like Roman,” Wayne said, before rising from his seat. “I hope you find whatever it is you’re looking for, Scott. I’m sorry I can’t help you with any more. But I can’t risk my job. Got alimony to pay.”
“Have you left Sarah?” Scott asked, genuinely surprised.
Wayne stared at his younger brother. How had they managed to let it get this far? To not having spoken together for years. He sat back down.
It was time to become friends again.
It was time to become family again.
Family trumped everything.
“How did you deal with it? Losing Sashi, I mean?” Wayne asked. He had always wondered how Scott had managed to get through the trauma it was to lose his wife to suicide.
“For a long time I was angry with her. Incredibly angry. I couldn’t understand how she could do such a thing to me. How she didn’t even leave a letter.”
“Well, my sorrow is different,” Wayne started. “I couldn’t care less that Sarah is out of my life. But she is making things hard for me. She won’t let me see Tom more than every second weekend. I’ve told her I don’t care about the money or the house, she can have it all. Tom is the only thing I care about. He is growing up so fast, starting high school next year. I don’t want to miss out on his adolescence.”
“That’s probably why she is doing what she is doing. She knows Tom is important to you. She knows he is the only way she can hurt you.”
“I must say one thing, Scott. I was always envious of you. You got the best wife. Sashi was an incredible person.”
Scott lowered his gaze so that he stared directly at the table. He didn’t want to cry in front of his brother. He pulled himself together before replying. “You have a wonderful son, Wayne. Never forget that.”
Wayne smiled. “He’s a good boy. He really is. Doing well at school also. Wants to become a psychologist when he grows up. Inspired by his aunt I guess.” Wayne finished his orange juice, and rose. “Stop by next Sunday. I’m planning to have a barbeque for some friends. Tom is with me that weekend. It would be good for him to catch up with his uncle.”
Scott nodded. He pointed at the plastic bag Wayne had just placed on the table. “What is that?”
“It’s some of your colleague’s belongings. His iPad and iPhone. We have done our checks on them. Nothing out of the ordinary. He received a couple of phone calls before the incident. We’ve been able to trace all but one of them. Came from a prepaid phone. And then he made a call to you. Thirty seconds later. Is there something you need to tell me?” Wayne asked.
Scott shook his head. “I never got that call. I woke up at two am and saw I had a message from my boss saying Mark was in the hospital. It was first then I noticed I had a missed call from Mark.”
“Ok, just giving you a heads up. Someone from the station might ask you about it, that’s all.”
“Thanks,” Scott said.
“No worries. Would you mind returning the items in the bag to your colleague when he wakes up?”
“If he wakes up,” Scott said.
Wayne nodded, and left the table.
Scott grabbed the plastic bag with his right hand. He should probably give it to Vesna. She would most likely be excited about the prospect of getting the phone and the iPad back. Mark was still in a coma, and that meant she could probably put his phone plan on hold, or give the phone to another journalist. Everything to save costs.
“Wayne,” Scott Davis hollered at his brother before he exited through the half-open door. “There hasn’t been any more information about those hands you guys found up at the parking lot of Australia Fair Shopping Centre.”
Wayne smiled. “I knew you hadn’t given up crime reporting.”
“What do you mean?”
“We haven’t received final confirmation, but we suspect that the hands belong to Jodie Harris.”
Scott’s eyes opened wide. “But she disappeared more than two years ago.”
“Don’t ask me,” Wayne said. “It’s just a rumour down at the station. But I’ve done my part now. Don’t ask me for any more favours. I’m not stupid, you know. Roman Bezhrev and his internet companies. That’s not a story for you. Those hands we found. They had perfectly clean cuts. Surgical precision. Roman Bezhrev studied medicine before he became a criminal. I can still add two and two, Scott. You never quit reporting crime – did you?” Wayne didn’t wait for Scott’s answer. Instead he disappeared out into the sunshine.
Later that night, Scott picked up Mark’s iPhone from the plastic bag his brother had given him. He didn’t expect to find anything. But it couldn’t hurt to check what Mark had been doing the last few days before the attack.
Scott flipped through page after page of mobile apps. Tuna Life, Martini, Elantra. Mark had installed every single one of the new hip apps coming out of the Gold Coast tech community. Scott went through them one by one. He had written dozens of articles about the companies, but he had never really tried their products. He couldn’t claim to have learnt that much after having surfed around on Martini’s app the last ten minutes, either. What was the point? Why was one supposed to share everything one did with the entire world?
Scott was glad he didn’t have any kids. It had to be hard growing up in a society where people tweeted, snapchatted and instamailed about how happy and successful they were at all times. He had only been on the site for ten minutes, but he had already witnessed more
life is great
messages, and over-filtered pictures of wineglasses and sunsets than he had in his entire life.
He clicked out. Apparently the social site wasn’t that cool anymore anyway. It was dying a slow death, according to most industry insiders. Scott clicked onto the next app: Pigdo. The Gold Coast’s answer to Evernote, a sort of post-it notes for your mobile. The app allowed you to store everything from memos to shopping lists. You could even use it to take pictures of things that inspired you. And then the app would magically store everything in the big cloud, the twenty-some founder of the company had told Scott when he first interviewed him. “The big cloud,” Scott had replied, “Is that where good ideas go to die?” The founder hadn’t gotten the joke. Instead Scott had asked him how he had come up with the name Pigdo. He shouldn’t have asked. Evernote had been the first player in the market, and their logo was the face of an elephant. It was meant to illustrate that whatever you stored in Evernote never got forgotten. The elephant had after all the best memory in the animal kingdom. So the founder of Pigdo had jumped on his computer, and quite methodically he had gone through the list; The Gorilla had next best memory, but there was already a range of popular games using a gorilla face as logo. The same went for dolphins on third. So he had ended up with a pigface logo, and the Pigdo name. Most people didn’t know, but pigs had exceptionally good memory. “So you chose the animal with the fourth best memory?” Scott had asked. “If we become fourth in the market, I become a millionaire,” the young founder had answered. There was nothing wrong with his logic, and Scott would think about that conversation every time he ate pork for weeks afterwards. Pigs never forget.
“What the fuck!” Scott stared at the Pigdo app. Mark Moss had been using it to make various lists and memos. And the last entry in one of those memos was just before he had been attacked, just before he had called Scott. It simply read: Tech community dead end. All girls at psychologist. Meeting AB.
What did it mean? Scott started reviewing the notes from the previous days. But he found nothing out of the ordinary. It was mostly to-do lists for the specific days. What did “all girls at psychologist” mean? Was Mark referring to the missing girls? Had they all been going to the same psychologist? Scott remembered that Marissa’s mother had said her daughter had been treated for depression. Was this the connection Mark had discovered? Was this the reason he had been called up by this mysterious guy, claiming he knew something about Marissa’s death?
Was this the reason Mark was now in the hospital, clinging to life?
And what did AB mean? Was it possible it could be the initials of the person Mark went to see?
64
Andrew was sitting at home in his small apartment watching Sunrise, Channel 5’s morning show. The program had suddenly become more interesting to watch after he had skulled shots with the host Horne into the early hours at one of the more seedy venues in Melbourne.
After basically having stolen the show at the SBA Lawyers charity auction, by outbidding everything and everybody, Andrew had spent the remainder of the night wildly flirting with the model Mira Jones on his lap. His phone had hardly stopped ringing after that night. Andrew had suddenly become cool. One of those guys everybody wanted to be seen with. People kept asking to get their selfie taken with him, and he had acquired more followers on Twitter than most of the professional rugby players in Australia, even though he hardly updated his status. Life was good.
He glanced at his mobile. Perhaps he should send the golfer Adam Parks a WhatsApp message. He had been introduced to him at a party two weeks ago. US Masters was about to start in two days. Andrew didn’t really have anything pressing to ask Adam, but if he sent a message now, and took into consideration the time difference, Adam Parks would most likely respond tomorrow. It would give Andrew an opportunity to casually mention that Adam had just texted him when the entire office was watching the final day play on the big screen Andrew had rented for the occasion.
In less than a year Andrew had received a Master in namedropping, and now he went for the doctorate. It was incredible how many doors opened when you knew the right people. Andrew had always been one of those in Avensis Accounting who used to talk behind the partners’ backs. How they never really did any real work for the firm, just attended expensive lunches and organised meaningless strategy meetings. Now, after having experienced how many deals and partnerships Tuna Life had signed due to his newfound network, he had realised how wrong he had been. Business was apparently still being conducted on the back of napkins in dodgy nightclubs. Andrew brought in the deals, and then his minions sorted out the formalities. The system worked.
“Next, we will be talking to a tech expert. Do we really know what we accept when we download all these new mobile apps? A flood of people have contacted Sunrise, claiming that Facebook is no longer the biggest threat to our privacy. There is a whole new generation of mobile apps out there that are much worse. And worst of them all is the lauded Tuna Life. More after the break.”
Andrew Engels almost choked on his croissant. Had his friend, Horne, just claimed that Tuna Life was the worst app with regards to its users’ privacy? Why hadn’t he called and given Andrew a fair warning? Why hadn’t Andrew been offered a chance to rebut the accusations? Andrew located Richard’s number in his phonebook. It rang three times before being diverted to message bank.
“Turn on Channel 5,” Andrew said, and rang off.
Thirty seconds later, after having watched a bunch of fit women attempting to convince him that K-Life cereal was the best way to start the morning, Andrew focused on Horne’s face, which had now returned to the screen. An overweight consultant, from a company Andrew had never heard of, held up a mobile phone in front of Horne’s face, and started what he called his personal crusade against the big mobile app companies. “You may think you try on an outfit on Tuna Life’s app. In reality you are taking a photograph that Tuna Life acquires total ownership of. If Tuna Life ever wants to, they can sell that picture to whomever they want, and there is nothing you can do about it. In fact, you can end up endorsing or advertising for products you don’t even like, and they have no obligation to pay you anything for it. But that’s not the worst. A week ago Tuna Life updated their user agreements. The new ones give them full access to your phone. You are basically giving Tuna Life permission to make calls and send texts on your behalf, and you are giving them permission to turn on or off your phone at will. You are basically handing them a carte blanche; they can do whatever they want to with your phone and its content.”
Andrew started to sweat. They had discussed this in the office for several days. It was necessary to amend the user agreement in order to enable some of the new functions in the app. But to claim that Tuna Life would ever attempt to sell its users’ photos or turn on their phone when they felt like it, was just outrageous. Even the average consumer wasn’t that stupid. They would understand that this was just taken out of context, blown out of proportions.
Andrew put his head in his hands. The problem was that Andrew knew something no one else did. The Tuna Life app quite possibly contained a virus, a virus that could turn on your phone’s camera, a virus that could access all your files and folders. A virus that could do all these things the average consumer feared.