The Anti-Social Network, Part One

Morgan Montez had killed a man, then gone home and confessed on social media: I JUST MURDERED ERIC GRACE. I HAD NO CHOICE.

Then he shot himself in the head in front of his computer.

            Now his widow sat in front of me at the dining room table. “It’s that website! They brainwashed him! He didn’t even know that guy!”

            “Okay.” I opened my laptop. “What website?”

            “Capper.” Gena Montez pounded a fist, rattling our coffee mugs. In her early thirties, she had thick black hair and wide brown eyes streaked with red. “They’re trying to be the next Facebook. Morgan was obsessed with it. And it got him dead.”

            We were meeting in the apartment I share with my girlfriend Rachel. We’d moved in together a few months ago. So far things were going well, although it still felt a little like we were playing house.

Right now Rachel was in the office we shared, working on a landing page for someone’s conference.

            I spoke carefully. “When you say ‘obsessed,’ and ‘brainwashed’? What do you mean?” I’ve had my share of crazy clients—all private detectives do. People wanting their cats followed, or folks wanting evidence that the Illuminati are watching them. I tend to attract cases involving weird stuff anyway, but that doesn’t mean I believe everything I hear.

Me? Tom Jurgen, P.I. I used to be a reporter, until I insisted on reporting about things my bosses and the city didn’t want spread around. Since then I’ve been a private detective—but strange cases keep finding me.

“He joined a couple of months ago.” She glared at my open laptop as if it was the source of all her sorrows. “It was the hot new thing. He was always big on Facebook, Instagram, and all the rest. I didn’t care at first, but after a few weeks he was on it all the time—at home, at work, on his phone at dinner, even when we were at my mother’s. I told him he was getting addicted. He didn’t say anything.”

I found Capper. It looked like a Facebook wannabe, or maybe a MySpace mutation. Profiles, videos, ads—JOIN HERE! at the upper corner of the page.

I clicked on some profiles. Everything looked normal. The JOIN HERE! page had a lengthy privacy policy that I didn’t look at, plus a long list of security safeguards.

Morgan Montez’s profile was sparse. Just a photo, a shot of Lake Michigan, and a few pictures of Wrigley Field and some cats. “There’s not much here.”

Gena waved a hand. “They pulled down almost everything after the murder. Just his first few items.”

There might be a way around that. “Do you know his password?”

“SM2000. But that doesn’t work anymore.”

I closed the laptop. I’d already looked up the Eric Grace killing when she’d called me to make an appointment.

            I try to stay away from open murder cases. But this one seemed to be shut. Tight. “I’ll be honest, Ms. Montez. I can look into this, but I doubt I can ever prove brainwashing through the internet. At least not the point where we could prove anything in court, or file a lawsuit.”

            She hung her head down, her long black hair trailing over the table. After a moment she sat up again and blinked her wide brown eyes. She looked as if she hadn’t slept in weeks.

            “All right.” She gulped the heavily-creamed coffee I’d poured. “Fine. I just—I can’t go on like this. Everyone—my family, Morgan’s mother—I just have to know.”

            She wrote me a check, stood up and said, “Thank you” before she slung her thick purse over her shoulder and left.

            Ten minutes later Rachel came out of the office, stretching her arms. “So what’s the case?”

            Rachel has short red hair and hazelnut eyes. She’s also kind of psychic. She was wearing a loose black tank top and red shorts. I tried not to stare. “The Eric Grace murder. I’m working for the killer’s widow.”

            “Wow.” She refilled her mug from the coffeemaker on the hutch next to the kitchen. “But he did it, right? I mean, the bullets matched and everything. Yuck.”

            Yeah. Montez had used the same handgun to shoot himself in the head that he fired into Eric Grace’s chest. Even aside from his online confession, there was no doubt that he was the murderer. The question was why. There was no obvious connection between him and his victim.

            “Gena Montez thinks he was brainwashed by a website.” I switched tabs. “Ever heard of Capper?”

            “One of those new social media sites?” Rachel yawned. “Come on, no one’s going to dethrone Zuckerberg.”

            “And yet in the 1990s, every startup was going to be the next Microsoft.” I tapped some keys.

            “And every CEO these days thinks he’s the second coming of Steve Jobs.” Rachel kissed my head. “All right. Got to get back to work. Good hunting.”

            “The game’s afoot.” I watched her head back into the office. Then I tried to refocus on work.

Capper had been founded three years ago by James Keeton, formerly of Apple, a graduate of Stanford. He was from Illinois, and after leaving Apple he’d come back to start his own company, KeetonTech, ten years ago.

KeetonTech had actually started out as a software developer, designing intranets for mid-sized companies. He’d started Capper almost on a whim, at least according to the company website, and while it was nowhere near overtaking Facebook, he claimed more than 60,000 members sharing pictures, news, puppy and cat photos, and the occasional seminude image of a Hollywood actress.

            Morgan Montez’s profile was down, as Gena had told me. But I found traces of him on the internet—links to his Capper profile from friends. The links didn’t work, but I was able to build a list of his friends on the network.

            Then I took a break for lunch.

            Rachel was still working. After I finished my sandwich I munched an apple and took a deeper look into KeetonTech and Capper.

            Then I found something. “Huh.”

            “What?” Rachel came out of the office, sipping from her water bottle. “Did you crack the case, Sherlock?”

            “Not yet, but this is interesting.” I pointed at my screen. “Eric Grace, the murder victim? He used to work for Keeton.”

            Grace’s LinkedIn profile was still active. He identified himself as president of ERG Consulting, but his previous job had been comptroller at KeetonTech USA.

            “Comptroller?” Rachel leaned down. “That’s something to do with money, isn’t it?”

            I snorted. “Don’t play dumb. You know more about corporate finance than I do.”

            She slugged my arm. “Yeah, but I’m only looking to get paid, not figure who’s embezzling from the Christmas fund.”

            “I wonder if the cops know about this.” I lifted my phone.

            “They’re pretty smart. At least that’s what you always say.”

            Yeah. But they had a confession from a dead suspect. Case closed. People were getting shot every day all around Chicago. Would they put a lot of work into following some conspiracy theory about a brainwashing website?

            I had at least one contact in the Chicago Police Department—Anita Sharpe. I worked with her on vampire cases. I pulled up her number—

            And then set my phone down. “Not yet.” The connection was tenuous at best, and I couldn’t try to convince the cops to look at Capper and KeetonTech if I wasn’t convinced myself that something odd was going on there. So far all I had was Gena Montez’s belief in brainwashing. I needed more.

            “I’m having lunch.” Rachel kissed my forehead and headed for the kitchen as I tried to figure out my next move.

            I didn’t really believe that Capper could really possess people. Yet. But I’ve seen enough strange things on my job that I couldn’t rule it out, either.

            So my best option was to start at the top.