Killer Email, Part One

The Rogers Park townhouse’s shades and drapes were all drawn, shutting out the morning sunlight. When Cristin Ward opened the door for me, she looked as if she was avoiding the world as well. Deep dark circles under her eyes, hair tied back under a scarf, sweats that looked as if she’d been sleeping in them for a few days. “Mr. Jurgen? Come in.”

            The house inside was spotless, as if she’d been compulsively vacuuming and wiping away every speck of clutter for weeks. Pictures of her husband and her children were displayed on the walls.

She was 32, and despite her state of dishevelment she seemed rigidly in control of her emotions. I’d picked that up when she’d called to hire me three days ago. Sometimes steely façade is more comfortable than the chaos of life. 

            “Sit down.” She pointed to a sofa in front of a fireplace, with a flatscreen TV mounted over the panel. I sat, and she took a seat in the opposite corner. “Thank you for coming.”

            “As I told you over the phone, I’ve gotten a decent amount of information on Chad Tyner, based on what you’ve given me. He doesn’t have a huge internet presence, but I’ve confirmed he went to the Northwestern in the same class as your husband, got a graduate degree at the University of Illinois here in Chicago, and worked at a series of tech companies around the state. The most recent was CronWell, a software company downtown, although he left six months ago and no one knows where he works now. He owned a condo in the city, but sold that six months ago too, and I’m having trouble finding a new address for him. He has a LinkedIn account but it seems inactive—”

            “He was sitting right there.” Cristin stared at my end of the sofa. 

            Huh? “Tyner was here?”

            “No. My husband. Jeremy. He was sitting right where you are now when—” She stopped herself, and for a moment her veneer of control cracked a bit. “I’m sorry. I asked you come here so you could—so I could explain.” She took a deep breath. “Last Wednesday, a week ago, we were sitting here. It was nine or so. I was watching the news. Jeremy was using his laptop, checking his email. And he said—he said—‘Chad Tyner? I haven’t heard from him since college.’ I asked him, ‘Who’s Chad Tyner?’ I was still watching TV. But he didn’t answer.”

            She closed her eyes. “Then there was a flash of light, like a lightning bolt, like a supernova, brighter than anything that ever comes out of a computer, and I looked over, and he was—Jeremy was . . . dead. Just—dead.”

            “I’m so sorry.” I knew that her husband had died recently. She’d told me when she called and hired me, without telling me how he’d died or why she wanted me to look into Chad Tyner. 

            She looked straight ahead, into nowhere—or maybe into the past. “It wasn’t the laptop. I’m in IT. I fix laptops, I fix mainframes, I’ve worked on the biggest supercomputers in the state. It wasn’t the laptop, the laptop was fine, the laptop didn’t explode. He just—they said it was an aneurysm. In his brain. But that doesn’t make sense.”

            We sat there in silence for a long minute. Finally she wiped a hand over her eyes. “The thing is, I looked at it later. There wasn’t any email from Chad Tyner. It wasn’t deleted or archived or anything. And I swear I never heard of Chad Tyner, not once, and we’ve been married—were married for six years. It just doesn’t make sense.”

            She clamped her mouth shut, her lips tense, as if afraid to let any emotion slip through. 

            I waited. I had a feeling I knew what she was going to ask.

            “I want you to find him,” Cristin said quietly. “I want to know what was in that email. I want to know why—how—my husband died. I want to talk to him. How did he and Jeremy know each other? Why did I never hear about him? What was in the email? Did he somehow—somehow . . .” Her voice trailed away.

            Murder by email? She might not have known it, but I’ve stumbled across some strange and dangerous threats as a private detective. Or maybe she did know about my reputation, and hired me because of it. 

            I nodded. “I’ll do what I can.”

            Cristin nodded, still looking away. “Thank you.”

            “May I take the laptop with me? To have it examined?”

            “I suppose. Nobody can find anything on it.” 

            “I have associates with—special abilities,” I told her.

            Cristin shrugged. “All right.”

 

Back home Rachel was working in our office. I was under orders to stay out—she was talking with a therapy patient, and she didn’t want me to overhear any of their conversation or have me making phone calls in the background of the session. Her new job had started letting her work from home some days, which was nice, but we were going to have to find a solution that didn’t turn the office into the Forbidden Zone while she was working.

            I looked the Wards’ laptop over. Cristin had given me the password, so I started with their email account. Jeremy had died a week ago. I saw emails from that day from his insurance company, his college, and a friend from work, and they started up again the next morning. I hunted around as much as I could, but Rachel’s better at computer searches than me. When we first started dating she used to be a hacker for the fun of it.

            Rachel is my wife. We’ve lived together for years but we’ve only been married a few months, so I still tend to think of her as my girlfriend. She’s slender, with red hair and hazelnut eyes, and she’s got psychic powers. Not that she can toss sofas around the room with her mind. But she can sense things the rest of us miss. I was hoping she could either find the missing email or pick something up from the computer. And make dinner. Tonight was her turn. 

            So I spent a few hours looking for more information on Chad Tyner. I’d already made one call to CronWell, the company he’d worked for. I called again and got a woman who’d worked with him.

            “No, he didn’t say much when he left.” She sounded busy and eager to get rid of me. “I think he wanted to start his own company, be a consultant? Lots of people do that. Hell, I think about it, but don’t tell anybody I said that. He didn’t talk about it, just said he was leaving and one day he was gone.”

            “Can you tell me what he was working on?”

            A pause. She was multitasking. “Uh, I guess I can say it was an email app. That’s about all, really. Everything like that is proprietary, you know?”

            Huh. “Would it be something like making an email go away after someone opens it?”

            Another pause, without any background noise. “Uh, I don’t really know. Really. Look, I’ve got a meeting—"

            “Go ahead. Thanks for your—” She hung up before I was finished.

            I felt like I’d scored a minor goal—Tyner was working on something involved with email, and the company was a little too quick to get rid of me. I wished I could have asked her if the email app was perhaps a tool for murdering people via the internet, but that would probably have gotten me hung up on even sooner. 

            I wrote up a few notes, then decided to go back to the beginning: Northwestern University, up in Evanston. I searched through all the alumni resources online without finding anything more than his name. Twice. I couldn’t even find a photo. 

So I expanded my search to include the media, everything from the Chicago Tribune and the Sun-Times to the Evanston Sentinel, the Daily Northwestern—the student newspaper—and any other outlets that had existed around the time of Ward’s graduation. This took time—a simple search for the name “Tyner” didn’t generate any worthwhile results on my first pass, so I had to go deeper, almost page by archived page in some publications. 

My mind was numb by the time Rachel came out of the office. “Hi, sorry. I’ve been finished for a while, you could have come in.” She was in jeans and a T-shirt, barefoot, and the sight of her helped recharge my brain.

“That’s all right. Honestly, sometimes I wonder if I need the desktop computer at all. But I do like having a desk for my coffee.” I lifted an empty mug. “Refill?”

“Get it yourself. I’m making dinner. Mac and cheese okay? With some grilled asparagus?” Rachel’s a vegetarian.

“Sounds good.” I picked up both laptops and my mug and carried them into the office, where I kept looking for Tyner.

My mind started breaking down again after another half hour, and I was ready to give up and play some Minesweeper on my phone when my eyes suddenly zeroed in on a photo: 

“TRIVIA WINNERS: Winners of Thursday Night’s Trivia Semifinals at The Club bar,” read the caption beneath a photo of six grinning young men, holding bottles of beer up in a toast. “L to R: Albert Miller, Matt Arreguin, Jeremy Ward, Chad Tyner, Dan Getty, Larry Larsen.”

The photo was from a small neighborhood newspaper, dated March 23, 2011. I zoomed in. There was Jeremy Ward, smiling, next to a man with a scraggly beard and another wide smile. But Ward’s beer bottle, raised high, obscured half the face of the man to his right, a skinny blond guy who was scowling. Tyner? The rest all looked happy about their victory, and a little drunk.

“Dinner.” Rachel stood in the doorway, her own bottle of beer in her hand. 

“Just a minute.” I saved the photo to my hard drive and sent it to my phone. 

“Big break in the case?” She led the way to the kitchen, swigging some beer.

“More names to check on tomorrow. I need you to look at a laptop for me when you have a chance.” In the kitchen I opened the refrigerator for a beer.

“Do you still pay me for help now that we’re married?” Rachel sat down and started spooning macaroni onto her plate.

“I’m not sure.” Rachel has always helped me with my cases, and sometimes I paid her as an associate to my business. Yeah, paying my girlfriend was probably an ethical no-no, but only a handful of clients had ever questioned it; when they did, I’d knock the fee off their bill and pay her out of my own pocket. Now that we were married? I’d have to consult a lawyer. Or an ethics professor.

“What’s with the laptop?”

            I told her about the Jeremy Ward’s death. “So I want you to see if there’s any way you can find that email—without opening it, obviously. And generally see if there’s anything supernatural going on with the machine.”

            Rachel nodded. “I’ll take a look after dinner.”

            “Thanks. How were your sessions?”

            “Fine.” She sighed. “I hate to say it, but we may have to find a new place to live if I keep working from home.”

            “Yeah.” I sighed in agreement. “Is that going to happen?”

            “Maybe. I don’t know.” She spiked an asparagus spear on her fork. “They like me at the clinic. I think they want to keep me.”

            “I like you here. And I want to keep you.” I patted her hand. “We’ll figure something out.”

            She kicked me under the table. “Yeah.”

 

Rachel looked over the laptop after dinner. “There’s something,” she murmured, lying on our sofa and resting it on her legs. “I don’t know what it is, but something. It’s sort of a leftover feeling, like it’s dissipating.” She grimaced. “Like a dead rat in the walls or something.”

            “Yuck.” I took a gulp of water. I had my iPad on my lap.

            “You asked.” She opened the laptop and started tapping keys. “Let me poke around a bit inside. No watching Resident Alien without me.”

            “Not a chance.” I surfed YouTube for funny videos until Rachel sighed and closed up 20 minutes later.

            “There’s some stuff on here I don’t recognize.” She picked up the TV remote. “It could have been hidden or erased when he opened the email. I can’t find it, and if I did find it I don’t know if I want to try and open it. I have a friend I can call if you want.” She handed it back to me. 

            “Thanks. What do I owe you?”

            Rachel grinned. “We’ll talk about that later.” She clicked the TV on.