Looking Good Dead

those on a computer, you had your first alert.
    Jon worked quickly and methodically. He scanned through the photograph album, with its many pictures of an attractive woman with wavy blonde hair and two kids, a boy and a girl, their development charted from the time each was a few days old, if even that, to now when the girl was about four and the boy about seven. Normal family pictures. Nothing to ring any alarms.
    Then he started on Bryce’s website bookmarks, but there was nothing remarkable there. He went back, following the man’s footprints over the past year, looking at every website address he had visited. There were dozens of porn sites, as there were on just about any man’s computer he had ever looked at, but apart from a few lesbian sites nothing to suggest the man was kinky.
    Then he came across something that puzzled him. At first he thought it was traces of a virus, but then he realized it was source code for some self-installing spyware. The design of it rang a bell, but he could not immediately fathom why. He followed it carefully, allowinghimself to be led through the links. And he saw that the software had recently generated a user name and password; he entered them but they had been invalidated, and he found his progress blocked.
    He turned round. Andy Gidney, behind him, iPod plugged into his ears, was concentrating hard, his fingers moving over his keyboard with the speed and grace of a concert pianist. The Detective Sergeant got up, walked over to his colleague and tapped him on the shoulder.
    ‘I need some help, Andy. Can you drop what you are doing for a few minutes and see if you can find a password and user name to get me through a firewall?’
    Without saying a word, the geek huffily went over and sat down at Rye’s desk. Jon went and got himself a coffee, and when he returned five minutes later Andy was back at work at his own desk.
    ‘Did you manage it?’ Rye asked.
    ‘It’s an eight-digit password, for God’s sake,’ Gidney said to Rye, as if the man was an idiot. ‘Could take me days.’
    The head of the High Tech Crime Unit sat back down at his desk, unpeeled the plastic lid of his coffee cup and set the cup down a safe distance from the computer. He went back through the footprints of the spyware and then, suddenly, he realized why the design of it had rung a bell.
    He remembered exactly!
    Moments later he was back in the Evidence Room, carefully removing the opaque plastic, marked police evidence bag , that encased a desktop computer and server tower which had been brought in just a few weeks ago.

38
    ‘Come on! Jesus, we are so incredibly late! Jessica, get back into bed right now !’ Tom Bryce yelled at his daughter, who had come running downstairs in her pink dressing gown for the third, or maybe fourth, time.
    His nerves were all shot to hell and back.
    Upstairs, Max yelled out, ‘Daddeeeeeeeee!’
    ‘Max, shut up! Go to sleep!’
    ‘Noooo!’
    Tom, dressed up and ready to go out in a black Armani jacket, white shirt, blue chinos and his suede Gucci loafers, was pacing around the living room gulping down a massive vodka martini. ‘Kellie! What the hell are you doing? And where the hell is the babysitter?’
    ‘She’ll be here any moment!’ she yelled back. ‘I’m coming.’ Then, louder, she shouted, ‘Jessica, come back up here at once!’
    ‘Daddy, I don’t like Mandy. Why can’t we have Holly?’
    ‘Jessica! Come back up here!’
    ‘Holly was already booked up,’ Tom said to his daughter. ‘OK? Anyhow, Mandy is nice; what’s your problem with her?’
    Jessica, proudly wearing two rubber bracelets to copy her brother, a pink one and a yellow one, plonked herself down on the sofa, picked up the remote and began to channel-surf the television. Tom snatched the remote back and switched the television off. ‘Upstairs, young lady!’
    ‘Mandy spends all the time on the phone to her boyfriend.’
    ‘She has her own mobile; she can do what she wants,’ Tom retorted.
    Jessica, freshly bathed and pink-faced, pushed back her hair, tilted her face in a very grown-up ladylike manner. ‘They talk about sex .’
    ‘Jessica, firstly it is rude to listen to other people’s phone conversations, and secondly you should be in bed, asleep, when she’s here babysitting, so why does it matter?’
    ‘Because,’ Jessica said huffily.
    Kellie came tripping down the stairs, looking stunning and reekingof a new Gucci scent Tom had bought her recently, which he