Chapter 27: Aunt Flo’s Come to Visit

Doesn’t Mother Nature know I have things to do besides lie in bed with peppermint tea and moan? What was she thinking?

Apparently my rather risky outburst with Tom could be taken for PMSing. By the time he picked me up for dinner, I was definitely short on good mood. This morning, all I want to do is fix a cup of peppermint tea and go back to bed. No such luck. It doesn’t always hit me this hard, but the combination of stress and nature have definitely taken a toll.

Dating and deception

All I could think of with Tom was I needed to tell him I was Peg Chester and I needed his help. I could have explained the false identity well enough to make him see. But he’d think I was going around behind his back and interfering in his business. Which I was. After all, he was the detective that investigated Georgia’s death and concurred with the diagnosis of the coroner. But I don’t think he was satisfied with it himself. He’d checked in with Peg twice and if it were a closed case to him, he wouldn’t have bothered. The problem was that even if I found video of her being killed on a snuff site, there’s nothing to say it would identify the killer. It was even possible the evidence would be considered an accidental death since she’d done so many kinky things on the web anyway. This might be considered as just being one that went wrong.

Regardless, telling Tom I’ve been deceiving him all this time would be a slap in the face. This secret identity will be something I take to my grave before I tell him I’m that schizo.

So, of course, he wanted to know what I’ve been working on. Not in a prying way but the kind of “I’ll share something and you share something,” way of getting to know each other better. I told him I was recovering files from a computer that the owner forgot the password to.

“You can do that?” he asked.

“Yeah. It’s not usually that big a problem if I have access to the computer. Most people don’t actually encrypt the data on their hard drives. They just depend on a password to keep people out. But if I have permission to access the drive myself, I can suck the data off to another disk and read it back to them, or reset the password and unlock the computer,” I said. I made it sound as boring as I could. “I’ll have to keep his computer a couple of days in order to convince the client that it is worth the money I charge.”

“I might have a use for that service sometime,” Tom said. “I’m still so new at being a detective that most of the time they’ve got me doing stakeouts for somebody else. I’ve seen cases, though, where computer forensics might have been a way to close the case.” You bet you have.

“Well, you have to get a special search warrant and there’s a procedure you go through to validate the evidence that requires an officer of the court to witness it. You might talk to Jordan about the legal side of it. I know he’s done it several times. Most of all, don’t touch the computers yourself. Get the search warrant and contact the computer forensics person so the work can be verified as not tampering with the evidence.”

“What happens if someone sends the police a disk or file or mail attachment that could be used as evidence?” Tom asked.

“It will be up to the court as to whether they’ll admit it or not. In all likelihood, it will come down to the credibility of the source. If the source is anonymous, as opposed to a whistleblower who comes to the police and asks for protection, it’s going to have a hard time standing up in court as evidence. People don’t want to believe computers. Only other people.”