Never take your phone with you when you’re out enjoying yourself. Your phone randomly being turned off (to avoid being tracked) when you enter the victim’s proximity is very damning. Several cases have been won in recent times using a mountain of circumstantial evidence of this sort, one of which hinged on the fact that the killer’s phone had not been switched off for more than three months, then suddenly there was a three-hour window of nothingness. So, take care. Leave your phone wherever you’re going to claim to have been, should you need an alibi. If this is a public venue, simply secrete your phone somewhere safe and leave it connected to the venue’s Wi-Fi across your murder window.
Remember that your victim will have a phone on them, too. You mightwant to use this to your advantage and leverage the phone to incriminate someone else. For example, you could attach your victim’s phone to a power bank and plant it in someone else’s house or car. This will mean that the phone is active for days after your victim is dead, thus reducing the accuracy of the police’s timeline and implying that someone else was involved.
If you’re keen on harnessing the power of technology, you can even learn to use the dark web. Honestly, it’s far more user-friendly than you might imagine.
The internet is made up of three parts. Currently, you use only two of these. The first layer includes websites carefully curated by search engines such as Google and browsers like Safari. Maybe you’re even old enough to remember Ask Jeeves. (I miss Jeeves—whatever happened to him?)
The second layer is known as the deep web. This is where all the websites exist that are not accessible to the public via search engines—for example, private company databases, banks and paywalled sites. Our emails live on the deep web, as does the private content of our social media (or so we are told).
These two upper layers account for 99 percent of the internet that we use. However, hidden at the bottom is the dark web. It sounds sinister because of its name, but a lot of it is pretty legit. The BBC is on the dark web. Their mirror site was launched there so that people in countries where democratic content is blocked can access it. Not that I’m pushing the old Beeb. ProPublica is the only outlet I trust for news, personally.
There is a darker part of the dark web, of course. You can find some stunning artwork in this area of the internet. You can also find some sites and sights that are enough to trouble even the most troubled mind. It’s a surprisingly friendly place. You can join forums and social networks for like-minded people with similar interests to yours. I’ve met many a chum in these forums. Some of them have gone on to become lifelong friends. Others are nuts.
I met Gerry in a dark-web chat room and we became friends. Actually, I started out as his client because, despite my best efforts, I’d been unableto snap out of my grief following the loss of my dear Tony, shortly after Richie was convicted of the lovely Mel’s murder. I had acquired a fresh pet from a shelter a few days after Tony’s demise but I found that I could not love Tony the Second as I had his predecessor. In all honesty, I was contemplating tying the usurper to a lamp post and commending him to his fate.
I found Gerry through an advert he’d placed in a forum. He offers counseling services to individuals of various tastes, in the secure, anonymous chat rooms of the dark web. You see, Gerry used to be a doctor, but he vacated that role when the morgue assistant began wrestling with apprehensions about the private arrangement that he and Gerry had made.
Gerry had come to believe that people, his own parents included, used a condition known as PTSD as an excuse for wallowing, drinking and generally failing in life. To prove this hypothesis, he needed to conduct some under-the-radar medical tests. He came across a dark site called Human Experiments, a group made up of people wishing to prove controversial ideas by necessary but occasionally fatal experiments. They’re a bit like flat-earthers, but much more rational.
Dr. Gerry recruited a number of PTSD sufferers, mainly veterans from the homeless population. He secured the participants to an electrified dentist chair with a small TV screen above it and monitored their brains and physical reactions while they were bombarded with war footage, complete with soundtrack, and exposed to the smells of barbequing meat and rotting fruit. If they reacted, they were given an electric shock. Gerry theorized that reverse conditioning would swiftly occur and their PTSD would vanish. However, it did not. He turned up the electric shock each time until he was Liam-Neesoming the shit out of them. Still, no results. It was a hard lesson for Gerry and he took to his bed for several months after the trials failed. I digress.
As well as meeting interesting people like Gerry on the dark web, you can also conduct private transactions, message anonymously and secretly recruit people to do illegal things for you. There are marketplaces, too—just like Amazon and eBay, but without any rules. These are trulyliberating. You can buy anything your heart (or other parts of your body) desires. Check out my favorite store—Humanleather.com. It’s vegan.
As a serial killer, the dark web has so much to offer. You can purchase all kinds of drugs, from sedatives that don’t show on tox reports to recreational substances and serums. Specialist equipment can be found, should your tastes be more niche, or perhaps you’re a collector and would like to procure a swatch of Aileen Wuornos’s knickers. The usual items are available, too: untraceable phones, phoney preloaded debit cards, mule bank accounts, dropboxes and so on. I know that technology can be really frustrating, but I promise the dark web is worth the effort.
I realize I’m pushing this hard, but the dark web has a particularly special place in my heart. You see, I’m a bit of a wallflower and the internet has helped me to make friends globally who have similar interests. I confess, I haven’t traveled much in my life, although I hope to take some Saga tours in my older years.
But let me tell you about the one holiday I did take, during which I met Amy, the love of my life.
Chapter Thirteen
Dr. Pete Thomson is the last person Sam expects to see when she arrives at work on Thursday morning, yet he’s standing in the doorway to Harry’s office, smiling at her and holding a box of Lindt chocolate balls. Behind him, Harry is busy trying to organize a press conference so that he can plaster Andrei Albescu’s face all over the news.
“Who’s he?” Taylor asks when Sam freezes as they step off the elevator to the fourth floor. Sam doesn’t respond. She doesn’t want Taylor to know that her therapist has tracked her down because she’s skipped every appointment he’s offered her over the past couple of weeks and shouldn’t be at work today. A dark shadow falls over Taylor’s face, and she wonders fleetingly if he could be thinking that the doctor is her boyfriend. His eyes darken and he steps closer to her as Pete comes toward them, leaving Harry to his phone call. Her neck prickles at Taylor’s proximity. Most of her wants to lean into the heat of him, but she does the opposite, for both their sakes.
“Samantha,” Dr. Thomson says, from a few paces away. “Ouch,that’s a shiner,” he adds as he gets closer. “What happened to your eye?”
“Samantha?” Taylor mutters. “No one calls you that.”
“Taylor,” Sam replies, more sharply than she means to. “Claire, the linguist I sentHow to Get Away with Murderto, has sent me her report. Can you take a look and summarize it?… Now, please?”
He looks at her, something like anger bubbling in his expression. She wants to ask him to say it aloud, whatever is bothering him, but now isn’t the time. She’s suddenly very aware of his scent—sweat and expensive musk—and of the hot moisture on her skin. She turns away from him and ushers the doctor toward the small meeting room.
“You missed last week’s session,” Dr. Thomson says, “then you canceled the rescheduled appointment and now you’re ignoring—”
“Do you normally do house calls, Doc?” Sam asks. “Orworkcalls? Look, I’m sorry I missed my sessions but there is a killer in this city and it’s only a matter of time before he strikes—”
“I saw the press conference,” he says. For her, it feels like months ago that Nigel Mathers had thrownHow to Get Away with Murderto the press, but it was only last week. “Harry’s just told me he’s made you SIO in a combined child-homicide and serial-killer investigation. I’ve told him what I’ll tell you now, Samantha: it’s too soon.”
“Joint SIO,” Sam says, sounding pedantic even to her own ears.
“Harry isn’t doing right by you here, Samantha,” the doctor says. Then he lowers his voice to a whisper and adds, “He’s doing what’s best for the Met… for himself. I have to say it as I see it, Samantha. Harry is putting you at serious risk of—”
“Stop,” Sam whispers. “Please.” She stares out through the room’s glass walls. The room beyond is as frenetic as a beehive but less well organized. On the whiteboard in the middle of the room, a child with green eyes stares back. “Look out there, Doc. See herface? That’s Charlotte Mathers. Fourteen and dead. Tomorrow, we could have another one just like her. I can’t think about Harry now.”
“I brought you these.” Dr. Thomson sighs sadly, placing the chocolates on the table between them. Sam wipes her eyes and reaches for a chocolate, pulling both ends of the wrapper and watching the red ball spin, the foil peeling back to reveal the confection beneath. She pops it in her mouth. It’s warm, but all the better for it. Sam doesn’t thank the doctor, though. She resents him for knowing how much she enjoys these chocolates. Resents him for knowing everything about her. Even resents him for suggesting that Harry isn’t doing the right thing by her now. Because the leap she doesn’t want to make is simple: Harry hasn’t done what’s best for her for a long time—not now, and not in the past, when it really mattered. It’s easy to treat people well when it costs you nothing, but Harry will always put his best interests first. The weight of it is too much to bear, even though she knows in her own bones that it’s the truth. Harry’s been part of her family for as long as she can remember, and since the death of her father he’s been the only family she has left. The dawning understanding that he’s failing her feels like too much to shoulder. She sags in the chair, as if the pressure of it is bearing down on her body.
They sit in silence for a few minutes, until Dr. Thomson asks, “How are you coping really, Samantha?”
