From Murder Vision by Jem Fox, free today on Amazon U.S. and Amazon U.K.:
We needed a real private detective, but we had no money. So, like many people with anorexic funds, we divided the jobs that needed doing into two lists: the things we could do ourselves and the things we thought we could talk friends into doing.
We needed someone to track down Carolyn James, whose current hidden location was beyond our weak interweb skills. For this, we went to Kenny.
Kenny was the kind of computer geek who could jailbreak your phone or get your term paper off your mangled hard drive … for a price. He wouldn’t hack into the school computer to change your failing grade — that’s the kind of thing that would ruin his chance to get into MIT. But if it was legal — or at least in a gray area — he’d slap a price on it and let you decide how bad you wanted it.
His office was the upperclass computer lab, which he supervised during lunch and after school — a handy front for his lucrative consulting business. He double-dipped, getting paid by the principal to keep students from spilling soda onto the school’s keyboards and getting paid by the students to fix their abused laptops and phones. He looked like Elvis Costello’s clone child and was going to make a zillion dollars someday, possibly before graduating. His chief weapons were sarcasm and his bionic brain.
Blake had e-mailed him our request and received a succinct reply:
LAB 4:15 BRING CASH.
Kenny was in his element, with three laptops open around him, a pile of scratched and dented phones, and a glum line of students waiting for their various diagnoses.
We were at the front of the line, waiting expectantly. Blake’s pocket was stuffed full of the cash he had saved to buy a car. He only had two hundred and fourteen dollars, so it was a very hypothetical car at best. Blake hardly put up a fight about using his money to pay for Kenny’s services. He figured at the rate he was saving, he might as well wait for his wife to buy him a car.
Hopefully she’d bring enough rubles.
Kenny played his keyboard like a concert pianist plays a Steinway. “All right, here it is.”
We were totally prepared to dicker over how much we were going to have to pay him to utilize his freaky Tron skills to ferret out Carolyn James’s location. So it took us a second to realize he was saying he already had it.
“She got remarried three years ago to Dr. Quint Bradley. They live at 113 E. Elm.” We didn’t even have that address on our list. “Hold on a sec.” He looked up at us over his Clark Kent glasses. “Is this someone you know … personally?”
“Uh, not exactly.” I didn’t want to share any details of the situation with Kenny. I’m pretty sure his brain is somehow connected directly to the internet.
“Okay, then, here’s the thing — she’s dead.”
Possibly the moment when I was standing in my serial killer evil twin’s murder house in the middle of the afternoon in my pink Victoria’s Secret bra — just possibly — that was the low point of my life up to that moment. Of course, the day was still young.
Jem Fox’s Murder Vision is FREE on Amazon U.S. and Amazon U.K.
