The Motif

Chapter 6

Jennifer walked back to her parents' house in contemplative thought, barely even noticing the crunch of autumn leaves underneath her feet. On the one hand, it seemed impossible that something as innocuous as a social networking message could have anything to do with whatever was happening. On the other hand, nothing about this mess seemed possible, so she might as well check it out. It probably wouldn't lead anywhere, but at least then she'd know.

The more she thought about it, the more it seemed implausible that there was a connection. After all, the Feds had thoroughly searched all of the killers' and victims' e-mail and social networking accounts looking for a common thread, so if the killers or victims had all received this same enigmatic spam mail, it would have set off warning bells almost immediately.

Still, she couldn't fight this nagging suspicion at the back of her mind that this was important.

When she got back home, she went directly to Kimmi's room and turned on her desktop computer. First, she checked Kimmi's G-mail account, browsing through the subject lines of e-mails sent within the last week, but not actually opening anything unless it specifically pertained to Twitter.

Rachel had been right; it certainly appeared as if Kimmi didn't delete or sort any of her messages after reading them, for there were plenty of messages which looked like they were junk or spam mail that were just left sitting in the inbox. And yet, Jennifer could find no evidence of the private message that had been sent through Twitter. She checked the e-mail trash bin, just to be sure, but this only confirmed that if Kimmi had ever deleted any messages at all, they had already been permanently deleted from the trash bin.

Jennifer then logged out of Kimmi's G-mail and moved on to her Twitter account. Jennifer had never bothered with Twitter, but it only took her a few minutes to figure out her way around the site.

She searched through all of Kimmi's sent and received private messages from the last two weeks, but found no evidence of the spam e-mail Rachel had mentioned. However, there were several others that appeared to be the kind of spam that Rachel talked about; mostly they said something along the lines of, "omg...you would not belief this pic i fond of you...clik the link..." Jennifer wondered what kind of naïve idiot would actually fall for that.

Why would Kimmi delete this one spam message, Jennifer wondered, but not any of the countless others like it?

It was also puzzling that there was no evidence of Kimmi or her account sending the message, even though Rachel had received it. The weirdness of everything only increased her suspicion that this was all connected. Was there some way that, after a certain amount of time, the message could have deleted itself and all traces of its existence from Kimmi's account? If that was possible, then that might explain why the Feds had not found any trace of the message when searching through the killers' and victims' accounts.

All of this was way above her head, unfortunately, but she did know someone who would be able to answer. He had after all told her to let him know if there was anything he could to for her while she was away...

She pulled out her phone and hit the speed dial for Tim.

"Hey Jen," came Tim's voice over the line after a couple rings, "how are you doing? Are you coping okay?"

"Yeah. I mean, no. I'm not calling about that. Well, not exactly...Look...I've got kind of a random question for you."

"Shoot."

"Is it at all possible for...I don't know, a virus or something, sent through a spam message through Twitter, or e-mail, to...delete itself and any trace that it ever existed after a certain amount of time?"