Rod - The Weapon

Chapter 10: Truthful?

"Ok jokes aside, let me continue telling the story," I say as we all cool off from the jokes.

They both nod and get the serious look back on, and I say, "Well that's pretty much all the progress that we made. We knew that on the day of Halloween he or she came in to buy the rod. They're tall and quite fit looking, and they were wearing a black outfit. I mean, you can't figure out much from this, but we understood that the killer had bought the rod around 6 in the evening. So they were in the neighborhood for some time, before the murder.

They probably lured her via text, we saw Alice texting in the gas station. Now, here is a question. What did the killer text? Why did Alice, a wanted criminal, carelessly follow the instructions?

Then another question popped up, where was her phone after her death?
The forensic team didn't hand any thing over. They only found a small pocket knife and some jewellery that Alice was wearing.

Rachel asked me this, so we went to the crime spot. We looked at the CCTV footage keenly, to not miss anything. The killer, at one point after Alice was on the ground with slight movement, bends down, as if speaking to her. Maybe in that gap he or she took it from her, or maybe when they were chasing Alice, she threw it away so that the police could find it.

From there, along with Alex and Sam, we started to search for the phone. So basically, at the front of our street is an arch with the wordings 'White street', indicating the one and only entrance to the area. Since the street was in a creepy and deserted area, you wouldn't find a lot of families or people in general. Only broke people out of desperation lived here.

It was a vast area of empty houses, some broken down or completely destroyed. We went on the search, like 50 meters away from the crime spot. I found the damn phone. I tried to unlock it but it was pass coded so I brought it back to Rachel.

She knew someone, who would help us, a guy named John, who I have mentioned before. You know, the one who he slept over at Carlos' house due to power cut. So he was unemployed, lived in our street, was a little weird with women, like a bad flirt but he never mistreated them.

He was good with computers, had a drone which he always used to fly. People on our street would keep on complaining and threatening him that they'd hit the damn drone like an insect with a newspaper. But he never invaded anyone's privacy, the drones were always taking videos of our neighborhood.

Let's say that he freelanced a lot, made videos for companies who wanted to check out our area for constructing buildings. But most of the time, he stayed in his house.

Rachel got a little suspicious and asked him if he used the drone on Halloween. He looked at her and thought for a second, I was pretty sure that, to avoid trouble he was going to say no, but hesitantly he said that he'd check if he did use the drone.

He brought his footage which was stored on his phone and started checking it, then he pointed to the one he took on halloween and showed it.
It was during day time, gave an overall view of the neighborhood, nothing suspicious.

Then Rachel asked, can we check your bin? He looked stunned for a second and then showed it to her, nothing it was empty. Then she asked once more politely, 'Are you really sure that you didn't capture anything which would be helpful for this case?'
To which he just said that he didn't have anything at all.

Rachel sighed and then told him the real reason to why we were there. We asked him if he could unlock the phone, to which he asked with a smug look, 'Why should I?'

Somehow I managed to stop Rachel from cursing him out, and I politely said that it would be very helpful for the case. I pleaded him a bit more before his ego gave in. We gave him the phone, waited as he did some things to unlock the phone and bam, unlocked!