Island 13

Chapter Eight: Elise

My sleek macbook pro was still booting up when mike slammed the front door. I watched Tara as she marched her way back to the couch and sat on the arm rest. I barely knew her. It didn't particularly bother me though. I may have seemed like the shy introverted type, but I was probably anything but that. I wondered how she'd gotten chase to let her work the case with him. She was a law student, no less. I decided to make small talk.
" This girl Audrey, she was your friend, huh?", I asked, already knowing the answer to that question full well. Tara missed a beat, her face sullen. My laptop pinged signifying that it was all boot up and set.
"You and chase, you're a thing, right?", she asked, quickly picking herself up again as if she meant to ask me this ever since I barged in tonight.
"What?! No. What even? Hell no. ", I repeated.
" Gurlll, I'm not the one wearing his T-shirt, making him tea and getting all entangled up with him in front of his couch. That's all you.", I accused.
Tara laughed a warm throaty laugh.
"Please. You follow him around like a puppy and warn him when the boss is mad. And I, I just met him. Like today. And its not my fault the sight of you, gets him so riled up, he actually throws his tea on me. ", she giggled. " The guy probably hates me."
"Ah. So that's what happened.", I snided while beginning to tap away at my keyboard. I pulled Cindy McAllister's employer information. We couldn't ask their families because the case was closed. No one was going to believe that snooping around this after the case was already closed was just routine or standard procedure.
"You even seem really comfortable here. At home, rummaging through the fridge..", she went on.
" Sweetheart, I'm the kind of girl who raids Mike's refrigerator to steal his secret stash of really stale root beer. Not exactly the type that would go on a fancy date and sip French wine ", I retorted. I pulled the information I needed and began to dial McAllister's boss, but then paused.
"You know, I think he really does like you. You throw him off, with your snarky remarks and all that. You notice how diststracted he got? Staring off into oblivion like that? he's never like that. Not when he's working a case. When he's working a case, he's usually like a rottweiler that discovered your new pair of nice boots and won't let go until he's thoroughly shredded and ruined them beyond repair. Not that he ruins the case, he just won't let go. He's that intense. But you throw him off his game. Off his balance. How did you even get him to let you in on the case?", I asked.
She smiled a half smile.
"You'll never know. ", she mused.
"Oh, come on.", I whined.
"Okay. Blackmail may have played a role. I'm not saying it did, but you never know." She answered, that half smile spreading across her face.
I decided then that I liked her. Then I quickly reminded myself that she was probably an ice pick murderer. Who the hell cares enough about some ex roommate to get themselves onto an illegal police investigation through blackmail? Someone with ulterior motives. That's who. I smiled back sweetly and hit the call button.
"Yes, Hi. I'm calling from the police precinct. I just haveone question for you. This won't take long", I said. There was a little bit of grumbling on the other end, then the gruff voice that was Cindy's boss told me to get it over with.
" Did your company use a recruitment website when you hired Ms. McAllister? ", I asked.
The man on the other end of the line asked me if I could hold for a second.
"Yes. Of course I'll hold", I replied patiently.
" Yes, HR says we used a couple of those. I'll have them email over a list to you if that's all you need?", came the voice after two minutes.
"Yes. That would be really helpful", I muttered a thank you but the call ended with a sharp click before I even finished the word.
After a similar conversation, I'd gotten laura Keyes company to send over their list as well.
The third victim's employer was a tad bit more troublesome.
" I'm sorry miss, but you'll need a warrant for that.", came a bitchy female voice from the other end when I called Jess Windsor's employers and explained what I needed. I remembered she worked with some kinda high end insurance company or something. Those are the worst. Pretentious with all their mind numbing procedures and protocols.
This just meant more work for me. I had to hack into Ms. Windsor's email and go back a couple of months. But then I found what I was looking for. They'd hired her through a website called carreermatchers. Just in time the other two companies emailed their list and sure enough careermatchers played a role in their recruitment process too. We'd caught a break. Finally found a connection.
"Careermatchers.com", I announced to Tara. "That's how they hired these women. You were right', I said.
" Now all we need to do is figure out who runs the website and if their algorithm to match was manipulated. God, what a corny name. Sounds like some kind of matchmakers website ", she beamed.
"Yeah. It is corny", I agreed. " I could check that out, see if their website was manipulated."
Tara busied herself with checking out the case files she'd snagged pictures of. The files spread out on the floor mostly consisted of the notes we'd made that weren't filed. I did some digging around the website and realized it was a real fortress. This was going to be hard to breach without setting off a firealarm. What kind of jobseekers website put in that kind of security? They shouldn't need it. It took a while, but Tara didn't interrupt. So I worked out a loophole and accessed the site's algorithms. I noticed one distinctly odd pattern from four months ago. The site usually used an electronic matcher to match the profiles with the jobs available. And then had a career expert, thats what they were called, verify the match. The odd thing was that four months ago, a career expert had made exactly 3 matches instead of verify an electronic match. This was not illegal per se. But it certainly struck me as odd. The time stamps had been muddled with to mimic an electronic match. But it still stuck out a little. If I wasn't a data analyst, I wouldn't have noticed the mix up. This seemed like the equivalent of trace blood in my head. So I decided to check them out. The three profiles that were manually matched listed only three names. Cindy McAllister, Laura Keys and Jess Windsor. And they were all manually matched from one IP address. It was the same career expert. I worked to match the IP address to the user. It pinged back with one name. Audrey Brooks.
I stared at Tara wondering if she would know about this.
"Hey Tara! What did Audrey do?", I asked her. " you know, for a living?"
"She was a graphics and arts major at the university. She sold some of her sketches to get by.", Tara responded. Her lips had twisted into a grim line.
" you don't suppose she was looking for some extra work? Or working a new job?", I asked her.
"Not that I know of. ", came her response. She looked sincere. And on edge. She knew I'd stumbled on to something.
"The IP Address that was used to manipulate the job offers all track back to one person. Audrey.", I told her.
" That doesn't make any sense. How would she even have access to do something like that? Someone is using her computer to do this.", she concluded, as though it could be the only option. I had a couple of others in mind. But first I had to figure out who owned careermatchers.com.
"I'll see who runs the website.", I said.
After a few minutes I'd tracked down that the site was registered to a shell corp until one month ago. These were set up to enable privacy of ownership. The shell corporation had also shut down its operations of the jobseekers website careermatchers.com and sold its shares and assets from the website last month. This shouldn't have raised a red flag. This was typical shell corp behavior. But the timing and the muddled time stamps on the manual match for the victims profiles were enough to get any judge to give us a warrant. There was only one problem. This was a closed case that we shouldn't be working with at all. I thought fast. Before I changed my mind, I dialled defence attorney Vince Salazar.
" Vince Salazar's office", came a voice on the phone.
"This is Elise Manning from the forensics and data analysis of Crimes Lab, I need to speak with Mr. Salazar immediately."
" please hold.", she said. ", Mr. Salazar can't take calls at the moment. Would you like to leave a message?", She came back.
Tara signalled for the phone. I was puzzled, but I handed it over.
" Hey Rodney! This is Tara watson. This is really important. You need to put us through to Salazar. I'll stick in that animal euthanasia piece you wrote on page two in the next edition. Just please put us through. ", she said. Then she handed the phone back to me.
It was Mr. Salazar. I explained what we'd just uncovered to the defence attorney.
" Unless we can confirm that the muddled time stamps were not an electronic glitch, the information cannot be used in trial. And it didn't have to be mentioned to the prosecutors office." This was code for 'I can't confirm it now, mostly because if the prosecutors office was to catch wind of this, the captain would kill us.'.
Salazar got the situation immediately. We needed to get that warrant in secret. I could get an independent lab to submit the report I'd just orally delivered. I just needed him to get us a warrant to uncover the owner of the shell corp.
"What's the name of this company?", he asked referring to the shell corp.
"Skyline tech. ", I answered. Tara drew the shirt closer to herself and huddled. I wondered if she was cold.
" Okay. I'm on it. ", came Salazar's voice. " Thanks for the information", he said before hanging up on me.
"The backstabber used Audrey's computer to hire these women.", Tara said. She still seemed shell shocked. I could see the vulnerability now. She hid it effectively. She was even able to hold back on it and get us Salazar on the phone, but then it was back full swing. She was trying to hide her worry behind her professionalism and snide. Sarcastic remarks. I could see her snarky front was a façade.
" I should leave.", she said, looking at the door. I didn't mind. She picked up her phone and a small briefcase and walked out the door.
"Bye Elise. ", she said.
" Good bye Tara", I replied.

*********
Authors' Note:
Hey guys! Thanks for reading Chapter 8 of our story! Hope you liked the fresh, all new PoV.
Today's questions are: Do you like Elise? Is she doing the right thing by not questioning Tara too much or is she just not bothered? Could Elise and Chase be a thing? Or do you think Tara and Chase are meant to be? Would you guys like to read chapters with PoVs other than Tara's and Mike's?
Make sure you vote and leave a comment down below! Get your cat's nod of approval for this chapter! Till next time, have some cookies