A Novel Murder - Episode 4

The missed call

I gently opened the bloody, wadded up paper. The typing on it was literary in nature - some kind of story.

“Detective?” The medical examiner handed me a cell phone. “It was under his body.”

The screen displayed a message: missed call from Malcolm. I showed Bob the message. “Seems like Malcolm was looking for Stephen.”

“Or trying to make it seem like he thinks the victim’s still alive.”

I pressed the button on the phone, but another message displayed saying the phone was locked.

“We need to get into this phone.”

Bobby groaned. It’s routine for us to hack into social media and cell phone accounts to see who they’ve interacted with. We can even use the phone to geolocate where the victim had been. But it took time to get this info, and sometimes the case would go cold by the time we got what we needed.

I had a closer look at the victim’s phone - it was a fairly recent model. I looked at Bobby. “I have an idea…”