A sudden flurry of tapping caused Andy to look up from what he’d been doing and over to where Spence was madly typing away on her laptop. “Got you, you evil little sod,” she muttered to herself as her fingers flew across the keyboard.
“Who have you got?” he asked, looking for an excuse to avoid the rest of the billing reports stacked in front of him.
Spence didn’t even bother to look around. “I’m bringing law to Shinbone, pilgrim,” she intoned in an overly affected drawl as she continued to scroll through what appeared to be a text file.
When he realized her attention was firmly elsewhere, Andy shrugged as he returned his attention back to the stack of paper before him. These billing reports weren’t going to do themselves. With a sigh he pulled the next one from the pile and groaned. It was one of Tommy’s. As a result he didn’t notice when a few minutes later Spence went very still. She sat and stared at her screen for long moments, her eyes wide with shock.
“Andy?”
“Yes?” He hardly glanced up.
“I need to go and see Hannah Marbury. Is that okay?”
Having no idea she’d moved onto an entirely different matter than the one he’d assigned her, Andy was confused by her request. “What, about the pen test?”
“The current batch jobs won’t finish until around midnight,” she replied, making no effort to explain what lay behind her request. “I’ll be in to check them first thing. Can I go?” Even as she spoke her hands were busy dropping a blank DVD into her laptop and grabbing a couple of sheets that had just popped out of the printer.
“Okay,” Andy nodded. “If you’ve got everything under control, I don’t see why not.”
The problem was that Spence knew that everything most certainly wasn’t under control, at least not in regard to the Eva Mumford case. The information her cookie had captured from the stalker’s machine had very definitely seen to that.
The canteen at New Scotland Yard wasn’t renowned for its tea or ambience. But today Spence didn’t care. In front of her a slightly bemused Detective Sergeant Marbury watched the young security consultant as she waited for Spence to explain why they needed to meet so urgently.
“Hannah, I need your help.”
“What? Century Consultants is coming to the poor underfunded coppers for help?”
“It’s not exactly Century Consultants,” Spence admitted uncomfortably under the suddenly sharp gaze of DS Marbury. “I’m doing a favor for a friend.”
“What sort of favor?”
“Do you remember the work I did for a modeling agency?” When Hannah Marbury nodded, Spence continued. “Well, one of the girls at the agency is being stalked by a particularly nasty piece of work. Unfortunately, her mother didn’t want to make any waves, so the girl didn’t come to you to report it, as she should have. Instead, I was asked to see if there was anything I could do to help identify him.”
“And did you?”
Spence nodded. “Sort of.”
“And this ‘help,’ it was all perfectly legal?”
Spence couldn’t help but notice the change of tone from the woman she considered both mentor and friend. “You’ve no need to worry about that. I checked before I did anything. I assure you, everything is completely aboveboard.”
“Go on,” Marbury muttered warily as she brought her cup to her lips.
“We set up a blog for Eva, the model being stalked, and ran it as a honeypot. Sure enough, the stalker showed up there pretty quickly.”
“So why have you come to me?”
“I was using third-party tracking cookies to collect data. As I said, all legal and aboveboard. He ticked the box to allow cookies. Today, when he revisited the site, the cookie dumped all its data back to the server. Apart from his IP address and some other stuff, it also collected the address of every website he’d been to.” Spence pulled out the list she had printed out earlier and slipped it across the table. She watched as DS Marbury pulled her reading glasses from her bag, picked up the first page, and scanned down the list.
“Did you visit any of these sites?” Her tone was sharp and clipped whilst her eyes glittered with a fury Spence had never seen before.
“God no! I printed the list off thirty minutes ago and came straight to you.”
“You can prove that?”
Spence pushed her laptop across the table. “If you want, image my machine and check. I have full audit logging enabled.”
“Has anyone else seen this? Have you spoken to anyone?”
“Just you.”
Hannah Marbury stared hard at the young woman seated across from her for a long minute before she reached a decision and her stern gaze softened. “Hold on to your laptop for the moment. We are going to need statements from you and possibly the models involved, plus full access to the blog you set up. Until then, say nothing to anyone, understand?”
It was times like this that made Spence appreciate why Hannah Marbury was one of the youngest Detective Sergeants in the Police eCrime Coordination unit. She was good. She was better than good. She was everything Spence aspired to be and then some. “Yes, ma’am.”
5
“Wow,” was all Eva could say as she watched the train in the movie chug off into the distance before the end credits began to roll up the screen of Spence’s TV. “So that’s where the two of you came up with that idea.”
“Yep!” Spence replied in an affected drawl as she fished around in the bowl for a piece of fully cooked piece of popcorn amid the unpopped kernels that lined the bottom of the bowl.
“You know, despite what you did for me and the way you were able to bring that git to justice without me having to go through being called into court, Mum thinks the two of you are a bad influence on me,” Eva admitted sheepishly.
From where she was seated on the other side of Spence, Pamela leaned forward and winked. “Your mum is right. We are.”
“Maybe if I told her what you really did for me, if she knew the truth, she wouldn’t be so down on the two of you,” Eva offered.
After glancing at Pamela and giving her a sly little smile, Spence turned her attention to Eva. “This is the West, little lady. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
It took Eva a second to catch on that Spence was having fun with her. When she realized it, the three of them broke out laughing.
Neither Eva nor Pamela ever became aware that the real reason the miscreant had been arrested had precious little to do with the way he’d been stalking Eva. It was the child porn sites he’d visited and the messages he’d shared with like-minded perverts that had allowed Hannah Marbury to take the bastard down. In the end, both she and Spence agreed this was a case in which the legend Spence carried back to Eva and Pamela was far better than the truth.
Coming to her feet, Spence rolled the near empty bowl about and glanced down at its pitiful remains a second before regarding the two models seated on her sofa. “Why don’t the two of you decide what we’re going to watch next while I go pop more popcorn?”
“Stuff the popcorn,” Pamela cried out. “If we’re going to be a bad influence on Eva, we might as well go all the way. Order a pizza.”
Spence, who was always in the mood for comfort food, particularly when celebrating a victory, grinned. “You got it. One pizza coming up,” she chirped before heading out to the kitchen, humming “Don’t forsake me, oh my darling” to herself as she went.