“Oh, Ava!” she said joyfully. “Such a lovely girl! And so diligent in her Cheer practice! But, if you go to the same school as my daughter, shouldn’t you be
“I’m taking online classes for now. I was stabbed a few weeks ago and I’m still recuperating.” I answered casually.
She blinked at me dumbfounded for a few seconds, then looked at the laptop screen and started screaming.
“THAT’S HIM! GEORGE! COME HERE!”
I had actually pulled away from her, startled by her sudden outburst, when Bill and the others came running in.
“Where?” Bill shouted, thinking she had seen him on the property, but she was pointing at my laptop screen.
“There! He found him! That’s definitely him! I’m one hundred percent sure! Look!”
“Yeah, that’s him alright!” Mr. Miller said, astonished, after walking around the table and looking at the screen himself. “How the hell did you do that? You were gone for less than fifteen minutes!”
“Well...” I said, looking at Bill again, hoping to get some sign of encouragement. But he was just grinning at me with a somewhat thoughtful expression. I decided to just tell it how it was. “I pulled the connection logs from the mobile tower, ran them through a script to filter out all the frequent connections indicating residency, and then ran them through the script again to filter out all the short-term connections of only a few minutes indicating deliveries, garbage disposal ... stuff like that. For the time and date Mrs. Miller provided, there were only two phone numbers left after the script finished its second run. I put both numbers through an online search. One number was a plumber’s, and the other one was this guy’s. The search pointed me to his Facebook profile, which ... you see on my screen right now.”
“Well, I was told you were good, Mr. Carter, but this is impressive!” Mr. Miller said to Bill, causing me to smirk about the prospect of getting a nice bonus. That is, until Bill spoke.
“You pulled something from the mobile tower?” Bill asked, and I nodded. Then he gave me a meaningful look before he spoke again. “Can we tell that to the police when we show them the profile?”
“These logs are ... not exactly publicly accessible.” While I had answered Bill’s question, Mr. and Mrs. Miller were scrolling through the guy’s profile. “Do you know him?”
“No. I have no idea who that is.” Mrs. Miller answered, while her husband just shook his head that he didn’t know him either. “James Campbell ... That name doesn’t even sound familiar.”
“Well, just tell the police you stumbled across his profile when Facebook suggested it as a potential friend.”
“I don’t care if you got that legitimately. I’m just happy you did. So, of course we can do that ... but is that plausible? What are the odds of that actually happening?” Mr. Miller asked.
“Facebook makes those suggestions based on many factors. There was a scandal in 2016, where it basically exposed a psychiatrist’s patients. Facebook’s algorithm suggested they befriend each other because their phones’ location data kept showing them all at the same psychiatrist’s office. So, it’s possible Facebook would suggest him as a friend because his phone’s location showed him at your house.” I explained, shrugging my shoulders.
“I have to tell you, however, experience taught me that the police probably won’t act on this.” Bill informed them. “Since you couldn’t identify the intruder before, they will consider the possibility of you just mistakenly pointing at someone that looks similar to whom you saw that night. And even if they check it out, as long as we don’t have admissible proof, that same argument weakens your stance in a word-against-word situation before a Judge.”
“Yes. I was afraid you would say that.” Mr. Miller announced. “That’s why I want you to get started on securing this house!”
“Then...” Bill responded. “ ... you need to decide what you want to achieve. Do you want the installations to be obvious and deter him from trying to break in again, or do you want us to secure the house, but make the surveillance hidden, so we can catch him in the act and gather proof?”
They thought about that for a while. Of course they didn’t want him to come back, but Bill must have already told them that, if someone had reached the point where they would try to enter someone’s house, they would also try to get to their target anywhere else.
“Secure the house and get proof. I want that man locked up!” Mrs. Miller announced with resolve in her voice.
Just at that moment, we heard the front door open and a myriad of girly voices travel down the hallway. Suddenly half the damn Cheer team burst into the living room, happily chatting away before stopping when they saw all of us. Of course Ava was included in the mix. When she saw me, she didn’t attempt to greet me, instead she just stared at me with an unreadable poker face.
