Chapter 17 Chapter Sixteen

As soon as Tom entered the case room, he felt the silent energy emanating from the dozen or so people hunched over their desks, whispering on the phone or sharing information with colleagues.Becky should have briefed the group by now, but his presence indicated his full support for her.Becky was in charge of the day-to-day investigations, but given the history of the family, Philippa Stanley was keeping a close eye on Tom, so he too needed to speed things up. Tom feels like he's been working for hours, but it's only eleven o'clock in the morning.He had a strange feeling that the day was going to get worse before it got better.He made his way to Becky's desk, nodding politely as he passed them "good morning," and pulling out a chair.

"Anything new?" he asked as he sat down. "The media has been notified and it's on most of the morning news, but it's too late. It's Saturday and I'm afraid not many people will pay attention to the morning news on TV. It might wake someone up. Memory, but little hope without photographs. Door-to-door investigations underway, technicians checking laptops. They'll give us a preliminary update at about..." Becky looked at his watch, " In five minutes, with luck. Although Mr. Brooks has locked the study to keep his wife out, we still need to requisition his desktop computer."

Tom could hear the anger in her voice, she must be upset that Olivia was restricted from entering a certain room in her own house. "Has there been any progress in tracking down Danash Jahand?" "No real progress. When he first disappeared, there was a note in the case files that contained information about his brother, called..." Becky pulled down the computer screen, "Samir Jahand. To find him, you need to Much easier, he's a doctor and lives and works in Dubai most of the year. But he occasionally goes to Iran to volunteer for a few weeks, where he lives now."

"So it's a dead end?" "We left him a message asking him to call us back and we also spoke to his wife. As far as she knows, Samir visited him in England a year or so before Danash disappeared and hasn't been there since. I met this younger brother. No one in the family wants to mention his name. Samir came to persuade him to leave Olivia and return to Iran. They had a big fight, and in the end Samir returned without success." "And then?" Tom demanded. "Samir told his wife that she had received a phone call from Danash about two years after he disappeared. He just called to tell the family he was alive, but also made it clear that it was Samir's fault for meddling with him. The relationship with Olivia, otherwise he would not have had to make the worst decision in his life, and he would never forgive his brother in his life. According to Samir’s wife, Samir and Danash had a bad fight that time, and never Samir hasn't mentioned him since then."

Tom grinned. "Have you figured out a way to get some pictures we can use?" Becky rummaged through the pile of papers on his desk, which Tom knew were more organized than they seemed. "The only pictures we got were from when he was with Olivia, at least a few years ago. They were provided by her at the time." Tom could see Becky's eyes linger on Danash Jaa On Hand's smiling face, he had a bright smile, his lips were completely raised, revealing a mouthful of white teeth, and his black curly hair was combed back from his smooth and wide forehead.Unlike Becky's former lover, who was in his fifties, Tom couldn't help thinking - this man was much better looking.

Becky's phone rang, and Tom asked her to answer while he stared at the picture of Danash Jahand.He looked like a respectable man, with a genuine smile that reached into his dark brown eyes, but Tom wasn't naive enough to believe appearances were reliable.From what they could gather, he might just be a complete jerk. For a moment, Tom's attention was distracted by Becky's words. "Are you sure, Jill?" she asked, followed by a moment's pause. "Okay, you'd better come up from below decks and explain it to Detective Chief Inspector Douglas, who is sitting across from me. I think we need to That's more to understand. Okay, see you in a few minutes." Becky hung up the phone.Tom gave her a puzzled look and waited. "Jill is going to come and explain to us how FaceTime works, and what's going on between those two laptops. I'm afraid it's a bit technical for me, I can understand it, but I can't paraphrase it. You Is it okay to wait a while, or should I call you when he arrives?"

Tom agrees to wait, then pulls out his cell phone to make a few quick calls—one to Leo.He has been planning to get together with her tonight, but he doesn't know when this place will end.Maybe he should offer to cook a late dinner, if she can get some ingredients, since they're all going to eat anyway.But no one answered the phone, and he didn't have time to leave her a message.He looked up when he heard someone approaching his desk. "Gill, pull up a chair," Becky said. Tom nodded and smiled at Jill Tennant.He is different from the typical technical geek that people imagine. From the outside, he can be said to be neat and handsome.Small and teenage, he wears mustard-yellow jeans and a black jersey today, paired with a pair of neat black suede running shoes.Several times Tom noticed that Jill was a man who liked to match shoes, a strange but harmless hobby.His bristly hair was glued together, and he always seemed to have a look of surprise on his face, which Tom suspected had something to do with his tendency to pluck his eyebrows secretly.

"Okay," Jill said, drawing out his voice exaggeratedly, "I found a couple of interesting things. How much do you guys know about FaceTime?" Tom looked at Becky and shrugged. "I know what it is, I use it on my Apple computer at home. But let's just assume ignorance, that's probably for the best." "FaceTime is a tool for communicating between any two connected Apple devices like phones, tablets, desktops, etc. It's a video link, like Skype. Makes sense?" Tom felt like he was being treated like a six-year-old. He suppressed a smile and nodded.

"Okay. The question is, if the FaceTime was between two computers rather than two phones, as in this case ... according to the complaint," Jill added, emphasizing the word "complaint." , paused, and smiled smugly at both of them, "The communication is between email addresses, so we can use the computer's IP address to lock the user's address." While Jill explained the differences between the various technologies and the intricacies of how to track people down, Tom didn't listen carefully and let his mind wander to Olivia Brooks, recalling November about nine years ago The scene of seeing her for the first time that windy night.He wouldn't have seen her at all, but Ryan Tippitz gave him a ride, and along the way Ryan got a call to check on Olivia, and he followed.

Speaking of Olivia, he couldn't forget the scene: she rocked back and forth, holding the crying baby close to her chest, repeating over and over again "Dan won't leave us, I know he won't leave us, Please find him."The scene was heartbreaking to watch.Tom's daughter Lucy is only a little older than Olivia's baby, and he knows how Kate would react in the same situation.Of course, that's when he and Kate are in harmony. Tom realized that Jill had paused again, and his eyes wandered over the two of them, to see if they could keep up. "Now, how about we talk about Mr. Brooks?" He looked at the two of them beaming. "He said he called his wife every day, right?"

"That's right," added Becky, "until Friday morning." Jill clicked her tongue and wagged her fingers. “Not really. We checked Mr. Brooks’ laptop and he did FaceTime his wife — every night and most mornings, but only on Wednesday. After the Wednesday night video call, there was nothing on his laptop. There is no call log." Jill finally got Tom's interest.So Robert lied about the time of his last phone call with his wife.But why was he not surprised? "We also looked at the records on Mrs Brooks' laptop, and interestingly, the records on her laptop showed that she and her husband hadn't been in touch at all for the past fortnight. That means, if I have to elaborate, When he was videoing her, she was obviously not using that laptop to talk to him, she was definitely using another computer, or a tablet." Tom couldn't understand.If, as Robert said, Olivia was videotaping him in bed in her bedroom, then she needed something that could move.But according to Robert, apart from her laptop — which Jill claims she never uses — there is no other suitable equipment in the house. Jill wasn't done yet.He turned his head from side to side, looking first at this and then at that, with a smug expression. "However...over the past few months, Mrs. Brooks' computer has made several calls to a Hotmail account with an IP address that appears to be—" He paused for emphasis, "Iran." Becky was scribbling notes as she listened, but at the news she paused and looked up.Tom saw her expression, so there was no need to ask. “Usually, the next thing we do is contact the network service provider, fill out the required paperwork, and ask them to give us the exact address of the person who will answer the call. But in my opinion, to be honest, from an Iranian network service There is little hope of getting news from Shang." "You're 100 percent sure this IP address is in Iran, aren't you, Jill?" he asked. "When was the last call?" Jill's perfectly groomed brows almost pierced the ceiling. "I'm pretty sure, Detective Chief Inspector Douglas, I wouldn't make that mistake. Last contact with that Hotmail account was two weeks ago." Jill checked his notebook, "Fifteen days ago, to be exact. " Tom picked up a pencil from his desk and twirled it between his fingers.Is it possible that Olivia is just going to elope with her Iranian lover and that's all?But it doesn't feel like that. Why would Robert lie about the timing of the video with her?Jill said the last contact was on Wednesday - though not through Olivia's laptop.Robert said she must be at their house until Friday - but that didn't sound like the truth either.Then why is he lying? "Sorry, Jill, I need a moment to think about it," said Tom. "There's nothing hard to understand about your explanation, it's just the damn Brooks family and their indistinguishable situation. Anything else? Condition?" "One more thing. As I mentioned, we know that until Wednesday, Robert Brooks was video calling his wife's email address. We tracked down the location of the device that received those videos, and it turned out that the receiving end was in France." Becky looked confused. "She doesn't even have a passport. How did she get there?" "She probably didn't go." Becky slumped in her chair and made a face. "Huh?" she asked. "We're pretty sure that IP address is fake. She must have bought it online, which is easy to do. But if you want to find out the real IP address, I'm afraid you'll have to do some more paperwork." "Then why doesn't she just go around the earth and set up a ecstasy array to completely confuse us?" Tom asked.His brother had done this particular technique and made a fortune, and this wasn't the first case he'd had to cover addresses in this way. "With FaceTime it can't be done seamlessly. The signal is not strong enough and the video will be unclear. We can get her real full address details from the provider, which her husband can't - I guess that's what she's aiming for. It takes time to do that, maybe two or three days, and like I said, a whole lot of nasty paperwork." Jill was silent for a moment, looking eagerly from one person to the next. "I know what I'm saying may be obvious, but can I draw your attention to the fact that the email address that Robert Brooks used to FaceTime his wife doesn't mean anything, there is no evidence that it was Ollie on the other end of the line Via. This is just one side of Robert. Anyone who knows her email address and password can accept Robert's video invitation. Speaking of which, he may write or act himself, just to make us believe that she is alive and well So, even if we find the address, there is no guarantee that we will find Olivia there." Great, really good, Tom thought.So we only know that Robert’s statement that he had a video call with Olivia on Friday was a lie, but we don’t know whether he has talked to her in the past two weeks-it may have been planned in advance.That's the only evidence we think she's actually alive.Maybe Becky was right from the start. But if Robert had murdered her, where exactly were the children?