NOVEL ONLINE FREE Chapter 2: Interesting Investigations
Grace sat hunched at her desk, the only light in her apartment coming from the glow of twin monitors. Her screen was split between digital trace programs and ghosted profile overlays—three tabs, three names:
Jared Kent. Maria Lang. Daniel Cross.
She'd spent hours combing through every piece of online data she could find: social media, app logs, location metadata, background processes. She expected dead ends—after all, they were dead.
But what she found was more chilling than a void. It was surgical absence.
Their online activity didn't just stop. It ceased—cleanly, methodically, and eerily synchronized.
Not right after entering the mall.
But shortly after each of them left it.
"That's too neat to be real," Grace whispered.
They had all gone in alive, jittery but normal. Then, after some time—Maria first, then Jared, and finally Daniel—they left, one by one. Each from a different wing. Each around twenty minutes apart.
And within minutes of leaving the mall perimeter...
—No more pings.
—No app connections.
—No messages.
—No camera captures.
—No trace of their phones connecting to anything at all.
Grace frowned. If it had been suicide planning, they'd have gone dark before. This was after.
She dug deeper—into the accounts of friends, coworkers, anyone they'd messaged in the last 24 hours. Some had clearly been tampered with—edited timelines, deleted responses, time jumps that didn't align.
Still, she caught it.
A message history between Daniel and a college friend showed repeated attempted calls in a tight 10-minute cluster after he left the mall. The call log ended abruptly. The friend had messaged back—"hey man, is something wrong?"—only for that response to disappear from Daniel's side.
Intercepted.
She leaned back. Someone didn't just watch them. They pulled the plug.
Her phone buzzed softly on the desk.
Ben: "Transmitter planted in underground security node. Might be a backup link to footage."
Grace: On it. Good work.
A small curl of satisfaction touched her lips. Then she opened her terminal and accessed the transmitter's signal line. A brief ping confirmed connection.
The mall's system was overprotected. Layers of encryption that didn't belong in a shopping center.
"What kind of mall hires military-grade IT?" she muttered.
She hacked in. Dug. Recovered.
Three hours of fragmented footage.
The third floor, near the cinema.
Maria left first. Head down. Fast steps. Then Jared. Sweaty, glancing over his shoulder. Then Daniel. Last. Pale. Eyes unfocused.
All left before the movie ended. Each from different exits.
"What did you see in there?"
She saved the footage. Tagged the timeframes. Made a new folder.
"Third Floor – Disruption Window."
---
Ben started with Jared Kent.
His apartment was modest, on the second floor of an old brick complex in eastern Greymark. The kind of place that blended into the background. Jared's older brother opened the door, visibly drained but cooperative.
"He never talked about any problems," the man said. "Was even planning a short trip out of town."
Ben asked for permission to look around. He moved through the apartment slowly, noting the details that didn't quite fit.
A faint square on the wall where a calendar had clearly once hung—the hook still embedded.
A bookshelf slightly misaligned, dust shifted around the edges.
A drawer that opened too smoothly, too recently handled.
It wasn't ransacked. But it had been searched, and carefully rearranged to hide it.
He took photos quietly. Documented the oddities.
Maria Lang lived in a compact one-bedroom studio in a quiet corner of Greymark's midtown. Her colleague met Ben there, letting him in with a spare key.
The apartment smelled faintly of coffee and books. Everything looked in place—but as Ben explored, the same pattern emerged.
Her desk was meticulously clean. Too clean. A ring of faint dust suggested a laptop had been removed recently.
The fridge had neatly labeled items. Yet one magnet was missing. The label above the spice rack had a torn edge.
"She'd just renewed her gym membership," her colleague said, voice low. "Doesn't add up."
Ben took pictures of the apartment from multiple angles, thanked the colleague for letting him take a look, and proceed with his search.
Daniel Cross's flat was the messiest of the three, filled with scattered books and posters. A mutual friend—unsure of protocol but willing to help—let Ben inside.
Even here, Ben found gaps that didn't make sense.
A patch of the wall where a mirror once hung. Books on the shelf alphabetized—except for a broken pattern halfway through. A jacket missing from a hook, its outline faint in the dust.
It was like someone had gone through and removed only the pieces that mattered.
---
The mall was next.
Ben blended in with the weekend crowd, making his way through kiosks and storefronts. He spoke with employees who might remember faces: cashiers, janitors, food stall workers.
"Lots of people come through here. I might've seen one of them… not sure."
"That guy? Yeah, dropped a soda. Looked nervous. Weird energy."
Nothing concrete.
Then he tried the main security post, asking to review footage under the pretense of a lost wallet. They shut him down quickly—too quickly. Polished protocol, no wiggle room.
A throwaway line from the guard "We upgraded systems last month, part of that new 'CitySafe Initiative'."
Ben walked off without argument, circling back down to the underground parking.
A smaller post. One bored guard.
Ben played a recording—the sound of a child crying behind a car. Distant. Distressed.
The guard stood up, muttered, and walked off to check.
Ben stepped in, unscrewed a panel, and carefully planted the DIY transmitter Grace had given him.
He slipped out before the guard returned.
Ben: "Transmitter planted. Underground security terminal."
Grace: On it. Good work.
---
Max returned home earlier than usual. The house was silent.
His mother had left that morning to visit an old friend in another city, and his father—Jonathan Blake, a senior investigator in Greymark's crime division—was still out, likely buried in paperwork or a crime scene. Typical.
The quiet was perfect.
He crept upstairs to his father's home office and closed the door behind him. The desk, as always, was tidy but lived-in. The computer sat waiting.
Max typed in the password without hesitation.
It was a combination of his mother's birthday and his own. Weak by cybersecurity standards. But perfectly believable, considering the consequences his father had to face as a result of forgetting these dates.
He chuckled.
"Guess even geniuses sleep on the couch when they forget Birthdays."
Jonathan had forgotten once. Mom—Elena—had made sure it never happened again.
The PC logged in.
He navigated through case records using his father's credentials. He started with the suicides.
Three victims. Three files. All closed. All clean.
Too clean.
He clicked deeper. Tried to open internal assessments. The screen flashed:
"Access Denied: Clearance Level Insufficient."
Max frowned. His father didn't have access?
Something was off. These were suicides in a small city, not black ops operations. Why the barrier?
Just as he was digging further, a push notification popped up on his phone. Motion detected in the driveway.
Dad was home.
Max quickly logged out, double-checked everything, and slipped downstairs just in time to see his father step in.
"Back early today?" Jonathan asked, raising an eyebrow.
"Finally finished exploring my mental map," Max said with a grin. "Unless I randomly pass by new places, I'm done for now."
They chatted casually. Max asked how his mother was.
"Elena has reached her destination safely. She'll be spending the week with her childhood friends, she did say something about her friends, being angry at you for not accompanying her and meeting them, after so long."
They talked about work, life, and food. After dinner, Max headed to his room. Jonathan returned to his office.
The moment he stepped inside, he froze.
Something had been moved. Subtly. But moved.
He logged into a hidden surveillance app. Played the camera from earlier.
Max, entering. Logging in. Browsing.
He shook his head, but a faint smile tugged at his lips.
Curious as always.
He accessed the official backend, curious what had drawn Max's attention.
He saw the names: Jared Kent. Maria Lang. Daniel Cross.
He exhaled, slowly.
"So... it begins."
After a pause, he deleted the backend trace and logged out.
Then leaned back, folding his arms behind his head.
"Let's give the kid a stage safe enough to grow."
---
Ben: "Got everything I could. Some things don't line up. We need to talk."
Grace: "Agreed. I found something too. Not enough to explain it. Just… enough to know."
Max: "Hey detectives, let's meet. Something weird's in the official records too. Same vibe—tampered, but not perfectly."
Grace: "We're circling the same center. Tomorrow. Same café. 10AM."
Ben: 👍
Max: "Bring your best theories."
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