The Drowning at Dyes Inlet (A Thomas Austin Crime Thriller Book 6) by D.D. Black

Author:D.D. Black [Black, D.D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Darkness and Light Publishing
Published: 2023-08-05T16:00:00+00:00

Austin’s phone rang as he shut the door and Kendall started the car. “Hey, Samantha.”

“You with Kendall? Put it on speaker.”

Austin clicked over to speakerphone.

“Kendall, it’s Samantha. I have news. I figured out why we couldn’t find local addresses for two of the guys Karen had matched with. They were using fake names. Spoke with someone at the app—Golden Connections—and he said it’s somewhat common. You have to pay $8 a month for a verified account, but anyone with an email address can start an unverified account.”

Kendall pulled out of the parking lot, splashing through potholes filled with water as she entered the road.

“One of the email addresses pinged a name in my searches,” Samantha continued. “His was one of twenty million email accounts that got leaked on the dark web in the Curtison Hack of 2022. Long story short, after gaining initial access through an exploit in the unpatched CMS, they were able to escalate privileges and dump the entire user table from the production database. The 2FA implementation was easily bypassed with a MITM attack on the session cookies, giving them unfettered RCE to extract over 10 million PII records and post them.”

“That was the short version?” Austin asked.

“Sorry,” Samantha said. “You don’t need to understand anything other than this: Remember Benjamin Bryans? He was one of the men Karen matched with who didn’t have a local address. Turns out, that’s a fake name for none other than Douglas Daniels, II. He was on the dating app under a fake name and matched with Karen Sturgis five weeks ago.”

“Holy hell,” Kendall said. She swerved the car across three lanes of traffic and made a U-turn, heading back in the direction of the office.

“There’s more,” Samantha said, and Austin could hear the excited satisfaction in her voice. “He matched with the first victim as well. Sandra Seville. Two months ago. We didn’t even know she was on the app until we saw it.”

As Kendall sped toward the station, Austin thought out loud. “If Douglas Daniels killed those women, why the hell would he follow us to the storage unit that day? It doesn’t make any sense.”

Kendall switched lanes, swerving around an old rain boot that, inexplicably, lay in the center of the road. “Not everything makes sense. This isn’t a movie where everything has to tie together nicely. In the real world, sometimes things don’t make sense. Sometimes people do dumb shit. And Douglas Daniels certainly seems capable of that.”

Austin wasn’t so sure. “Yeah, but he is a real person with real motivations. He had to have some reason to follow us.”

She didn’t respond. Instead, she tapped on the little screen on her console, which was connected to her phone.

“Who are you calling?” Austin asked.

“I have an idea.”

Austin saw the name in her contact book as she tapped it on the screen. Stacy Holmes.

Douglas’s ex-wife.

It rang three times before she picked up. “Hello?”

“Ms. Holmes, it’s Kendall Shaw.” She pulled into the parking lot of a grocery store, leaving the car idling.

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