A Quick Coffee and a Case

A Quick Coffee and a Case.  699 words

          "The game's afoot, Watson," Holmes told me as I entered her office in the corner of GC-B3 building. Her windows afforded views to the mountains while mine overlooked the shopping centre car-park - at my request. I like to spend time at the windows with my binoculars, watching. Nothing in particular. It's just a habit. The traditional methods have dropped by the wayside a bit and I kind of miss them.

          "Whassup?" I asked, hot coffee in hand, eager to have something more to do than filing old histories into TwinkleDataBase.

          "We had a call, Watson. The feds asked us to look into a bank hold-up this morning at the Great Southern Bank on High Street."

          "Let's head out there, Holmes." Excellent. I love a good crime.

          "Not so fast, Watson, old boy." She angled her plasma screens slightly and bade me observe. "We have to check the facts." She tapped rapidly on the keyboard, opening databases and search programs with complex password strings.

          I peered at the array of coloured boxes and the logos within them, wondering what half of them meant. I'm no computer person; inputting old data in my office SunSystem takes all my mental powers. That's why I do detective work with Charlotte Holmes - so I don't have to stretch my mind too far.

          "Watson, the police emailed me the report of the robbery. It occurred at the bank back door, which is odd."

          "Indeed, let's go look-"

          "Not yet. If we use BadgerSearch we can access the video records from the council monitoring of the street outside the bank."

          "But Holmes, how do you know there are cameras out there?"

          "I looked it up on the Traknet. Now see, this image at the time of the robbery shows our suspect."

          Sure enough, on one screen was a grainy picture of a man at the bank rear door. Freezing and manipulating the image with Gingko gave us a clearer photo of a blonde man with a goatee wearing a team Ferrari shirt.

          "Bravo, Holmes. The police can-"

          "But see, there is a swipe reader on the door. Does he open it or someone inside? If we search GazeboCollect for that bank reader.... Look, Watson. At that time Brian Roggens swiped the reader. Now, looking into bank employee records held in central HosePipe database should return his file. Here we go. Roggens was fired three months ago for suspected embezzling. Nothing proven. That correlates with what just came through the police Aphid files."

          "We have our man! Let's go-"

          Holmes shook her head. "Not enough to be sure. If we check his phone records on the Stormboy system we can see that prior to the robbery he was contacted by three people. Chain those numbers and... There's the names. Now feed those back into SonOfStormBoy and it should give us identities of the three. Ah ha!"

          Her exclamation caught me by surprise. My boss was excited to be in the hunt again. Now I was excited, too.

          "Here, check it out. One of the three callers was the manager of the bank. Let's hear his conversation."

          She downloaded the call content from SalmonStore and played it through her speakers. The smooth voice of the bank manager came clearly through as he invited our suspect over to the bank back door to discuss re-employment.

          "So our suspect was invited! We'll tell-"

          "Wait, Watson. A quick check of Ballast will give us the manager's bank account details and - look! He's deep in debt. All these transactions are to these numbers flagged by Harbinger as syndicate alert. He's a gambler! But see, this morning the manager increased his account - by the amount our 'suspect' supposedly stole."

          "Good God, Holmes, the pieces fall into place. Let's go get this scoundrel!"

          "No need, Watson. I'll use my preformatted template email and send the data as a packet over to the feds." A few more taps and clicks with the mouse and off went the email. Our work was done and my coffee was still hot.

          "I miss the old days, Holmes."

          She shrugged. "But now we've got time for Grand Theft Auto."

          I sighed. I wish it were the real thing.










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