Chapter 10 (POV – Dancia)
POV = Point Of View
Joshua and Dancia take the radio back to his apartment and set it up. They immediately start listening to it and are surprised when they are able to get it to work. She monitors the IRC group on his laptop and he plays with the radio. It begins to get early in the morning around 2 am and he goes to bed. She stays up, listening and playing his XBox and eating his snacks. Drinks his wine, she hates beer. Somewhere around 4 am she hears a conversation in French about poetry and coding. She grabs his digital hand recorder and records it, translating it into english. The conversation is between a Frenchman and a man in the States. She is absorbed by what they are discussing. She writes down the call signs and checks them out. The Canadian is legit and lives in Tri-Rivers area. The IRC room is largely vacant. Which means they were probably the ones – shemp and Muse.
Around 7 am, she goes to his room and crawls into his bed.
Chapter 11 (POV – Joshua)
They wake up in bed together around noon. She insists they didn’t do anything. He says he would not have minded it if they had. They kiss, it’s awkward yet for both of them. She changes the subject to what she heard the night before. About poetry and coding. They talk about who they think did it, – Shemp. They talk a bit about motive, does not seem to have a solid motive yet. Why would a French-Canadian want to kill a German kid and a American coder. No connection. Dancia thinks one or both of them are using voice scrambling tech on the radio.
They shower and eat breakfast. He cooks her some pancakes and they listen to the radio, talk some more. She wants him to take her home so she can grab some clean clothes. They figure out a listening schedule and agree to camp out at his place for a few days. In the mean time, they would go back to work and try to resume their lives.
Joshua still not exactly sure how the two men were killed. He suspects flash induced trance, but that alone could not explain it. He bounced some ideas off Dancia, she agrees that they don’t have enough data to conclude that. They chat up shemp again and try and probe him for more info on his Flash programming. He is more guarded this time. Talks around the subject. They talk about favorite bands. Shemp is into speed metal. Joshua is too, they share some favorite bands.
Chapter 12 (POV – Joshua)
Joshua goes back to work. Describe Glenn’s empty cube, have him remember his aunt and the dirty house he lived in. Describe how much alone Glenn must have been. He has a brief conversation with Taggert about unix or something in the news. Taggert uses a phrase that is unique to him. Joshua had never heard it from anyone else before. He thinks Taggert is a bit of a nut for using it.
Describe Joshua working but thinking more about the crime and how it was done. Using his hacking skills to deconstruct what may have happened. He gets curious about the Flash bit and does some messing around with it by asking the media/graphics guys on the team about Flash and it’s capabilities.
During a break, he talks to his coding friend who is a drummer in a local Metal band. The friend mentions in passing that his heart was skipping during a concert over the weekend. He talks about how the snare drum can interfere with a human’s heart beat. Even cause it to stop. Joshua gets a glimmer of an idea. Glenn was wearing head phones the night he died. So was the German kid. Both were known to like heavy metal type music to code by.
Chapter 13 (POV – Joshua)
That night he relates the drum bit and the flash news to Dancia. They agree that it could be possible to use both the drum beating and the flash together to mess up someone. They catch Shemp talking about poetry and he even mentions being Canadian. She asks him about how his Flash stuff works. Plays along that she might believe him. He gets guarded again. Then changes the subject to sex and women. Dancia ducks out and goes to the other room to play XBox Halo.
Joshua is listening to the radio and monitoring the IRC. He is also researching Flash shows and watching them. He finds all kinds of links to stories about syncopation and animation and music. He is beginning to believe that Shemp is the one who may have made the flash for the killer, but he can’t prove any links to either dead man. He asks Shemp if he knows who killed the German kid. Shemp is amused by the question but says he has no idea and doesn’t really care. He thinks the kid was killed by a jealous coder or something. No real info on that try. But it gets Joshua to thinking about who the kid was pissing off or doing wrong.
This leads him down another path and into anther IRC room to try and chat with someone in Germany or Europe who may have known the kid better. He keeps running into dead ends. Dancia comes in to take over from him and he goes off to his bed. He lays in bed, thinking about his parents and what advice his dad would have given him. Some kind of quote about good friends capable of stabbing you in the back when they become jealous of you. See Shakespeare on line.