Godwin's Law

A Twitter murder mystery

This is a sort of sequel to my short story Who Murdered the Dinosaurs — or at least it uses the same CSIs — though you don’t need to have read that beforehand.

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The rain poured down in sheets. The sky roared with anger. If CSI Braeburn had been a superstitious man, he’d have taken it as an ominous sign. But Braeburn was a man of science. All it meant to him was the clouds above had become heavy with condensation.

“Sounds like God is angry,” said his partner Devereux as she stepped into the apartment complex with him. She pulled at her navy blue cover. “This rain poncho makes me look so frumpy.”

“We’re not trying to impress the dead,” Braeburn said.

“But there are living people here too.” Devereux struggled to get off her poncho, slamming into the wall and knocking off a painting. She fell to the ground but soon stood back up, now just in a gray pants suit. “Let’s investigate a murder!”

Braeburn nodded, and the two headed for the stairs. They saw police officers standing around on the third floor and one room with the door open and yellow police tape over the entrance. As they approached, a young, female police officer came out of the room, quickly ducking under the tape and running to a wall, where she started throwing up. An intimidating, dark-haired woman in a blue dress emerged from the taped apartment. She looked with disdain at the vomiting police officer and shook her head. “Rookies. Always thinking they can cover up their bulimia by only throwing up at crime scenes.” She called out to the officer. “I saw you throw up at a shoplifting! You’re not fooling anyone!”

“Detective Haralson,” Braeburn addressed the woman.

She looked at him coldly. “Braeburn.”

A police officer approached, bringing a bearded man in a bathrobe with him. “He says he heard the gunshot,” said the officer.

Haralson pulled out a notebook and a pen. “Can I ask you a few questions?”

“Sure,” answered the bearded man.

“If you were to get a hat for a seal, what kind of hat would you get him?”

The man looked confused.

“Just answer the question,” prompted Haralson.

“Um... a bowler hat, maybe.”

Haralson made a mild sound of contemplation as she wrote in her notebook. “What do you think the number seven would taste like?”

Again, the man looked confused. “A little sour, I guess.”

“If I told you one of the letters of the alphabet robbed a liquor store, who would you most suspect?”

“Um... X. No, wait, K.”

“Thank you. No further questions.”

“So, do you want to hear about the gunshot?”

“No further questions,” Haralson repeated.

The confused, bearded man walked off.

“Those were... some interesting questions,” Devereux told Haralson.

“People lie,” Haralson explained. “So I ask people questions they don’t know how to lie to.” Haralson stepped toward the taped-up doorway and looked inside.

Devereaux turned and whispered to Braeburn, “Wow. She’s either a genius or an idiot.”

Braeburn shrugged.

Haralson turned away from the apartment and looked again at Braeburn and Devereaux. “I’m going to talk to other witnesses; the crime scene is yours. I don’t know how much you’ll have to find; it looks like a gunshot to the back of the head, the perpetrator having come in through the bedroom window.”

“We’ll determine that,” said Braeburn. “Things aren’t always as they seem.”

Haralson gave another cold look to Braeburn and walked off.

“She doesn’t seem to like you,” commented Devereux.

“We used to date.”

“What happened?”

“She didn’t like how I always put my job ahead of her,” Braeburn said. “Also, she’s a lesbian.”

Devereux nodded. “In a relationship, it’s important to put each other’s needs first and to also be attracted to each other.” Devereux hesitated a moment and then added. “I’m attracted to men, by the way.”

“And I’m not,” Braeburn said forcefully. “And I can’t understand anyone who is. I guess that’s why I’m only attracted to lesbians. Come on.” He ducked under the crime tape into the apartment, and Devereux followed.

The victim’s name was Doyle Barker. Thirty-four years old. Lived alone. When Braeburn and Devereaux entered the crime scene, the body was lit by the glow of a laptop screen. Doyle was slumped over on his desk, blood splattered on the screen. The screen was distorted, spiraling from one center of impact.

“I guess someone cut off his screen time,” Devereux remarked.

Braeburn looked at her. “Huh?”

“I was trying to make a morbid quip.”

“The chief told us to stop doing those.”

“The chief can suck it.”

Braeburn looked back at the laptop. “We will have no problem finding the slug; it’s right there in the screen.”

Devereux stared at the broken screen. “Looks like he was on Twitter. I love that site. There are so many dumb people on there, and you get to spend all day yelling at them.”

“I don’t use social media or the internet,” Braeburn stated. “It’s a big waste of time.”

“It’s not a waste of time to inform dumb people they’re dumb,” Devereux said indignantly. “I’ll see what I can find out about the bullet trajectory.”

“I’ll check out the bedroom.”

Braeburn entered the bedroom of the one-bedroom apartment. A window leading out to a fire escape was open, the latch on the window broken. It looked pretty clear someone had broken the window open from the outside and forced his way in.

Braeburn looked more carefully at the broken latch. There were some fibers snagged on it. Braeburn carefully collected them into an evidence bag.

---

“So what did you find?” asked Detective Haralson as she re-entered the crime scene.

“The perpetrator appears to have come in through the bedroom by breaking open the window,” Braeburn said.

“And according to the bullet trajectory,” Devereux added, “he must have snuck up behind the victim and shot him through the back of the head.”

Haralson tossed up her hands. “I already knew this from a quick glance at the crime scene. What are you even here for?”

“We found some other pieces of evidence we’ll have to analyze back at the lab,” Braeburn said.

Haralson nodded. “Great. In a few hours, we’ll have even more confirmation that our victim was shot in the back of the head. Do you think either one of you could see if you can get something off his computer to give us a hint as to maybe who murdered him?”

Braeburn and Devereaux looked at each other and then at Haralson. “Neither of us is really a computer guy,” Devereaux said.

Haralson sighed. “Give it to Crispin and tell me what he finds. You two try to be useful, okay?” Haralson then left the apartment.

“I don’t like your lesbian ex-girlfriend,” Devereaux remarked.

“She’s an acquired taste,” Braeburn stated. “I’m still smitten with her.”

Devereaux groaned and began to bag up the shattered laptop.

---

“Huh, that’s interesting.”

Braeburn raised an eyebrow at Devereau’s statement. They had been working in the lab for hours — the long boring part of their job that would have been covered up with a fast-paced montage if it were a TV show. “What did you find?” Braeburn asked.

Devereaux was looking at the slug from the murder scene under a microscope. “Well, it’s a 9-millimeter bullet. The rifling is preserved, and it should be easy to match up to the gun when we have it. But the composition is... odd.” Devereaux beckoned for Braeburn to take a look through the microscope.

Braeburn looked through the eyepiece. He saw a bullet. “You see it?” Devereaux asked.

“It just looks like a bullet to me,” Braeburn said. “I don’t spend as much time looking at bullets as you; could you tell me what I’m looking at?”

“Look where I cut into it,” Devereaux instructed. “I noticed something was odd with the weight, so I checked the composition. Inside is an iron core. The bullet is made from lead surrounding iron.”

Braeburn could see the cuts Devereaux had made and the different-colored metal inside. “And that’s unusual?”

“It’s stupid,” Devereaux declared. “Why would you put iron in there? Just use all lead like a God-fearing bullet-maker.”

Braeburn looked away from the microscope and thought about it. “Is it to reinforce the bullet?”

“If you’re going to do that, you put metal on the outside, not the inside,” Devereaux explained. “Make a full metal jacket bullet. Metal on the inside is dumb. It’s a dumb bullet.”

Braeburn thought about it for a few seconds. “Maybe whoever made the bullet ran out of lead.”

“Then you go to the... um... metal store and get more lead,” Devereaux said. “It’s not that hard to get lead. What you don’t do is make a dumb bullet like this dumb bullet.”

“Still, the bullet worked for its intention.”

Devereaux rolled her eyes. “Well, anything fired at high speeds is going to kill people. But have a little pride making your bullets.”

“So, do you think the shooter himself made this odd bullet?”

“No, I see a lot of precision, including the iron part. It was manufactured,” Devereaux answered. “And we can’t assume the shooter is a ‘him.’ Women can shoot people too.”

Braeburn shook his head. “Doesn’t happen that much.”

“I’ve shot people,” Devereaux asserted.

“Yeah, but you’re a statistical anomaly.”

Devereaux frowned. “I’m almost certain that’s an insult.”

“Hey, guys.” A young, skinny man in a white dress shirt and black tie walked in carrying the damaged laptop from the crime scene. It was Crispin, the police station “computer guy.”

“What do you want, you disgusting nerd?” Devereaux demanded.

“Well... uh... you told me you wanted me to see what I can find on this laptop,” Crispin answered.

“But it’s broken!” Devereaux said. “What are you going to show us?”

“Just the screen is broken,” Crispin replied. “I can still hook it up to an external monitor and show you what’s on it.”

Devereaux put her hands over her ears. “Don’t pollute my brain with your stupid geek talk. Just tell us what you found!”

Crispin walked over to a desk with a monitor and set down the laptop. “I just need to connect this HDMI cable to it and—”

“I swear if I hear any more of your nerd jargon, I will vomit all over you in disgust!” Devereaux shouted.

On screen appeared a web browser on the Twitter website.

“There’s that site where you tell wrong people they’re wrong!” exclaimed Devereaux.

Crispin scrolled through the Twitter feed. The victim’s avatar was of some anime character, and his name online was Truth Party. “Yeah, and the victim apparently got in a lot of arguments on Twitter.”

“Anything look significant?” Braeburn asked and then spotted something. “That one. ‘I hope you die in a fire.’ That’s close to a threat.” Braeburn stared at the message more closely. “The avatar looks a lot like you, Devereaux.”

Devereaux leaned toward the screen to look. “Oh, that is me. But I say ‘I hope you die in a fire’ to people online all the time. It doesn’t mean anything — other than that someone’s opinions are so bad I hope he has a painful death. People threaten each other on here all the time, but that’s just the charm of Twitter.”

“So I guess if the killer is from online, we need a conversation more unusual than just a disagreement,” Braeburn stated.

“Well, there was this one guy the victim argued with a lot.” Crispen scrolled to show angry back and forth with a user named Matchbook with an avatar of a pug wearing a birthday hat. “But look how abrupt his last conversation ended.”

They saw a few back and forths between the victim, Truth Party, and Matchbook, and then Truth Party had one last reply: “Your argument makes me think of something Hitler would say.” There was no reply from Matchbook.

“What were they arguing about?” Braeburn asked.

“Whether a hotdog is technically a sandwich,” Crispen answered.

“Godwin’s Law,” Devereaux stated. “It’s a law of the internet: If any conversation goes on long enough, eventually a comparison to Hitler is made. That’s because people with different opinions from your own are very reminiscent of Hitler. The comparison doesn’t usually work, but maybe it did this time. Maybe the conversation ended because the guy was like, ‘Oh yeah, I do sound like Hitler in my rigid definition of a sandwich.”

Braeburn’s eyes narrowed. “Or maybe he went quiet because he decided to plot murder.”

“That seems like a big leap,” Crispen said. “But I’m no detective. Then again, neither are you; you’re the CSIs. I probably should be showing this to Detective Haralson.”

“We solve murders, too!” Devereaux yelled. “Unlike you, you nerd!”

“I’ve solved a lot of crimes using computers,” Crispen replied.

“Yeah, but you looked like a dork doing it!” Devereaux made a face and pretended to type at a keyboard.

“Crispen, can you find out anything about this Matchbook person?” Braeburn asked.

“It’s hard with anonymous Twitter accounts, but I’ll see what I can find.”

“Good, get out of here, you nerd,” Devereaux said. “It’s workplace harassment just having a nerd like you exist near me.”

Devereaux watched as Crispen disconnected the laptop and headed out of the lab. She then turned to Braeburn. “Is he ever going to ask me out? I’ve given him all the signals!”

“Don’t talk to me about dating men,” Braeburn said. “I’ve told you the thought of someone dating a man disgusts me.” Braeburn returned to the piece of cloth he was analyzing and looked at the computer screen. “Hmm. Here’s something interesting from that piece of the killer’s clothing. There’s nothing unusual about the fabric, but I found chemical traces of gum arabic on it.”

“What does that mean?” Devereaux asked.

Braeburn shrugged. “Nothing much by itself. Gum arabic is used in a lot of foods.”

“Maybe the killer is a fatty,” Devereaux suggested.

“How does that help us?” Braeburn asked.

“Well, if we eventually find him and he runs, that will make catching him easier.”

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