like Death eating a cracker

Crumbs. That’s how it always starts. Hansel and Gretel trying to backtrack their way home.

Except these are binary breadcrumbs. Bits and bytes strewn unevenly through the program. Through nearly fifty-nine million lines of code. How do you follow that?

Maybe the safer question is: Why try?

Murder.

That gets a sniffer going. And multiple murders is sniffer crack. Have to admit, I like that kind of shit. Digital forensics can be slow and tedious, but if you’ve got dead bodies buried in the code, it livens up the work.

Go ahead and gag on my word play. At least I’ll spare you code play. Only savants like me bark a tooth loose over clever arrangements of ones and zeros. Yeah, I’m not normally someone anyone wants to spend a lot of time around, but when the body count climbs, I suddenly become indispensable.

Not that algobots or other kind of AI dicks can’t sleuth their way through labyrinths of code. They just can’t bring what I can when the game is afoot. Sure, they can scan millions of lines of code more quickly than I can. But they can’t smell the deceit, hear the whispers, taste the sweat, feel the fear like I can.

Machines don’t conspire. Humans do. Which means all conspiracies are sensual.

And that’s how I track them back to the source code: on all fours with my nose to the screen, sniffing at the dirty crumbs that are left behind. Especially when there are bodies.

That’s the upshot. In my line of work, murder is always messy because Death is so goddamn crumby.