“Fuck, yes,” Chloe said. “For sure.”
The video file was called TabithaHenry.avi, so the first thing we did was look up the name Tabitha Henry.
“Find anything?” Baron asked.
“Just one picture on an old Facebook page,” Chloe said, holding up her phone, “and it’s definitely her.”
It was clear that Tabitha Henry was the woman with the curly brown hair from the video. In the photograph, she was pictured smiling on a boat somewhere.
“This girl doesn’t have much of an online presence,” Chloe continued, “although she does follow Jeff Goldblum.”
“We need more,” I said.
“Darknet?” Baron suggested.
“Oh, sure,” I said. “We just fire up the old Tor Browser and type in ‘Jeff Goldblum murder video’？”
“Attempted murder,” Chloe said.
“You’re not helping,” I replied as I opened up a browser and performed a Torch for “Jeff Goldblum attempted murder video.”
There was nothing.
After a few hours of fruitless research, Baron had an idea. He pulled out a phone I’d never seen him use before and left the room.
A few minutes later, he came back, and before we could ask him what the hell he was doing, a text alert sent him rushing over to my laptop.
He quickly loaded a program, typed in a bunch of numbers and letters, and then waited. A couple seconds later, he opened a Tor Browser of his own and entered a .onion URL. Once the site had loaded, he leaned back in his chair and motioned us over.
I was fairly tech savvy, but whatever Baron had been doing on my laptop appeared to involve some kind of root-level modification that was way outside my experience or ability to understand.
“What the fuck did you just do to my computer?”
“I was just following instructions,” Baron said. “Look.” He pointed to the screen.
“What is it?” Chloe rolled her chair over to where I had recently joined Baron at my desk.
“Tabitha Henry,” I said.
And there she was.
Her face occupied the center of the screen. It was a candid shot, probably taken from another old social media account. She was smiling in what appeared to be a Thai restaurant. There was some additional information surrounding that image, including links to Tabitha’s now-defunct Instagram and Twitter accounts, college transcripts, high school yearbook photos, library book withdrawal info, at least one bank statement, and her recent employment records.
“None of this social shit is live anymore,” Chloe said. “She must have deleted it.”
Baron shrugged and took another hit off his pipe. “Deleting wouldn’t do it. Probably hired a fucking cleaner.”
“Where did you get this?” I asked.
“A couple of guys I used to work with at Lehman Brothers owed me a favor.”
“You got this from broker bros?” Chloe asked.
“They got into some pretty fucked-up shit over there,” Baron replied.
“I’ll bet,” I said, staring at the screen.
The stock market was a sophisticated system that I’d enjoyed exploring for a while, but the behind-the-scenes workings of the deeply crooked world of corporate high finance were a web of fuckery that made advanced game theory look like eighth-grade math.
“Do you have any Bitcoin?” Baron asked as he took another hit of weed.
“A little.”
“I’m going to need to borrow it.”
“Okay. How much?”
“All of it.”
* * *
—
It took us a while to comb through the information. There was a whole bunch of useless material—dozens of photographs, expired links, and archived social posts—but not one mention of any kind of attack on the famous Hollywood actor.
There were some photographs that had clearly been taken on the day of that event—including three pictures of Tabitha Henry and Jeff Goldblum, the two of them standing on the familiar stage with the movie’s poster in the background. In all three pictures, they were smiling; clearly no attempted murder, and not one drop of blood.
“It looks like that attack never happened,” I said.
Baron nodded. “I told you it was fake.”
“I don’t know,” Chloe said. “That video is pretty fucking legit. Are you sure these photos aren’t the fakes?”
“Nah, these are real,” Baron said. “The metadata’s on point, and there are a bunch of other attempted-murder-free photos of the same event online.” He took another huge rip from his pipe and leaned in to stare at Tabitha’s face on the screen.