Cold Dewdrops Formed Throughout theNight
“We have to be open to every possibility. The criminals could be persons whom are not related to Violet or Ed at all. Or if, they made a plan with Violet, they could contact her directly through other means besides her phone. I couldn’t find peculiar contents on their message logs either. But.”
Cynthia continued,
“I can see the numbers on Violet’s log-those which regularly had incoming or outgoing calls from the beginning of the day to the end on the date of the rape-and the same goes for Ed's log. I asked if this number was familiar to Ed, but he answered he didn’t know this number.”
“It’s possible. If Violet borrowed his phone to call that number,”
he fell in deep thought.
“Who is the owner of that number?”
he asked.
“It’s a woman, aged in her 50s,”
she answered while checking the documents again.
“The real user could be another person,”
he said.
“That’s it,”
Cynthia agreed.
“Did you have the contact number?”
he asked.
“I did. But there was no answer. No reply to my messages,”
she said.
Alexander wanted to meet the nominee for unknown reasons, even to himself. Alexander had his suspicions. It was possible that the number was being spoofed to mask the caller, or perhaps the elderly woman was the victim of a SIM swap attack, where criminals use compromised information to fool your cellphone provider that they are you, and want to swap "their number" to a "new phone", locking out the old owner, and giving access to the scammer. The third possibility was that she was somehow in on it. He took the file from Cynthia, scanned it, found her last known address, put it into his GPS and took off.
The woman's name was Bertha Wilson, and she lived a good 20 min away. This gave Alexander time to organize his questions. When he arrived at the house, he knocked on the door. After awhile, a woman opened the door just a crack, and peeped out.
"Mrs. Wilson?"
Cynthia asked.
"Who are you?"
she asked, still half behind the door.
"I am detective Gresham from the local police station. I am in the process of investigating a criminal case. Are you familiar with this phone number?"
Cynthia produced the number. Mrs. Wilson looked at it precisely.
"According to my search, this number is registered to your name, ma'am. Who uses this number?"
Cynthia asked again after quite a long pause.