Read Surfing Detective 04 - Hanging Ten in Paris for Free Online

about the cheating. But she had failed to mention that not just one person was cheating—the entire class was cheating. Herself included. If Professor Van couldn’t see it, he was blind. Or had he turned a blind eye?
    All seven students had lied. Their professor had, at minimum, withheld information and abdicated his responsibilities to them and to the college. Were they covering for each other—all of them involved in Ryan’s death?

fifteen

    Back in my Waikīkī apartment that night I checked the mail program on Ryan’s laptop. Oddly, I found no personal messages from early February before he had died, only generic and junk emails. What puzzled me more was that I found not even the emails between Ryan and his mother that she had mentioned. These personal messages might have revealed Ryan’s state of mind—and also contributing factors to his death. In other words, they were essential.
    Then I realized that since Ryan had been a long way from home—in Paris, not in Honolulu—he would have used webmail rather than his laptop’s mail program, connected no doubt to a Honolulu server. With a little searching I found his webmail link. The inbox looked identical to the other. No personal emails. All had apparently been deleted. Then I remembered that deleting messages from webmail doesn’t necessarily remove them. Deleted emails go to a trash folder where they remain—unless or until they are expunged.

    I opened the trash folder.
Bingo!
The missing emails had been deleted but, fortunately, not expunged.
    The first was an email sent by Ryan to his mother after Marie had moved from Rue des Écoles—the email Mrs. Song had told me about.

    I’m OK, Mom. Paris is cool. I’m seeing the sights with a girl named Meighan . . .

    I had to agree with Mrs. Song that he didn’t sound too shook up about Marie. I scanned further until I found one sent to Scooter dated February 24th—five days before Ryan died.

    Scooter, I know you and Brad have the answers to Professor Van’s exams. That’s not fair to the rest of us. Do the right thing, brah.

    “Not fair to the rest of us” suggested that at this point only Scooter and Brad had the exams, which was corroborated by Van’s grade sheet. I checked Ryan’s inbox for an answer from Scooter. None. But I found one from Brad dated February 26th.

    If you know what’s good for you, Ryan, you’ll mind your own fucking business.

    I looked for more emails between Ryan and the two guys, but found none. If the battle of words had escalated, it must have been through verbal exchanges rather than emails.
    Next I checked Ryan’s laptop for documents. If the suicide note had been printed from his computer, the document still might be there. But I couldn’t find it, of course. Until I clicked the trash icon on his desktop. There it was:
Au Revoir, Marie
    The document had been created on March 1st at 2:13 am, Paris time (to which the laptop was still set). That was several hours after Ryan reportedly died. He couldn’t have printed the note himself. And whoever had trashed it afterwards had neglected to empty the trash.
    No wonder the Paris police had failed to mention these documents in their report. They may have given Ryan’s laptop a cursory look, but found nothing.
    The emails and the suicide note provided circumstantial evidence that Ryan had been murdered because he threatened to expose cheating in Van’s history class. That the cheating had become more widespread, involving every student except Ryan, meant all had a motive to cover up. What I needed was specifics—who did what and when. What I needed was somebody to talk. I didn’t expect Brad or Scooter would implicate themselves. And I didn’t expect Heather would let Kim talk to me again. With Marie accessible only by email, that left Meighan.
    Serena had given me her address: the Marco Polo, a once swanky seventies-era condo on Kapiolani Boulevard overlooking the Ala Wai Canal and Waikīkī. I drove there hoping to