t w e n t y - n i n e | PART I

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Slivers of delicate snow fell onto the Westfield grounds nimbly, painting the little town with a milky veneer

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Slivers of delicate snow fell onto the Westfield grounds nimbly, painting the little town with a milky veneer. The sky was a gray shade of moonstone, the winter sun obscured by lashes of cirrus clouds; a picturesque sight for any admirer of beauty to behold.

Despite sitting a hairsbreadth away from a window through which one could easily observe the scenic opulence outside, Tahlia Meyers' honey eyes were only fixed on her bright, incandescent laptop screen.

Earlier that morning Tahlia had decided to tidy up her room, feeling some winter cleaning was overwhelmingly due for the holiday season.
It was then that she had rediscovered an object which had been pushed away into the corners from her conscious mind. She mentally cursed herself for having almost forgotten all about it, but a part of her reasoned to go easy on herself, reminding that a lot indeed had happened in her life over the weeks since she'd got it.

Jordy Miller's diary.
And in it, scribbled a single obscure word:

silverdoor306agpym

The entire journal was empty from start to finish, except that one meaningless word, if it could be called that.

It ate away at Tahlia, not knowing what it was.

Her conscience nagged at her to go to the police with the information, that their teams and resources would prove to be much more effective than Tahlia's speculation and shots in the dark.

But the devil perched on her shoulder leered at her to think about herself, how this could and would bring out her involvement in all of this.

Therefore, for the last hour and a half, Tahlia had been working on cracking exactly what the letters meant.

At first, she operated with the belief that it was some sort of username Jordy must have used to communicate with Logan via some internet chat room or shady sites. With no feasible results, Tahlia then worked the theory of it being the password to one of his accounts.

Since then, her dive into the cyberworld had yet to open any promising doors.

With over an hour's worth of research proving to be fruitless, a sigh played at her lips, begging for her to look at this from another angle.

Her mind drifted to Jordy's place.
In almost two years of studying criminal profiling, Tahlia had learnt that there was a lot that could be revealed about a person just by taking a look at their living conditions. She hadn't seen a single computer in his house, the only modern electronic devices present in there being a microwave and a DVD player. From what she recalled from her time at the asylum, he used an old flip phone.

The possibility of the fifty something year old man cracking into the dark web to communicate top secret stuff with a serial killer, was wearing thin.

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