Free TUNA LIFE by Erik Hamre Page A

of Sumatran civets, but they still weren’t able to produce a cup that wouldn’t leak. How difficult could it be?
    The car door was opened and a wind-blown Mark Moss got into the passenger seat. He put away his soaked umbrella, resting his eyes on the lonely cup of coffee in the centre console.
    “So, tell me your theory,” Scott said.
    “Have you read the folder I gave you?” Mark Moss asked.
    Scott Davis shook his head.
    Mark Moss looked disappointed, but he still began explaining his theory. “Even though it hasn’t been officially confirmed, I’m certain that the body parts found today belong to Marissa Soo. She was a twenty-year-old student. Worked part time at a café and Crazy Kangaroo Strip Club.”
    Scott Davis smiled contently. It almost sounded like the exact description he had given eight weeks earlier.
    “She disappeared two weeks ago, on the way home from work. She was originally from New Zealand, and it doesn’t seem like she had any large circle of friends here on the coast. The whole family only moved here four years ago,” Mark Moss continued.
    “And you base all this on a tattoo, which I assume is pretty hard to identify after a few weeks in the ocean.”
    “That’s the strange thing. The witness claimed that the tattoo was easily recognisable. Thus that arm can’t possibly have been in the ocean for two weeks.”
    “It could belong to someone else though. A surfer disappeared from Kingscliff two days ago. The currents have been moving north. It could be his arm that washed up here today.”
    “Then tell me why the arm was wrapped in a black plastic bag. It was an arm, not a body that was found today.”
    “There are plenty of bull sharks around, even the occasional great white. A human corpse would be a tempting meal for a lot of those predators. And take a look at our beaches, Mark. They are filled with crap. A storm like we’ve had for the last few days washes all kinda shit up onto the beaches. They found a dead cow down at Miami Beach yesterday. A dead fucking cow! If you want to have a career as a crime journalist you’ll have to learn that not everything is murder. I know it can be difficult to admit. But most deaths are just deaths. Accidents, old age, illness, nothing exciting. You need to learn to accept this, and not look for a crime in everything you see. If you want to become a good crime reporter then you need to let the scene of the crime tell you what happened, not the opposite.” Scott Davis took a big drink of his coffee. “Have you got an umbrella I could borrow?” he asked.
    Mark Moss looked down at his own umbrella. It was evident that Scott Davis wanted it, and that Mark Moss would have to do without.
    “Let’s go down and review the scene together,” Scott said, before stepping out of the car with Mark’s umbrella in his hand.
    Mark Moss pulled his jacket collar up to his chin, and braced for the rain.
     
     

18
    Andrew and Ken lay resting on two couches in Frank’s basement. It was seven o’clock in the evening. They had barely slept the last twenty-four hours and were exhausted. The demand for the Tuna Life app was still going strong, and it now represented a continuous challenge for their servers. The app was downloaded from iTunes, so the downloads in themselves didn’t represent any problem. The problem arose when people started using the app. The servers in Frank’s basement had to process all the enquiries it got. The software had to redesign and adjust the images of the clothing before sending it back to the users’ phones. This process required immense datapower, and Andrew tended to agree with Frank when he had claimed that to succeed in the mobile internet industry, it wasn’t enough to be a great software company – you also had to be a great hardware company. Speed was so important for users that you needed adequate hardware capacity to make the user experience seamless. In some odd way Frank had managed to connect a bunch of servers,