Crypto Murders: Part IV—All Gut, No Clues

Aside from the partially opened glass bottle of Stonewine Cadarca red circa 2013, the Calarasi apartment was pretty much nondescript. It was evident that no one had lived here, even while the one who rented it, Stoyan Pogrebnyakov was actually alive.

That made the wine standout even more. It had long since gone bad in the open air, though,so it was not a recent addition to the flat. Even so, I had Kanoa swab the bottle opening for DNA and dust the rest for fingerprints just for fun.

I'm not sure what I was hoping we would find at the apartment, aside from a gathering layer of dust and a two year old trail stone cold dead, but since it was one of the few leads we had, I didn't want to rule it out. We'd already talked with the landlord, who said the apartment had been paid for in Bitcoin several years ago and was good, depending on how much further Bitcoin fell, for at least another five years.

END OF FIVE MINUTES

I didn't tell the graying man that the individual who rented the fourth story one bedroom was dead, and he didn't ask. Once he saw our fancy badges, the landlord didn't seem to care what we were doing, either. He did say that as far as he knew, there had been no one up to the apartment in at least two and a half years. This current renting had only been going on for 32 months, so that meant that someone could have been up there within weeks of when the contract first started.

It was obvious, though, once we found the former STEEM server in the bedroom, that someone had been there a little more recently, but likely around the time of Pogrebnyakov's demise. It was no longer running any STEEM protocols, but it was filled with what anyone snooping around was meant to see—cultist documents and images, and even a note about how Progrebnyakov would like to die. All of it was meant to wrap up the lie of his death in an ugly, life gone wrong kind of bow.

Now that I was here, looking at nothing to tell me otherwise, I bought the cultist cover even less than I did when it first happened. I didn't know the man—few did, since he was one of the many who enjoyed his anonymity—but things just didn't feel right. There was reason for him to rent a separate apartment just to keep cultist things on it when the home he kept near Plovdiv was hard enough to find. Of course, I had the luxury of knowing Pogrebnyakov was clarioncall101, a STEEM witness, so I couldn't really blame the authorities for not looking harder.

In the end, it didn't matter. There were no clues to who had swapped out the SSD with the STEEM blockchain on it, and the only evidence that another SSD had been its place was the slightly less dusty drive bay door where the switched SSD sat. Hardly much to go on.

I still had the team dust and document everything. Sometimes good fortune was an investigator's only ally. While they were sweeping the place, I created a mental log of the server room. Low price gear, except for the high end earphones sitting on their own rack in a corner. Oddly, there wasn't anything in the apartment for the old school headphone jack to go into. The only thing that told me, though, was Pogrebnyakov was an audiophile throwback, and he could probably afford to be eccentric.

STEEM didn't have to be his only coin investments. We already knew he had Bitcoin, too, and it was common for crypto enthusiasts to have many more than just one.

The problem would be tracking them down. Anonymity, along with time, had its drawbacks when it came to solving crimes. Especially ones where the only 'evidence' was coincidence and a gut feeling.

I came back to the main living area, where my eyes fell upon the withered carnation sitting in the kitchen window. It seemed a fitting metaphor given all that was involved.

"Anything?" I asked, as the four of us gradually gathered in the living room.

Kanoa, Smythe and Lettrier all shook their head, as if they had rehearsed it. "Just what I'm sure will be a partial print belonging to the deceased," Smythe said.

Even Pogrebnyakov had been extraordinarily careful the little he'd been here. Except for the wine.

"That's just not normal," I said out loud as I headed to the door.

"What's not?" Lettrier wondered.

"Don't worry," Kanoa said, "Boss is just mumbling again."

In addition to being a serialized fictional story, this post is part of the daily five minute freewrite hosted by @mariannewest. Five prompts were used and are italicized throughout. If you'd like to participate in the daily five minute freewrite, click here.

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_{Source of all images—Pixabay}

Crypto Murders is an original serialized work by Glen Anthony Albrethsen. Copyright © 2019. All rights reserved.

Previously posted: Prologue, Part I, Part II, Part III