Current Affairs (Tiara Investigations Mysteries) (13 page)

Instead of leaving we walked through the hallway and up the stairs. Tara picked up a glass of wine and Victoria took it out of her hand and put it right back down. We were hoping David’s home office was upstairs, but it could have just as easily been in the basement. I glanced around to see if anyone was watching. Beatrice was. She winked at me and I gave her a half nod.

 
“She’s literally watching our backs.”

Tara and Victoria saw it too and uh huh-
ed
in agreement.

 
All the doors down the long hallway were open. It’s only in movies that they’re closed and you have to open them one by one until you see something that gives you a jolt. Bingo. It was in a converted bedroom at the end of the hall. Tara sat down in the desk chair and started rummaging through the wide middle drawer. It was orderly but held nothing of interest to us. Ditto the top side drawer which Victoria and I were exploring. We found typical geek paraphernalia: yellow highlighters, pencils, rulers and a calculator.

Tara opened the bottom drawer of files and scanned the labels. “Hello. Check out these two folders in the back.” She had reached past the expense report folders and the tax receipt folder, as exciting as those probably were. Both back files were labeled CHINA
,
and I mean the country, not the dishes. “China? Oh, good. Now we’re international detectives.”

“That’s baby-pool-water-by-afternoon hot.” Tara opened up the first file on the desk. Then her eyes hooded over as she considered it further. “Wait, you’re not serious.”

“Don’t worry, I was just kidding.”
 

The first few pages were background on satellites in the form of newspaper clippings and technical articles downloaded from various websites. From his underlines and yellow highlights on the articles, David Taylor had gotten the message that satellites would be to the twenty-first century what oil had been to the twentieth.
 
A satellite can gather all the intelligence in the world, but if it can’t communicate the information to a human, it’s of no value. Then the idea was taken a step further by raising the possibility of integrating satellite data with feed from a UAV. From there he went into interference of the signal by one with the other. We looked for, I don’t know, something that had to do with the Chinese government. There was no sales pitch, proposal or anything else to or from their government.

Tara drummed her fingernails on the page. “Why isn’t anything written in Chinese? Something in here should be in two languages. Maybe a contract or product specs, just something should be.”

“Good question,” Victoria and I said together. We continued to scan through the pages.

David had downloaded and printed an unclassified USSTRATCOM, U.S. Strategic Command publication. The corner of the second page had been folded over to make an arrow to a paragraph
. Information superiority can have a force multiplying effect if, and only if, you add in control of space. The flow of information must be unhampered and uninterruptible.

“Why was he interested in that?” I wondered aloud.
 

We scanned journal articles and white papers with more general background information on satellites. One of the margin notes read “G.W.O.T.” His handwriting was squared off, masculine.

“Hmm,” said Tara, “
Gone with the Wind
. I have to say I never expected that.”

I whispered, “
It’s
global war on terror.”

“That would make more sense.”

We read that several thousand satellites, operative and inoperative, orbited the Earth. The United States owns about eighty percent of the communications and surveillance satellites
.
 

 
The next file, still labeled CHINA, contained articles on explosives, including IEDs, or improvised explosive devices, the roadside bombs used so often in Iraq and Afghanistan. They are responsible for about half the American casualties in Iraq and about thirty percent in Afghanistan.
 
For a minute I forgot I didn’t believe in fear as that term hit my gut and burned all the way to my brain. A vision of my husband in his uniform flashed in my head. The three of us stood at the desk reading as fast as we could.
 

“We have got to get one of those little cameras that photograph documents. I still want private eye hardware.” I was only half joking. Truth be told, I felt like the words on the page had pushed me off a cliff, and I was trying to stop the free fall.

“
Eeu
-
wee, that
would be waitress-saying-these-plates-are-hot hot.” Tara’s nervous laugh betrayed her, but the joke had done the trick. I was back. Had she known?

“Want me to shop for those?”

“No-o-o!”
Victoria and I said at the same time.

Clippings from
Army Times
,
Stars and Stripes
and other like publications were included. All the articles were about the search and sometimes the capture of insurgents that build or detonate roadside bombs.

“Assuming he had a contract with the Chinese government, what was the application? What was he working on?” I thought Vic was asking no one in particular, but then she looked at me. “Does the Chinese military have Backpack UAVs?”

“Um, I would assume so. They have the third largest military in the world.”

They both looked at me wide eyed, and it wasn’t just the white liner we wear in the inner corners of our eyes.

“But let’s keep it in perspective; the United States spends more on the military than the next nine largest countries combined.”

“
Puh-leeze
,” Victoria said.

“I’m just
sayin
’. If you add in the supplemental budgets to pay for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, we spend more on defense than the rest of the world.”

Tara flipped to the next page. “What else was David Taylor into? Working for the Chinese government is big time, right? And now we know that he had a client other than The Peachtree Group. Is that how he was paying for this house?”

Victoria gathered the papers to tidy up the folder, but she saw something and stopped. “What’s this?” She pointed to something written on the inside cover of the folder. It was another acronym. David had written F2T2EA.

“It’s the Kill chain, Find, Fix, Track, Target, Engage,
Assess
.”

“I want to go over these files again.” Victoria gave them to Tara and turned around.

That was when we heard a floor board squeak. We turned and saw the door move slightly. Someone must have looked in on us. I mouthed, “Still out there.”

While Tara helped Victoria put the folders in her back waistband, I slipped closer to the door. “If we’re going to make our three o’clock tee time, we have to get going. We can’t play golf dressed like this.”

The folders were in place, and Tara gave Vic a pat on the back. “No, that would be criminal.”

 
In the hallway we found Kerry Lee and walked past him. On television that would have made him start crying and confess, but he just looked at us. Obviously, he didn’t give a hoot if we saw him or not.

Our foray into psychological ops warfare having failed, we went back downstairs with Victoria leading the way. “Do you think he’ll tell Kelly what he saw us doing?” She was whispering because by this time we were winding through clusters of guests.
 

“Beatrice will cover for us.” I surprised myself with how quickly I had started trusting her and hoped I wasn’t making a mistake.

We went home to change and then met up at
Hartfield
Hills Golf Course. Posted along the winding, climbing road to the clubhouse were about five signs cautioning NO COOLERS. By the time we reached the parking lot, we had taken the hint and figured a blender attached to the battery of the golf cart was more than likely out of the question. We play there anyway.

With our three cars parked next to each other and three back hatches open, we changed shoes and unloaded bags. I pointed over my shoulder. “The City of
Hartfield
Hills is building a seventy-acre recreation complex over there. It’ll include a stadium to hold ten thousand people.”

“Your little town is growing up.” Victoria patted my shoulder. “I know you’re proud.”

“Don’t laugh, I am.” You learn a lot by going away and coming back. “The town was founded in 1939. Since my rule has always been never to live in a town younger than
yourself
, this works out just fine.”

Then it was back to business. I felt like I didn’t understand all I knew about David Taylor’s murder and figured they were thinking the same thing. We used our push carts, instead of renting two golf carts, so we could talk. While Tara and Victoria were in the ladies room, I made notes about the case on my score card. When they returned, I walked quickly to the first tee box. In some of my golf shirts my stomach shows when I swing so I liked to get the first hole over with and get away from other golfers. “This morning at The Peachtree Group when we got off the elevator our footsteps glowed for a few seconds after each step, and I heard a faint crackling noise. Have you ever come across anything like that?”

Next Victoria teed off. “I did a little research on that while I was home changing clothes. We were tracked.”

Tara took her place at the red tee. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It’s the latest in biometrics. Other biometric techniques are fingerprint readers, iris scanners, face imaging devices, and voice readers. They all use an individual’s physical characteristics for identification. The tracking system writes and saves a profile of you and your movement in the area.”

A bit extreme for most businesses, I thought. “Is this with an electrical charge? Like a body composition monitor?”

“No, that could be dangerous to anyone with a pacemaker. Trackers employ a number of different measuring instruments, like heat sensors and even a scale.”

Victoria and I were on the green and Tara was on the skirt.
“A scale?
You mean they know how much I weigh?
Uh-oh.”
She took her putter and her pitching wedge out of her bag and waited for one of them to say
pick me, pick me
. She replaced the pitching wedge. “Did you notice Beatrice had no intention of letting her daughter know she got together with us last night?”

“Maybe she thinks the investigation is going to be just more stress for Kelly.” I kneeled behind my ball and imagined it rolling into the cup.

“I don’t know. It sounds controlling to me. I mean, how good a mother do you want?” Victoria had putted in.

After Tara putted in and we were replacing the flag, a golf cart driven by a course ranger pulled up.

“Your fourth is here.” Out crawled Detective Kent in golf attire. He looked so much like an ad out of
Golf
Digest
,
I looked for price tags hanging off.
 

“Hello, ladies.” He got his clubs out and we walked to the second hole. “Are you any good at this?”

“We usually break a hundred, but that’s for nine holes. That’s okay, isn’t it?” Tara’s smile and raised eyebrows accompanied this smart-alecky reply.

He teed off the white tee, and the ball shot a couple of stories high. Unfortunately for him it dropped about three yards past our red tee, the ladies tee.
 
“I’ll take another.”

“That’s consistent,” I whispered to Victoria and Tara.

“Taking another?” Victoria whispered back.

“Yeah, and cheating.”

As we walked to the fairway the detective said, “I’m not much of a golfer.”

“No?” I’m sorry, but he was begging for that.

Then we heard the first few bars of “Hey, Good
Lookin
’,” and Tara looked around for marshals as she rummaged through her golf bag for her cell phone. Tiara Investigations’ calls had been transferred to her phone.

“Actually, it’s mine.”
 
The Detective had his open phone in hand and obviously didn’t give a rat’s ass about course rules. He turned his head away and chuckled.
“Later, a little later.”

I remember thinking,
what the hell?
When I saw the look of foreboding on Vic’s face, I moved over to stand next to her.

“Same song on his phone as Tara?
Can’t be good,” she whispered.

Detective Kent hung up and looked at Tara, “Buffett?”