How to Succeed in Murder (14 page)

“I saw him in the copy room,” Simon volunteered.

“What was he doing there?”

“As far as I could tell, he seemed to be copying things.” The quantity of alcohol Simon had consumed seemed to have evened out his caffeine buzz. “Heaven knows what he was copying. But he had quite an effect on some of the more skittish employees.”

I’ll bet he did. I was just surprised I hadn’t heard any screams.

***

By the time Jack let us in the front door, I was ready to fall over. And it was just dawning on me that I’d have to get up and do it all over again the next day.

I was leaning against Jack, so I felt it when he suddenly tensed.

“What is it?”

“Someone’s been in,” he said quietly.

I looked at the little blinking keypad inside the door. “The alarm is still on,” I whispered. “Are you sure?”

“I’m sure. Stay here.” He left me outside the door, moving cautiously and keying in the code to disable the alarm.

Jack moving cautiously has a certain style that I normally enjoy watching. But I’m not normally watching him while standing in the dark in front of my burgled house.

At least the burglars couldn’t have gotten away with much. We only had a bed and a table. And Harry’s chair. Oh, wouldn’t it be great if they took Harry’s chair—

Then I thought I heard Jack laughing.

“Jack?” I took a step inside.

The lights came on, and I jumped. Jack was standing at the usually closed door to the library. Looking extremely amused.

“You’ve got to see this.”

“What? Did someone break in?” I went down the hall.

“You might say that.”

“But there’s nothing in the library.”

“There is now.” He moved aside.

I peeked around him. In the corner of the room, looking like it had always been there, was a bar. Perfectly matched to the surrounding woodwork, perfectly sized for the space, and fully stocked.

I stared at it. “Jack?”

“I didn’t do it.”

“Then—”

“There’s a note.” He handed me a piece of stiff creamy notepaper.

I looked up at Jack. “How the hell did he—”

“I have no idea. But I’d like to find out.”

I was rattled. Seriously rattled. And not because Harry had been able to break into our house, or—more likely—pay someone to break into our house. No, I was rattled because I’d had just that thought about a drink after my first day at Zakdan. And to know that I’d been thinking like Harry…

I was rattled.

“What do you want to do?” Jack asked.

I eyed the thing. “Sweep it for bugs.”

“Do you want a drink?”

“Not now.” Since I was standing so conveniently close to him, I ran my hands up his chest. “We need to talk.”

“I like it when we talk.” He lowered his head toward mine.

“About Tess McGill.” I poked him in the shoulder.

At which point he laughed at me, but since he was doing other, nicer things as well, I got over it.

Chapter Twenty-four

The big substance abuse problem in the workplace isn’t alcohol after all. It’s caffeine. This became glaringly apparent to me as Day Two at Zakdan progressed.

Jack propelled me out the door with a travel mug of coffee in the morning, and I met the gang at Arugula for cappuccino and strategy, Flank having again staked out the perfect parking spot.

“Before we get started,” I addressed Eileen. “SFG?”

I hadn’t remembered to ask her yet where she’d come up with the name for our fake consulting company.

She grinned. “Don’t you like it?”

“I should probably know what it stands for—just in case I’m asked.”

“San Francisco….something,” Simon guessed. “San Francisco what, darling?”

“San Francisco nothing,” Eileen explained. “It stands for Scoto,” she pointed to herself, “Fairfax,” me, “and Gee,” Brenda.

“What about me? I don’t even get billing?” Simon blinked.

“You would have, but SFGB starts to sound like a college radio station.”

Brenda spoke up. “Shouldn’t we get to work now?”

Right. Yes. Work.

***

I had two appointments for the day. The gray-haired MoM in the morning, and the disheveled Quality Assurance guy, Bob Adams, in the afternoon.

But before any of that, I wanted to take a look at the Zakdan calendar system. That thing Brenda had said, about everyone being able to look at everyone else’s calendar, had tickled something in my brain overnight. So after we got to Zakdan and the others went off on their assignments—except for Flank, who stood watch in his corner of our conference room—I settled in and opened my laptop.

I have a computer at the theatre, and I use email as much as I have to, so I at least knew how to get started. I clicked the icon that looked like a clock, and opened up the email and calendar program.

It was just that simple. Someone—Jack? Mike?—must have set up the laptop to connect to the Zakdan system. I saw my two appointments on a time grid of the day, and my email Inbox had eight messages. But I didn’t stop to read them. I wasn’t interested in my own data.

I went hunting around in the menus until I found a command that said “Open Other User’s Calendar.” I clicked it, and a small screen with a list of names appeared. Presumably everyone who worked at Zakdan.

I scrolled down until I got to the C’s, and there she was. I clicked the name, and after a brief pause I was looking at Clara Chen’s calendar. I paused a moment over the entry for 12:30 that day. Clara would have met with a wedding planner.

I shook my head, telling myself to hurry up before I was interrupted, and clicked the arrow that would take me back in time. After two weeks I stopped. Most of the meetings were engineering gibberish to me. Bug councils and UI reviews and the like.

But one appointment was perfectly clear.

Clara had met with Lalit Kumar on the day before she’d died.

***

Millicent O’Malley—MoM—appeared at the conference room door at exactly ten o’clock. She looked like someone featured in those stark winter paintings of prim New England townsfolk grimly skating on frozen ponds. Today again she wore a turtleneck, this time a loden green, over a long slim black wool skirt. She carried a green suede day planner notebook. I was a little miffed when I noticed it, because I have a fabulous hot pink Kate Spade day planner, but I hadn’t judged it a sufficiently techie accessory to bring to the office.

“I thought I was going to speak with the team leader,” MoM said. “Is she gone?” Her dismissive glance around the room indicated that I was a poor second best.

I glanced around too, for some reason.

“She had another appointment.” I gave her my most I’m-a-competent-professional smile. “I hope I’ll do.”

I meant it as a joke, but she seemed to need a minute to consider the question. A flash of annoyance crossed her face, then she embraced the change.

“WONderful! Let’s get some coffee.” As if she’d been dying to get me alone for days.

I noticed two things about MoM: First, that she had completely ignored Flank. And that is not easy to do. He is the proverbial elephant in the room. And second, that she was more of a phony than I was. Once she’d decided that I was as close to the top of the SFG org chart as she’d get that morning, I’d suddenly become the most important person in the world to her.

She made little flourishing gestures as she led the way across the hall to the kitchen, and turned into a tour guide as soon as we got there.

“You have your choice of beans,” waving her hand toward a line of canisters, each neatly labeled with the provenance and roasting methodology of the coffee beans contained therein. “And here’s the grinder. Honestly.” She lowered her voice conspiratorially. “You would not believe the amount of money they spent on this equipment. It’s all Italian, and they actually hired baristas to come in and give us training when we got it.”

Her eyebrows went up two inches, waiting for me to say “You’re kidding.” Then she shook her head as if they—whoever “they” were—were very naughty boys indeed.

“Now.” She arranged herself at one of the small tables and scooted a chair around for me. “Tell me how I can help you.”

She’d positioned the chair so my back would be to the door. I scooted it back before I sat down. We were alone in the kitchen, but I didn’t count on it staying that way, and I didn’t want to be overheard.

I mentally referred to my script. “I’d like you to tell me about your organization. Engineering Services?” I wished I’d brought the laptop with the recorder, or at least a notepad, but she’d swept me across the hall so quickly I hadn’t picked anything up. “What exactly does your group do?”

“Well,” she frowned. “First I should make it clear that I don’t like the name Engineering Services. We are not handmaidens to the engineers.” She verbally underscored the word “not.”

“Okay…”

“I’ve only recently taken this position. Before the last company reorganization I oversaw all of Client Education—that comprises both Client Instruction and Client Knowledge.”

I only understood one thing out of that sentence: MoM had been Clara Chen’s boss.

“Client Knowledge,” I said. “Isn’t that Krissy’s group now?”

“Yes.” She wrapped her hands around her mug. “For now.”

“Oh, you don’t think she’ll get the official promotion?”

“Krissy is a sweet girl.” She gave me a sidelong glance. “But
really
.”

Uh huh. Now the gloves were off. “What about the last person in that job? Didn’t I hear something about…”

“Yes.” She set her coffee down. “There was a tragic accident. We’re all still in shock.”

“How awful,” I said. “Did you know her well?”

“I hired her.” She gave me a tight, brave smile. “But I don’t imagine that interests you. What do you need to know for your report?”

I needed to know who killed Clara, who faked Lalit’s suicide, and who was planting bugs in the Zakdan code. But those were not the sort of questions best asked directly.

“I know Client Knowledge is what other companies call Tech Support,” I told her. “But what’s Client Instruction?”

“It’s our Technical Publications department.”

“The technical writers.” I knew from the Fake Book that they wrote the user manuals. And, according to Simon, they had a wide variety of extracurricular interests.

“That’s right,” she said encouragingly. She may as well have patted my head.

“But now you run Engineering Services. How did that happen?” Had she had a falling out with Clara? Is that why she didn’t want to talk about her?

She delivered a great sigh and turned into a martyr before my eyes. “Well, the web team was in trouble, and there was a new initiative that they just…” She gave me a stoic my-fate-is-to-take-care-of-those-less-competent look. “They needed me.”

Right. The train wreck of a plan that Morgan Stokes had told us about. Something about cataloguing information? A paperless office—that was it. Doomed to failure, but that was beside the point.

“So Engineering Services is the web team.” Now I was getting it. Maybe she hadn’t had a falling out with Clara after all. Maybe she’d used her as a stepping-stone to get ahead.

“Oh, no,” she protested. “No, I’m not involved with the web team anymore.” The look on her face said she wouldn’t want to touch that icky web stuff with a ten foot pole. “No.” She straightened her spine. “Now it’s Engineering Services that…well, I don’t want to be indiscreet, but…” She shook her head, implying untold layers of corruption and mismanagement in Engineering Services.

“Thank goodness they have you to help out,” I told her.

***

“She sounds like a piece of work,” Eileen said.

We’d all gone to lunch at Eliza’s, a hole-in-the-wall Chinese fusion place on Potrero Hill, figuring a quick comparison of the morning’s findings might be better accomplished away from the office. Flank had ditched us to pick up a pizza from Goat Hill. He was devouring it in the front seat of the little green bug, parked illegally outside Eliza’s.

I’d been trying to capture my overall impression of MoM.

“Let’s just say she’s not my new best friend.”

Brenda toyed with her Basil Chicken. “Well, pathologically condescending or not, the question is…”

“Could she be a murderer?” I finished.

They looked at me.

“It didn’t feel like she was hiding a murder,” I said. “It felt like she was covering insecurities of a breadth and scope I don’t even want to think about, but…” I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

Eileen nodded and turned to Simon. “How did your talk with Krissy go?”

He took the last Crab Rangoon from the plate of appetizers we’d been sharing. “I hate to sound as catty as your friend MoM, darling, but my assessment is that Krissy is about as clever as a box of lint.”

I expected Brenda to scold him, but she just leaned forward. “Really?”

He held up his hands in helplessness. “Try as I might, I couldn’t get her to say anything remotely interesting. She walked me through the entire tedious Client Thingy operation as if someone had pulled the string in her back.” He gave me a dark look. “Completely over-rehearsed, if you know what I mean.”

“Does that make her stupid?” Eileen asked thoughtfully. “Or is she sticking to some script in order to avoid making a slip about Clara?”

“Did you ask her about Clara?” I asked.

“Mmmm.” He nodded, his mouth full of Mango Beef.

“And?” Brenda demanded.

He swallowed. “She just said it was tragic and they were all still in shock.”

“That’s almost exactly what MoM said!” I nearly lost a prawn in my excitement. “Could they be in on it together?”

“Either that or it was tragic and they’re all still in shock,” Eileen said.

Okay, fine.

“But you have to admit that so far Krissy has the strongest motive,” Brenda said. “After all, she gets Clara’s job.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Depending on how much MoM has to say about it.”

“Well,” Simon said brightly. “If MoM is murdered next, we’ll have our answer, won’t we?”

We stared at him.

“What?” He blinked.

I turned to Eileen. “How did it go with Jim Stoddard? Did you have any better luck with him than I did yesterday?”

She made a face. “Not really. But you’re not the only one he hit on.”

“Oh, my God,” Brenda said. “Would you believe Troy from Marketing hit on me too?”

“That place is a hotbed of sexual frustration,” Simon mused. He looked at his watch. “When do we go back?”

We ignored him.

“Okay, but before the romantic overture, did you get anything useful out of Jim?”

Eileen shook her head. “It was the same as with you. He just wanted to talk about how brilliantly architected the software was and how much he liked my shoes.”

They were very pointy shoes with very spiky heels. Did that say something about the Engineering VP?

Eileen looked at Brenda. “What was Troy’s technique with you?”

She made a face. “He did the hair thing you told us about. Taking the ponytail out and putting it in again. I wonder if it’s his way of preening? Like a male bird, sort of putting himself on display?”

The only thing I could say to that was “yuk,” so I kept quiet.

“Anyway,” Brenda went on, “I thought we decided yesterday that he doesn’t have a motive. Is anyone going to talk to him this afternoon?”

“No.” Eileen consulted her small electronic organizer. “I’m with MoM—I can’t wait for that,” she grimaced. “And you, Charley, are with Bob from Quality Assurance.”

The bearded couch potato. I’d already written him off as a suspect because he couldn’t have been the one at the gym with Clara, and I thought he was too chubby to have been the one dashing across the street in the rain to get in Lalit’s car.

“Simon, you’re with Jim.”

“I wonder if he’ll proposition me?” He wiggled his eyebrows. “Or if I should—”

“And Brenda, you’re in Human Resources with Tonya again. See if you can get her to crack about who Clara was going to fire. I still think that’s our best bet.”

She looked up. “Are we ready?”

I wished people would stop asking that.