How to Succeed in Murder (22 page)

Chapter Thirty-six

I assumed it was wishful thinking when I thought I heard Jack’s voice. A side-effect of the ringing in my ears. Then I heard another voice.

“Are there any casualties?”

Inspector Yahata.

Jack and the inspector were both standing in the doorway to the elevator lobby, both surveying the damage, both holding guns.

“Stay put,” Jack said when I started toward him. “This isn’t stable.”

I followed his gaze to the ceiling, where crackling sheets of glass still hung between us. Safety glass, thank heavens, but that didn’t make getting caught in a shower of the stuff any more appealing.

“Is she dead?” Brenda asked. She was looking at Flank.

He shook his head and crouched over MoM’s body, applying pressure to a fast-spreading stain on her shoulder. She was covered in broken glass.

Yahata pulled out a cell phone and started speaking into it in urgent, clipped tones, which probably meant an ambulance was on its way.

“Well.” Simon brushed himself off. “You three certainly know how to make an entrance.”

“Who shot her?” I asked. There were a lot of guns around.

“Me,” Flank grunted. “Saw her gun.”

“Where were you?” Eileen asked. “Did you get my messages?” She looked from Jack to Flank.

“What messages?” Then I remembered her surreptitious typing. “Is that what you were doing on the laptop?”

“I sent SOS text messages to Jack and Flank,” she said.

“You’re a genius,” I told her.

She picked some glass out of her hair and looked modest.

“I was at the Hall of Justice with the inspector when I got the message,” Jack said. “And you are a genius.” This to Eileen.

The Hall of Justice was only a few blocks away. Still, they must have done the whole lights and sirens bit to get here so quickly.

“We were outside the door coming up with a plan when Flank…” Jack surveyed the extensive wreckage. “…took action.”

“Came up the back stairs,” Flank said. Which explained why we hadn’t seen him in the hall. He must have been behind MoM in the hallway, which accounted for the fact that his shot had shattered both conference room walls, as well as the kitchen’s.

Flank was still crouched over MoM’s body. “She’s waking up.”

Jack and Yahata crunched their way through the broken glass to her, skirting the perimeter of the room.

“It’s fake,” Flank said, handing MoM’s gun to the detective.

Yahata took it, and turned it to read the inscription on the barrel. “To MoM, for all her great work on
Sniper
.”

“I’ll be damned,” Jack said. “That was the first game ever developed on Zakdan software. This must have been a team gift.”

Right. She couldn’t have gotten a tee-shirt like everybody else.

“Charley, you’re bleeding.” Brenda came closer to look at a cut on my arm.

“So are you.” From several scattered cuts on her hands and arms.

Simon had a small cut on his forehead. “This had better leave a damn sexy scar.” He reached up to touch it.

“Come on.” Jack was suddenly next to me. “Let’s get out of here.”

***

Several hours later, in the cafeteria of San Francisco General, Inspector Yahata found us cleaned up, bandaged, and drinking lots of coffee. All of us except Flank, that is. He hadn’t been hit by any glass, so he’d gone to the police station to surrender his gun and make a statement. Although if they made him surrender his gun first, I didn’t know how they’d ever get an intelligible statement out of him.

But that wasn’t my problem.

“How is she?” Brenda asked the detective.

“Well enough to give us a statement.” He sat, producing the familiar small notebook and glittering silver pen.

“Is a statement the same thing as a confession?” Brenda asked.

The detective’s eyes flashed in Eileen’s direction. “Had it not been for your recording, I believe she would have insisted that Ms. Chen’s death was accidental.”

“What recording?” Brenda and I asked simultaneously.

“You clever thing,” Simon said. “You recorded the whole thing, didn’t you?”

Eileen shrugged. “After I sent the text messages, I turned on the computer’s microphone. It seemed the obvious thing to do.”

“For you, maybe.” I stared at her.

Brenda put her hand over Eileen’s. “Thank you.”

Jack cleared his throat. “Did she have anything to say about Lalit Kumar or Jim Stoddard?”

Damn. I’d completely forgotten about them.

Brenda’s hand flew to her mouth. “Oh, she must have killed them. At least, she must have killed Jim. Remember when we asked if she was going to his memorial service? She said it would be hypocritical.”

“But why?” Simon asked. “Don’t tell us she was jealous of him too?”

“If I had to make a guess—” Jack looked at the inspector closely. “I’d say Jim knew something about Clara’s murder.”

Yahata hesitated, seeming to consider several thousand things at once before speaking. “He saw them in the garage on the night of Ms. Chen’s murder.”

“And he didn’t go to the police?” Brenda protested. “What a bastard!” She looked shocked at her own outburst.

“He tried to blackmail her.” I looked to the detective for confirmation, which came as a minute lift of his eyebrows.

“How did she kill him?” Eileen asked. “I mean, how did she make it look like an accident?”

Yahata looked at Jack. “How would you suppose?”

Jack thought about it. “He was already drunk. So she probably followed him to his car and offered to drive him home. Maybe she gave him more to drink, or maybe she just talked to him for a while until he passed out.”

“Literally boring him to death,” Simon muttered.

Jack, having learned the technique from me, ignored him. “Then she could have driven the car into position, heading downhill on O’Farrell, gotten out, and released the brake so it rolled to a stop in the middle of Van Ness, where the road flattens out.”

“And waited for the inevitable,” I finished.

We all looked at Yahata. “It might very well have happened that way,” he acknowledged. Which was not the same thing as telling us the details of MoM’s confession, but it was as much as we were going to get.

“You put it best when we first met her,” I told Eileen. “She’s opportunistic. With both killings, she saw the opportunity that presented itself, and she took it.”

Eileen nodded. “Which is why she probably still thinks none of it was her fault.”

“Hang on.” Brenda’s eyes widened. “What about Lalit Kumar? And what about the shooting? That wasn’t opportunistic. That was a deliberate ambush.”

“But, be fair,” Simon said reasonably. “Charley did provoke it by stealing—”

She waved her hands. “No, not today. The shooting at the museum. At Jack and Charley. The same night Jim Stoddard was killed.” She looked at Jack. “If she wasn’t killing people because of the software bug, why would she have wanted to kill you? And if she didn’t even have a real gun, how could she have?”

She turned to Simon. “Wasn’t she at the party before you? So how could she have been shooting at Jack and Charley all the way across town?”

Brenda was right. It couldn’t have been MoM. So who? And where did Lalit Kumar fit in?

“Well, darling, people have been known to shoot at Jack before,” Simon suggested. “Maybe that didn’t have anything to do with dear old MoM.”

All eyes turned to my husband.

“Eileen,” he said. “I may need to make a few changes to your PowerPoint presentation tomorrow.”

The presentation?

Oh.

Chapter Thirty-seven

We were in the executive boardroom, as scheduled, at ten the next morning.

After all, the show must go on.

Even if, as we now assumed, MoM had been the one to schedule it.

Jack and Mike had left for Zakdan ahead of us. They, along with Bob, Krissy, Tonya and Troy, were already in position by the time we got there. We were still undercover, so I wasn’t entirely sure if I was supposed to know Jack or not, but I had a hard time not staring at him.

Jack looks good in Armani.

Brenda, Eileen, Simon and I took our places and waited for Morgan’s arrival to ring up the curtain. Nods were exchanged. Conversation was murmured and minimal.

“Does anybody know where MoM is?” Krissy’s high voice cut through the quiet.

Nobody who knew was telling.

Things were starting to get fidgety when the door opened again. All the Zakdan execs sat up taller and began straightening their clothes when Morgan entered the room. But that was perhaps less because of Morgan, and more because of the man striding in next to him.

Harry.

His cigar was a flagrant violation of state smoking regulations, and his hula-girl shirt was a slap in the face to corporate dress codes, but his wealth guaranteed that the staff of Zakdan would sooner die than point that out to him.

Morgan made a round of introductions, and I did my best not to react when Harry winked at me. Or maybe it was at Brenda, but it was in our general direction.

“I don’t know about anyone else,” he said with a broad grin, “but I’d like to hear what these folks have to say about this place.”

He looked at Eileen. “You ready?”

She nodded briskly, rose, and flipped a switch on the conference table’s elaborate center console. Suddenly the screen of her laptop was replicated on large flat-panel monitors mounted at either end of the room, and the SFG logo was on display.

The SFG logo had been created the night before by her ten-year-old son, but it looked good enough for the purpose of the meeting.

“The evaluation of Zakdan has had two distinct branches,” she began. “As you all know, the SFG team has concentrated on understanding the business models and overall viability of the corporation as a whole.”

Heads nodded on the Zakdan side of the table.

“Concurrent with our efforts, the consultants from MJC have been conducting an investigation of the core technology and intellectual property of the company.”

That caused a little ripple of something. I thought Bob was going to speak up, then he just stuffed his hands into the pockets of his baggy jeans and looked sulky.

Eileen continued. “I think it would be the most effective use of our time to turn things over to Jack Fairfax and Mike Papas, of MJC, for a discussion of their technical findings.”

“Excuse me,” Troy spoke. “Was Jim Stoddard aware you were examining the code?”

“Yes,” Jack answered for Eileen. “He was very aware of our activities.”

“Morgan,” Troy addressed the CEO, “I really think if we’re going to proceed with this we should have some representative of the Engineering function here. Have you named Jim’s replacement yet?”

Morgan stared at the Marketing VP. The phrase “not yet cold in his grave” could have been written in script on the wall behind him.

“It’s a little premature, Troy. And we do have a representative of the Engineering function here. We have Bob.”

Bob looked like he’d just found an electric eel in the bottom of his latte.

“Bob?” The scorn in Troy’s voice was clear.

“Yes, me.” The Quality Assurance VP got over his shock and sat up a little straighter. “Coding and testing go hand in hand. Both functions, working together, make up an Engineering organization.”

Score one for Bob.

“In any case,” Harry rumbled, “I’d like to hear what you came up with, Jack.” His eyes glittered.

Jack nodded. “What we came up with was a deliberate and systematic effort, occurring over years and across multiple releases, to implant a sophisticated series of delayed-release viruses at the most fundamental levels of the Zakdan code.”

It took a minute for everyone to realize what he’d said, mainly because he’d spoken so casually. He might just as well have been remarking “gosh, it looks like rain” instead of informing them that their company was sitting squarely on a time bomb.

Krissy reacted first. “Excuse me?”

Jack looked at her. “My colleagues and I specialize in system security. And it became obvious to us that some individual or group has been planting increasingly complex viruses in every product released by Zakdan for the last decade.”

She stared at him for a minute, then shook her head. “That doesn’t make sense. We would have known about it. We would have gotten Tech Support calls.”

“Not if the virus hadn’t been triggered yet,” Mike told her. “The only calls you got were the results of accidental triggers that set off small corruptions in individual applications. The pattern wasn’t obvious, but it was there.”

“But how could someone do that?” Krissy protested.

“Yes, how?” Troy challenged. “It doesn’t even sound possible.”

“It would take planning and patience and access to the code at the highest level,” Jack explained. “It’s exactly the sort of scenario that Homeland Security has been concerned about.”

“Homeland Security?” Tonya echoed.

Mike spoke up. “Terrorist cells have been known to operate for years, with a single goal, working in isolation for the day when they can unleash something of a scale that would otherwise be inconceivable.”

“Terrorist cells?” Bob’s complexion had taken on an alarming purple cast. “No way. There’s no way terrorists could have gotten access to the code.”

Jack looked at him. “As a matter of fact, our liaison from the SFPD agrees with you. He feels it’s a simple criminal affair.”

Inspector Yahata, right on cue, slipped into the room. A frisson of electricity circled the table.

“Hello, Inspector.” Harry pulled out the chair next to him, clearly enjoying the unfolding show. “Have a seat.”

“So the only question remaining—” Jack’s voice made several people jump— “is who had that kind of access, over that period of time, to the Zakdan code?” He looked around the table. “Inspector, do you have any thoughts on the matter?”

Yahata sat with his hands, fingertip to fingertip, on the table before him. “Our investigation has yielded evidence that Jim Stoddard, the late executive vice president of Engineering, was the mastermind behind the plan.”

“No way,” Krissy murmured.

“Stoddard appears to have long nursed a resentment towards the original founders of the company, Zak Bridges and Dan Maceri, with whom he was a student at Brown,” Yahata continued. “He was deeply hostile toward them for what he perceived as their condescension in offering him a job when they were in the early phase of the company. He believed himself to be a far more gifted programmer than either of them, and that it was his genius that was ultimately responsible for the success of the company.”

“You’re shitting me,” Troy said. “You are absolutely shitting me. How could you know that?”

I didn’t think the inspector cared for his language. “Jim Stoddard, like many egomaniacs, kept a journal.”

It was probably just my imagination that he looked at Harry when he said “egomaniac.”

“Why?” Tonya asked, her eyes huge. “Why would he have done something like that? He can’t have just wanted to bring all the systems down—was he going to hold up the company for ransom or something?”

“If that had been his motivation,” the detective replied, “he would have had ample opportunity to act upon it.”

“Then why?” Krissy wailed.

Harry said one word.

“Power.”

They all stared at him.

Jack spoke. “It gave Jim a tremendous sense of power to know that he had his finger on the button.”

“But I still don’t understand how it can have gone on for so long,” Krissy said. “I mean, why wasn’t this virus discovered? Why didn’t anyone find it in all the testing over all the—”

She stopped, and turned to stare at Bob.

I’d been watching him turn from purple to very, very white. And now that everyone was looking at him, he went a shade paler.

“You said it, Bob,” I spoke to him. “Coding and testing go hand in hand.”

His eyes flashed, and he looked at Inspector Yahata.

“Jim would have been nothing without me.”

Jackpot.