Now You See It (19 page)

The boy sniffed, nodded.

“How old are you, son?”

“Nineteen.” Justin’s heel beat a frantic tattoo up and down on the cement floor.

“Nervous, Justin?”

“Duh. Wouldn’t you be? I mean, sure, I’m nervous. I didn’t DO anything! What are you going to do to me?”

“Me, personally? Not a thing except ask you some questions.”

“About what?” Justin sniffed hard and made a sucking noise in his throat.

“What were you doing when the officers picked you up last night?”

“Nothing. Sitting. Sitting in my car. Look, I told the other officers what happened. These guys shined a light in my face and threatened me.”

“Did you see them?”

“Uh-uh. I mean, no. I couldn’t see sh—anything with that light in my eyes.”

“But there were two of them?”

“I’m not sure. It seemed like more than one, though.”

“Would you recognize the voice if you heard it again?”

“I think he was doing something to it—it was kind of growly, you know?”

“Did they rob you?”

“No.”

“Did they assault you?”

“I’m not sure. They threatened me, and they cut my upholstery. Does that count as assault?”

“Threatened you with what?”

“With getting killed like Mr. Carrow.”

“They said that? Used his name?”

Justin nodded, and the foot sped up. “Yeah. They know where I work, what I do.” He dropped his head into both hands. “They’re gonna kill me, dude. I know they will as soon as I do what they told me to.”

“Which is what, exactly?”

Justin told him, laying it all out, the email file, his brilliant business idea, his terror when he saw the knife. “One thing I need to know here,” he said at the end.

“What’s that?”

“Just, um, how—how did Mr. Carrow die? Exactly.”

Lyons told him, in some detail.

Justin’s face went dead white and his bladder let go as his eyes rolled back in his head and he slumped forward in the chair.

Lyons jumped to cushion Justin’s head before it struck the table, but was too late to save his shoes from the growing puddle on the floor. Oh, this was going to be just lovely.

“Come on, Justin. Wake up, son.” Lyons carefully put Justin’s head down onto the table with his face against the cool metal surface. The boy began to revive almost immediately. Lyons could tell the exact moment Justin realized he’d wet himself, and mortification pushed aside his fear for a few seconds. Lyons pounced.

“You work for Wheeler, Epstein and Carrow.”

Justin cleared his throat, and wouldn’t meet Lyons’s eyes. “Yeah. I mean, yes, sir. I’m their computer and systems tech. Until they find out I got busted again.”

“So you knew Ned Carrow.”

Something flickered across Justin’s face. Disgust? Contempt? It was too brief to tell for sure.

“Yeah. Sure. He’s one of my bosses. Was.”

“I didn’t see you at the memorial service.”

“I was there.” Justin’s eyes slid to one side. “People never see me.” Again, a flicker of something, gone too fast. “I was there, though.”

“How did you get along with him?”

“Mr. Carrow? He was okay, I guess. All the people at the firm think I’m some kind of servant, or plumber, or something, and they’re hot shit.”

“Was Carrow like that?”

Justin shrugged. “Pretty much, yeah. He was kind of a shit, but the money’s pretty good there.”

“Okay, Justin. Where were you weekend before last?”

“Over the weekend?” Justin looked up and he broke into a smile. “I was at hacker camp.”

“Hacker camp?” That was a new one. What in the hell was “hacker camp”? Lyons was almost afraid to ask.

“Yeah. It was shiny. The firm sent me because I’m in charge of system security, too, along with everything else. We’ve been hacked a couple of times lately—pretty seriously, once, that was from China.”

“So, you learned to do what, exactly?”

“Cool stuff. Security, reverse engineering, that sort of thing. Not a lot of new information, but I got this Hacker’s Handbook out of the weekend.”

“Was it here in town?”

“Yeah. Well, Bellevue. They put us up in a hotel for the weekend. Even paid for room service. It was cool.”

“And Saturday night?” Lyons watched Justin carefully, but the day and time didn’t seem to register, except for a big grin.

“Oh, man. A bunch of us got into an all-night session of
World of Warcraft
. I was so tired next morning I could hardly stay awake through the presentations. Came home and crashed—nearly didn’t get to work next morning.”

“You didn’t know Ned Carrow was dead?”

“No.” Justin shook his head. “Not until Wheeler came blasting out of his office and announced it.”

“What time was that?”

“Late. Maybe five, five-thirty.”

“Who was there at the time?”

“Everybody. Dude, it’s summertime. We work four-tens, get a three-day weekend. Pretty sweet, actually.”

Something niggled at Lyons, but he couldn’t put a finger on it.

“And how did Mr. Wheeler seem?”

“Scared shitless. His face was, like, dead white. Seriously. He looked like somebody’d shot
him
.”

“How did you feel about Carrow’s death?”

“Surprised, but not surprised, you know? Carrow was into some freaky shit.” Justin’s eyes flickered.

“What kind of freaky shit was he into?” Lyons asked.

Justin looked away, then back. He squirmed briefly before answering. His wet jeans were probably beginning to chafe. “I’m not supposed to check on what the attorneys have on their hard drives. I mean, they’ve always got lots of privileged stuff.”

“But you do.”

Silence.

“Justin?”

“Yeah. Mr. Wheeler asked me to keep an eye on Mr. Carrow’s surfing.”

“And?”

“I don’t see how the guy had time to work. He watched porn for hours at a time. Hard-core stuff. I mean, no kids, or anything, but, dude.”

Lyons decided to go with his gut, which was telling him this kid had plenty of problems, but he hadn’t murdered anybody. “Anything else I need to know?”

Justin stared into space, and then hung his head, the picture of misery. “No. No, sir. Can I stay here? They can’t get me here, right?”

Lyons sighed and stood to take him back to his cell.

Chapter Fifteen

“I was able to talk to Tran briefly today,” Brady said as he handed mugs of coffee to Mike and Gemma and took one for himself. There were no windows in his apartment, situated as it was in the center of the building, but he didn’t need to see the slanting sunlight to know it was late afternoon. He hadn’t gotten much sleep last night, and the last few days were catching up to him.
I am definitely getting too old for this shit.
A deep swallow of coffee helped a little. “He confirmed some of what I thought, what we’d both said earlier. Ned’s murder is way over-the-top for a personal vendetta. But not if he was supposed to be an example. Tran and his task force are working a really nasty sex slave operation centering out of the South Sound, somewhere. What if the two are tied in together, some way? It makes sense. It works better than anything else we’ve been able to come up with.”

“Yeah, for Ned and what happened to him,” Mike said. “But the kinds of shit happening to Gemma aren’t consistent with that scenario.”

“We’ve been assuming it’s all the same doers. But what if it isn’t?” Brady asked.

“Two separate sets of attacks, one on Ned, one on Gemma? Sorry. I don’t buy that kind of coincidence.”

“Neither do I. But if Ned had a partner—”

“If we’d had the key sooner we’d have known the bank was a dead end, and wouldn’t have wasted so much time,” Mike began.

“Tell your sister. She’s the one who sent the key into the Eleventh Dimension or wherever.”

Mike’s eyebrows shot up nearly to his hairline. “She told you about that?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s a surprise.”

“I saw it happen, so she didn’t have a lot of wiggle room.”

“Still—” Mike glanced over at Gemma. “I wonder who else knows what you can do.”

“Ned knew,” she said, “but he didn’t believe it. He thought it was some kind of sleight-of-hand.”

“A lot of people can’t get their brains around something like that.”

Brady didn’t answer.

“So,” Mike said, “where are we? Where are all these leads taking us?”

“Nowhere,” Gemma said. “Every time we follow one it trails off into a false cue. The key led to nothing but a bunch of papers, and a lot of money, but no help in figuring out why Ned was murdered, or who did it.”

“Yes,” Mike answered, “but that was our fault. We just assumed it was a big clue, because he’d stashed it.”

“True,” Brady said. “Now the pictures turn out to be—I don’t know what they are, but the women in them, even the really young ones, are all professionals. The photos are twisted, but nobody is going to look for revenge for the women in them. The one exception is the young girl in Gemma’s picture. The cops have one just like it they’re not showing around, because the girl was a suicide a few months back. Tran has been in touch with her family. They’re not close relatives, and they’re not brooding over her death.”

“You heard this from Tran?”

Brady nodded. “He’s convinced they’re for real.”

Mike chewed his lower lip. “The police know some of the women were clients at the shelter Ned worked for. The bastard was a predator.”

Gemma looked over at Mike. “It’s okay, Mike. When you set your jaw like that, even I quake in my boots.”

That got the smile she was hoping for, and seemed to calm Mike down a notch.

“But it still doesn’t answer any of our questions,” she said, rummaging through her purse for a pen and tablet. “Who broke into the house? What were they looking for?”

“What are you doing, Gemma?” Brady asked.

“Taking notes. Maybe we’ll see something if we go through it all again.” She was getting the hang of this. “I wish...”

“What?”

“You don’t have a whiteboard handy, do you? And some colored pens for it?”

Brady said, “Sure, down in the office.” He jerked his head toward Mike. “It’ll be easier with two of us.”

He and Mike were back in less than five minutes, each carrying one end of a portable whiteboard. While Mike put it against a wall, Brady began pulling dry erase markers out of various pockets.

“Cool,” Gemma said, and took up a position in front of the board. “Now I think again, with a marker in my hand. Once a teacher, always a teacher.” With the black marker, she divided the space into columns, heading them
Ned
,
Computer
,
Break-In
,
Sam
,
Fire
.

In the columns she started writing elements of each incident, using specific colors: red for fire, green for organized, blue for search, purple for murder.

“This was a good idea.” Brady looked a little less grim. “Okay. First was Ned’s murder. Whoever did it planned it out pretty carefully—they had to get him there alone, had to bring the photos, get everything set up. Lot of prep work.”

Gemma wrote “Organized” in green under the
Ned
column, then switched pens and wrote “Murder” in purple.

Mike nodded. “Agreed.”

“The second one was Gemma’s computer,” Brady said.

“Organized, again,” Mike said.

“Right. Came with keys or tools, gloves, nothing disturbed. Very controlled. If he’d been a little more computer-savvy, we’d never have known he was there.”

“Then the house was trashed,” Gemma said.

Brady looked up from his coffee. “I do know something about that. One of the bad guys cut himself through his glove.” He told them what he’d learned from the bloody piece of glass out of Gemma’s clock.

“We don’t know whether Ned’s apartment was searched,” Mike added.

She drew a line out beyond the grid and wrote “Ned’s apartment” and added a question mark.

“If it was,” Brady said, “it probably would have happened before the house was torn up.”

“Then Ned’s attorney,” Gemma said.

“Right,” Mike answered. “SPD thinks that was a break-in, Sam surprised the Bad Guy, Bad Guy panicked, killed him. Same night, Mark Taylor’s office was torched. Only that happened a couple of hours later.”

As Gemma wrote, he dug through the files on the table, pulled out copies of the arson report. “All the arsons used gasoline as an accelerant. That’s pretty common, but the techs have been able to prove it was the same brand of Premium Unleaded. Not the usual choice for causing mayhem.”

Mike took a sip of coffee. “So, Bad Guy tries to find something in Ned’s hard drive—I’m assuming it was in Ned’s files, or he thought it was, considering what came next. He has no luck. So, he hires some guys to steal the whole computer and everything else that might have the McGuffin.”

“McGuffin?” Gemma asked.

Brady turned to her and grinned. “Somebody in the movie business made that word up. It means ‘whatever everybody is looking for.’ Comes in real handy when you don’t know what that is.”

“So next, he breaks into Sam Dawkins’s office.” Mike shifted his weight forward on the seat.

Brady held up a hand. “Yeah, but the timing is interesting, here. He doesn’t go to Dawkins’s place until he’s had time to go through all the stuff from the house.”

“Right,” Mike said. “It’s late, nobody should have been there. But Dawkins is working after hours, bunking on his couch. Hears the break-in, goes to see...”

“According to the police report,” Brady said, “Bad Guy clocked Sam, tied him up, beat the crap out of him, before he killed him.”

“That sounds like an interrogation,” Mike said.

“Yeah, I think so, too. The office wasn’t burned, wasn’t even seriously tossed. So, Bad Guy interrogates him, kills him,” Brady said. “Otherwise, how would he know Sam had given everything to Mark?”

“Good question. But why kill Sam?” Gemma asked.

“Another good question,” Mike said. “We have to assume Sam told him he’d given the box to Mark. Bad Guy knows stuff’s not there. He takes off. Heads for Taylor’s. But first he smashes Sam’s skull with a handball trophy from the bookcase.”

“Handball?” Gemma suddenly felt very cold. “Ned and Doug played against Sam and his partner in some attorney league championships. And lost.”

Both men paused.

Mike took a deep breath and continued. “At Mark Taylor’s office, he lucks out—no one’s around. He goes through whatever he wants to, takes his own sweet time, then torches the place. To cover his tracks?”

“Or to make sure if he missed whatever it was, the fire would destroy it.”

“By this point,” Brady said, “he’s got to be pretty sure neither attorney had it. The next logical place, then, is you or Gemma.”

“But he’d been through everything,” Gemma protested. “He knew I didn’t have it.”

“Yeah,” Mike said. “They’d already had plenty of time and opportunity to take what they wanted. It makes no sense to torch the rest.”

“I feel bad for your friends,” Gemma said. “And after they were so great about the lease.”

“Not your fault,” Mike assured her. “I just don’t see the motive. So he still hadn’t found it, and isn’t taking any chances?”

“Maybe it’s not just one motive,” Brady said. He looked steadily at Gemma. “Maybe it started out as one thing, and became something else.”

Her mouth went dry. “Me? It really is about me?”

“I think so. At least part of it. That’s the only thing I can think of that fits.”

“I don’t—”

“Who wants you, Gemma?”

“You think it’s Doug.”

Mike stared straight at Brady. “Doug is the one who connected the dots for the police. The divorce, the attorneys, the break-ins—all of it. And tied it all back to Gemma.”

“Doug did?” Her mind came to a full stop.

“Yeah, but if he’s so into Gemma, why would he do that?” Mike asked.

“Ever run into a wolverine?” Brady asked.

Mike looked confused. Gemma shook her head.

“We had them in Canada. If a wolverine can’t have what he wants, he’ll destroy it out of sheer viciousness.”

“I can’t believe it’s him,” Gemma said. “I just can’t. I mean, can you see him doing that to Ned? Getting his clothes messy? His hands all bloody? You’re talking about Doug, for God’s sake. That’s just nuts.”

“Whoever killed Ned
is
nuts,” Brady asserted.

“Brady, when you met him, did you get anything like that from him?” Mike asked.

He shook his head, his eyes dark and troubled.

Gemma rubbed her forehead. “You even shook hands with him,”

“I’ve learned to shield my hand when I have to touch somebody. It’s automatic, any more. Unless I’m running on empty. But my batteries were pretty well drained from working on your computer. Besides, we were too busy facing off.”

“I noticed,” she said, looking at Brady. “And Mike knows what you can do.”

Mike scratched the side of his nose and said, “I found out when we were in the Navy. Later on, when I heard Brady was out and looking to start a new business, I figured I could use a good Tracker from time to time.”

“Tracker?’ Gemma asked, looking from one to the other. There was something a little too convenient about Mike’s explanation.

“That’s as good a name as any,” Brady said. “‘Investigations and Security’ might be more p.c., but it amounts to the same thing. Just not as scary to civilians.”

Gemma was silent for a minute as she tried to fit the pieces together. The shape that was forming hung just beyond her grasp. She leapt for it. “That must have been some Team.”

“Yeah,” Brady answered, at the same time Mike muttered, “You have no idea.”

Brady stood and scrubbed both hands over his face and hair. “This isn’t getting us anywhere. Gemma, there’s another reason I might not have gotten anything when I shook hands with Doug. If it is him. Sometimes sociopaths don’t ‘register’ as being wrong. Maybe because they don’t think they are, I don’t know. But it’s something to keep in mind.”

“What if—” Gemma said, and stopped, almost afraid to articulate another idea that had just come to her.

“What if—?” Mike repeated.

“Okay. If there are two motives, could there be two people?”

“Working together? Maybe, one organized and one disorganized.”

Brady shook his head. “Maybe, but I don’t think so. There’s a pattern. The attack on Ned looked like someone had lost it—but I think that was staged. That, and the first break-in, were meticulously done. After that, each incident gets sloppier, as if Bad Guy is coming unglued.”

“Or is under pressure, maybe,” Mike said.

“The Wallingford house fire was different, too. No break-in, no search, just Molotovs,” Gemma said.

“Rage.” Mike looked up at Brady for confirmation.

“But why?” Gemma asked.

Mike leaned forward on his elbows and clasped his hands. “What changed that day?” This time he didn’t meet their eyes, but they were too embarrassed to notice.

“Brady stayed the night. He was on the couch,” she added with emphasis.

“Yeah, but someone watching from outside wouldn’t have known that,” Brady said.

“Listen, you two,” Mike said, still pink along the cheekbones, “I have to take off if I’m going to be ready to catch my plane. We’ll need a place to put all this stuff.”

“I’ll put it in my safe for now. It’s as secure as anywhere else.”

“You sure?”

“Well, we could maybe get Gemma to
file
them.”

“Oh, yeah. And maybe get them back in a decade or so.”

They walked Mike to the door. “So, you’re off to Ohio tonight?” Gemma asked him.

“Yeah. There’s a one a.m. into Toledo. I’ve got some stuff at the office I’ve got to clean up.” He glanced at his watch. “Gotta run, though. I want to pick up a couple of games for Tim before the stores close.”

“For Tim, eh?” Brady grinned when Mike looked sheepish.

“Better you than me,” Gemma said.

“You don’t play?’ Brady said.

“Computer games? Not really. I love my
Wii Fit
, but otherwise, assorted kinds of solitaire is all. Mah-jongg games. Ned gave me
MYST
once, installed it on my computer. I never could get into it. I don’t have the patience for figuring it all out, and I can’t cut ahead to the end and get the answers.”

“Don’t know what you’re missing,” Mike said.

“Fly safe, Mike,” Gemma whispered, holding him tightly. “We’ll see you when this is all over.”

* * *