The Devil Went Down to Austin (21 page)

"Right now," Engels said, "while we've been talking, I could've killed you five, maybe six times."

I stepped inside the elevator, smiled at Engels. "Missed opportunities. They suck, don't they?"

Those chrome lenses gave back my reflection as the doors slid shut.

Dwight Hayes was a natural.

Not only had he found my truck in the Met garage, he had discreetly parked right next to it. I walked around behind his Honda and came up on the open passenger'sside window.

Dwight was occupied looking at the F150, craning his neck, trying to see through the tinted glass of the back window.

"What are those?" he muttered. "Swords?"

"Yeah."

I guess he wasn't expecting an answer. He jumped so hard he bumped his head on the Honda's ceiling.

I said, "Hey."

He cut his eyes to either side, seemed to come to the conclusion he was cornered.

"I followed you here," he blurted.

"Really? You did that?"

He blushed. "When did you spot me?"

"About the time we left the entrance of the Techsan parking lot. Until then you were tailing me flawlessly."

He put his elbow on the window of the Honda, rubbed his forehead.

His face had the same slightly nauseated expression as yesterday. The colourfulness of his blue and yellow Hawaiian shirt didn't do anything to offset the morose poodleeyes, the chevrons of Band Aids patching cuts on his neck and forearms.

His floorboard was littered with cassette tapes—Lightnin' Hopkins, B.B. King, Fabulous Thunderbirds. Points for Dwight on the tasteometer.

On the passenger's seat was a yellow legal pad, a pen, half a pack of Hostess Snoballs. From the rearview mirror hung a small plastic Jesus, its arms spread like the Rio de Janeiro model. It seemed to be making some kind of pathetic promise—Some day, Dwight, you'll catch a fish this big.

"Don't worry," I told him. "Any fired employee of Pena's is a friend of mine."

Dwight scowled. He gave his rearview mirror Jesus a tentative nudge. "I shouldn't have called Maia."

"Pena was so true to you. So loyal."

Dwight's scalp glistened under his fuzzcap of brown hair. Sweat was trickling down my back. The summer midday parking garage was getting about as comfortable as the mouth of a Labrador retriever, but I waited while Dwight did his internal wrestling.

"He was my roommate at UT," Dwight said. "That's how far we go back. Freshman year. He kept track of me when he went out to California. When I was looking for work he sort of—adopted me. I owe Matthew a lot. Not just my job. I never expected to be as successful as him, but I've watched him. I've tried to learn some things about business."

It was almost verbatim what Dwight's mother had said. I decided not to point that out.

"Pena fired you, Dwight. You'd had enough, you argued with him, and he fired you."

"I shouldn't have pushed him."

"He used you like a dowsing rod for new victims. You saw the results."

Dwight thought about that. "I followed you—I don't know, I guess after I talked to Miss Lee this morning, I started thinking about all the things I'd left out, things I should've told her."

"I can take a message."

"If I tell you something about Techsan's software, what can you promise me? I mean, about confidentiality. Protection."

"I can promise that if you're desperate enough to talk to me, Dwight, it's going to come out anyway. You might as well tell me."

He blinked, then gave me that wobbly smile again, that same illfed sense of humour I'd seen at Windy Point when I'd borrowed his wet suit. "You always make your informants feel this good?"

"Wait until I get rolling. You got airconditioning in this thing?"

I climbed inside and shut the door.

Dwight turned on his engine, let it idle. I slanted one of the little air vents my way, got a blast of cool that smelled like old Silly Putty.

Dwight said, "Jimmy Doebler called me about the software, about a week before he died."

Dwight was staring out the window, watching the concrete columns of the parking garage as if he expected them to move.

"Why you?" I asked.

"Jimmy and I met when Matthew first approached Techsan about a deal. We spent an afternoon going over the code so Jimmy could show me it was solid. He treated me really nice. Even after Techsan rejected Matthew's offer, Jimmy stayed cordial, told me I could come out to his place sometime for barbecue."

"When he called you two weeks ago, what did he say?"

"He thought Matthew was sabotaging their program. And he thought he knew how."

I felt like a hunter who'd just had a sixteenpoint buck sit down next to him. I wanted to shoot the thing pretty bad, but I didn't dare move. I let Dwight take his time.

"Jimmy needed someone with access to Matthew's computer," he told me. "He wanted me to confirm his suspicions. He thought Matthew was using a back door in the program."

"A back door."

"Programmers call it that. It's a command that's not advertised— something that lets you inside the program. You hit your special access sequence, and you can get behind the program, go into God mode. The back door can give you unlimited access, let you change data at will."

"Or steal confidential files from betatesters," I suggested.

Dwight didn't answer.

"This back door," I said. "Where'd it come from?"

"Jimmy didn't tell me. Probably one of the original programmers—Jimmy, Ruby, or Garrett. Maybe they forgot about it, or

thought it so well hidden there was no reason to take it out. One of them could've even snuck it into the program maliciously."

"Dwight, we're only talking about three people, here—how would the others not know?"

"You have to trust your partners in a startup—there's no time to check each other's work. A highlevel encryption program has millions of lines of code—millions of places to stash a back door."

"If one of the principals, a malicious one, gave Pena access to that back door ..."

"Matthew could destroy the betatesting," Dwight finished. "The other principals might never know what hit them. Once Matthew bought Techsan, he could fix the back door quickly, document the problem, blame it on the original programmers, then turn around and make a huge profit. He could afford to bribe his informant several million and still come out ahead."

I thought about that. There were only three principals at Techsan. One was now dead.

"You told Jimmy you couldn't help him," I guessed.

Dwight nodded slowly. "I couldn't go behind Matthew's back. Jimmy couldn't give me any more specifics. The conversation came to an impasse."

"But now you think Jimmy was right."

Dwight stared at his little Jesus on the rearview mirror. "The way Matthew was talking yesterday, about how quickly he would fix the software, yes. I think Jimmy was right.

But that's not what bothers me most, Tres—not how Matthew hurt your brother's company, but why."

I waited.

"I've seen Matthew do bad things," Dwight said. "Scary things. But this acquisition seems . . . special to him. I gave him a list of four or five possibilities in Austin. Not just Techsan. But he looked at the names of the principals and zeroed in on Techsan immediately. He's spent a lot of time on this project, more than anything else he's done."

"The money potential," I said. "You indicated it was huge."

"That's just it. He's making it huge. He could've made the same size IPO with any other company I showed him, probably with less work. But Matthew is pulling in all his markers with venture capitalists to make Techsan his biggest play. It's like he intentionally wants

to hurt these principals, make them know they've been crushed. He's being worse about this than I've ever seen him. Almost like—"

"It's personal," I supplied.

He nodded.

"Why would it be?" I said. "Pena ever meet Jimmy before?" "No."

"Ruby or Garrett?"

"Not that I know of."

"UT," I said. "That's where you and Pena met. That's where Jimmy and Garrett and Ruby met. No crossing of paths?"

"We must've graduated at least ten years after the Techsan folks."

He was right. There really wasn't much coincidence—a school with fifty thousand students. It was hard to find five people in Austin who hadn't gone there.

"What about before college—you know anything about Matthew's past?"

Dwight hesitated. "I know he was from a welloff family. I know he hated his parents."

"Because?"

"He said— I don't know why this would help you. His parents were doctors, lived in Marble Falls, did a lot of charity work in orphanages, homeless shelters, places like that. According to Matthew, he was like their trophy child. They gave him everything but never paid attention to him. When he turned eighteen, he pretty much severed all communication with them."

"Parents still alive?"

"No. They died while we were in college. Car accident."

I stared into the parking lot.

I wondered whether my urge to dig up Pena's past was really my investigative instinct, or just the desire to find a weak chink in Pena's armour, a place he could be hurt. I didn't trust myself to stop if I found the latter to be true.

"W.B. Doebler," I said. "How tight were he and Pena?"

Dwight shook his head. "An occasional meeting. I wouldn't describe them as tight. The only person Matthew spent any real time with in Austin besides me—"

He stopped himself.

"Dwight?"

He ran his knuckle along the windshield. "I was going to say, Ruby McBride."

I'd looked through Pena's appointment book and seen only one meeting scheduled with Ruby—the one Dwight had already mentioned in the spring, when Pena had first approached Techsan.

I decided against asking Dwight about this discrepancy. For one thing, I didn't want to admit having the datebook. For another, Pena might not have written down every meeting for his secretary to see.

Dwight apparently took my silence for disapproval.

"I wasn't implying anything," he assured me. "Miss McBride . . . I mean, I never saw them talking business. Matthew just got along well with her socially. She was a lot like Miss Selak—same personality, same interests. It probably just made Matthew feel better, being with her."

Dwight's assurances about Ruby left me ten times more unsettled than I'd already been, but I didn't tell him that.

"Last question," I said. "Did you tell Pena about Jimmy's call?"

Dwight nodded slowly. "I told him that if Jimmy was right about the sabotage, I would go to the SEC. Matthew just laughed, told me I was crazy and I should stick to what I do best—finding him fresh blood."

"And a week later, Jimmy was murdered."

Dwight's eyes were small brown points of pain. "Why do you think I'm talking to you?"

In daylight, Ruby's property looked much less romantic—a series of eroded limestone shelves, dotted with twisted live oaks, sloping down toward the shore.

I'd noticed the illuminated sign at the gates the night before— POINT LONE STAR, docking services, day trips, eats. Back from the road was a much older sign—deep block letters burned into a weathered square of wood. It was barely readable now, but the underbrush and tree branches had been carefully trimmed away from it. MCBRIDE

FARMS—pecans, peaches, in season.

The giant padded forklift was bringing a yacht out of the warehouse. On the deck of the floating restaurant, couples were having lunch. Up the hill, construction workers were taking a soda break in the driveway of Ruby's tower.

I parked my truck in the marina lot, watched the boat jockeys, and pondered my next move.

I grabbed my backpack, got out of the truck, and took a stroll toward the pier.

It was easy enough to get past the boat jockeys. The security gate was open. When I asked one of the dockworkers where Ruby was, he told me she'd gone into town on business. I tried to look disappointed.

"Tell her Mr. White would like to see her on his yacht when she returns," I said. "Tell her it's about the purchase of the new sixty footer."

The dockworker let me pass.

I walked down the pier, scanning names of boats without slowing down. Fortunately, Ruby's was conveniently named the Ruby, Too—a white Sea Ray with bright red trim, docked in wet slip 12B.

I climbed aboard, dropped into a squat next to the main cabin door, out of sight unless another boat happened to come up from the stern. I put on surgical gloves and opened my backpack, spread out my leather roll of lockpicking implements. I chose the one for deadbolts—a thin metal rod curved like a W at the end.

In a few minutes, the lock clicked; the door slid open with a sigh.

At the bottom of the stairs was a large living room/workroom with a kitchenette in the back. One wall was devoted to computer equipment—two highend Dell workstations, a portable power generator, a wireless modem setup, a colour printer, and several backup tape units. The trash can was full of Pecan Street Ale bottles. An incense holder on top of one monitor was loaded with a halfburned stick of copal. Sticking out of a CD tray was Buffett's latest live recording. All the signs that Garrett and Jimmy Doebler had once worked here. This was the room where Techsan had been born.

I spent too much time booting up the computers, only to find I couldn't get past the first password.

I went down a narrow hall into the sleeping cabin. Open boxes were filled with winter clothes—sweaters, longsleeve shirts, things Ruby wouldn't need for months. The bed was made, though there was an impression like a snow angel in the centre, as if Ruby had lain there looking at the ceiling.

On the dresser were photographs. One showed a young Ruby in graduation robes, standing next to an older, rustyhaired man in a tuxedo—her father, I assumed. Ruby was smiling brilliantly, as if to make up for her father, who stared out at me with a slightly dazed expression. The next photo showed Ruby midair during a parachute jump. Another photo was Ruby in scuba gear, underwater, waving as she floated over a bank of coral. The final photo showed Ruby and Jimmy together, standing on a beach. I compared the photos, didn't like what I saw. In each, Ruby had the expression of a thrillseeker. Her excitement seemed forced, her eyes too wild, as if her desire to have fun was almost desperate—as if she'd never yet caught fire with anything, and was beginning to fear that she couldn't.