A Grave Prediction (Psychic Eye Mystery) (24 page)

“Yes,” Candice said. “At least, that’s what it seems like.”

“Whoa,” said Kelsey. “That’s good, you guys!”

“It explains how he knew about the security cameras being down,” I said, so excited now that we had an actual link that could crack the case wide-open. “And why it took so long to get them back up. He could’ve easily sabotaged the system a little more to drag it out so that he and his gang could hit as many banks as possible.”

“We need to talk to this Mr. Scott,” Kelsey said, making herself yet another note.

“But didn’t you guys already talk to him?” I asked. “I remember you saying that you’d been stonewalled by these guys when you requested the video from the bank.”

“We were stonewalled, but not by this guy. The head of the company was the one who interfaced with Agent Perez—his name was Meadows, I think.”

“I still don’t get that,” I said. “I mean, you’d think he’d do everything he could to assist the FBI with the investigation.”

Kelsey shrugged. “You would hope that the head of a company would want to cooperate fully, but in a world where even
the smallest scandal can destroy a company’s reputation, he was probably smart to try to keep this under wraps.”

“So how do we get Scott to talk to us without Meadows, Perez, or Robinson shutting the conversation down before we even have a chance to ask our first question?” Candice asked.

Kelsey smiled. “We’ll meet with him for a late lunch and a little chat,” she said, like it was simple as
that.

•   •   •

K
elsey set things in motion by calling Scott directly. She claimed to be a recruiter for a major defense contractor and said she had come across his profile on LinkedIn. She told him she was very interested in speaking to him about an opportunity that would definitely be worth his while, but she had only an hour and asked him if he could meet her for a late lunch. At first, Scott seemed to resist, but she was persistent and slyly persuasive. In the end it took her only five minutes to talk him into meeting with her.

Little did he know, he wasn’t even going to spend the time speaking to her. He was going to chitchat with us instead.

“I’ll be at the next table,” she said as we walked toward the hotel bar, where he’d agreed to meet.

“I get that in order to interrogate him, you’d have to identify yourself,” I said, mentioning the reasoning she’d offered as to why we’d do all the talking. “But I don’t see why you can’t just sit at the same table and listen.”

“I’d have to identify myself,” she said simply. “If I didn’t, and Scott mentioned something he shouldn’t that could land him in hot water with us, then it wouldn’t be admissible in
court. But if I’m sitting at the next table and overhear, then I can testify as to what he actually said. He can’t have any expectation for privacy in a crowded bar.”

At that moment we arrived at the hotel bar, which was empty of patrons except for two guys at the actual bar. “Or even an empty one,” she added.

“Kelsey,” Candice said. “You sit at the bar and Abby and I will be at the table right behind you.”

Once we were all set, we waited, and thank goodness, we didn’t have to wait long. Scott showed up exactly three minutes early. A tall, thin man, with a gray beard and a ring of hair around a shiny pointed dome head, he wore steel glasses, slid a bit down on his nose, and a maroon sweater with black dress slacks. He looked very much like a professor, and Candice waved him over. He seemed a bit confused at my appearance at the table, but he smiled gamely and didn’t hesitate to sit down. A wave of aftershave potent enough to choke a horse sat down with him. “Peter Scott,” he said, offering me his hand.

“Abigail Cooper,” I said to him as my eyes watered.

“Candice Fusco,” Candice said when he offered her his hand.

Scott blinked. “I thought I was meeting a woman named Brenda,” he said.

“She got tied up at the last minute,” I said easily. “We’re her replacements.”

“Oh,” Scott said, that big wide smile of his faltering only slightly. “She had said on the phone that she wanted to talk to me about an opportunity at Boeing?”

Candice placed her hands on the table and laced her fingers together. “Actually, Mr. Scott, that was a lie.”

He blinked again. “I’m sorry?”

“It was a lie she told you to lure you here, away from the
office, so that we could speak to you about something else entirely,” Candice explained.

“I don’t understand.”

“We want you to tell us about Will Edwards,” I said. “And his recent involvement with the security cameras at various banks around the region not recording footage of five bank heists all committed by the same gang.”

The blood drained from Scott’s face. “Who are you?” he asked us point-blank.

I was glad he didn’t automatically get up and walk out. That he wanted to know who we were was a good sign. “We’re consultants,” I said.

“Consultants?” he repeated. “For who?”

“I believe you mean for whom,” Candice—the grammar police—said. “We consult with the FBI, Mr. Scott. They’ve recruited us to find out more about Mr. Edwards’s possible involvement in the bank heists, and we’ve uncovered a few suspicious inconsistencies that we’d like your feedback on.”

“The FBI is now hiring consultants?” he said, like we had to be joking.

“They are,” I said. “You know how it is—resources at the federal level are stretched so thin these days. Farming out what they can to professional investigators like us is becoming the norm.”

Scott’s eyes shifted back and forth between me and Candice. “I don’t think I should talk to you,” he said.

Candice made a casual sweeping motion with her hand. “Of course you don’t have to talk to us, Mr. Scott,” she said. “But I guarantee you that if you don’t talk to us, we’re going to think it’s because you’ve got something to hide. I mean, you worked closely with Mr. Edwards for a few years; maybe you two were both involved. And it’s that kind of thinking that’s going to
make us head right over to the FBI and tell them that we think you’re a person of interest.”

“I had nothing to do with that!” he said sharply.

“We didn’t really think you did,” Candice said. “But Mr. Edwards is a different story.”

“Why would you suspect Will?” he said, his tone defensive. “He worked long hours trying to clean up and rewrite the software.”

My brow shot up. We’d suspected, but hadn’t been certain, that Edwards had been involved in the software development, and now we knew that he was. I said, “It’s more that it took such a long time for him to get it working again, I mean, what was the delay?”

Scott stared at the table for a moment and tugged at the collar of his sweater. “It wasn’t his fault,” he finally said, and I breathed a sigh of relief. He was going to talk to us. “We were alerted to the problem when one of the banks called to tell us that they’d discovered their cameras weren’t recording. They’d needed the footage to review a slip and fall at the lobby’s ATM. I assigned the issue to the man who replaced Will, but he’s not nearly as good at identifying issues within the code, because he didn’t write it, so I called Will and asked him to take a look. He found the virus almost immediately. He even pulled it out and sent it to me so that I could see that it was sourced out of Russia, and then he told me the entire code would have to be rewritten because the malware had been that invasive.

“I didn’t trust Will’s replacement with the project—after all, he’d been the one tasked with regularly inspecting the software for viruses, and it was obvious that he hadn’t been doing his job—so I got the sign-off to hire Will as a consultant and we agreed that he would rewrite the code from scratch, working at night after his regular day job. He said it would take him about
ten days, and we kept our fingers crossed that he’d do it before anything happened.

“Unfortunately, while he was rewriting the code, the first bank robbery occurred. Our company is in the middle of negotiations with a much larger conglomerate, and Bill . . . Meadows—he’s our CEO—he wanted us to keep a lid on the malware attack, and he had us send a tech out to the bank to inspect the cameras and convince the bank that it was just a temporary glitch.

“The next week there was another robbery, and it started to look very bad for us. I put a lot of pressure on Will to finish the code, and he came through for us, but as soon as we implemented it, we were hit again by the very same virus, only this time it erased other bits of code too. While we were in the middle of trying to restore our systems, the third bank heist happened, and the FBI began demanding to see the video footage of the heists, but we didn’t have any to give them.

“Meadows was going ballistic of course, and my job was on the line. I spoke to Will and told him that we needed to identify specifically where the viruses were getting into the system, as well as re-create the code again, which was fairly easy for him, as he did it on his laptop.”

My radar pinged as he said that and I sat up straight in my chair. Scott had just given us a major clue.

“So then what happened?” Candice said. She’d been taking notes the whole time.

“Will re-created the code three times,” he said. “Each time it was corrupted by the malware, which was somehow duplicating itself and entering the system. In the meantime, another bank got robbed. Finally, though, he said that he’d identified the sources of where the code was coming into the system, told me he’d put up a firewall targeted specifically at that entry point to prevent any further corruptions; then he personally delivered me
the new code, and that version got the camera recording system functional again. And, I’ll add, they were up and running in the nick of time, because that very day a fifth bank was robbed and that footage we were able to give to the FBI.”

“And it even leaked onto the news,” Candice said.

Scott’s cheeks turned crimson. “I had nothing to do with that.”

Liar, liar, pants on fire . . .
rang in my head. Scott had everything to do with it, but I could hardly blame him. It’d probably been important to his job security that he publicly demonstrate the system was once again functional.

Still, everything else he’d said had rung with the bell of truth to my intuitive senses. He wasn’t lying. Not about what’d happened with the malware or Edwards’s involvement. And yet, I still had the very strong feeling Edwards was directly involved with the heists, but beyond his being involved with the code to the system, I wasn’t sure how.

Then I had a thought and asked, “Did Will have access to the camera feeds while he was working on the code?”

Scott cocked his head. “Yes,” he said carefully. “He’d need that in order to test whether the cameras were recording in real time.”

I looked pointedly at Candice. “He’d also need it if he was interested in casing out the branches remotely without being seen. It would’ve provided him with a perfect window to observe the employees and each individual branch without ever having to step foot inside the banks.”

Scott’s face reddened. “I really think you have Will all wrong,” he said. “I know him. I worked side by side with him for seven years. He’d never risk his freedom or his family for money. He’s a good man.”

I had no doubt that Scott thought so, but nobody knows
everybody’s secrets. “Did you know that Will Edwards had a girlfriend named Flower?” I asked, wanting Scott to recognize that maybe he didn’t know Will as well as he thought he did.

“I did,” he said, casting his eyes at the table as if he was embarrassed that I’d mentioned it. “He met her online, or that’s what he told me. He said she was beautiful, didn’t mind that he was married, and didn’t want anything from him other than what he could give. He’s been seeing her for several years now. I think he’s in love with her.”

Candice and I traded another look. That surprised both of us.

We asked Scott a few more questions about Edwards: Did he know Edwards to ever associate with members of a gang, or thieves, or even an organized crime group? He appeared genuinely shocked by that one, and swore that he had no knowledge of Edwards ever associating with anyone below board.

“What about his home life?” I asked Scott. “Did he ever talk about it?”

“I’m not comfortable discussing the man’s personal business,” Scott said.

“We don’t really care if you’re comfortable with it,” Candice said bluntly. “But we need to know, Mr. Scott. Lives may depend on it.”

Scott scowled. “Lives?” he said. “Really?”

Candice looked him in the eyes. “Really.”

He rolled his eyes but said, “Will is a good man. He works hard for his family every day. If I had to say anything about what I know about his home life, it’s that he’s underappreciated.”

“Have you ever met his kids?” I asked next.

Scott’s gaze was guarded. “I have.”

“Thoughts?”

His scowl deepened. “His daughter is quite accomplished.
Will is very proud of her and talks about her a great deal. His son . . .”

“Yes?” I pressed.

“His son has been a difficult young man to raise. If there is one thing that I think Will regrets, it’s not trying to get his son some therapy at an early age.”

It wouldn’t have helped,
I thought.

“And he and the missus?” Candice said. “If you had one word to describe their relationship, what would it be?”

Scott pursed his lips and seemed to think about that for a beat. “Strained.”

We ended the interview with Scott very shortly thereafter, thanking him for his time and promising not to reveal anything that he’d said to us to anyone else. Of course, my fingers were crossed behind my back when I made that promise, and I can’t really speak for Candice’s fingers not being crossed too.

After he’d gone, Kelsey came to the table and set down her laptop. I’d thought I’d heard the tapping of keys behind me. “Everything Scott said checks out,” she told us.

“You verified all that, that fast?” I asked.

“Edwards’s telecommunications company granted me access about fifteen minutes ago,” she said. “I have the e-mails between him and Scott to prove that he was hired as a subcontractor to rewrite the code and logged all the issues week to week that Scott claimed he had. Edwards appeared earnest about trying to find the source of where the code kept replicating itself within the system and wreaking such havoc. Three weeks ago he confirms with Scott that he’s identified the source, and assures him that it won’t break into the system again. The last communication is him stating that he’s rebuilt the code from the ground up and wants to deliver it to Scott.”

“Still, he could’ve taken his time, right? He could’ve
organized the heists to come during the time he’s supposedly rebuilding the code.”

But Kelsey’s expression was skeptical. “I don’t know where he’d find the hours to do that, Abby. The guy was working full-time at his current job, then coming home and working on the code until well after midnight, at least according to the time stamps on the e-mails back and forth to Scott. During that five weeks he couldn’t have gotten more than five hours’ rest a night.”

“Okay, so the guy didn’t sleep,” Candice said. “If he got away with a couple hundred thousand dollars, maybe that was incentive enough to forgo some snooze time.”

Kelsey shook her head. “See, it’s more than just that. The heists all occurred at between three fifteen and four thirty on a weekday afternoon. I’ve confirmed with his employer’s HR department that he was at work on all of those days at that time.”

I sighed. “He’s involved,” I insisted. “I mean, if he wasn’t, why would he get all cagey when Candice and I confronted him and then go off and hide his computer somewhere we’d never find it?”