How to Succeed in Murder (20 page)

Chapter Thirty-two

I wandered downstairs the next morning wrapped in a heavy silk kimono, fully expecting to find a note from Jack in the kitchen. But when I got to the second floor I could have sworn I heard noises coming from his office.

I poked my head in the door. “What are you doing here?”

“I live here,” he answered.

“But you’re usually…what have you done to this place?”

The room had been completely transformed. An entire wall of shelving was filled with neat stacks of books and miscellaneous things like ceramic pots and Indonesian-looking carvings. Low-slung chairs in clean modern lines were arranged around a coffee table on a kilim area rug. The wall behind the desk held filing cabinets and a set of deep bookshelves.

“I went to Ikea,” Jack said. “What do you think?”

“How did you do all this?” I tried to take it in.

“I had some things in storage.” He pushed his chair back from the desk. “Do you mind that I did it?”

“It’s your office.” I noticed an Asian tapestry hanging on the wall behind me. “And it’s gorgeous. Do you want to do the rest of the house?”

He grinned. “That’s your project.”

“I don’t know.” I looked around. “This seems to be another of your hidden talents.”

“I thought all my talents were pretty obvious.” He came up behind me as I was looking over his book collection. “And yours are pretty stunning too. Just think what we could accomplish if we—”

“Hey Jack, you’re out of—”

Whatever we were out of was lost in my yelp at the sudden appearance of Mike at the door.

“Oh,” Jack said. “Mike’s working here today.”

If I were a cat, I’d have been clinging by my claws to the ceiling. As it was, I tightened my kimono and turned around. “So I see.”

“Hi, Charley. I just made coffee. Want some?” Mike put a tray with a coffee pot and three mugs on the table. Three mugs.

“Is Gordon here too?”

“He should be, any minute,” Jack said. “Mike wants to show him some photos of a couple of the engineers who’ve been at Zakdan the right amount of time to have planted the virus.”

“So he can watch them in the cafeteria?”

“Among other things.”

Mike went to Jack’s desk and picked up a folder. “This is for you to take in and show to your gang. It’s got the names and photos of the four guys we’re interested in.”

I took the folder. “I’ll see if Simon can place any of them at the party.” I checked the clock on Jack’s desk. “And I’d better get moving. I don’t want to be late for work.”

“There’s something I never thought I’d hear you say,” Jack grinned.

I suppose there really is a first time for everything.

***

I completely chickened out of asking Brenda what she’d done the night before, and whether it had involved my Uncle Harry. Probably because I was afraid she’d tell me. At least the conference room was blissfully free of balloons, so the whole V-Day discussion never even came up.

Flank couldn’t find a place to park and he refused to let me go to the café without him. So we were gathered around the Zakdan conference table before I had a chance to show Simon the photographs of the four engineers Mike had come up with.

“Maybe…” He flipped through them. “Maybe…possibly…I don’t think so.”

“That’s a help,” Eileen said dryly.

He shrugged. “Sorry, darling, but these are grim little head shots and I was in a dark bar when I might have seen them.”

The head shots were grim. They were copies of the photos on the engineers’ security badges, taken from the employee database.

“They look like mug shots,” Brenda said. “Every single one of them looks guilty of something.”

Flank made a growling noise and I quickly shut the folder. It’s good to have an early warning system when two of your walls are made of glass.

We saw what had set him off. MoM was on approach, and she began making may-I-come-in gestures when she saw we’d noticed her.

Eileen waved her in, and as she entered she tucked her day planner under one arm and pressed her hands together in supplication. “Please forgive the intrusion.”

Which forced us to say things like “It’s no intrusion—” and “Please, sit down,” until she did.

“I know this is
wildly
inappropriate.” She pushed up the sleeves of her slate gray turtleneck as if she were about to deal us all a hand of poker. “But I heard you’re going to share your findings on Friday, and I just couldn’t wait to see what you have to say.”

She must have recognized our expressions as stunned, because her eyes widened. “Oh
no
, I shouldn’t have said anything. Wasn’t I supposed to know?”

Hell, we didn’t know. What was she talking about?

“Where did you hear that?” Eileen asked.

She retreated into the depths of her sweater, pulling the neck up to cover her mouth and nose. Then she peeked out again. “Was it a secret? Everyone’s talking about it. It’s on your calendars.”

Someone should tell her she couldn’t pull off coy.

“No,” I said. “Of course it’s not a secret. We just…”

We just what?

“We just don’t think it would be fair to everyone else if we gave you a sneak preview,” Eileen finished for me. “But, as long as you’re here, there are a few follow-up questions I’d like to ask you. Is now a good time? How about if we go to your office?”

I silently blessed Eileen for taking MoM off our hands. She’d tapped something on her laptop, and turned the screen toward me as she stood to hustle MoM out of the room.

I looked at Eileen’s computer when they’d gone. It was opened to her calendar and, sure enough, there was a meeting scheduled for ten o’clock on Friday.

“‘Presentation of SFG Findings,’” I said. “Who put that on there?”

“I wouldn’t know how, even if I’d wanted to,” Simon said. “But it’s on my calendar as well.”

“And mine,” Brenda said. “I think whoever put it there wants us gone.”

Flank grunted in agreement.

We’d been given a deadline.

***

I saw Bob Adams at the espresso machine in the kitchen across the hall. “I think I’ll go have a chat with the future sheep rancher.”

“Better you than me,” Simon said.

I told Flank I wouldn’t stray out of his sight, and went over. The kitchen had a high arched window that overlooked the CalTrain station. Bob was staring out of it, sipping a latte. He was wearing baggy pleated jeans and another ancient tee-shirt that stretched across his midsection. This one had a drawing of a large hairy beast on the back, and a cryptic slogan—
If you don’t get it, you might as well be herding Yak
.

I didn’t get it, but I’d learned in my time at Zakdan that the more obscure the saying, the more the engineers loved it.

“Hi, Bob.”

He jumped and looked over, a little foamed milk clinging to his facial hair. “Hey. I heard you’re going to be presenting your findings on Friday.”

“Word gets around.” Especially around Zakdan.

“Any chance you’ll tell me what you’re planning on saying?”

As if I knew.

“I really can’t.”

He nodded and looked back out the window.

“I was sorry to hear about Jim Stoddard,” I said. “You two must have worked together a long time.”

He left the window and sat at one of the tables. “I guess you just never know, do you?”

“No, I guess you never do.”

I sat with him. Surely I could do something to save the conversation from disintegrating into funeral-parlor platitudes.

“Who do you think will get his job?”

My remark was sufficiently callous to startle him. He glanced up, then got an uncomfortable look on his face as he gestured toward the glass wall of the kitchen. “Probably one of them.”

Half a dozen men in brightly colored spandex were clumping through the hallway between the kitchen and our conference room. They wore the heavily logoed jerseys and pedal-ready shoes of seriously pretentious cyclists. They’d just come through the lobby door and were peeling off gloves and loudly commenting on each other’s riding abilities as they made their sweaty way along.

“Who are they?”

“The biking club. They meet twice a week in Mill Valley and ride in together.”

“Mill Valley? The one on the other side of the bridge?”

“They like to do at least a quarter-century before work.”

Twenty-five miles on a bicycle is not my idea of how to spend a morning. Neither, I could tell, was it Bob’s.

The cyclists were spilling into the kitchen now. “Hey Bob, you missed a great ride today,” one of them called out.

“Yeah, you should join us some time,” another one smirked.

Bob flushed, which was not a look that worked well with his reddish hair. He sat up a little straighter and sucked in his belly. “Yeah, sounds good. Maybe I will.”

“You’ll need to get a new bike, dude. They don’t allow training wheels on the Golden Gate.” The wit who said this looked around for someone to high-five him.

Bob turned a shade darker. “They’re really great guys,” he muttered to me. “We just like to give each other shit.”

The Quality exec might not have been a glorious physical specimen, but I can’t stand jerks—particularly of the jock variety.

“I get it,” I murmured to Bob. “They’re assholes.”

He choked on his last gulp of coffee.

Suddenly I didn’t blame Bob for wanting to go hang out in the highlands and get away from all of this. It didn’t seem sinister at all. It seemed—

Then I forgot all about Bob. Because I realized I’d seen four of the sweaty cyclists before.

In mug shots provided by Mike.

***

“So what?” Eileen demanded. “So they ride bikes together—that doesn’t mean they’ve conspired to bring down Zakdan.”

“Maybe not,” I told her. “But you have to admit it’s suspicious. I mean, all four of Mike’s suspects are best friends? They hang out together outside of the office? Don’t you think that’s worth looking into?”

We’d reconvened to compare notes before leaving for the day. I’d had an uneventful lunch with Troy and had spent most of the afternoon trying to catch my new four suspects doing something incriminating together. But unless you could call sitting in meetings and working in their cubicles incriminating, I’d come up empty, except for the discovery of a back stairway to our little corner of Zakdan and a handy shortcut to the ladies room.

“I’m not sure it’s exactly suspicious,” Brenda said. “The reason Mike identified them is that they’ve all been working at Zakdan a long time, and they’re all senior engineers, so it doesn’t seem that odd that they’d hang out together.”

“But I’m completely willing to keep my eye on them,” Simon volunteered. “Where did you say they took their showers?”

Bob had told me about the locker rooms on the second floor, but I didn’t think sending Simon on a stakeout would be terribly productive.

“Never mind,” Eileen said.

“Uh oh.” I’d been toying with my laptop, and hadn’t realized I’d spoken out loud until I noticed them all staring at me.

“I just got an email from Morgan Stokes,” I explained.

“What does it say?” Brenda asked.

“He’s in New York for a series of meetings this week, but he heard about our presentation on Friday and he’s changed his plans so he can be here.” I looked up. “He wants to know if it means we’ve identified Clara’s killer.”

Eileen was the first to speak. “Well, it looks like we’re giving a presentation on Friday. Does anybody have a copy of PowerPoint?”

I had a lot of questions. Was going ahead with the meeting on Friday the right thing to do? What could we possibly say about our “findings”? Who had set up the meeting in the first place—was that person the killer?

And what the hell was PowerPoint?

Chapter Thirty-three

Wednesday night at my house, chaos ruled.

Mike had shown up with three guest geeks and a small flotilla of computer equipment, all of which he deposited in the library to work out a few remaining secrets of the universe while he went upstairs to share something with Jack that I was clearly not technical enough to appreciate.

Not that I minded.

Eileen had shown up with a gigantic green chalkboard, on loan from Anthony’s private school, which she positioned against the fireplace in the living room. She and Brenda then began drawing an enormous chart of suspects and facts, taking Mike’s who-left-Jim’s-party-when spreadsheet as a springboard. They were currently arguing over whether Tonya Ho, of Human Resources fame, even merited being added to the list.

Anthony, who had accompanied his mother, was on roller blades. I realized I had only myself to blame, and it did look like fun as he swooped down the hallway from the kitchen and shot across the living room floor, but his activities weren’t exactly conducive to clear thinking.

Harry was in the kitchen, having been driven out of his position behind the bar in the library by the arrival of the guest geeks, none of whom had accepted his offer of a flaming rum punch. He was currently stirring something he called “grog” in a large pot on my kitchen stove, on the theory that the ex-navy men in the crowd would find it irresistible.

“Do you really think this is the time to get them drunk?” I asked.

“Everyone’s mental machinery needs a little lubrication from time to time, Charley.”

Harry was lubricated enough for all of us, but then he usually is.

***

The doorbell rang, and I opened the door to find Simon chatting delightedly with a pizza delivery man.

“Darling, this is Tony. Do you know he stopped off at a mini-mart to pick up some energy drinks for the profs on his way here? Wasn’t that delightful of him?”

Energy what for the who?

“Hi.” Tony handed me four boxed pizzas and held up three six-packs, variously labeled Monster, RockStar, and Full Throttle. “That’ll be seventy-two dollars.”

I looked at Simon.

“I didn’t order it, darling. I just ran into the man on the way to your door. Where’s Eileen?”

He moved past me smoothly, and Tony the delivery guy spoke again.

“The profs ordered it. Said they were working on a wicked juicy bug here.”

I was beginning to get it. Although the term “wicked juicy bug” initially conjured up a mental image of something icky with thousands of legs, I was willing to bet it had more to do with the Zakdan code and the three guest geeks in my library.

Sure enough, one of them stuck his head out with perfect timing. “Tony! Dude! Thanks!”

Geek No. 1 and his cohorts swarmed out, relieved me of the pizzas, took the energy drinks from Tony, and vanished behind the library door again.

Tony looked after them with stars in his eyes. “They’re so awesome.”

Uh huh.

“Are they your professors?” I asked him. He looked vaguely student-ish.

He gave me one of those looks the young reserve for the hopelessly clueless. “They’re just the three best hackers in the entire world, is all.”

Of course they were.

“Give me a minute,” I told him. “I have to go find my purse.”

On my way to the kitchen for some cash, it occurred to me that this had been an unfortunate choice for Flank’s night off. I could have used him on door duty. It also occurred to me that I really didn’t want to find out how Harry’s grog mixed with Monster cola in the systems of the world’s best hackers.

Anthony skated past me. “Aunt Charley, you have the coolest house ever!”

At least I didn’t have to worry about the furniture getting broken.

“Charley, where do you keep your coconuts?” Harry demanded as I entered the kitchen.

“In the cabinet right next to my machete,” I told him.

I opened the drawer near the telephone, pulled out the phone book, turned to M for Money, and took one of the hundred-dollar bills I keep there for just such emergencies.

“You know, nobody likes a smartass,” my uncle told me.

“I have to disagree with you there, Harry.” Jack had come in behind me. “Charley, who’s that guy in our front hall?”

“Tony the pizza man,” I told him. “He’s a big fan of the profs.”

I left them and went off to pay the guy. I got to the door just as Gordon was coming in, loaded down with a giant tray of something that smelled garlicky and fabulous.

“Charley, why is there a pizza delivery car in front of your house?”

I gave Tony the money and sent him on his way. “Because the best hackers in the world ordered some delivered to my library. What’s that?”

“Enough Fettuccini Ricardo to feed an army. I can’t believe you ordered pizza!”

“I didn’t!” I protested. “And that smells amazing. Why don’t we take it to the kitchen, and—”

He went off muttering, and I was about to close the door when I heard my name called from somewhere outside.

“Charley!”

“Martha?” What was the Rep’s costume designer doing here? Had Simon called her in for some sort of emergency fashion consultation?

She made her way up the front path in a swirl of black knitwear, her long loose hair whipped by the wind.

“I’m sorry I’ve taken so long to get to this, but it’s really the first chance I’ve had. Is this a good time?”

“For what?”

She was taking something out of the large black bag she wore crosswise over her chest. “For your ritual purification ceremony, remember?” She produced what looked like a large clump of dried herbs tied together with red string at one end.

“My what? What’s that?”

“A sage wand. I’m here to do your smudging!”

Right. Not here for fashion. Here in her capacity as my friendly neighborhood Wicca. And now that I thought about it, I did remember saying something like “oh, sure” on our clothing expedition when she’d offered to come purify my new house.

“Um, Martha…”

“Oh, there are a lot of people here.” She pushed past me and started looking in rooms. “That’s not really…well, never mind. We’ll make the best of it. Do you have a match?”

“Uh, no, and—”

“Who needs a light?” Harry boomed from behind me. He held out his ever-present cigar to Martha. “Will this do?”

“Oh…” She looked a little taken aback, which was nothing compared to how I was feeling. “It’s a bit unorthodox, but in a pinch…”

She lit the sage, which began putting out a pungent gray smoke. She started waving it all around, looking serious.

Anthony careened around the corner from the living room and came to a sudden stop. “Aunt Charley, why is there a witch in your house?”

“A Wicca, dear.” Martha wafted the sage toward him, then asked Harry where the heart of the house was. He led her off to the kitchen. Jack passed them as he came out.

“Do I want to know?”

I shrugged.

Anthony skated up to Jack and grabbed hold of his arm. “Hey Jack, can I go play the pirate game on your computer?”

“Sure. Ask Mike to come down, okay?”

The boy zipped to the bottom of the stairs, then clumped his way up.

“Anthony! Take your skates off on the stairs!” Eileen called from the living room.

I went back to the still-open front door and looked out.

“Who are you expecting?” Jack asked.

“Just Groucho and Harpo and the boys.”

He closed the door and turned me around to face him.

“We’ll figure it out, Charley,” he said. “Things are a little crazy, but we’ll figure it out.”

I looked beyond him down the hall and into the kitchen, where Martha was waving a sage wand over Gordon’s fettuccini, while the cook looked on darkly and Harry attempted to hand him a drink. To my left I could hear Simon and Eileen bickering about the viability of Troy as a killer, and to my right I swear the hackers were having a power belching competition.

“If you say so, Jack.”

The doorbell rang. I took a deep breath, turned, and opened it.

“Hi. Are you Charley? I’m Kevin Allred. Morgan Stokes asked me to stop by with some samples. I’m his interior decorator.”

Perfect.

***

Harry’s grog turned out to be a surprisingly good accompaniment to Gordon’s fettuccini. And after sufficient quantities of both, following the departure of the decorator and the witch, with the hackers still closeted in the library, the rest of us were finally able to get down to business.

“Darlings, I don’t think we have a clue.” Simon spoke first, after we’d all taken rather longer than was needed to study the chalkboard chart that Eileen and Brenda had put together.

“We have plenty of clues,” Eileen corrected him. “We just don’t know how to make sense of them.”

“And we’re about to be given the bum’s rush out of Zakdan,” I didn’t need to remind them. “Without being any closer to figuring out who killed Clara, Lalit, or Jim, and who planted the ticking time bomb in the Zakdan code.”

Brenda turned to Mike. “Can you figure out a way to turn it off?” she asked him. “I mean, even if we can’t figure out who put the virus there, can you figure out how to fix it so it doesn’t go off?”

“We’ve got a team working on that,” he told her. I assumed he referred to the pizza fans in the library. “But isolating the trigger in the current code is one thing, and disarming it in every application that’s ever been deployed on a Zakdan system is something else again.”

Jack was leaning against the far wall, his arms crossed and a look of concentration on his face. This is the part where I expected him to have the blinding realization that would make everything clear. This is the part where he should look at the chart, smack his forehead, and say, “Why didn’t I see it before?” This is the part where he was supposed to solve everything.

“Jack?” Harry was watching him. “What do you think?”

Jack frowned. I held my breath.

“I think it may be time to call it a night.”

Okay, not what I had hoped for.

“Do you think if we had more time…” I suggested.

“Maybe we should search everyone’s offices,” Simon proposed. “We still have tomorrow, right? So if we just create a series of diversions…” He looked around and apparently picked up on a noticeable lack of enthusiasm.

“That isn’t necessary,” Mike told us. “We’ve already…um…we kind of…”

I turned to Jack. “You broke into Zakdan and searched everyone’s office?”

He moved closer to the chalkboard. “Not everyone’s.”

Oh, well, all right then. He was only guilty of selective breaking and entering. I was just about to launch into something approaching a diatribe when we heard Anthony yelling from the top of the stairs.

“Jack! Hey, Jack! Can you come help me?”

Eileen waved Jack away and went out into the hall. “Anthony, don’t yell in the house!” she yelled. “And take off your skates.”

“But, Mom…”

“Now.” Her voice held the kind of authority that makes investment bankers quail.

She came back in and started gathering up their things. People with children, I’d noticed, rarely travel light. “Sorry, everyone, but I think we’d better be going.”

“I’ll go see what he wanted,” Jack said.

“You don’t have to do that,” Eileen told him.

“It’s no bother.” He left, and the rest of us started wrapping things up for the evening.

It was not a happy group. I was pretty sure everyone else was feeling exactly as frustrated as I was. Nobody likes failure, and I couldn’t tell any more whether Harry’s loud assurances that it would all make sense in the morning were examples of optimism or denial.

***

When everyone had gone I went upstairs to take a long shower. I passed Jack in his office on the way up. He had called out his goodbyes but hadn’t made a reappearance downstairs. He still hadn’t come to the bedroom by the time I toweled off.

I went to his office. He was still in front of the computer.

“What’s so fascinating?” I looked at the screen over his shoulder. A group of rowdy pirates was making somebody walk the plank. But every time the tattered sailor got to the end, he popped back to the beginning again.

“You’re playing the pirate game?” I asked him.

“Anthony found something,” he said.

“Treasure?”

“Better. A bug.” He looked up at me. “And this game was developed with Zakdan tools.”

I blinked and looked back at the screen. A parrot kept repeating, “Dead men tell no tales. Dead men tell no tales.”

Maybe not, but from the look on my husband’s face, this game had told him something.