Shiver on the Sky

by David Haywood Young

Chapter Sixteen

  (Tuesday, Late Morning—Owen)

  Owen parked a few blocks from Signs & Portraits. He figured he had at least an hour to kill. But that was okay; he could wander around downtown for a while. He always seemed to think better when he was walking.

  Junior hadn’t been the kind of boss who would have made all the changes Owen had seen at CyberLook without a good reason. He’d been open to suggestions and excited by what the company was doing. He’d also tended to leave people alone to do their jobs in whatever way worked best for them.

  Of the senior management staff, only Frank Serno seemed likely to enjoy name badges and keycards and the mindset that went with them. But Serno hadn’t ever had that kind of clout. And from what Danny had said about wishing he would disappear, Serno was still too much the butt of everyone’s jokes to have managed the transformation on his own.

  It almost had to be some external influence. The only possibility Owen knew of was the advent of CyberLook’s mysterious new customers. Maybe they’d demanded the security measures.

  More to the point: Did any of this matter? Even if Owen figured it all out, the changes at CyberLook were probably a dead end. Obviously Junior, at least, had known all about them.

  So what had he wanted to hire Owen to poke into? And whatever Owen did manage to learn, how could he find out whether Junior had known about it a month ago?

  But he had an idea about why Junior had come to him, specifically, and if he was right it had little to do with either the increased security or his private investigator license. Two years ago, Owen had almost accidentally uncovered a problem, and Junior had tried to sweep it under the rug. It might have come back out and bitten him.

  One of the programmers had told Owen that Danny had hired two cousins to work as salesmen. Owen almost hadn’t looked into it at all. He didn’t really care who Danny hired as long as they produced, and he was sure Danny would demand the same, relatives or not.

  But if one of the programmers had noticed, other people probably knew about it too. Owen decided to be sure the company was protected against a potential lawsuit. Danny had followed their standard hiring process, though. Everything looked okay, at least as far as the paper trail went.

  When he halfheartedly decided to see if Danny’s cousins were actually producing, he couldn’t find any records of their sales at all. When he dug deeper, he found out they were dealing with customers who weren’t in any of the databases he could access.

  Owen went to Danny. Danny hit the roof. They pulled Junior in, who listened to them and summoned Serno.

  When it turned out none of them would admit to knowing what was going on, Danny drummed his fingers on the table and left to do what he called research (Owen would have called it yelling). He came back in less than ten minutes with one of his cousins—and Serno’s assistant. The pair explained the whole thing was intended to be an aid to market research.

  The customers they were working with were all small businesses that either required only simple websites or had indicated they had no major plans for their websites in the near future. Because these customers required so little attention, and because CyberLook’s billing and customer support computer systems didn’t talk to each other, the pair said they needed a separate database. There was no better way, supposedly, to track the profitability of such customers versus those who required more complex software development.

  Danny’s cousin argued he should be commended, not criticized, for agreeing to focus on these customers in spite of the low commissions he earned.

  Serno had been sorting through the papers the pair had brought in with them. He looked up suddenly, glanced at Danny, and excused himself for a moment to make a phone call.

  When Serno returned, he showed that money from the segregated customers actually went into a separate bank account. Serno said he hadn’t been aware of this, and it invalidated several of the reports his department had produced over the last couple of months. It also affected CyberLook’s tax situation, but he couldn’t say yet how bad it was.

  Owen demanded to know who had created the account. Serno, by now sweating and looking more upset than Owen had ever seen him, admitted that he’d opened it a few months before. But he claimed he’d believed the account was nearly empty, and had intended it for another purpose that had never materialized. While he’d been out of the room, he’d called the bank and verified there had been no withdrawals.

  Owen let the issue of the bank account slide for the moment. Regardless of anything else, he pointed out, creating a separate customer database had been ridiculous. His group was responsible for all CyberLook’s databases. They could have flagged any set of customers. Reports could have been modified or created, as needed. Also, Owen’s team was responsible for backing up all databases to guard against system failures, and rogue databases they’d never heard of wouldn’t have any such protection.

  Danny’s cousin jumped in, saying Owen’s group was so slow to make changes that it had been easier to just start fresh. Owen asked if anyone else had noticed that the customers they’d separated out were also those whose absence from the original database was least likely to be missed by anyone else at CyberLook.

  Junior put an end to the argument by asking Danny’s cousin and Serno’s assistant to wait in another office. An hour later, he announced a solution everybody could live with—and would, he said with a tight smile, start living with right away.

  Danny’s cousin and Serno’s assistant were to be terminated immediately for overstepping their authority in creating a new database and—worse—deleting customers from the copy in common use. But because the situation was unclear, and Serno said all funds could be recovered from the bank account they’d used, no charges were to be filed.

  Junior, perturbed that the scheme hadn’t been uncovered earlier, also created a new Quality Assurance position and hired Julie Jacobsen away from Dell Computers in Austin to fill it. She regularly audited all departments and reported to the management team on a monthly basis, which (Owen conceded) irritated everybody about equally, including her.

  Danny’s remaining cousin, an outstanding salesman who appeared to have been uninvolved except as a dupe, remained on the payroll.

  But Owen had never quite trusted Serno since. Not only had he appeared excessively nervous at the time, but after months passed and tempers cooled he’d begun to make statements like the one he’d made this morning about the whole thing being a result of miscommunication. Other times he’d blamed it on improper training, or overzealous but innocent research, or something else innocuous.

  Given that Serno had made no such statements when it was all happening, and that he had to know Owen was wondering about him, his behavior only increased the strength of Owen’s suspicions. Owen went to Junior with a request that they look more closely into the situation, specifically the separate bank account, but Junior asked him to let it go. He did, but he hadn’t forgotten any of it.

  Serno’s relief earlier this morning, when Owen had asked if something similar might be happening now, had been obvious. Whatever was going on, Serno clearly felt the situation from two years ago was minor by comparison.

  But if it had been an outgrowth of the earlier problems that had led Junior to try to hire Owen a month ago….

  If nothing else, it was at least a place to start.