“Too early for you, is it? I suppose you keep a pocket watch in those furry britches of yours.”
He yawned at her and lowered his chin to the floor.
“All right, lazy bones. But you’d better come down at nine or Mrs. B will be up here to fetch you herself.”
Eulalie closed the door behind her and trotted down the stairs. She had just remembered that she had a third person to interview. If Jimmy the Knife really had information on Odysseus Pryor, she wanted to speak to him as soon as possible. Unfortunately, that meant not before seven in the evening. Jimmy was strictly a nocturnal creature.
She switched on her laptop to find several emails from Queen’s Town Federal Life. They contained access details that would allow her to log into the private servers of the companies that had been affected by the computer hack. This was what she had been waiting for. The hacker in her couldn’t wait to get to grips with a fellow hacker.
But first she wanted to trace the ghosts from her dream.
It took only a few minutes to locate Mikayla Sorenson and Cole Richmond. Sorenson was thirty-three years old and working at a comic book store in Finger Alley. Eulalie knew the store well but had never gone in there because comic books didn’t interest her.
Cole Richmond was forty-seven years old and worked for a firm called Head Start that specialized in corporate training.
They would both be easy to find. Now she could work the insurance case.
Almost rubbing her hands together in glee, Eulalie began her online sleuthing. Within minutes, she was inside the server of Lafayette Savings and Loan. Their computer system was a mess, extensively damaged by a Trojan-type virus that had corrupted files across the board. She installed a software mole of her own to trace the origins of the virus.
While that was working, she logged on to the server for Script-Rite Medipharm and found that the same virus had wreaked havoc in their system, destroying confidential patient records.
It was the same inside the Prince’s Museum of Arts. Items that had been on loan to the museum had had all records of their original ownership wiped out.
The same virus had preyed on Flite courier company, Maurice Auto-Electricians and a small plumbing company called Prince William Pipes and Drains. They were six very different businesses that all had one thing in common – they were insured by Queen’s Town Federal Life.
“Make that two things in common,” Eulalie muttered as she examined their internal operating systems.
All six companies had outdated anti-malware and virus protection in place. The virus that had decimated their data was itself outdated. It should never have been able to penetrate a modern operating system.
As she got information back from her software, she realized that it hadn’t. In each case, the computer system had been tampered with onsite, leaving it open to attack by the virus.
Eulalie looked at her printout of Odysseus Pryor’s face. “That’s why you were physically present at all six of the companies on the days they were attacked, isn’t it? You were sabotaging their system’s defenses so that your partners could launch their viruses.”
She sent an email to Queen’s Town Federal Life telling them to check whether any external technicians had been called in on the days of the attack. The interesting thing about this cyber-attack was how unsophisticated it was. Perhaps that was why it had succeeded – it was simple and low-tech.
She left her mole software in place, hoping it might be able to isolate an IP address as the source of the attack.
When Mrs. Belfast arrived at nine o’clock, Eulalie was feeling rather pleased with herself. She had done a good hour’s work. She made coffee for them as she caught her secretary up on the investigation.
“That sounds like Odysseus.” Mrs. Belfast nodded. “Simple and low-tech. He’s no genius computer hacker, but he has plenty of audacity.”
“He hasn’t been back to your place?”
“No, I think he must have found another source of cash.”
“Wouldn’t he come around just to say hello?”
“That depends on whether he’s up to no good or not. The usual pattern is that he’ll wait until he’s about to leave the island and then pop in to see me.”
“I’ve left a software program running, trying to trace an IP address for the computer that this attack originated from. This evening I’m going to talk to Jimmy the Knife. Apparently, he and your brother are friends.”
Mrs. Belfast looked surprised. “They certainly used to be, but I didn’t know they had much contact these days. I suppose it makes sense considering the line of work Odysseus is in.”
Eulalie phoned the comic book store and was told that Mikayla Sorenson was working the nine to four shift that week. She decided to go and see her first. Her priority was to find out about the club, and Mikayla was the person to ask about that.
She left Mrs. Belfast making her weekly credit control phone calls, and the cat sitting regally in the wicker basket Mrs. B had placed on the porch next to the front door of the office.
Eulalie rode her Vespa north on Lafayette Drive in the direction of city hall. Before she got that far, she turned left into a narrow opening between two buildings. From Lafayette Drive, it looked like a blind alleyway, little more than a deep recess. She kept going through the damp opening, maneuvering her Vespa between the narrow walls. Soon it opened into a quaint road that was the closest thing Queen’s Town had to an underworld. Finger Alley boasted little in the way of chain stores and strip malls, but there was no shortage of tattoo parlors, brothels, betting shops, pawn shops, loan sharks, dive bars, and flop houses.
The respectable citizens of Queen’s Town avoided Finger Alley. They liked to pretend it didn’t exist.
Eulalie had been coming here since the age of twelve. Her grandmother was equally at home sipping jasmine tea with a criminal kingpin as she was chairing a meeting of the board of governors of the school. She moved effortlessly between the two worlds, commanding respect wherever she went. Eulalie moved between the two worlds too but given the choice between Finger Alley and the local Rotary Club, she would choose Finger Alley every time.
Chapter 12
The comic book store was sandwiched between a betting shop and a lawyer’s office. Eulalie had long suspected that the lawyer’s office was a front for a numbers racket. The comic book store was called Flash Komix and had blacked-out windows.
The door dinged as Eulalie went inside. She immediately saw someone she recognized. It was a woman who used to work at Mo’s Bar.
“Hey, Irina.”
“Hey, Eulalie.”
“I’m looking for Mikayla Sorenson.”
The woman pointed across the store with her chin. “That’s her over there.”
“Thanks.”
Eulalie saw immediately why Fleur said that she had changed in appearance. Her face was still recognizable as the teenager Eulalie had seen in her dream, but everything else about her was different. The long blond hair had been cut short and dyed black. She was wearing a pair of Levi 501s and a baggy black T-shirt. She had multiple facial piercings. She had grown a couple of inches and put on some muscle weight too. She was now a formidable person.
“Mick!” said Irina. “Someone to see you.”
Mick Sorenson swaggered over and looked Eulalie up and down, taking in her tailored blazer and soft leather boots.
“Lady, I think you took a wrong turn at JC Penney.”
“My name is Eulalie Park and I…”
“Did you hear what I said? You’re in the wrong place. Go back to Lafayette Drive. That’s more your speed.” Mick moved in closer, crowding Eulalie in an attempt to intimidate her.
“I just want to ask you a few questions.”
“Get out of here. Don’t make me tell you a third time.”
“Uh, Mick…” Irina tapped her shoulder. “I wouldn’t do that if I were you. She might be small, but she could throw you through that window. Why don’t you listen to what she has to say?”
>
“You think she’s here to buy a comic book? I can promise you she isn’t.”
“Leave her alone, Mick. You’ll regret it if you don’t.”
Mick’s eyes lit with interest. “Is that so?”
She took a step back and sized Eulalie up. Then she lunged at her, swinging her big forearms like clubs. Eulalie leaned out of the way, and Mick’s hands met empty air.
Snarling, she turned and lunged again. Eulalie side-stepped her.
To Irina who was watching, it seemed as though Mick were moving fast, and Eulalie were moving slowly. But Eulalie was always one step ahead. It was as though she knew what Mick was going to do and had time to move unhurriedly out the way.
Their progress around the shop looked like a dance, with Mick moving forwards and Eulalie fading out of her reach. Soon, the big woman was too puffed to go on. She stood with her arms hanging at her sides, breathing heavily. “How the hell do you do that?”
“That’s Angel de la Cour’s granddaughter, Mick,” said Irina. “She’s one of us.”
“Then why does she dress like that?”
“I dress in a way that makes me feel comfortable, just like you do.” Eulalie indicated a cluster of tables and chairs next to the store’s coffee bar. “Why don’t we sit so we can talk?”
Mick shrugged and sat down. Irina brought them each an espresso.
Eulalie took a sip. “Do you always greet potential customers like that?”
“I didn’t used to. It’s the ‘roids. They’re messing with my mind.”
“You’re taking steroids to bulk up?” Now that she was looking for it, Eulalie could see the signs. Mick’s jawbone was bigger and bonier than it had been when she was a teenager.
“I like the bulk, but I don’t like the aggro. I’m angry all the time. Sorry about earlier. I acted like a dick.”
“Apology accepted.”
“Who did you say you were again?”
Eulalie pushed her private investigator’s license and her police liaison officer’s card across the table. “I’m looking into the disappearance of Rochelle Chirac. I presume you heard what happened on hatching day at the school?”
“Sure. They opened up those dumb eggs and found a note saying that someone had killed Rochelle. What does that have to do with me?”
“You were friends at school.”
Mick laughed. “You want to check your facts, lady. We weren’t. Ask anyone.”
“Let me put it this way, you and Rochelle were close friends until the end of your junior year. Then something happened and suddenly you weren’t friends anymore. You still hung out in the same group, but you ignored each other completely. I want to know what happened.”
Mick shifted in her seat. “Why is it important?”
“I don’t know what’s important and what’s not until I have the whole picture. An eighteen-year-old girl went missing, Mick. Missing and presumed dead. She never got the chance to grow up into a different person like you did. I’m trying to find out who took that chance away from her.”
Mick stared at her hands. When she looked up, her face was full of pain. “I’ve never told anyone what happened.”
“It’s the stories we don’t tell that hurt us.”
This got a nod.
“You’re right. And you’re also right that it happened over the summer between our junior and senior years. Rochelle and I had been friends for years. We told each other stuff we’d never told anyone else. She told me about her parents’ divorce and how it had made her feel. I told her how I’d always felt out of step with everyone else. She told me how difficult her dad was and how much she loved him. It made her feel stupid to be craving his attention all the time, but she couldn’t help herself.”
“That’s what I’ve heard.”
“We had a lot of sleepovers that summer, either at my place or at Rochelle’s mother’s place. Her father didn’t host sleepovers. He barely had his own kids sleeping over, never mind anyone else’s. That was when we used to tell each other things – in the dark after midnight when we were feeling brave. I finally worked up the nerve to tell her something I had never said out loud before, that I was attracted to girls. I didn’t look the part in those days. I was just another skinny blond kid amongst a bunch of other skinny blond kids. I only started signaling my difference after I left school.”
She broke off, and Eulalie nodded to show she was listening.
“I thought it would be like the thing with her father. Something that we knew about each other and didn’t talk about to anyone else. I just wanted the relief of sharing it. It felt like too much to carry on my own. So, I screwed up my courage and told her during one of our midnight confessional sessions. I was prepared for anything – acceptance, disgust, disbelief. She said the one thing I wasn’t expecting, which was that she felt the same way. She told me she was also attracted to girls.”
“Interesting,” said Eulalie. This was new information.
“I was flabbergasted. I had no idea. Then she started trying to get me to admit that I was attracted to her. But the thing is, I wasn’t. I just saw her as a friend. I’d never thought about her romantically at all. Up to that point, I had mostly had crushes on actresses and singers, or girls who were a lot older than me. It put me in a difficult position. I didn’t want to reject her out of hand because I thought it had taken so much courage for her to say what she had said. But I genuinely wasn’t attracted to her and didn’t want to pretend to be just to spare her feelings. I launched into a complicated explanation for why we shouldn’t try to be together. I said this was all so new and we should just try to get used to knowing about each other first.”
“That makes sense.”
“You’d think. But as I was trying to talk my way out of it she suddenly started laughing at me. She laughed, and she laughed, and she laughed, and my blood ran cold. She said I was a fool for ever believing that she was gay or that she could ever be interested in someone like me. She said she had been trying to trap me into admitting that I liked her. I started to cry. It got so bad that her mother had to phone my parents to come and fetch me at one in the morning. After that we didn’t see each other again for the whole rest of the summer, and when we ran into each other at school in the fall, she pretended I wasn’t there. There was no big scene, no drama, and no explanations. It seemed like the simplest solution, so I did it too. I pretended she wasn’t there. We continued to hang out with the same friends, but we didn’t acknowledge each other’s existence. I was too grateful to her for not telling anyone my secret that I was prepared to put up with anything.”
“You must have wondered over the years about why she acted like that?”
“Of course. To this day, I’m not sure what happened. Was it a trap to get me to admit who I was? Or was she so hurt when she found out that I didn’t have feelings for her that she was prepared to destroy our friendship over it? I can’t tell you how many times I’ve asked myself those questions. Maybe if she had lived, I would know the answer by now. I’ve had fantasies where we’ve met up as adults and talked the whole thing over, but it never brought me closer to the truth. Whoever killed her took that away from me – the chance to know what she was really thinking that night.”
“What can you tell me about the club?” said Eulalie.
Mick’s expression didn’t change, but her face lost a little color. She swallowed as though her throat had gone dry.
“What club? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“One night, the four of you – Rochelle, Sheena, Rosie and you – broke into an old warehouse near the docks to drink vodka and smoke weed. You and Rochelle were still friends. You and Sheena and Rosie started whispering together and came to a decision. You told Rochelle that it was time for her to join the club. You all knew what you were talking about except Rochelle. She had just started to ask what club, when you were interrupted by a teacher. Now, I want to know what club you were referring to.”
Mick’s mouth hung open.
“Which one of those cretins told you all that?”
“None of them. It’s something I heard in the course of my investigation.”
Mick shook her head. “I can’t believe it.”
“What club was it?”
“Nothing. There was no club. We were probably talking about some afterschool project.”
“Why didn’t the three of you wait for Rochelle that night?”
Mick stared at her. “They told you that as well? Someone had a bad case of blabbermouth.”
“Rochelle was much more incapacitated than the rest of you. She had drunk more and smoked more. You didn’t wait for her when you got busted, or even try to help her stand up. Why was that?”
Mick moved her chair backwards and crossed her arms. “Look… none of us really knew how baked Rochelle was that night. We didn’t know she was nauseous or that she couldn’t stand up. I don’t think she realized it herself until she tried. We thought she was right behind us. When we heard the noise and knew someone was in the warehouse, we panicked. It was every girl for herself. We grabbed our stuff, jumped out the window, and hightailed it out of there. We didn’t stop running until we reached the harbor club. That’s when we realized Rochelle wasn’t with us.”
Mick closed her eyes for a second and then opened them again.
“No, that’s not true. I’m trying not to lie to you now. We knew she wasn’t with us, but none of us wanted to go back for her. It wasn’t that bad for her to be caught, see? She wasn’t on her final warning like the rest of us.”
“Final warning?”
“We’d been in trouble before – all of us except Rochelle. There would have been serious consequences if we’d been caught, but she would have been fine.”
“Who exactly did you think was coming through that warehouse?”
“It didn’t matter. We knew the teachers were conducting raids all over Dockside. The cops too. It was the start of the big drive to revitalize the area. Construction at the warehouse started soon afterward. I think it’s a bagel bar now. Whoever it was, we were about to be in big trouble. Rochelle was fine. Nothing bad would happen to her.”
The Complete H-Series of The Eulalie Park Mysteries Page 127
