But was that what Catrina really wanted? She was so confident, so self-assured. Could she really be interested in a guy twenty years her junior? If not, then why did she call him?
The walk to Doc Maynard’s was only a few blocks through a steady drizzle. On a wet weeknight, the usual crowds had disappeared.
Ted entered the hundred-plus-year-old watering hole and glanced around the bar. He pictured Jack London sitting at the bar on his way to the Yukon gold fields. What other famous characters had sat on these worn benches?
He didn’t see Catrina, so he found an empty table. Even this early on a miserable evening, the place was near capacity. What the hell? An empty balcony sat on the second floor above the bar. Oh yeah, this was where the Underground Tours started.
The sound level was just below the roar of a 747’s engines and a cloud of smoke hung below the ceiling. He couldn’t wait for Washington’s new anti-smoking law to go into effect.
He ordered his usual Henry’s and waited. A couple of nice-looking Asian girls hung out at the bar. When one smiled at him and lifted her glass, Ted mouthed “I’m meeting somebody,” raised his hands and shrugged his shoulders. The girls laughed and turned away.
Where was Catrina? He’d been here twenty minutes and was already starting his second beer. If she didn’t get here soon, he’d be too drunk to hold an intelligent conversation. What the hell. He took another sip. I don’t think she wants me for an intelligent conversation anyway. He felt a slight tingle below the belt.
At the half-hour mark, she appeared in the doorway. The room was dark and she was backlit. Her silhouette was unmistakable. Short hair, long legs, perfectly proportioned body. Man, why couldn’t she be twenty years younger?
She didn’t so much walk across the room as glide. Ted was mesmerized by her cat-like movements and swaying hips. Halfway across the room, she turned to talk with an older man at the bar. He stood and she embraced him.
Man, does she look good in those tight jeans. They showed off her perfect, round ass. As she turned, he almost lost his breath when he saw that she was wearing a tight, turtleneck cashmere sweater.
“Mr. Higuera, Ted, I’m sorry I’m late.” There was that sexy, husky voice. “I had an emergency come up at the office.” She extended her hand to him. “We can’t leave any of our clients hanging.”
What kind of date begins with a handshake? And Mr. Higuera? Ted took her hand. It was hard, her grip firm. “That’s okay. You’ll just have to catch up with me. I’m already two beers into the night.”
“The usual, Cindy.” Catrina smiled at the bar maid. When she crossed her legs and sat back in the chair, she reminded him of Sharon Stone. He felt more excitement stirring down below.
“Thank you,” Catrina told the barmaid as she put down tonic water with a twist. She turned to Ted. “I hope this isn’t too unusual. I don’t do business in conventional ways.”
Business? “Uh…yeah. Okay. This is alright.” What the hell is she talking about?
“I think I may have something you might be interested in.”
Baby, you got two things I’d be very interested in. “What did you have in mind?”
“I have a new client.”
Huh?
“I think your skill set is just right for this job. I wanted to see if you’d be interested in taking a look at it.”
Taking a look? All of Ted’s excitement evaporated. His head spun for a moment. “This is a job offer?”
“Not exactly. I thought we could talk for a few minutes; see if we share the same values. Then, if you’re interested, we can talk more about the case.”
A woman at the next table lit a cigarette. It immediately caught Catrina’s attention. She looked longingly at the cloud the woman exhaled. It’s almost like she’s trying to suck in the smoke.
Who is this woman? Why is she interested in me?
Chapter 12
Battered or not, Ted needed his car. Catrina’s office was south of Safeco Field in the industrial area of town. He followed his Google Maps directions, passing warehouses, steel foundries, the old Rainer Brewery and other heavy industrial businesses.
He finally found his way to Sixth Avenue South and Massachusetts Street. This place is a dive. The parking lot, infested with weeds, hadn’t seen new stripes in decades. Cigarette butts, beer cans and the occasional used condom, littered the pavement. The warehouse’s corrugated metal siding was many years past needing a new coat of paint.
Ted got out of his car, and following Catrina’s instructions, pushed the button on the call system. The accented voice greeted him and buzzed him in. Climbing the long, narrow, steep stairs nearly winded him.
Dios mío, this place looks like they bought everything at a swap meet. This dump certainly didn’t look like a successful PI’s office on TV.
There must have been two-dozen secondhand desks scattered around the large open area. Most of them were back to back, with the women working there facing each other. A few were arranged in fours, with two women working side-by-side, facing two other women across their desks.
Here and there, a dog sat at its owner’s feet while she worked away. He could hear a baby screaming from somewhere down the hallway.
There wasn’t a man in sight. What kind of outfit is this anyway? A bunch of Amazon male haters? Ted felt the estrogen oozing from the walls.
“Mr. Higuera.” A large, black woman got up from her desk to extend her hand. She let Ted grasp her fingers. Her limp handshake was merely a slight flip of the wrist.
“Mrs. Flaherty will be with you shortly. Would you like to take a seat? I can get you coffee or water.”
“Water would be nice.” Ted sat on the well-worn sofa. Some ancient copies of National Geographic littered the coffee table.
“My name is Abeba.” The large woman handed Ted a glass filled with cold water. “Mrs. Flaherty has been talking about you. I’m hoping we’ll see more of you.”
Ted couldn’t put his finger on her accent. She spoke perfect English, but it just sounded a little funny. She almost sounded British.
“Ted, thank you for coming.” Catrina came around the corner into the reception area. “Come right this way.” She looked much as she did the night she saved Ted from the Neo-Nazis. Dressed from head to foot in black. Black boots, black jeans. His gaze lingered on the black sweater.
Ted followed Catrina into her office. Her butt was almost hypnotizing.
“Sit down, please.”
Ted took one of the unmatched set of chairs in front of Catrina’s desk. “I hope you don’t mind meeting so late,” he said. “I didn’t want to have to leave work early.”
“Oh, it’s no problem. We often work late here. As a matter of fact, I have a stakeout tonight.”
She was serious. Ted figured she would be spending the night tailing some tomcat of a husband. He didn’t want to get on the bad side of this lady.
“You said you wanted to talk to me about a job?” he said.
“Our operation here has kind of evolved," Catrina said. "I never intended to be running a criminal background check business. I got a job doing a background check for one company, then they recommended me to another company, and so on.
“Over the years, it just sort of grew. Now we have a database with thousands of names. I have associates in all fifty states to check court records and public documents. For a hundred dollars, I can learn everything there is to know about you.”
“Isn’t that a little like science fiction? I’m in the computer security business, I read the crime novels too, but that doesn’t make it true.”
“Let’s see, Eduardo Higuera.” Catrina picked up a file folder from her desk. “Born July Fourth, nineteen eighty–four in East LA. Parents are both illegal immigrants. The oldest of five children, three boys, two girls. You were a football star at Garfield High School. Went to the University of Washington on a football scholarship, but didn’t play much. Graduated Summa cum laude with a bachelor’s degree in computer science.”
>
Ted couldn’t believe what he was hearing. She had his whole life mapped out on paper.
“You went to work for YTS Digital Security about two months ago.” Catrina sipped at her coffee. “It looks like you ‘pulled the sword out of the stone.’ You hacked into Justin McCormack’s private system. That’s marked you for the fast track at YTS. I expect that if you stay there you’ll end up a millionaire.”
Wow! Ted hadn’t really looked that far into the future. When she put it that way, well, it didn’t sound bad at all.
“Here’s the part I like.” Catrina flipped a sheet of paper in her file. “You were one of a group of American kids who stopped an al-Qaeda attack on an American cruise ship. Your friends were all shot up, two of them killed. Eye witnesses say you never flinched.” She fiddled with the crooked gold horn pendant on a gold chain around her neck. “You took control of the boat and rammed the terrorists’ ship. I have reports here that you never panicked and never batted an eye. You saw people getting hurt and killed all around you, yet you kept your head and caused the terrorists missile to go off target.”
Ted felt that old, familiar throbbing in his chest. His breathing became fast and shallow. “I really didn’t have that much to do with it. The Mounties showed up just in time. I’m not any kind of a hero, I’m just a tanto who got my friends shot up.”
“That’s the part I like best of all. You’re modest, even self-depreciating. I think that attitude would fit in here well.”
Ted grabbed on the opportunity to change the subject. He didn’t want to think about the terrorist’s attack any more. “So, what do you need me for? This looks like a low-tech operation.”
Catrina picked up a brown onyx fountain pen and tapped it on her desk. After a long pause, she said, “That is precisely the problem. A client calls and wants to do a background check, chances are that we already have the data in our database. We have tens of thousands of records.” She took the cap off of the pen and doodled mindlessly on her desk blotter.
“We’ve outgrown our technology. We keep the data in an Access database.” She capped the pen and set it down. With a new vigor she continued. ‘It’s an old, crumbly system. It crashes several times a month. We have a consulting firm that patches it together for us, but they’ve been recommending that we rebuild the system in more scalable technology for years. I need someone who understands this technology stuff to make it happen. Like I said, this is our cash cow. We have to take care of it.”
Ted stared at Catrina’s blotter. It was full of doodles of martini glasses, whiskey bottles and drinks with frilly umbrellas. “Why do you need me? I’m not a database expert. I’m a security analyst. I mean, I took database and programming classes in school, but that’s not what I do.”
Catrina got up and walked to the filing cabinet next to the book case. She took out a file and returned to her desk.
“You’re right,” she said. “I can hire a consultant to rebuild the system for me. But I want someone here who understands technology. I don’t trust what consultants tell me. They’re all trying to sell me something. I want someone with some skin in the game to decide what’s best. I also have an interesting challenge.” She shoved the file in front of Ted.
Ted picked it up and opened the cover. “Millennium Systems? What do you have to do with MS?”
“You said you were a hacker for hire.” Catrina paused and let her words sink in. “I want you to hack into the Millennium Systems network. I want you to worm your way into their systems and find some secret information for our client.”
“Lady, you’re nuts!” Ted felt the palms of his hands grow sweaty. “Even if I could hack into MS, which is clearly impossible, it’s as illegal as hell. I could go to prison for five years.” He dropped the file back on Catrina’s desk.
“Not exactly.” Catrina picked up the file and flipped a few pages, then handed it back to him. “Here, we have permission from the CEO.”
Ted stared at the document in disbelief. “I don’t get it. Why would the CEO hire someone to hack into her own system and get data that is plainly, legally already hers?”
“Something is fishy at MS. Someone's trying to sabotage the company. She can’t trust her own security department because they might be part of the problem. We have to find out who it is.”
Holy shit! Was he really good enough to hack into a hotshot firm like MS?
****
Detective Sergeant Tom Bremen had been on “The Job” for twenty years. He’d worked his way from uniformed patrolman to homicide detective. His best assignment had been on the Seattle Mounted Patrol. He loved horses, and people, especially kids, were drawn to mounted officers. He spent more time answering questions about his mount than he did fighting crime.
But all good things come to an end. When his sergeant suggested that he might have a shot at homicide, the elite detective unit, Tom had bitten. Now, after five years of finding dead bodies in all sorts of places, nothing surprised him.
This call wasn’t unusual. A floater. Tom hated floaters. After a few days in the water, the fish and crabs left little that resembled a human being. He only hoped that this DB would be in better shape.
The one thing he hated more than floaters was unsolved cases. His squad, one of three homicide units in the city, had an eighty-percent close rate. That was average for the city, but well above the national average. It wasn’t near good enough for him. His goal, his only goal, was a one-hundred-percent close rate. Every homicide victim deserved that.
Tom pulled his unmarked Crown Vic up to the curb and climbed out. A coroner’s van and two patrol cars with flashing lights waited for him. The CSI van pulled in after him.
“What ya got for me, George?” Tom asked the salt and pepper haired officer in charge of the scene.
“Floater. Female, looks like mid-forties. Pretty badly decomposed. Harbor Patrol fished her out for us. Undressed, no obvious signs of sexual trauma, but look at this.”
The officer led Tom to a covered lump on the pier. He pulled back the cover. Tom winched.
He had seen all sorts of things, but this was bad. “That wasn’t fish or crabs. Someone did that deliberately.”
The body was missing all of its fingers and teeth. “We’ll have to run DNA on her, see if we can get an ID. What the hell is that?” Tom pointed to red marks on her breasts.
“Looks like signs of torture to me, Sarge.”
Human beings’ capacity for cruelty to their fellow human beings always amazed Tom.
“Okay, turn her over to the coroner. I don’t think that CSI is going to find much here. She was obviously dumped somewhere else and drifted here with the tide.”
****
“I’m in business to help people.” Catrina put down her clear glass coffee cup. She looked into Ted’s eyes. “The only reason we have a criminal background check division is to fund my investigative unit. We spend most of our time chasing cheating husbands and working sexual harassment cases, but every now and then, we get to make a difference. We do a lot of work for domestic violence victims. I specialize in working with policemen’s wives. I lost a wife a couple of years ago and I never want that to happen again.”
Despite the beat-up furniture in Catrina’s office, she was a professional. Ted sensed the conviction in her voice. She was dedicated to her work.
“When a woman gets a restraining order against her ex, odds are it won’t do any good. If the son of a bitch needed a restraining order, he isn’t going to listen to the court anyway. Do you know how many women are killed or hurt by their exes and boyfriends who had restraining orders?”
“No.” Ted really hadn’t thought about it much.
“Most of them.” Catrina put down her coffee cup, leaned forward and gazed straight into Ted’s eyes. “For the most part, restraining orders aren’t worth the paper they’re written on. That’s where we come in.”
“You serve restraining orders?” Ted squirmed uncomfortably in his ill-fitting chair.
“No
, we protect women. We get them out of dangerous situations and into safe houses. We do things that the police can’t or won’t do. Anything it takes to defend our clients. We defend people who can’t defend themselves.”
Ted felt like an arrow hit his heart. Those words we defend people who can’t defend themselves, he’d heard them before. He remembered saying them. Shortly after the terrorist incident, when Chris’ life hung in the balance, he remembered making a pledge to Chris’ dad. He said that he had been given a second chance at life and he wanted it to mean something; he wanted to defend people who couldn’t defend themselves.
“So how would hacking into MS or building you a new database defend helpless people?”
Catrina sat back and took a long breath. “It would fund our efforts. Jobs like that bring in enough money that we can work for these women who can’t afford to hire help. They can’t afford an attorney and they certainly would never think of hiring a PI. You want to see examples of our work?”
“Yeah.” This woman intrigued Ted. The fact that she wasn’t hard on the eyes didn’t hurt either.
“Look around our office. Every one of those women was rescued from a bad situation. We got them out. We got them safe. We made a job for them. Now each of them is dedicated to helping her sisters. The only compensation I ask, for cases like that, is that they pay it forward.”
Ted thought about growing up in East LA. With the macho attitude of most of his friends’ fathers, the running around, the gangs, women were a commodity. He had seen more than one mom in the ‘hood picked up by the meat wagon after su marido came home drunk. He couldn’t even count the ones who showed up at work with black eyes and broken bones from “walking into a door.”
“You’ve already met one case: Abeba Iskinder, our receptionist. Abeba is Ethiopian. When her daughter turned thirteen, her mother-in-law insisted that she be circumcised.”
“Circumcised? How do you circumcise a woman?”
“It’s an African tradition. They cut out the clitoris with a sharp stick.”
Ted instinctively pulled his legs together.
Hacker For Hire (Ted Higuera Series Book 2) Page 11
