Hacker For Hire (Ted Higuera Series Book 2)

by Wallace, Pendelton

  Maybe he still had a job.

  ****

  “Where’s Jeff? Doesn’t he normally do this kind of stuff with you?” Ted slid into the passenger side of the burgundy Ford Explorer.

  “Jeff’s on another case tonight. We can’t leave Jessie in that house another day. If we don’t get her out of there, that bastard’ll kill her.” Catrina turned the key in the ignition and shoved the gear shift lever into reverse.

  “Bring me up to speed.” At least she was talking to him again, even if it was only because she needed backup on this job. “Who is Jessie Madison and what’re we doing?”

  “Jessie’s the mother of two kids, a five-year old boy and a two-year old girl. Her husband, Jim, is SPD. He’s working a night watch out of Wallingford tonight. He beat Jessie up before he left for his shift. We’ve got to get her out of there and into a safe house before he gets off duty.”

  Catrina didn’t pay much attention to traffic laws as she sped out of the industrial district of South Seattle and onto I-5 northbound. Weaving in and out of rush hour traffic on the freeway, she constantly swore and banged her hand on the steering wheel as other drivers cut her off or went too slow.

  She took the Forty-Fifth Street exit and headed west. After making a right turn on Bagley Avenue she flew up the quiet residential street much faster than was safe. Ted hung on. He was used to wild rides, but there was a determined anger in Catrina’s driving.

  Just before the street dead ended at Meridian Park, Catrina pulled into the driveway of a one-story clapboard house surrounded by boxwood hedges.

  “C’mon, let’s go. This has to be fast.” She leapt out of the door.

  Ted ran to keep up.

  Catrina knocked twice, then opened the door.

  “Jessie, are you OK?”

  Jessie Madison, a petite brunette sat hunched over on the sofa, crying. A young child sat on each side of her.

  Catrina kneeled in front of Jessie. “Jess, hon, it’s going to be all right.” She gently lifted Jessie’s chin.

  Ted caught his breath. Jessie’s face was a mess. Her left eye was swollen shut. Blood dripped from her cracked lips.

  “C’mon. Let’s get you cleaned up.” Catrina gently lifted Jessie to her feet. “Ted, keep an eye on the road. If that filthy SOB comes back, I want to know about it.”

  For the first time, Ted had second thoughts about “that filthy SOB.” Jessie’s husband was a cop. They could get into real trouble crossing the SPD. The guy carried a gun and had a temper. What in the hell is Señora Higuera’s little boy doing here?

  A painful cry came from the bathroom. Ted looked over his shoulder. Should he go help or stick to his post? Cat knew what she was doing. This wasn’t the first time she had done an extraction. He better do as he was told.

  “The bastard.” Catrina led Jessie back into the living room and seated her on the sofa. “Her arm’s broken.”

  “Jesus, Cat. What do we do?”

  “We get them out of here. Now!”

  The children were crying at full volume. Catrina picked up the little girl. “Hi, honey. My name’s Cat. What’s yours?”

  The girl wailed. The little boy clung to his mother like a baby orangutan.

  “We need to get a few things for them. Ted, find a bag, one change of clothes for each of the kids. Don’t bother with toothbrushes or toiletries. We don’t need any clothes for Jessie. They’ll have those where we’re going. Find a couple of toys for the kids, bears, dolls, something like that, something that they’re familiar with. But hurry.”

  Ted jumped into action. He found a duffle bag in the immaculately clean master bed room. Not a thing was out of place, not a wrinkle in the bed or pillows. The clothes in the closet neatly arranged, freshly pressed shirts hung next to blue uniforms.

  In the kids’ rooms, he grabbed a few clothes, a teddy bear, a stuffed tiger and a wooden Tommy the Tank engine. Back in the living room, Catrina had already fashioned a make shift sling for Jessie’s arm.

  “Okay, Cat. Got it. Let’s get out of here.”

  “You go first. Make sure there’s no one watching on the street. When you’ve put the bag in the car, come back for Jimmy.”

  Ted ran to the SUV and tossed the duffle in the cargo area. He quickly checked to make sure the two child seats were secure, then glanced around the neighborhood.

  Nothing seemed out of place. Kids were playing in a yard down the street. A woman watered her flower beds. A man worked on a ladder against his house.

  What he didn’t notice was the dark-colored Dodge Charger with two men in the front seat parked in the next block. He was still new to this game.

  “We’re clear. Let’s go.” He ran back into the house. “Jimmy, you want to come with me?” He pried the crying boy free from his mother and headed for the door.

  Catrina carried the girl and helped the mother up.

  Jessie climbed painfully into the middle back seat, while Ted and Catrina strapped her children in the car seats next to her.

  Ted slid into the passenger seat as Catrina fired up the Explorer.

  This time, Catrina drove with extreme caution, slowly backing out into the street, driving the residential neighborhood at a sedate pace.

  They turned left onto Forty-fifth and headed for the freeway. Catrina constantly scanned the rearview mirrors.

  “I was worried there for a minute.” Her voice was tense. “I thought we were being followed. That Dodge Charger followed us down Forty-Fifth, but it went straight when we turned onto the freeway.”

  ****

  Catrina exited at Stewart Street and turned left onto Denny Way. Taking the Denny Overpass, she climbed Capitol Hill.

  “Where’re we headed, Cat?” Ted was confused. “I thought that the safe house was in the Central District.”

  “Just being careful. I don’t want to take a direct route. Just in case I missed a tail.”

  Turning right onto Broadway, they slowed in traffic.

  Suddenly Catrina floored the throttle. The Burgundy Explorer roared and jumped forward.

  “Shit. They’re back.”

  Ted looked over his shoulder. Accelerating behind them was a dark-colored Dodge Charger. “Who are those guys?”

  “Don’t know, don’t care. We need to get out of here.” Catrina drove like a wild woman. She wove in and out of traffic, ignored traffic signals, swerved into the oncoming traffic lane to get around slow cars and shot forward in any opening.

  “Shit, Cat.” Ted couldn’t believe the pickup the Explorer had. “What do you have in here?”

  “The biggest, baddest V-8 you’ve ever seen.” She hit the brake and turned hard. The Dodge shot past the turn.

  “Gotcha.” She floored the accelerator and shot down the street, making a hard right at the next corner. “We’re going to lose them.”

  “Mierda. There’s two of them, Cat.” Ted watched as a Chevy Malibu’s tires screeched as it made the turn after them and followed.

  “Tag team. Police tactics. Those have got to be her husband’s friends. Let’s get out of here.” Catrina shot through intersections at dizzying speed. The Explorer went airborne as they hit bumps in the road.

  The Malibu kept the pace. Something exploded the side-view mirror next to Ted.

  “Shit. Cat, they’re shooting at us.”

  Catrina smiled. “They’re going to have to do better than that.”

  A bullet slammed into the rear window. Ted covered his head, but the glass didn’t shatter.

  Suddenly, Ted was back with Chris and Meagan on the sail boat. The terrorists were shooting at them. He saw the bullet hit Chris’ chest in slow motion. Chris was jerked from his feet and crumpled in the corner of the cockpit. Meagan shoved Ted aside, only to be met by a hail of bullets.

  He froze. Sweat cascaded down his brow. His heart ran wild.

  “Higuera. Higuera! Are you in there?”

  Somewhere from far, far away he heard her voice. Like a life line, Catrina pulled him back to reality.r />
  “Higuera? You okay?”

  “Yeah.” Ted struggled to catch his breath. “I’ll make it.”

  “Well, heads up, I’m going to need you.”

  This time, a burst of bullets hit the back of the Explorer.

  “They have a MAC 10 or something.” Cat looked up into the rearview mirror. “They’ve given up on their pistols.”

  Everything was a blur. Horns honked, cars pulled onto the sidewalk to get out of the way. People screamed. “Shit!” Ted’s breathing came fast and short. “This happens on TV, not it real life.”

  Bullets splattered against the back of the SUV, stitched a line across the rear window.

  “I don’t get it.” Ted could hardly breathe. “Why doesn’t the glass break? Why don’t those bullets get through the back door? What the hell kind of a truck is this?”

  Catrina grinned. “It would take an anti-tank missile to stop this thing. I had it custom built. By the same people who build the presidential limousines.”

  The Explorer jumped, then the ride became bumpy. “They’ve shot out a tire,” Catrina yelled, but kept going. “There are steel disks inside the tires. That won’t slow us down.”

  She hit the brake and the Malibu sped along side of them. The passenger grinned and pointed his MAC 10 directly at Catrina.

  Catrina swung the wheel to the left, crashing into the Chevy. The driver swerved left and crashed into a car at the curb. Catrina accelerated and turned a hard right at the next intersection.

  “I don’t see the other car.” Ted looked all around them. “I think you’ve lost them.”

  Catrina didn’t slow down.

  “Where the hell you learn to drive like that?” Ted heard sirens in their wake as they sped south. His pulse slowly began to return to normal. “That was just like in the movies.”

  “In the movies they don’t use real bullets. That wasn’t Jim Madison’s friends. That wasn’t the cops. They wouldn’t take a chance on hurting his family.”

  “If it wasn’t the cops, then who the hell was it?”

  Chapter 24

  Catrina rode up the Millennium Systems Tower elevator in her best white linen business suit. She didn’t know quite why, but she felt that it was important to make a good impression on Alison Clarke today. She knew that her long legs were her best feature; at least they didn’t sag like nearly everything else on her body. The skirt might have been a little short for a middle-aged woman, but what the hell. She loved the feel of the suit’s fabric against her skin.

  The elevator stopped and the door opened on the bastion of one of the most powerful women in the country.

  “Catrina Flaherty, here to see Ms. Clarke.” Catrina held up the temporary ID card that Security had issued her in the lobby.

  “Have a seat, Ms. Flaherty.” The tall thin secretary, no he would be called an executive assistant nowadays, smiled at her. “I’ll let Ms. Clarke know you’re here.”

  Catrina leafed through a copy of CEO magazine while she waited. She glanced at an article on cloud computing, Ted would know what this stuff was all about, and started reading an article about transformational leadership. That’s what Alison had done at MS, transformed the company. There weren’t many people, men or women, who could have done that, taking an organization as large as MS and completely changing the corporate culture.

  Alison was becoming something of a hero to Catrina as she learned more about her.

  “Ms. Clarke will see you now.” The assistant led Catrina to Alison’s office suite.

  “Cat, so nice to see you.” Alison smiled and held out her hand.

  Catrina shook it, but Alison clapped her left hand over Catrina’s and held it for a long moment. Catrina’s heart beat accelerated.

  “I thought I should bring you up to speed on the case.” Catrina broke free and headed to the loveseats around the coffee table. She reached in her bag and retrieved a file folder.

  Alison sat next to her in the love seat as Catrina spread the black and white surveillance photos on the table. “Someone sent these to us.” She looked up to see surprise in Alison’s brown eyes. “We don’t know who, but someone with access to MS security tapes wants to help us. More importantly, they know we’re investigating.”

  Alison took a deep breath and exhaled. “These are from our cameras?” She picked up a picture of Donna Harrison reaching up to dust the camera that was taping her. “I’ve never seen these.”

  “Here’s what else we have. . .” Catrina explained about Steven Winston, the board member whose developmentally disabled son had died under mysterious circumstances. She went on to lay out how Jackson Schmidt, Millennium System’s CFO, was cooking the books and moving half a million dollars a month into an offshore account.

  “The bastard. I never did trust him.” Alison appeared genuinely shocked. “That might be worth killing for. Six million dollars is a lot of money.”

  “Terry Metcalf has always been at the top of my list,” Catrina leaned back in her seat and crossed her long legs. “With him, it’s personal. There was something distinctly personal in the way Donna was killed. The killer wanted to humiliate her. We haven’t found anything in her personal or work life to suggest that someone would want to degrade her that way. The killer certainly knew her. Why would he want to humiliate her so?”

  Alison just stared at Catrina.

  “She hurt him in some way. Something she did deeply offended the killer and he had to pay her back. What could she have done? Did it involve her investigation for you, or was it something else? We really don’t know.”

  “You mean, you think she might have been killed for some other reason? It wasn’t about what she was finding at MS?”

  “We don’t really know at this point. I’m not sure if this is one investigation or two.” Catrina stopped to study Alison’s face. Alison’s expression was somewhere between disbelief and relief.

  “I have a friend at Homicide. I know that they’ll do everything in their power to solve Donna’s murder, but that doesn’t get you any closer to finding out who was leaking your information about Delphi.”

  “Regardless of what happened to Donna, as sad as I am about that, I still need to find that leak. I still have a business to run, a product to roll out.”

  “There’s more.” Catrina watched Alison carefully. “Last night we were working on another case, extracting a battered wife. Someone followed us. Shot at us.”

  “Oh my God!” Alison’s hands went to her cheeks.

  Either she was genuinely startled, or she was one of the best actresses Catrina had ever met. Catrina would not rule out the latter.

  “I don’t know for sure if it had anything to do with this case or not. My gut instinct is that it did. Why would a husband shoot at his family? Even if he beat his wife? He wants her in his power, not in a cemetery.” Catrina paused to gauge Alison’s reaction, then continued. “The people who chased us, shot at us, were professionals. They were using automatic weapons that I don’t think my client’s husband could have procured. I can’t help but think that it had something to do with this case.”

  “Cat, you have to be careful. I don’t want you getting hurt” Alison took Catrina’s hand in hers. “Is it time for us to just turn this over to the police?

  That was a no-brainer for Catrina. Outside of Tom, there were few people on the Seattle Police Department that she trusted. Or rather, that should be, who trusted her.

  “No. We’re going to keep investigating. We can do things the police can’t. They’re constitutionally handcuffed. We aren’t.”

  “I’ll say it again.” Alison’s voice was barely a whisper. “I don’t want you getting hurt.”

  Catrina gulped. This wasn’t going to be easy. “There’s something else you should know about.” She looked into Alison’s eyes. “We found this snooping around in your Finance system.” She slid a print out to Alison. “You and Angie Hopper seem to take a lot of trips together.”

  Alison must be a good poker player. He
r face betrayed nothing. “We often attend the same conferences. We like each other. We travel together when possible. What significance does this have?”

  “If we could find this stuff, then so can the police. When they’re investigating Donna’s murder, the trail might lead back to you.” Catrina paused to let her words sink in. “It doesn’t take much of an imagination to figure out that you’re having an affair with Angie Hopper. The police will see that as motive. If someone found out about it, leaked it to the press, it would have dire consequences for MS.”

  Alison stared at Catrina for a long moment, then apparently decided what she wanted to say. “Angie and I go back a long way. My husband knows about her. In fact, I’ve never really kept any of my liaisons a secret from him. As long as I’m not involved with other men, he knows it’s just for fun. He’s not threatened, he’s okay with that.”

  Alison leaned back in her seat and smoothed her hair. She twisted her wedding ring around her finger. “I don’t know, Cat. Maybe I’m just wired differently. Maybe I’m more like a man that most women. I think it’s the same thing that drives me to succeed in business, that killer instinct. Sometimes I just feel sexually aggressive. Sometimes I just need to prove to myself that I’m still desirable.” Alison’s hands dropped to her lap and her face fell.

  “If a male CEO had an affair, it would hardly be news,” Alison said. “It would be glossed over and business would go on as usual. Why should I be different? What makes a woman so special that the press is after them like a pack of wolves?”

  Catrina had a thousand answers for that question. It went back to human kind’s need to know who the fathers of their children were. There was no doubt who the mother was, but who fathered that child? If the mother had multiple partners, they could never be sure. The way to prevent that was to place a taboo upon a woman’s sexual desires. She thought about the unfairness of it all, but said nothing.

  “So what does this mean?” Alison asked. “Will you tell the police?”

  “No. You can count on our confidence. No one will find out from us. I thought you would want to be prepared, in case they ask you.”