by Karen Woods
“Somehow,” I said, “I didn’t expect otherwise. I’ll get my purse and be with you, presently.”
Geoff and I went to the lab in Phil’s car with Sam. Mike and the other night guard, a bodybuilder named Peter Cross, remained at the house.
I stood at the outer door to my lab. Looking in, the only sign that anything was amiss was that the video surveillance camera lay on the floor, broken into several large pieces and many smaller ones.
“What.” I started to ask, then found that I couldn’t piece together a sentence. “How long ago was this found?”
“I’ve had a patrol come round about every couple of hours and check the place. There was a power outage in this section of town about two and a half hours ago. Strange thing. It took out only the center of town,” Phil answered.
“What caused the outage?” I asked sharply.
“Should have known that you would pick up on that. A pair of raccoons in a transformer at the substation. They won’t bother anyone again,” Sam replied.
“I’m getting a little paranoid. But, is there any way of determining whether the animals were alive or dead when they came into contact with the transformer?”
“Not hardly, Al. But, the question had crossed my mind as well. I’d say that you have every reason to feel persecuted. Every reason,” Phil said. “Don’t be shocked by the amount of damage. It’s pretty bad. And I only looked at the main room.”
“The place has been photographed, finger printed, and whatever else you had to do to it?”
“Yeah. You don’t have to worry about touching anything, Doc,” Sam said.
“You’ve been inside, Sam?” Geoff asked.
“Come on, Al,” Phil urged. “We need a damage assessment.”
“I’m not sure that I want to do this, Phil,” I responded, unable to keep the tremble out of my voice.
Geoff took my arm, gently urging, “Come on, darling. The sooner we get it over, the sooner that we can get past it.”
They had warned me, I told myself. Yet, I hadn’t been prepared for this level of destruction.
Scrawled in black spray paint on the block wall from ceiling to floor to the left of the door was “Once a gal from Chicaga, over her computers went gaga, soon you will see, she is no longer to be”. On the right was “Roses are red, violets are blue, your business is dead, soon you will be too.”
“Hardly likely to win awards with that poetry,” I remarked.
“The paint was still tacky when we found it,” Phil replied.
I spun around sharply and began looking through the room in detail.
Electrical cables lay coiled in a jumbled mess like some ancient reptile against the cream quarry tile floor.
There wasn’t a monitor in the room intact. Bits and pieces of glass were scattered over the entire main room from where the tubes had exploded after they had been obviously thrown to the floor.
Circuit boards had been pulled from the small mainframe computer. The integrated circuits had been yanked from the boards when possible. Then the multipronged black and silver circuits had been smashed with something very heavy. Now the ICs lay like so many dead spiders after an exterminator’s visit. The remaining boards from the small mainframe computer had been tossed carelessly on the floor then beaten into small pieces.
The removable disk packs used by the mainframe computer had been pulled from the disk drives. The magnetic platters lay in bent and broken pieces, an angry modern sculpture.
The coaxial cabling from the mainframe to the system console and the local area network cabling from each of the smaller computers had been disconnected. The male and female connectors had been snipped from the cables, then smashed.
My commercial laser printer lay in pieces, obviously a victim of whatever heavy instrument had destroyed the other equipment.
Plastic lined cardboard cases of what had been new floppy disks lay open. The dissolving disks were swimming in some liquid that smelled suspiciously like acetone.
Six keyboards had been disconnected from their respective computers or terminals. Several keys had been removed from the various keyboards. I made a mental note to ask if the keyboards had been left in the same order as they had been found. I stared at the keyboards for a minute before I understood. The message conveyed by the keyboards was simple. Each keyboard’s missing characters formed a word. Together the message from the six keyboards read: Death comes slow to the wicked.
The remains of a Logitech and two MS mice, a scanner, and a trackball lay where they had been hurled against the walls.
A long florist’s box containing more dead roses lay inside the now crippled system unit of the mainframe. A note was also scrawled on the inside of that door. Rather terse, it read simply, “Die, Bitch.”
“This is not the act of a sane person,” I said, breaking the relative silence that had filled the room since I had begun my inspection.
Geoff sighed as he wrapped his arm around my shoulder. “Hold on, ‘Licia.”
“Can you give me a damage estimate?” Phil demanded.
I sighed. “Not yet. Let me look at the other rooms.”
Geoff lightly kissed the top of my head before he released me.
I went through the clean room changing area. Several of the overalls had been torn to pieces. One was missing. Obscenities were painted onto the walls. The large thick armored window in the door was totally blacked out with paint. I looked at the locks on the heavy steel door.
“I wonder how good of a lock picker he is,” I asked rhetorically, not meaning to voice the thought. Then I got out my keys. Slowly, I unlocked all three locks on the door. Hesitantly, not wanting to see the damage, I went inside.
“Thank God for small miracles. There are advantages to strong doors and excellent locks. He didn’t get in here.”
“You sure, ‘Licia?” Geoff asked.
“Absolutely. Nothing’s been moved. I always set little traps in secure areas. None of them have been tripped,” I said as I left the room and locked the doors behind me. “But, I’ll find someplace more secure to store the machines.”
“What’s so important there?” Phil demanded.
“Those machines, and the technology there, may be worth billions of dollars by the time that all of the applications of the pieces are done,” I replied. “Or it may be worth nothing more than the licensing fees and sales which I’ve already derived from the patents and copyrights. It’s still in development. Probably always will be. But it has potential to be very big.”
“Big enough so that someone would be tempted to manufacture this whole threat to cover their theft of the system?” Phil asked.
“This level of security would have been pointless otherwise. Although a fat lot of good my security measures have done.” I couldn’t keep the anger out of my voice.
“Just thinking out loud,” Phil stated.
“To answer your question: possibly. The subassemblies are all patented. It’s within the scope of possibility that someone could have looked at the pattern of the patents and figured out what I am up to. But, it would take a truly sick mind to come up with that tactic for industrial espionage.”
“You’ve said yourself that this is not the act of a sane person,” Phil countered.
“Thank you, Chief Mallory. Your grasp of the obvious is outstanding,” I replied, trying not to focus my growing anger on him.
I looked at Geoff. “I want one of the guards here and armed for the rest of the night, and until I can get the devices moved to more secure quarters. I’m going to call Rusty and see if she will house them, if I can get them to her.”
“All right, ‘Licia,” Geoff answered. “That sounds like a good idea.”
“I have to look at the rest of the building. I don’t want to, but I have to,” I stated.
In the kitchenette, there was a general mess as canisters of coffee and tea were spilled all over the floor. Obscenities, again, were painted on the walls. But, I had seen worse words scrawled on the walls in LA
.
I backed away from the room and went to the bathroom. The contents of the medicine cabinet had been emptied without ceremony onto the floor. There were a collection of pills which I didn’t recognize. I did a quick inventory. “My hairbrush is missing. Along with a small bottle of Chanel No. 5, and a lipstick. Added are those capsules on the floor. They aren’t mine.”
“You’re sure?” Phil asked.
“I like Chanel and always keep a bottle. I just bought a new bottle last week. Same reason for remembering the lipstick. I bought it at the same time that I got the Chanel,” I explained. “And I always keep a brush here. But, I don’t do drugs. You’ve already had the bloodwork done to prove that.”
Then I went to my office. The door was unlocked, but closed. “Has anyone looked in here?”
Phil nodded affirmatively. He pushed open the door and went in first. I quickly followed.
I looked around. Then I went to a cabinet and threw open the door. Spray painted on the face of the safe were more obscenities. Quickly, I worked the seven tumbler combination and opened door to the large fire resistant safe. I looked through the contents of the safe. Then I closed the door to the safe and relocked it. “Everything’s there. Nothing has been moved.”
“Where do you write down the combination?” Sam asked.
“Nowhere. The only record of the combination is in my memory.”
“Suppose that you forget it?” Sam asked.
I looked at him.
He shrugged. “Forget I said that,” he replied with a smile.
Again, I looked around the room. I flinched when I saw the obscenities on the wall. I walked over to a now empty frame that had held a painting. I began to laugh and continued to laugh until the laughter became nearly hysterical.
Geoff came to me. “‘Licia, calm down!”
“But, it’s so funny, Geoff. He stole the paintings,” I said as tears began to roll from my eyes. “He actually stole the paintings.”
“They were valuable,” Geoff said.
“Those were copies, made by the prototype of the machine in the cleanroom,” I replied when I got my laughter more under control. “Absolutely worthless. And for all the mess that he made in the other room, the damage is much less than he would have thought. I have backup copies of all the files in the safe. And I keep a set of backups off site for added security. It’s a set back, but not a crippling one. More of a nuisance, really. This time, this time, he miscalculated.”
I walked over to my desk. Then I began to methodically search the drawers, looking for anything the least bit odd. And I found plenty odd: papers misfiled and missing, my lethally sharp surgical steel letter opener missing, and things in the wrong drawers.
I sat at the desk and made up a damage estimate. “This is rough. Will it suffice for your purposes?”
Phil looked at it. “Fine. Thank you, Al.”
“Let me make a copy of it for my files?”
“You mean, he left the copier unharmed?” Phil asked. “I wonder why.”
“Good question,” I replied after a moment. “There’s only one way to find out.”
Then I pushed my chair back and walked over to the copier.
“‘Licia,” Geoff said as I hit the button releasing the top portion of the copier.
Lying there face down on the paper feeds was a photograph. The first time that I would have used the copier, there would have been a jam. Cute. Very cute.
Phil tapped me on the shoulder. He had a removed a plastic evidence bag from the inside pocket of his coat. It covered his hand. I stepped back.
He blocked my view.
“Well?”
“You don’t want to see this, Al,” Phil told me. “You really don’t want to see this.”
“Maybe not. But, I have the right.”
He had inserted the photo into another evidence bag and sealed it shut. Holding the bag by the edges, he turned around and showed me the photo.
Phil had been right. I didn’t want to see it. I barely made it to the powder room before my stomach gave out.
Chapter 35
GEOFF
“‘Licia, sweetheart, are you doing better?” I asked from outside the closed door of the bathroom after I had heard the sound of her retching cease.
The toliet flushed. And there was the sound of running water as she obviously tried to clean up.
“Stupid question,” she answered as she opened the door. She buried her face in my shoulder for a moment. “Did you see the picture?”
“I saw it.”
“It’s one of the images from my dreams, Geoff. I saw that in my dreams. How could he have known?”
Phil asked, “Who did you tell about the dreams?”
“Only Colleen,” ‘Licia said as she turned to face him.
“Colleen Kelly?” Phil asked.
“Yes,” ‘Licia answered. “I’ve been seeing her.”
Phil nodded. “Professionally?”
“Professionally. This situation is rather tough, you know,” she said.
“Easy, Al. No one is judging you,” Phil said.
“Let’s go home, ‘Licia.”
“Sounds great to me. The sooner I get out of here, the better. But, we ought to make a run over to the duplication facility, just to make sure that there is no damage over there,” she said.
After we had walked through the duplication/shipping facility and she was certain that there was nothing wrong there, we were driven back to the house.
“I won’t say that it has been pleasant, guys,” she told all of us. “But, thank you for being here for me.”
Sam turned around from the front seat and looked at her. “Are you okay, Doc?”
“Not really, Sam,” ‘Licia said as she laid her head on my shoulder. “Not really.”
I heard the shower shut off as I sat reading, early that morning. The clock on the fireplace mantle in my bedroom had just chimed three. I listened for her door to open.
But, instead, a few minutes later, ‘Licia came into my room. She was wrapped in her long quilted robe.
I put down my book and stood. “I’m sorry, ‘Licia.”
She nodded tightly. “Me, too,” she said.
I crossed over to her. “Would you like for me to hold you for a while?”
She nodded again. “If you don’t mind. I’m feeling fragile.”
“You need to rest,” I said as I wrapped my arm around her waist. “Come to bed.”
She finally slept. I looked at her for the longest time, before I fell asleep. I would have given anything for her not to be going through this. Yet I was powerless to stop any of it. The situation felt as though we were on a giant roller coaster, up, down, thrown sideways, by sudden turns, twists, and plunges.
I’ve never liked roller coasters.
Chapter 36
DIARY, May 21
I am not disappointed. I have a collection of tapes now to make good evidence against her. Threats. Anger. Pain. She’s nailing her own coffin closed.
Only a few more steps are necessary. Any day now, all hell should break loose when her car is found.
Even her tame police chief won’t be able to save her, then. There is no way that anyone will be able to keep her out of jail with the evidence I’ve accumulated against her.
Maybe she won’t go to jail over the deaths of Luis and Juan. It’s too late for that. But, she will suffer over this. She will. No amount of bodyguards’ swearing as to her whereabouts will detract from the overwhelming physical evidence.
The police are a lot like hound dogs. Throw them meat and they’ll eat it, even if it is poisoned.
Chapter 37
PHIL
“Mallory,” I answered as I picked up my office telephone on the morning of May 26.
A woman’s voice came over the line, “Chief Mallory? I am Detective Sergeant Larson of the St. Louis P.D. I’m with homicide.”
“What can I do for you, Sergeant?”
I wished that I had never asked.
>
“Your car was found,” I told Al as we sat in Geoff’s living room.
“And?” she demanded as she paced behind the long sofa.
“Why don’t you sit down, Al,” Phil urged.
Instead, she walked over to the liquor cabinet and poured two stiff shots of Wild Turkey. Then she crossed over to Geoff and handed him one of the drinks. “I’ve got a feeling that we are going to need it.”
Then she looked over at me. “Give it to me straight.”
“The car was abandoned in a parking garage in St. Louis. The plates were switched, but your registration was in the glove box.”
Al looked at me, waiting for the rest of the story. She didn’t know what was coming, but there had to be more to the tale. I could read that much on her face.
“The St. Louis police want to question you first thing tomorrow. The FBI want to talk with you as well,” I continued.
“Over an abandoned car?” Geoff demanded.
“No, it’s a little more serious than that.”
“Oh?” Geoff asked.
“Hernandez’ body was in the trunk.”
“He’s dead?” Al asked on a whisper.
“Very.”
“Why do they want to question me?”
“It was your car,” I told her.
“My car was stolen weeks ago.”
“Phil knows that ‘Licia.”
“He does. The St. Louis police obviously feel otherwise,” Al offered.
I watched as she downed the shot glass of amber liquid in one toss. She had never been much of a drinker. I wondered if she had been drinking more heavily lately.
Chapter 38
DIARY, May 26
They found Raoul’s body. Good. I wondered how long that would take. It might have been better if it had waited until Friday night when it would have been more dramatic. I could see it. The police bust into the wedding rehearsal with a warrant for her arrest on suspicion of murder charges. But, it doesn’t look like it is going to be that dramatic.
I’ve been keeping the brat sedated. In a few days, I’ll call someone and tell of her location. They’ll chalk up the call to just another anonymous citizen doing her duty.
