Uncle and Ants

by Marc Jedel

  When both men were out of earshot, Mace turned to me. A small vein on his forehead pulsed. “I told you to stay out of this.”

  “I couldn’t help it.” It sounded whiny even to me. “Spike had a gun to my head and pushed me into the room.”

  Mace ignored my comment and spoke to Meghan. “Unfortunately, Billy Bob’s probably right. We don’t have enough to make more than a misdemeanor assault charge stick, at best. Nothing on bullying you or attacking Laney.”

  “What do you mean?” Meghan’s voice rose. “He’s going to get away with threatening me and trying to kill Laney?”

  “I’ll talk to the prosecutors, but he didn’t admit to anything. About either of you. So, it’s still his word against yours.” Jackson’s outstretched arms made patting motions in the air as if he were trying to calm Meghan.

  I looked down as I balled my hands into fists in frustration that Billy Bob would get away with it.

  Meghan would have none of it. “Are you saying you don’t believe me?”

  “I believe you.” Jackson started sweating. A man with a gun didn’t scare him, but Meghan had him on the ropes. “We just don’t have enough proof to hold him, let alone win a court case.”

  A flash of pink from the Band-Aid on my finger caught my eye. Before Meghan could get even more worked up, I said, “Wait. Maybe there is something more.”

  “I think we’ve heard quite enough from you. This crazy sting was your idea in the first place.” Mace dismissed me with an annoyed grunt and turned back to keep an eye on Meghan.

  Ignoring his reaction, I said, “Remember, he used the word ‘bulletin’ and that he needed it?”

  “What bulletin?” Jackson kept his wary attention on Meghan.

  I didn’t explain, not right away. “When he had his hands up, both his thumbs were normal, weren’t they?”

  Perhaps intrigued, Mace finally turned to me. He pinched the bridge of his nose and scrunched his eyebrows while one elbow rested on his other wrist. Police get trained to remember details. Engineers were trained to remember equations, but, in general, I was good at remembering odd details. That has proved to be my best talent for uncovering computer bugs.

  “Yeah, his hands were normal. Why?” Mace’s tone had lost some of its skepticism as he honed in on me.

  I kept any pride out of my voice while I explained. “He said ‘Bulletin’. As in The Gonzaga Bulletin. Remember I told you about those old Gonzaga newspapers in Laney’s briefcase. One had a front-page story about how William Robert Allen, editor of the newspaper, had been a hero during the fire at the paper’s offices.”

  “Ok, so what? I can’t arrest him for being a hero.” Mace had little patience for me.

  “The picture showed his hand wrapped in heavy gauze. The caption said that part of his thumb had been cut off, but he was otherwise fine.”

  Mace caught up. “Wait. Those were two, absolutely normal thumbs he showed us.”

  Intrigued, Meghan asked, “How does he have normal thumbs now?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe the police should check it out.” Perhaps not the smartest thing to give sarcastic directions to someone carrying a gun, but I felt smug.

  Mace just grunted. But, this time it didn’t sound annoyed.

  32

  Sunday Morning

  Laney lay on the couch in her family room while I sat nearby resting from a late night and long week. A visiting nurse had only recently left Laney’s house and would return tomorrow. Laney’s bruises had progressed from red and blue to more of a yellowish-green, along with some multicolored spots. Her face looked like a Jackson Pollock painting come to life, but the nurse had been pleased with her rapid progress.

  Although Laney still needed more recovery time before returning to work, she had the strength to get around the house and handle her kids. “Where’d you run off to so quickly last night?”

  I blushed. “I went to a play.” By the time I got her checked out of the hospital, into the car, and home with the girls, it had been late afternoon. I’d ordered a pizza delivery for them and told the girls to take care of their mother. Then I left, hurrying to the Santa Cruz mountains to catch Meghan’s performance at the Renaissance Faire.

  “A play?” Doubtful that culture would attract her brother, Laney raised an eyebrow. The prospect of teasing me about doing something cultural energized her. She propped up on an elbow and leaned forward to have a go at me.

  I cut her off before she got going. “Did Mace, I mean Sergeant Jackson, call to give you the update?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t checked my voicemail. What happened?” She settled back on the couch, willing to let me off the hook if I filled her in.

  I relished the idea of breaking the news to her. “Well, it looks like the NorCal Water Agency will need a new CEO.”

  “What happened?” Laney’s eyebrows raised slightly as she focused on me.

  “Turns out that Spike wasn’t as loyal as Billy Bob believed. When the police offered him a deal if he rolled over on Billy Bob, he sang like a canary. He admitted that he’d killed that old woman on your floor.”

  Laney interjected, “That was so sad.”

  “Yeah. I met some of her family the morning they found her. Spike told the police that Billy Bob had offered him a bonus to do it. That’s conspiracy to commit murder or something like that.”

  “Why did he want to kill me?” Laney sounded indignant. “Wait, did they crash the drone into my car also?”

  “No.” My frustration drew a surprised look from Laney. I still couldn’t believe that the outrageous drone crash on Monday that started me on this investigation had merely been a slipshod accident. “Some startup trying to crack into DroneTech’s market had a bug in their code.”

  “That bug couldn’t fly?” The head injury hadn’t affected Laney’s wit.

  “Funny.” I admired her wordplay. Our dad would be proud. He claimed responsibility for our ability, or disability, with puns.

  The bug in the startup’s system had caused their drone to stop responding to the guidance commands and then veer off course. Eventually, it ran out of power and plummeted to earth. The situation offended my professional pride in my fellow software engineers. This wouldn’t have happened if it had been my project. There are effective ways to test your code against unusual scenarios rather than whatever nonsensical approach this company had used.

  With the sarcastic tone she’d used since we were kids to drill through the mental fog of my thought processes, Laney said, “Hard to imagine the concept of a startup having trouble getting its code perfect. I’m sure that never happens.”

  I refocused on her. “You were the lucky bystander, well I guess, unlucky bystander when the drone crashed into that truck at that moment.”

  Perhaps I could convince DroneTech to pretend my visit to their control center had also been an accident. I needed to ask Daniel to tell the recruiters to treat my earlier visit as a minor misunderstanding that shouldn’t affect DroneTech’s willingness to hire me.

  Laney waved to catch my eye. “Then, why’d Billy Bob want to kill me?”

  “Because of that old Gonzaga newspaper article you had in your bag. You know, the one about the fire with the newspaper editor in bandages on the front page?”

  Her brow knotted in confusion. “What did that have to do with anything?”

  Skye and Megan ran into the room, playing some form of tag with rules known only to them. “Hi, Uncle Marty,” they chimed in near unison before racing back to the bedrooms. This morning, I had needed some green tea to get moving without my daily diet of heart-pounding, panic attacks wondering what happened to Megan. Although I appreciated getting my apartment back to myself, I’d been surprised that I missed the noise and energy of having them underfoot.

  “Earth to Marty,” said Laney, this time with a sigh.

  Now I knew where her girls had heard that old-fashioned phrase. “Sorry. Billy Bob got worried you figured it out last Friday when you mentioned the articl
e and shook his hand at the Water Agency executive meet-and-greet.”

  Laney scratched her head but winced and quickly lifted her hands when she touched the bandages that still protected her cuts. “I don’t understand. I only brought them back with me from last month’s trip to Spokane to show them to him. Like a memory of his heroic times.”

  “How’d you get them?” I was curious how she’d dug up these ancient stories.

  “I ran into an old neighbor in Spokane when I stopped at our house.” She swallowed, thinking about our recently sold, family home and her years of happiness living in it with her husband and kids. “He’d retired from Gonzaga years ago, a professor of something, I don’t know what. He invited me into his house and showed me these stacks of papers from when he’d been the newspaper’s faculty advisor. The archives burned down a few years after the newspaper office.”

  Hmm.

  She continued, “I saw Billy Bob’s name under that picture. I thought I’d bring him some clippings from his days as the editor as a way to build rapport, you know, to win him over. I had just won the Water Agency business. I thought he might enjoy some reminders of his glory days at Gonzaga.” She shifted her position on her pillows. She wouldn’t last the day resting that the nurse had recommended. “That made him want to kill me?”

  “Yes,” I said, smug with anticipation.

  “That’s bizarre.”

  “Oh, it gets weirder.” I smirked before continuing, “It turns out that Billy Bob and his twin brother both went to college at Gonzaga. One was the school editor, president of his fraternity and a top student. The other barely graduated. He’d been in and out of trouble with the local police ever since their parents died in a car accident during high school. The boys lived with their grandparents, but they were elderly and both passed away during the boys’ junior year in college. The boys came into quite a bit of money between the insurance settlement for their parents and their grandparents’ estate.”

  Laney broke in, “That’s how Billy Bob got his money?”

  I ignored the interruption. “After they graduated from college, the boys took the summer off, traveling around Asia until another tragic accident struck. One brother died in an unusual boating accident in the middle of the ocean near Thailand. His body was never recovered.”

  Laney’s mouth fell open. “Billy Bob’s brother died, too?”

  “Well … That’s what Sergeant Jackson told me this morning.” I kept a close eye on Laney. I wanted to see her reaction. “Turns out that Billy Bob was the school editor who lost part of his thumb in the fire. But the CEO of the NorCal Water Agency has two perfectly good thumbs.”

  “What?” Her mouth gaped open wider as her palm smacked the couch in exclamation.

  I beamed like a Cheshire cat lapping up the reaction. “Yes. Our Billy Bob is actually named Robert Joseph Allen. At least, according to his old, Washington state driver’s license fingerprints. Growing up, he was called Bobby Joe.” I giggled, despite myself.

  She snorted. “How would you ever keep them straight? Remember how Mom used to call me Mar-Laney whenever she’d start to yell at me?”

  I did remember. When our mother would get mad, she’d call Laney by Mar-Laney, or M-Laney. Perhaps I got in trouble more often and she got accustomed to yelling my name. I couldn’t imagine the chaos in a house with one twin called Billy Bob and the other called Bobby Joe. Would a third son get called Joe Bob or Billy Joe just to complete the silliness?

  Something else occurred to me. “You realize what this means, don’t you?”

  “No, what now?”

  “It means the evil twin did it.”

  “I thought that only happened in soap operas and comic books. Not in real life.”

  A few moments of laughter ensued before Laney used the neckline of her t-shirt to wipe away her tears of laughter. She shifted her shirt back into place and hesitated. “Do you think Bobby Joe killed his brother in Thailand all those years ago?”

  A small shiver ran down my spine. “Maybe. Or maybe he took advantage of the situation when his brother drowned by switching identities without telling anyone. I doubt we’ll ever know for sure.”

  The thought sobered us up.

  “How did you know to check him out in the first place?”

  I rubbed my unshaven cheek, not quite sure how to tell Laney that I’d investigated all of her recent clients. I decided on the truth and ripped off my metaphorical princess bandage. “I didn’t. I, kind of, checked out all of the clients you had scheduled for Monday to see if they did something to you.”

  She gulped. “Rollag and DroneTech too?”

  “Yeah. That’s a pretty cool company. I, uh, don’t think Rollag wants to talk to you again.” Or me.

  “Thanks a lot.” Her lips tightened into a thin line for a moment. Almost as quickly, Laney’s mood lightened. “Of course, it’s not like they were going to hire me to run their whole HR department. He was such a sexist jerk anyway. I’d wind up having to investigate him for harassment.”

  “Most definitely,” I said, relieved that she wasn’t mad and that she already shared my opinion of him. Then I remembered why I needed to call his venture capitalists on Monday and my evil sneer returned to my face.

  “What?” She looked a tad worried that an evil doppelgänger of her brother had entered her house.

  “Well, we apparently think alike. I called Sierra Smith and pretended to be an IRS agent.”

  Laney reddened and let out a small giggle. “I know I shouldn’t do that. People get so nervous if they think the IRS has called them. Then, when I ask them about someone else, they’re so relieved, they blab. It’s practically guaranteed.”

  I tried to pull off a look of haughty disdain while I told her how I’d been a more effective fake agent than her. I explained what I’d learned about Rollag’s bribe to Sierra and thus, his subsequent false graduation.

  She gasped. “He didn’t?”

  “He did. He’s definitely worse than just a sexist jerk.”

  Laney surprised me by sitting up, leaning over and grabbing my hand. She pressed my hand to her lips. “You’re awesome!”

  Why, yes, I am. “Besides saving your life, why now?”

  She slapped my hand away. “I wasn’t working for Rollag. The VCs hired me. They’ll be so happy I found something.”

  Technically, I found something. But, I gave her this one.

  Laney continued, “They put a big bonus in my contract if I found something that fit their reputational clause so they could claw back a bigger portion of the company before it went public. I only asked Sierra if she remembered Rollag or Saunders had been extra flush with money in their senior year. I thought maybe they might have combined the company funds from the VCs with their own money. I never thought to ask about bribery.” She trailed off. It must have been in wonderment at my superior detective skills.

  Laney swung her feet to the floor, now more alert after my update.

  Despite my external show of composure, I couldn’t believe what had happened either. “Hard to believe that Bobby Joe could pretend to be Billy Bob for all these years without anyone catching on. Despite looking alike, siblings can be so different. With Megan and Skye, it’s hard to believe they’re even related.”

  Laney gained a suspicious glint in her eyes. “Definitely different personalities. What did they do this week?”

  Cool Uncle Marty wasn’t going to spill the beans on his nieces. “Uh … Nothing. I guess I thought about it this morning when I brought over Skye’s science fair project with the stupid ants.”

  Without thinking, Laney corrected me, “Crazy ants.”

  “Really, you too?” I spread my arms in a disbelieving shrug.

  She grimaced. “Sorry. Skye has me well trained”

  I waved it off. “You can’t get much more different than feeding ants and tasting different kinds of milkshakes.”

  “Milkshakes? What are you talking about?”

  “Megan’s science fair proje
ct?” I raised my eyebrows.

  Laney raised her eyebrow into a matching quizzical expression. “Megan doesn’t have a science fair this year. That doesn’t start until next year.”

  I leaned back, put both hands on my head, and burst out laughing. “Oh, she got me good.”

  Laney laughed as well at her gullible big brother.

  With my update out of the way, Laney leaned forward with a twinkle in her eye. “I’ve got a few questions of my own for you.”

  Now I gulped. I checked my watch. I couldn’t leave quite yet and didn’t see a good way to avoid this. I paused as long as I could, before responding, “What?”

  “First, why did I get two messages from the school secretary. Something about the girls having an unexcused absence from school and then about their poor eating choices?”

  I reached into my pocket and pulled out my wallet. “There was a little confusion, but the girls went to school every day and I made sure they ate well enough.” Taking the two folded slips from my wallet, I handed them to her. “Send these in with the girls on Monday morning.”

  Laney took them from me without a glance. Before she read them, she continued her interrogation. “Ok. Who is Mrs. Kim and why do I need a tea kettle?”

  This one was much easier. “She’s my neighbor. You’ll like her. The girls really hit it off with her. They stayed with her in the afternoon a few times and one evening while I, uh, had some, uh, work to wrap up.” I didn’t outright lie to Laney, just stretched reality a bit. I justified this to myself because I didn’t want her upset while she recovered.

  Laney didn’t seem to fully believe me but didn’t know what angle to pursue next. Absently, she nodded while she unfolded the slips of paper I’d handed her. Her brows furrowed as she read the Excused Absence Forms. “Who’s Dr. Emerson? And while I’m asking you questions, who’s this other Meghan and why was she sleeping at your place last night?”