by Mary Bowers
Justine was a born fashionista. She was slim, sleek and did her model-turns unconsciously, because that’s just the way she moved. Her hair was thick and honey-blond, and her eyes were a melting brown. What she was doing up to her elbows in flour every day was anybody’s guess, but I wasn’t going to ask.
It was my first time in The Bakery, and I took a look around. It was extremely pink. It almost made my teeth ache, all that pink and white, with sweet little ice cream tables and chairs with heart-shaped backs. It looked like an oversized doll house.
“Very nice,” I said.
“I hope so. Do you know anybody who’d want to buy it? Because I’m about done here. Baking is just not my thing.”
I gaped at her. “Oh, Justine, I’m so sorry. You just opened!”
“Yeah, and now I’m going to close,” she said grimly, bringing two cold bottles of water to a table and motioning for me to sit down. “Go ahead and eat your cookie. You must be starving.”
So I had to eat it. It actually wasn’t as dry as it looked, but it was strangely bitter. While I ate and nodded and blinked, she rambled on.
“I had a meeting with my accountant and my father yesterday afternoon, and we all agree it’s time to cut our losses and look around for other opportunities. Daddy called a business broker and it’s officially going up for sale after this weekend. I have a few orders I need to fill for Halloween party cakes and platters of cookies, and then I’m outta here. I think this town is too small for my business plan anyway. I’m going to open a vegan restaurant in downtown St. Augustine, right around the corner from the Cathedral-Basilica. It’s what I should’ve done in the first place, only I figured this town needed a bakery.”
“Well, good luck with that, Justine. I’m . . . shocked.”
“Yeah, I know. But that’s me. I make a decision and I stick with it. Just like that.”
Just like she’d come up with the idea of opening a bakery when she knew nothing about baking. Still, if daddy wanted to finance her, I guess everybody was happy.
“I met your I.T. guy the other day,” I said. “Victor? He mentioned you were a client.” Actually, he said he never spoke ill of a client when he declined to comment on her sweet rolls, but I didn’t mention that.
“Oh, yeah, Victor,” she said, almost with disgust. Not the reaction I expected at all, and I had to choke back the girlish chit-chat about the hunky guy.
“What’s wrong with Victor?” I asked.
“He’s an ex-con, that’s what. That’s not even his real name; he’s using an alias.”
“What?”
“Daddy had him checked out after I mentioned I’d hired him to check out my POS system. You know, Point of Sale? I got the best there is, but it turned out to be kind of – you know – complicated. I couldn’t figure it out. I thought it had been installed wrong, but Victor got me straightened out right away. He knows way more than he should about POS systems, I think. I can’t believe I let him look at mine! Right there at the entry port for my customers’ credit cards! And he’s a hacker. I don’t know, but Daddy says that any time an I.T. guy works on a computer, he leaves what they call a ‘back door’ for themselves, so he can get in and wander around your system any time he wants. Whoever buys The Bakery, I’m going to have to warn them to have the POS checked, but from what I understand, Victor’s some kind of world-class genius. I’m not sure any of the local-yokels around this town are going to be able to outsmart him.”
I was aghast. Kady had made Victor’s youthful escapades sound so harmless, I hadn’t paid that much attention. This put things in a whole new light. I felt like a plague had been let loose in Tropical Breeze. “What about Wi-Fi? He just worked on the Wi-Fi of one of my friends.”
“He’s probably piggybacking on it right now, hiding his identity and cruising all over the Internet where he doesn’t belong. When Daddy was researching hackers, he read about a guy who was arrested for trading kiddie porn over the Internet. The cops came banging on his door at four in the morning, and there he was in his underwear with a lot of S.W.A.T. guys and dogs and everything on his front porch, telling him to come out and put his hands on his head.”
I felt like my own head was going to explode. I looked down at my napkin and realized I’d eaten the whole nasty cookie and didn’t even remember it.
“What happened?” I said.
“It was some other guy hijacking his Wi-Fi and trading porn. The poor innocent guy spent about two days being interrogated, they took his computer away and looked at everything in it, and it took months to get it all straightened out. So you’d better warn your friend.”
“Victor did this?” I was horrified.
“Well, that wasn’t Victor, but it just goes to show you.”
She sat back, took a bite of one of her own cookies, all but spit it out again, made a face at it and said, “Definitely should’ve opened a vegan restaurant in the first place. I hate baking.”
“I gotta go,” I said, getting up. I looked at my sticky orange fingers, went around to the sink behind the display cases and rinsed them off, then ran to the door wiping my hands dry on my capris. It was locked, of course, but I fumbled around and managed to unlock it. Then I burst into the street like an escaped lunatic and began to run. I had to get over to Rita’s house – fast!
When I came around the corner of 5th Street, I ground to a halt and stood there staring. Even from Locust Street, I could see the plain white van with the logo “I.T.I.Q.” on it parked in front of the Whitby House.
The dangerous felon was there – with Rita. She was probably alone with him. I began to slowly walk again, considering my options. Then I pulled myself together and went forward, deciding to do things the simple way. I was going to confront the man. This was all my fault for recommending him without checking him out first.
When Rita opened the front door and started to say something, I brushed right by her and went into the foyer. “Okay, where is he?” I demanded.
“What? Taylor! What’s wrong with you? If it’s Victor you want, he’s in the kitchen.”
I stomped down the hall and there he was, smiling at me, nice and cozy and ready to shoot the breeze.
“All right, Mr. Smith, if that is your real name, who are you and what are you up to in my town?”
I held my had up to silence Rita as she came in behind me wanting to know what in the world had gotten into me.
He lifted an eyebrow and stared at me, still smiling. He didn’t look like he was going to pull out a gun and mow me down, and I was a little relieved, but I kept Rita behind me anyway, just in case.
“’Your town?’ Well, howdy-do, Sheriff. Did somebody report me spitting on the sidewalk?”
“I just found out that you’re an ex-con,” I said, “and I want to know what you’ve been up to in Tropical Breeze.”
I heard Rita gasp behind me, but I kept my steely gaze riveted on Victor.
“What do you think I’ve been up to?” he said, mildly amused.
“I don’t know, but I do know this. The lady who followed you here from Atlanta is dead, and another one of your friends is missing, so you’d better wipe that smile off your face and start talking.”
He wiped the smile off his face. He inhaled and exhaled. “I knew it couldn’t last,” he muttered. Then he said, “Before you haul me off to the slammer, can I at least tell you the truth? I don’t know who you’ve been talking to, but I’ve never done jail time. In fact, I’ve actually worked for law enforcement.”
“And,” I guessed, “you’ve also worked against law enforcement.”
“That’s their take on it, anyway,” he said lightly. “Oh, come on, ladies. Come in and sit down. If I was going to make a break for it, I would’ve done it by now. And you’re right; my last name isn’t Smith. My first name really is Victor, but my last name is Pacetti.”
“The Italian connection,” I said.
He was gazing at Rita in a smarmy way, and said, “Gotcha.”
She blinked, the
n slowly smiled. “You knew?”
“Knew what?” I said. They ignored me.
“What gave me away?” Rita asked nonchalantly.
“What the heck are you two talking about?” I asked.
They smiled at one another again. Then Rita said, “Taylor, I’d like you to meet one of America’s most accomplished computer geniuses. He goes all the way back to the days of phone phreaking, and you could say he grew up with the Internet, staying ahead of the innovations every step of the way. One of the world’s premier hackers.”
“A white-hat hacker,” he said, still amused.
Rita made a graceful little shrug. “Some of the time.”
“I’m a man who believes in justice.”
“Even when justice comes in the form of ‘sticking it to the man.’ He likes to think of them as victimless crimes. Actually, Victor, there is no such thing as a victimless crime. It if was victimless, it wouldn’t be a crime. But you know that, don’t you? What I’d still like to know is what gave me away?”
“Oh, Rita – if that is your name – how can you ask? You let me look at your computer.”
“Not my computer. It’s one we seized last year, and we seeded it so carefully. Hidden tracks to stolen credit card vendors, me participating in chat room rants in words that could have been written by you –“
“Actually,” he said in a silky voice, “some of them were written by me. Three years ago, when I did that thing with the carder’s market, which you should be thanking me for.”
“Damn! And we were being so careful. NightLord was you?”
He shrugged and said nothing.
“Okay, you two, what the heck is going on here?” I said.
Victor was still gazing at Rita, and said, “Why don’t you introduce yourself to us? You’re definitely law enforcement. A Fed? Yeah. For sure a Fed. Come on. What’s your name, darling?”
He said it so affectionately I began to feel disoriented.
“Actually,” she said, “my name is Rita Garnett. I am Rita Garnett, whose family used to own this house as a summer home, and who wanted to come back to some semblance of a home again after a divorce. I decided to quit my job and see if I could work as a private consultant instead. Why couldn’t the real Rita Garnett have had a job in law enforcement? When my bosses found out that you and I were about to intersect, purely by chance, they asked me to take one last assignment and just check to make sure you were being a good boy.”
“And they gave you a nice new computer.”
I had lost interest in the Bond-movie dialogue. I wanted to cut to the chase.
“So you’re some kind of undercover agent, and you’ve not going to tell us who you’re working for, and frankly I don’t care –“
“I’m a Federal agent,” Rita said. “Actually, as of this exact moment, now that you’ve outed me . . . an ex-Federal agent.”
“And you’re some sort of shady character who lurks around the Internet and commits crimes –“
Victor held his hands up with his palms toward me. “Retired. Honestly. I swear here and now before an officer of the law that those days are over. But all I’ve got is my computer skills, and I’m trying to make a living using them honestly. I get it about the mythical victimless crimes. I’ve seen the victims. I understand that identity theft messes up peoples’ lives pretty much permanently, or for a long time anyway. Believe me, Rita, Taylor, I’m strictly white hat, from now on.”
I was still skeptical. “A white-hat hacker?”
“Just a white hat.”
“When I asked you to fix my Wi-Fi, you did take the opportunity to poke around to see if I was really the sweet little old lady I seemed to be,” Rita pointed out.
“Oh, I wouldn’t say ‘little old,’” he said smoothly.
I would’ve said, “Oh, puh-leeze,” if Rita wasn’t taking it rather smoothly herself. Or at least, seeming to.
“Well,” I said, “I hope you two will be very happy together, but we still have a murdered woman and a missing woman, and they were both friends of yours, so where does this bring us? No matter how we look at it, it comes down to you, Victor. Those girls had a fight on Friday night, and supposedly, it was over you. It’s also possible that hacking is at the bottom of whatever happened last weekend, and if so, you probably know all about it, even if it wasn’t criminal. Even if Eden was only snooping. So give. What do you know about it?”
He was mulling it over. I’m a straight-ahead person, and I had the feeling that a chess match was going on around me, and nobody was going to tell me the next move.
“You’re working with the locals?” he said to Rita.
She gazed at him, mulling over her next move. Then, finally, she said, “I told you I wanted to start working as a consultant. When that woman was murdered, I decided there were bigger things to look into in this town than just you. I offered my help.”
“Uh huh,” he said cynically. “Because you figured I was involved.”
She shrugged. “I had to consider the possibility. But I’m not convinced you’d get violent if you found yourself driven into a corner. You’re not that kind of a guy. You’re much more likely to pull up stakes and disappear. In the past, whenever you’ve had a vendetta with somebody, you’ve attacked them in cyberspace, not in the real world.”
“Counter-attacked,” he said. “I never attacked anybody who didn’t attack me first.”
“Who cares about cyberspace?” I said impatiently.
“Eden did,” Victor said, “and it got her killed.”
Finally! I thought. “Why don’t you explain how? In itty-bitty words that you don’t have to be a computer specialist to understand.”
“You don’t have to understand exactly how she did it,” he began.
“Or who taught her to do it,” Rita added.
He slid a glance at her, but didn’t react otherwise. “You just have to start with the premise that it is possible to breach a lot of systems run by people who should know how to protect themselves better, and systems nice people like you are running all over the world, completely unsuspecting, maybe not bothering with the latest security patch because they don’t understand it, or it doesn’t seem important, and after all, who would want to hack into your stuff anyway, right? You’re nobody, right?”
I wasn’t admitting anything. But damn it, he was right.
“It’s only a website,” I said. “Who’d want to hack Orphans of the Storm?”
“Does Orphans of the Storm have a bank account? Do you have a password that you use to check on that bank account? Maybe pay some bills electronically? Do you use the same computer system for your personal e-mail? Your personal banking? At the very least, it could be used as a drone in a botnet.”
“A what?”
“A network of computers a hacker can control to send out spam or take down a website with a Denial of Service attack. You know, all those computers in his botnet trying to get into that website at the same time and overwhelming their server so it crashes.”
“Stop! Okay, I get it already. Actually, the Orphans website is run by a volunteer, and I have very little idea what she does with it. I just tell her to post up something about an event coming up, and she does it. Bingo. It’s done.”
“Very trusting, aren’t you? You have no idea how much of yourself has leaked into the Internet.”
“Who would care about me?” I asked hotly. “I’m not interesting.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that. Pulling up stakes and moving here from Chicago, after the deaths of your parents, investing your inheritance in a shelter, because you love animals. Even the details of your divorce – the fact that you’re a vegetarian – that your family comes from Verona – everything is on-line. Your whole life. Actually, I’m a vegetarian myself. And obviously, I’m Italian.”
I nearly got up and smacked him. My divorce! I was suddenly positive he’d read the old divorce decree, from 1981. I almost never thought about that any more, and to have it brought up by a c
omplete stranger made me feel violated.
“Please,” he said, reaching across the counter to actually lay a hand gently on my forearm. I stared down at it like it was the head of a snake. “I’m sorry, Taylor. When I knew that Eden was spending a lot of time with your organization, I wanted to know if it was legit, and just what it was that she was doing for you. Or to you. I was suspicious of her, not you. Besides, I found out that we have a lot in common. We’re both orphans, for one thing. That’s how you named your organization, isn’t it? Orphans of the Storm? These animals, they’re orphans, just like you were – suddenly alone after your parents died.”
For a moment I was too shaken to speak. I hadn’t thought about that in years. Decades. Nobody had ever caught on to it before, but he was right. But if he meant to create a bridge between us, he’d failed. I was more creeped out by him than ever.
When I didn’t answer, he took his hand away, but he didn’t stop talking. “You had no brothers, no sisters. Just like me. That’s a bond that a lot of people could never understand. We’re really a lot alike, Taylor. That’s why I’m telling you all this. I know it’s scary, having somebody you don’t know suddenly telling you all about yourself, but I’m doing it for a reason: you need to take Internet security more seriously. Like I said, you’re too trusting.”
“Until I run up against people like you, yes, I’m very trusting.” I glared at him, and he muttered, “Touché.”
I backed down a bit. It was unsettling to know that this man knew so much about me, and I knew pretty much nothing about him. I took a deep breath. “Look,” I said in a quieter voice, “you say you’re going straight, and I hope you mean it. Bully for you. But what did you mean when you said Eden got herself killed? Do you know who killed her?”
“No. But I know why. And I’m pretty sure you do too.”
Rita turned to me and raised her eyebrows. I looked back at her and nodded. Then, briefly, I went over my theory that Eden had been snooping electronically to prepare herself to look psychic when she played fortune teller at our Halloween event.
When I was finished, Victor added, “And somehow, she hacked into the wrong computer.”
