by Mary Bowers
“She’s a typical seer,” he said ruefully, almost affectionately, after worrying away at it for a while. “Truths told in riddles. And in the end, we are left to work it out for ourselves.”
“Not entirely,” I said. After a moment’s hesitation, I just decided to go ahead and say it. “There was an impression of Charles Dickens.”
“Oliver Twist,” he said immediately. “I knew it!”
I was too shocked to speak for a moment, and as I sat there with my mouth open, he whispered, “Fagin!”
When I recovered, I said, “Yes. I think so too.”
“Our mysterious hacker.”
“Exactly.”
“Yes. Yes. Now we’re making progress, Taylor. Now we begin.”
“Uh . . . how?” I said, not nearly as confident as he seemed to be.
He seemed to be thinking about it. Then he said, “Where does this fellow Victor have his office?”
“Uh, I don’t know. But I think I’ve got his card here somewhere. Let me put you on speaker.” I grabbed my purse to rummage through it. Bastet leaned over, getting in the way, curious as cats always are. When I lifted the business card out of a pocket in my purse, she sniffed it. “Here it is. He must be working out of his home. There’s just a website and a phone number.”
He asked for the information, and I gave it to him.
“Have you suddenly developed computer problems?” I asked with a grin.
“I could modernize my website, I suppose. Make it more interactive. The archives are dull-looking, but then they consist mainly of links to research done by psychical societies a long time ago. I don’t know how you pretty that up. Perhaps you’d like to have computer problems instead?”
“Ummm – this might be more manageable if we work it from Tropical Breeze. I know! Let’s have Bernie have computer problems. She knows how to dither. She can give a very good imitation of a confused old lady, when she wants to. We can be her concerned friends, protecting her from being ripped off. You know, because she doesn’t understand anything about computers. ‘Cause she’s old.”
“And confused.” I could hear the amusement in Ed’s voice. “Very good, Taylor. Will you call, or shall I?”
“Better let me tackle it. First I’ll call our confused octogenarian. Maybe we should let her call Victor. Sound good?”
“Excellent. In the meantime, I’ll get some sleep. Don’t hesitate to call me, though, even if you need me to report for duty immediately. I don’t want to miss anything.”
“Ten-four, over and out,” I said, saluting at Bastet, who suddenly lost interest in me, the purse and the office, and jumped down to be let out.
“Rather exciting, all this,” Ed chuckled before he hung up.
“Well, what do you think?” I asked Bastet as she waited for me at the door.
She actually nodded. Then she turned back to the door and gave it an impatient scratch.
When I’d explained our new theory and our plan of action, I could hear Bernie giving her throaty, smoker’s cackle in a baritone register. I didn’t think my experience at the séance was strictly relevant, so I left that out. I just let her assume that Ed and I had been throwing ideas around. “Sounds like fun,” she said. “I’m in.”
“Was there ever any doubt?”
“Never. Are we keeping Kyle in the loop?”
I considered. “He’s probably busy with the forensics people and a squad of detectives. Let’s let them work it from their angle, and we’ll work it from our angle, and maybe, if we’re right, we’ll meet in the middle. I don’t think this could be dangerous. What’s he going to do, spam us?”
“Eden wasn’t exactly spammed, my dear. Okay, Taylor, for the moment we’ll work on our own, but I’m not promising I won’t mention it to Kyle if I see him.”
“Deal.”
“I’ll call him now. Call you right back.”
Her call came through less than ten minutes later. “All right, we’ve got an appointment for two o’clock today. Can you be here at 1:30 so we can strategize first?”
“Absolutely. I’ll call Ed and tell him.”
“See you then,” she said. “Uh – just out of curiosity, does Michael know about this?”
I hesitated long enough for her to catch on to the fact that I wasn’t planning on telling him. “Oh, sure. I’m going to talk to him about it now, in fact. But I don’t think we need him to come into Tropical Breeze. Victor may be suspicious if there are too many of us milling around, trying to keep you from being ripped off during a simple computer check-up.”
“I’m going,” Michael said when I had him up to speed.
“I don’t think Bernie has enough chairs in her office for all of us to cram in together. Ed is coming, don’t forget. It was his idea.”
“I’ll wait in the kitchen.”
“Michael, why are you coming? This isn’t going to be dangerous. We just want to feel the man out, maybe put a little pressure on him.”
“You think this man is a murderer?”
“Edson does,” I said. “I think he’s . . . connected to the murder. Maybe loosely; maybe directly.”
“I’m going. Don’t argue.”
He had that look. The look he doesn’t get very often, because he’s a mellow kind of a guy who takes his frustrations out on the golf course, not at home. His ice-blue eyes had gone all steely, and he had that stillness about him that physically-fit men get when they have their minds made up. They’re not flexing anything, but they’re sort of coiled up. He didn’t even bother to raise his eyebrows. If I’d been a fortune teller, I’d have read his body language and said, “This man is about to have his way.”
I couldn’t see my own body language, but I knew exactly what it said: “And I’m going to let him.”
Chapter 12
When Michael and I got to Bernie’s house at 1:27, Edson’s little green Geo Metro was already parked by the curb.
He had offered to stop by Cadbury House on his way down to Tropical Breeze and pick us up, which would have been amusing. Three of us in a 1991 5-door hatchback about the size of a clown car. I could just see that car, bumping and farting down the dirt road coming out of Cadbury House with the three of us jostling around inside it. Also, he would have been extremely early (he always is), and would have been reading the time off his precision atomic watch at regular intervals until we’d been ready to leave.
I said we’d meet him there.
We got out of my SUV and stared at the I.T.I.Q. van, which was parked at the curb in front of Ed’s little monster.
I could only shake my head, while Michael muttered, “Point to Mr. Smith.”
“Mr. Pacetti,” I reminded him. “The dude is slick. But why would he have smelled a set-up? For once, I’m glad Ed is always early. Hopefully, he got here first, though I’m not sure how much difference it would make. We’re going to have to keep our mouths shut and let Bernie cue us in. I have no idea what she told him about why she needed his services.”
Bernie opened the door to us and loudly said, “Why, it’s Taylor and Michael! What a surprise. Come on in. I have an I.T. guy here looking at my print-shop software set-up. You know, they’re always upgrading it for me, and I can never figure the new features out.” She was chattering away as she led us back through the house to her office, seeming nervous for once.
“Well, that’s just fine,” Michael said. “I’m sure this nice young man will be able to help you.”
Victor stood up from whatever he’d been doing on the floor under Bernie’s desk and gave us a beautiful smile.
Bernie kept fussing. “I just hate having to learn how to do the same darn thing a different way, just because they changed the software, or I needed to get a new hardware, or whatever they call it. It’s not better, you know, it’s just different, and I’m all confused all over again.”
Victor’s smile had been broadening, and he gazed at Bernie with sparkling amber eyes. “You can drop the act any time, dearie. Did you really think you w
ere going to fool me? I’ve seen your archives, and I’ve looked at the way you work here. You’re not some confused old lady. So what’s up, citizens of Tropical Beach? You seem to have a quorum here. The rest of the town must be out surfing, but I think there are enough of you here for the meeting to begin.”
We looked at one another guiltily. Then Ed said, “I’m not a citizen of Tropical Breeze. I live in St. Augustine.”
Victor sat down in Bernie’s chair behind the desk, giving himself the power position, and Michael dragged a chair in from the dining room. We squashed in together facing him and he spread his hands on the blotter. “Everybody comfortable? Now. What’s this really all about?”
And we had set the thing up so blithely, forgetting who we were dealing with, confident that Bernie’s dithery act would work again. I’ve never seen it fail, but most of the people she bats her eyes at aren’t looking at her computer files.
Before sitting down, Michael leaned over the desk to shake hands. “Michael Utley. I assume you’ve met Edson, here?”
“We were chatting while Bernie was bringing you in. I’m sure Miss Verone there has given you all the information she has about me, yes?”
“Michael and I live together,” I said. “Ed’s my friend.”
“Oh, word around town is that Michael is more than just your star boarder, and Ed is sort of a sidekick – a little bit more than a friend. This is a small town, remember. And when Rita and I took our hair down and got honest with one another, she mentioned she’d hired a psychic . . . and Mr. Ed, here. Did she mention to you,” he asked Ed, “that that whole séance was a set-up to investigate Miss Purity? So many psychics are con artists. Our Miss Rita is a tricksy little lady. You never know what to expect from her.”
I expected Ed to come unglued, but he just muttered, “I suspected as much.”
He threw me a glance. “You told him that Rita Garnett is a Federal agent?”
“I may have mentioned it.”
“And you told your lover and your sidekick that I’m a criminal mastermind, right?”
We stared back at him silently.
“Get outta there, Victor,” Bernie said, stirring to life. He’d caught her off-guard before, commandeering her usual seat, but she was back on her game now. She went around the desk to take her chair from him. He politely got up, pulled the chair back and held it for her.
She sat down and immediately went into the center drawer. She doesn’t smoke anywhere but in her own office, and only while she’s working, but the way our sting operation had unraveled had upset her, apparently. She lit up one of her little brown cigarillos.
He placed his hands on her shoulders affectionately and bent down. “Comfy now?”
She turned her head and blew smoke into his face. “Just fine. Thanks. Take a seat, buster.”
He waved the smoke away with one hand, grinning, then came around the desk and sat down next to me, relaxed and pleased with himself. Michael was on my other side, and Ed was beyond him.
“Now, folks, just tell me what you want to know. I’m an open book.”
Ed took his ever-present voice recorder out of his satchel, activated it and set it on the desk. Victor stared at it, disconcerted for a moment, then let himself relax again, smiling.
Michael and I glanced at one another, silently deciding he’d go first. “What’s going on in the computer geek community of Tropical Breeze? Because you just came to town, and already two of them are dead. What have you been messing around with, and more importantly, what have you got those kids up to?”
Victor looked at Michael and seemed serious for the first time.
“I’m worried about that too, believe me. Like I told you, Taylor, I’m legit now. I’m building a business, and I don’t need the hassle of police sniffing around trying to pin a couple of murders on me. I had nothing to do with what happened to those two girls, and I’ve been . . . conducting my own research on the matter. I’m stuck in the role of the poor sap in the film noir who needs to find the murderer so he isn’t framed for the crime himself.”
“Okay, slick,” Bernie said, squinting through her own cigarette smoke. “Convince us.”
“You already know that Eden sometimes did work for me,” Victor said. “I started out there and backtracked. She was in a lot of hacker’s forums, and they try to hide their identities, but you can always figure out who they are if you really want to know and have a little patience. They usually bounce their communications around so they seem to be coming from another state, or even another country. Most of Eden’s shi --, uh, stuff, looked like it was coming from the Ukraine, but it was actually coming from right here from Tropical Breeze. I checked her out when she started doing work for me, and I saw right away that there was a lot she wasn’t telling me. Disappointing, but not unusual.”
“And you got into Eden’s computer by using old passwords?” Ed asked.
Victor gave a superior chuckle. “She was just barely more competent than that.”
“You hacked in when you first met her, and you left yourself a backdoor into her computer,” I said.
He looked at me, let it hang in the air for a moment, then shrugged. “Whatever. After she was dead, I needed to know.”
“But the cops had her computer by then,” Bernie said.
He laughed. “Not gonna do them any good. She’d encrypted the hard drive with an old code I wrote when I was a teenager. Listen, I’m going to level with you. I was just, you know, poking around one day –“
“Hacking around Tropical Breeze in general?” I asked.
“No. Just Eden. I mean it,” he said when he saw the look on my face. “I knew her well enough not to trust her completely, and I kept an eye on her. I noticed she had some odd-looking files, and she’d put them in a folder marked ‘Recipes.’ Eden didn’t cook. So I figured I’d better have a look at them. She’d saved posts from a private forum, which is really bad manners. It looked like good old-fashioned blackmail. Shocked the hell out of me. I mean, if you’re going in for cybercrime, you don’t mask your identity, get into a private chat room with somebody and say, ‘Put five hundred in small bills into the second recycling bin from the walkover by the end of the week or your husband finds out about your affair.’”
“Eden did that?” I said.
“Not that exactly.” He said evasively. “But close enough. Anyway, the operation was strictly bad cinema. I thought Eden was smarter than that. If you want to make money, you deal in information, but not like that. You gather it, then you sell it to somebody else, or you buy it from somebody else and find a way to use it yourself. And you don’t settle for blackmailing your next-door neighbor. You need a bigger pot of money than he’s got. The most efficient way is to just hack into a corporation’s headquarters, take advantage of a security weakness and lift their live transactions as they come in. Hackers have been able to feed off a single corporate target for as much as seven months before anybody noticed. Or you go to a financial institution and transfer money from there to here, load it onto a debit card and then you go shopping. Or somebody goes shopping for you, and you sell the merchandise at a discount, because it’s pure profit at that point. You know what I mean?”
“No,” I said. “I mean, I get the idea, but . . . .”
He rolled his eyes. “You don’t have to understand all the details. It’s simple. There’s something going on in Tropical Breeze, and I wanted to find out about it. I backtracked from some carding transactions I uncovered – credit card fraud – and began to run into . . . other things. It all began with a dirty little website.” He sat back to mull it over. Then suddenly he pointed at Ed’s recorder and said, “Turn that off.”
We looked at one another, Bernie, Michael, Ed and I, but there was nothing we could do. If Ed refused to turn the recorder off, Victor could simply stop talking, get up and leave. At least there would be plenty of witnesses to what he was going to say, for what that was worth. We nodded, and Ed turned it off and threw it back into his satchel
.
“It looked like Eden had been spying on her old friends here in Tropical Breeze. At first, she just silently watched, kind of an Internet voyeur, gloating over her secret knowledge, but recently she seemed to have decided it was time to get a piece of the action. She stumbled onto a criminal enterprise. They were selling credit card dumps.”
“Dumps?”
“Active credit card numbers that have been stolen. The first guy sells them to a second guy who has blanks – blank credit cards – and the machines you need to mock up a card with a stolen name and number on it.”
“I want to know about the dirty little website.” Bernie said. “You mean, like porn?”
“Yeah, porn,” he said, as if bored by it. “Real old-school peep show stuff. It was really old – from some time in the mid-1990s. You know – some girl sets up a video feed through her computer, gets in front of the camera and bounces around the room for a while, talking dirty. For a fee, members can log on and watch.”
I blinked, took a look at Michael and was tickled to see him blushing. Edson just looked blank. He didn’t look like he didn’t understand; he looked like he was attempting an out-of-body experience so he could project himself back to his safe little office. Bernie just shook her head.
“And you recognized the girl?” she said.
“It was little baby Eden. At least, middle-school Eden. She must have had one of the first computers with a built-in webcam; they were introduced around the time she was a teenager. Apparently, she enjoyed having a souvenir of her first business enterprise, because she kept some of the sessions on her hard drive. Anyway, she took the website down after a year or so. Probably outgrew it, or got caught by the parents. Can you imagine? But it was just a way of playing with her new toy. You know, harmless.”
“Harmless?” I said. “I guess that depends on your point of view. And I bet she made a fortune at it.”
“Probably. She looks about sixteen in them, and when you’re sixteen, you’re awfully cute, and you want a lot of pretty things. I bet she blew the money on clothes as fast as she made it. Her parents were probably sitting in the next room watching TV, thinking she was doing her homework on that expensive new computer, which they didn’t even know how to boot up. I’m not sure parents have caught up with their kids technologically, even now. Anyway, I copied her hard drive, so I . . . what?” he asked, when he saw how we were looking at him. “It was funny. She was too young to really be any good at it, but she was giving it her best shot. It was hilarious. In one of them, she had this great big lollipop –“
