by Mary Bowers
“You’re laughing at me,” I said warily.
“Not at all.”
Bastet suddenly lost interest, jumped down from the chair and sashayed across the great room. She gave me one more lingering glance and then went into my office.
“Think she wants you to follow her?” Michael asked, only half-joking. “She doesn’t usually go in there.”
“I’m not working today. At least not in there. A quick check of my e-mail, and I’m outta there.”
Except . . . .
When I booted my computer up that morning, I noticed something funny on my computer’s desktop. There was a new folder. It was labeled “Recipes.”
I don’t cook.
I forced myself to check my e-mail and take a look at the Orphans website to make sure the details of our organized watch were right. While I was doing that, I deliberately ignored the new folder and the steady green-eyed stare I was getting from my cat. Then I shut the computer down and left Bastet sitting on my desk.
I fought the urge for about thirty minutes. When Michael asked me what the heck I was doing, and I realized that I was putting a large container of yogurt into the pantry instead of back into the fridge, I stood in the middle of the kitchen floor and muttered something foul. I scowled at the yogurt as I shoved it into the fridge, told Michael, “I’ll be right back,” and went into my office and closed the door. She was still sitting next to the computer, patiently waiting for me.
I glared at her. “Okay, you win. Let’s see what that maniac has done to my computer.”
She went from a sitting position to the classic “curled up cat” pose, all neat and tidy, watching me through half-closed eyes.
I booted the damn computer up and stared at the Recipes folder.
Chapter 15
The hand I cupped over my computer’s mouse was trembling.
Over and over, I muttered, “Why am I doing this?”
I clicked on the Recipes folder and found . . . a list of recipes. Vegetarian recipes. Black Beans and Rice, Four-Cheese Grilled Sandwiches, Caprese Salad, Veggie Patties, you name it.
At the bottom, the very last recipe was called, “Pesky-tarian Grill.” Very funny. I’m pescetarian – a vegetarian who eats fish. I rolled my eyes, thought about it a minute, faced the inevitable and clicked into the recipe.
It had the usual list of ingredients, but where the instructions should have been, it read, “The techniques involved in executing this complex and delicious masterpiece are far beyond your skill level, Taylor. For expert help, click here.” It was underlined in blue. A link.
I positioned the cursor over the link and it obligingly turned into a little hand. I closed my eyes, I shook my head, and I clicked on the mouse. Immediately the computer began to play cheesy music.
When I opened my eyes, my desktop icons were gone. Across the screen were a few lines of elegant script reading, “Please Be Patient. Your Business is Important to Us. We’ll Be With You Shortly.” I muted the music.
Within thirty seconds, he was there.
“How did the passcode work?”
“Fine. They’re in.”
“Excellent. What’s up now? More trouble?”
“No. And I’m not grilling fish today. Just curious about the new folder. Have a Happy Halloween. Good-bye.”
“Wait!”
“OK what?”
“I want you to see something.”
He sent me what was apparently a still-shot from Eden’s teenage enterprise, and I grunted in disgust. But before I could force a shut-down of my computer, I did a double-take and brought my face almost up to the screen.
“Oh, no,” I breathed. Without taking my eyes away from the screen, I scrambled my hand around the desk for my cell phone. If I could be quick enough, I could take a picture of it. Heart thumping, I touched the camera icon on my phone, but before it was ready, the picture on the computer screen dissolved.
“Damn!” I muttered. Right away I knew it was no loss; I could never have taken the screenshot to the police without explaining where it had come from. But I could have taken my time and studied it, convinced myself I was right, and discussed it with Michael.
“Well?”
I set my fingers on the keys, hesitated, then typed, “She was selling that?”
“Smart girl.”
“The cops will figure it out,” I typed.
“Will they?”
I closed my eyes again and sagged in my chair. When I opened them again, the screen read, “What are you going to do, Taylor?”
“Why don’t you tell them???” I typed. “Make some brownie points. You need them.”
“That would only make them curious, and I don’t want to have to move again. And in case you’re thinking of sharing your Recipes folder with them, kiss your computer good-bye first. Not that they’d be able to trace me, of course.”
“Of course,” I muttered bitterly. I typed: “I already thought of that.”
“What are you going to do, Taylor?” he repeated. The question disappeared, all except for the question mark, which sat there blinking at me relentlessly until I began to type.
“I’m going to the Sheriff, damn you. SOMEBODY has to tell him.”
“Excellent. You wear the white hat.”
I nearly spit. Before I could type out something scathing, my desktop screen came back up and Victor ascended into the cyber-clouds.
Bastet jumped down from the desk and strolled to the office door, looking back at me to open it for her.
“Because I can’t just call,” I told Michael when I told him where I was going in such a hurry. “I have to show them. And then there’s the thing about the cars. I could kick myself for not figuring it out sooner. Kyle needs to know right away. I gotta go.”
“The volunteers are reporting to Rita’s house at 4:30. Are you going to be able to be there?”
I checked my watch. It was already 9:00. Damn it! I thought. I don’t have time for this. Then a little perspective worked its way back into my mind. Halloween was going to happen, with or without me, and it would come again next year, but this was a matter of murder. And even if the cops couldn’t instantly make an arrest, they’d know who the killer was and do surveillance, or whatever. We’d all be safe, and Tropical Breeze could have a peaceful Halloween.
But I was bringing my lioness costume, darn it, stick-on whiskers and all. If I made it in time, I could change into it at Rita’s house.
“I’ll come home first, if I can.”
But of course, I didn’t.
The cops had already gotten a lot of evidence from Eden’s computer, but as soon as Kyle heard what I had to say about the cars, he left for Tropical Breeze. There I was, alone in a cubicle at the back of the Sheriff’s office (the big one, in Bunnell), with a computer geek in a Flagler County Sheriff’s Office shirt.
His name was Howie, and he was awed by Victor’s work. When I mentioned that Victor claimed to have written the encryption code as a teenager, he just shook his head in wonderment. I got the feeling that it had ruined his day and also made his day at the same time. While he talked, I nodded, glassy-eyed.
“She was in on it all the time,” he said. “You already figured that out, right? Chrissie Brown was the ringleader, and the credit card fraud had started a long time ago. Kendra didn’t just stumble into a way to rip people off; Chrissie taught her. She’s been a hacker since the Internet began – since there was almost nothing out there to hack.”
“So we had a Fagin in our midst after all,” I mused.
“Fagin? Oh, right. Dickens. Well, you might just have given us the key to the whole criminal enterprise. Eden O’Sullivan had been hacking her sister for years – since they were both teenagers, as far as I can tell. At first she was just doing it because she could. Some hackers are like mountain climbers that way. They breach Internet security just because it’s there. But this had turned into something else in the last few months. Eden had enough evidence on her to unravel Chrissie’s whole op
eration, and she was blackmailing her. At least, that’s what I’m getting from what I’ve seen so far. We’ll see how things look after the Chief interviews the kid.”
“What kid?”
“The daughter. Asia.”
“Oh, does he have to?” I blurted. I realized immediately how silly I sounded, but Asia was such a sweet girl.
“Well, she did give her mother an alibi for Saturday. She said they were together in St. Augustine all day.”
“They couldn’t have been. That’s what I was just talking to Kyle about, just before he went running out of here. The car thing. Chrissie couldn’t have been in St. Augustine all day Saturday.”
“Why not?”
“Because if Chrissie drove to St. Augustine on Saturday to spend the day with Asia, they would’ve traded cars right then and there. Chrissie had Asia’s Jeep, so Rusty could do some cut-rate body work on it. In the meantime, Asia was using Chrissie’s car in St. Augustine. When Asia heard about her aunt being missing, she drove Chrissie’s car back and they exchanged cars on Sunday.” I told him about meeting Asia in Perks, and how she’d bragged about how wonderful her mother was, using the car repair as an example. “At that point, Chrissie had already told me she’d been in St. Augustine all day Saturday. Why wouldn’t they just have traded cars then? It should have hit me right away, but so much else was going on, I didn’t catch it.”
“I get it,” Howie said. “The Chief needs to get that Jeep before Chrissie can get rid of any more forensic evidence,” Howie said. “With her daughter showing up out of the blue, and everything that’s been going on since, she probably hasn’t had a chance to really clean up. She must have used it to move the bodies. She never mentioned the car switch to us. She was probably planning to get it back to St. Augustine as fast as she could, and her daughter surprised her by showing up at home instead. She was hoping we’d never find out they’d exchanged cars, and would never think to check the Jeep.”
“But Asia wasn’t a part of all this, was she?” I said, gesturing at the computer. “Did her mother have her involved in crime?”
He was shaking his head. “Not at all. In fact, we’ve found plenty to indicate that she was carefully protecting her daughter from all this. She made threats about what would happen if anybody tried to involve her, or told her anything about it. You were right about that debit card Eden gave to Asia; it was fraudulent. The Chief thinks it might have been the tipping point. If the kid had been caught using a bogus debit card, it would have been hard for her to prove she wasn’t in on the carding operation. She might have ended up with a record. The Chief is still skeptical, but based on what I’m seeing here,” he said, gesturing at the computer, “she was completely in the dark, and her mom wanted it to stay that way. Eden must have been using what she knew about the identity theft to blackmail Chrissie into supporting her, and the debit card gift was a way of showing her how vulnerable her daughter was. That must be why she killed her.”
“It was definitely a wake-up call, but there was more to it than that. I think Chrissie had decided it was time to clean up her act. She’s been living in a dump and making a lot of money with her carding scheme all these years, so she must have had enough saved to live on for a good long time. But while Eden was around making threats, with an encrypted computer full of evidence, she would never be safe. And of all her partners in crime, Kendra was the most dangerous. She’d been supplying the credit card information. What about Rusty and Kady? Were they in on it too?”
“Yes. But they were just worker bees, using the phony cards to buy expensive merchandise they could turn around and sell for cash.”
“I was afraid of that.”
“They were runners – part-timers, as the operation as a whole went.”
I nodded. “But Kendra was a working partner. She was smart. She must have had proof.”
“Right. As long as nobody got caught, they were all safe. But if anybody did get caught, everybody else was in jeopardy, and Kendra was the only one who could have put Chrissie in jail. Chrissie got rid of both her problems on the same day, and counted on the other two kids keeping quiet to save their own skins. They might have become liabilities later on, so I’m not saying they would have been safe, but first and foremost, Chrissie had to get rid of her own sister. Pretty cold. And all over money.”
“I think it had more to do with protecting her daughter. But there was something else, almost as bad. I’m thinking when she found out about it, it was the last straw.”
“What was that?”
“Did you also find a kind of a peep show on the hard drive? You know what I mean. The girl in the bedroom, doing a live feed, from about twenty years ago.”
He looked at me sideways. “A little birdie told you?” he said.
“Victor. And I passed it on to Kyle, so don’t look at me like that. You were looking for it, and you found it. So let’s see it.”
He gave me a quirky smile, but he did as I asked.
“There!” I said, touching his computer screen. “Stop it. Can you freeze it?”
“Okay. What?”
“There. Do you see that mark on her arm?”
“Like a bruise or something?” he asked, looking hard.
“No. It’s a strawberry mark. I wasn’t absolutely sure before, but I am now. That’s not Eden O’Sullivan. It’s Chrissie O’Sullivan. Chrissie Brown. Both sisters had strawberry marks, but in different places: Eden’s was on her thigh, and she covered it with a rose tattoo. Chrissie’s is on her arm, right where you see it in this still shot. What’s the original date on that recording? Can you tell?”
He swooped and clicked the mouse around and then said, “June 1, 1996.”
“Eden would have only been about twelve at the time, and that girl’s not twelve.”
“No, she sure isn’t,” Howie said, staring at the screen. I glared, and he snapped out of it.
I wondered why Victor hadn’t figured it out for himself. And then it hit me that he had. He’d just been holding out on us long enough to get out of town. Then he came creeping into my office by way of the Internet and said, in essence, “Oh, by the way . . . .”
“Yeah, I get it,” Howie was saying. “The two kids probably had to use the same computer. Kids caught onto computers very fast. She must have been digging around in her sister’s files and found this. She filed it off, or if she was computer-savvy enough, she could have made a mirror of it – another website that’s an exact copy. If she set it up under a different name and deleted it from the computer’s history, it’s unlikely Chrissie would have known about it. Websites were fairly simple back then, and easier to copy.”
“So somehow she pirated her sister’s files, and all these years she’s kept them. And rumor has it she packaged them somehow and was selling them.”
“She was. Available for immediate download, at a surprisingly affordable price,” he said like a telemarketer.
“She was monitoring her sister’s computer since they were teenagers, and stalked her through one of those infamous back doors. That’s how she found out about the carding business, and when Victor decided to move to Tropical Breeze, she figured she’d follow him, and while she worked on seducing him off to her fantasy life in Italy, she’d cut herself into her sister’s business and live rent-free. Chrissie wasn’t too happy about having a freeloader around, but when she found out that Eden was putting Asia in jeopardy, and also selling the images from her old website, it must have been the last straw. How did she get into Eden’s computer in the first place, by the way? Did she break the encryption?”
“No. It doesn’t look like it.”
“No, of course not,” I said. “It’ll be interesting to find out how she knew, if she couldn’t even log in. Otherwise she would have cleaned up this stuff before she gave it to you.”
“She tried. She ran out of time. She couldn’t very well start disposing of her sister’s things – especially her computer – while her daughter was in the house. She could work
at breaking the encryption, saying she was looking for clues about where Eden might be, but if she couldn’t break in, she couldn’t very well bury it and say Eden took it away with her. Asia had already seen that it was still in the house. Chrissie was working on it when she came in.”
“And I was telling her she had to report Eden missing.”
He nodded. “The body had already been found. When we asked for a look at Eden’s computer, she couldn’t very well refuse. She had to be praying we couldn’t get past the encryption either. When we asked if we could take it back here to the computer lab, she had no choice but to give it to us. So,” he said, switching gears, “you think Eden wanted Victor to run away with her?”
“She had some dream about him taking her to live in Italy with him. She was learning Italian. For the fortune teller act, she chose a name that meant ‘Happy tomorrow,’ in Italian.”
He stopped and pointed at the monitor. “She had an Italian language course in the computer.” Then what I’d said suddenly registered, and he looked at me. “Happy tomorrow. More like dead tomorrow.”
“Yeah. I know.”
Detective Weyer came in and pulled up a chair.
“Kyle’s got the car. The mother – Chrissie – has been at work this morning, but he talked to the daughter, and she’s admitting now that she lied. Her mother wasn’t in St. Augustine Saturday. Asia didn’t see her mother until she came to Tropical Breeze on Sunday, after hearing that her aunt was missing. She thought her mother would be happy to see her, but instead, she was upset. Really upset. She started making all kinds of excuses about wanting to have the Jeep cleaned up before she gave it back to Asia.”
“I bet she wanted to have it cleaned,” I said. “She used it to get rid of the bodies.”
“Yeah. Kyle is having it brought to Forensics now. When Chrissie came home and saw the Jeep being hooked up, and Asia surrounded by cops, she confessed.”
“Protecting her daughter,” I said.
“What I don’t understand,” Bill said, “is how Chrissie got Kendra to go do the fortune teller thing on Saturday night.”
