Pushing Up Rhubarb (A Millsferry Mystery Book 1)

by Diana Saco

  I texted my recommendation to Bruno confident he would agree and give his people the order to bag all food items.

  “Just restock, Marvin,” I said. “That’s the safest course of action.”

  “I agree, Marv,” Maxi said. “It’s a small price to pay for your health.”

  “Fine,” he said, relenting but not happy about it.

  “You old curmudgeon,” Maxi said fondly. Then she turned to me, still smiling, and said, “Thank you . . . Nina.”

  I smiled back. She had called me “Nina.” This was promising. This was more than détente. This was truce. This was treaty. This was peace on earth. This was, very possibly, the beginning of a beautiful Twitter following.

  I saw another chance at achieving my initial objective in going to the hospital. “Does this mean that you’ll consider unlocking your sister’s tablet, Maxi?”

  Her smile fell a little. “I can’t. Monica’s privacy still matters. I won’t have it trampled and compromised. Plus nothing that’s happened today proves that Ms. Owens is innocent. You’re going to have to find another way,” she added, with a hint of regret this time.

  “It won’t be up to me,” I told her. “Judge Ota has made his ruling, and he won’t back down without a good reason.”

  “Then give him a good reason. Please. Find something else you can use to solve this case.”

  12. Recovery

  I left Maxi and Marvin a short while later and sat in my car trying to decide what to do next. I still had to smooth things over with Al. I considered meeting up with him at the office, but facing him while he was still disgusted with me made my stomach hurt all over again. I couldn’t even play up that I had been poisoned, too. He made it clear that he thought I deserved it.

  As I mulled over the best way to soften him up for an apology, I got a text notification on my phone. It was the dun-dun sound from the “Law and Order” TV shows, indicating that I had a message from Mason. He wanted to schedule a team meeting for five that evening. I texted back that I’d be there. Maybe Al would be friendlier by then. Or he might be meaner having to miss more leisure time with his family. Still, the meeting wasn’t my fault. It was Marvin’s. He went and got himself poisoned. So really, how much more could Al blame me for?

  I decided to call Chloe next. I pretended it was to make sure Al had picked up the tainted sugar. He had. I lingered on the call longer than I needed to because I had an ulterior motive. I was secretly calling for sympathy. After all, I had just found out that I had been poisoned, too. I wanted to tell someone about my tummy ache and that I had even thrown up and how it did not make me feel better. Now that people were done yelling at me for breaking into the Munch house, I felt I was owed a little fussing over. I liked Chloe, and she always smelled nice, making her the perfect person for my immediate need to be pampered.

  Unfortunately for me, Chloe didn’t get the memo. She wasn’t quite as brusk as Al, but she did say, “Good times’ll hurt you in the end.”

  “Why are you quoting Desert Hearts to me, and not one of the kinder comments?” I complained.

  “I’m just poking fun at your tushy,” she said.

  “Don’t poke at my tushy, Chloe.”

  She laughed. “Don’t you remember the scene?” she continued. “Frances said it to Vivian as she was about to go horseback riding for the first time in years. Get it? ‘Good times’ll hurt you in the end’?”

  “Yeah, I get it,” I said tersely. “Not funny, and not my favorite Audra Lindley line, anyway.”

  “Okay, which of her lines is your favorite, then?” she asked, playing along.

  I huffed impatiently, and then parroted, “Hey, this brain is light—even for a man.”

  I had to pull the headset from my ear as Chloe cracked up. I had to admit, getting laughs felt good, but I wanted to get sympathy.

  “Did you just switch movies on me?” she asked.

  “Yes, it’s from a monster movie called The Relic. She played the medical examiner—a small but memorable part.”

  “I’ll have to put it on my watch list. I have to go now. Things to do before the team meeting. I suppose I’ll see you . . . in the end,” she added. I heard her cackling as she hung up.

  Suddenly, the whole witch thing made sense, I thought petulantly.

  My wireless headset chimed the end of the call, sounding strident in my ear. I pulled it away again and looked at it with a scowl. I’m not sure why I was blaming the thing for Chloe’s dismissal. I couldn’t really blame Chloe, either. It was just one of those times when life wasn’t giving me what I wanted.

  I persisted. My mind scrolled through a list of other possible candidates and promptly rejected each one. Aunt Dottie might oblige, but she might as easily tell me again to stop jackassing. Alice Tidwell was motherly, but I was sure my wanton neediness would make her feel nervous. Lily Bingham could handle my excessive desire for attention, but she’d probably want to perform some kind of ritual at the Runes to dispel my negative energy. I decided to drown my sorrows in a bowl of ice cream, and that’s when the perfect mother figure came to mind—Farm! He’d take care of me.

  Delighted with my decision, I started the car and headed for Steamy’s. The best part was that I could tell my tale of woe over a bowl of sea-salt caramel gelato.

  Moments later I was ensconced in one of the booths, pouring my heart out to Farm as I explained about my near-death experience.

  “Oh, you poor baby!” he said, pulling me into a big hug.

  Finally! I smiled into his shoulder and closed my eyes, reveling in the tenderness.

  Farm wasn’t directly affected by this case or my actions, so he could afford to give me some Me time. The best part was that he did it without passing judgment.

  “I love you, Farm.” I said.

  “Aw. I love you, too, Nina,” he said, tightening his arms around me.

  “Thanks for dinner last night, by the way—and the drawing,” I added, as I finally pulled back. “I wanted to save the bag, but it got greasy.”

  “That’s not possible,” he said in mock seriousness. “We don’t serve greasy food at Steamy’s.”

  “Right,” I said, playing along. “Maybe it was condensation from the malted milk shake.”

  “I’m sure that was it. So Gizmo filled me in on the developments at the trial yesterday.”

  “Was he there?” I asked, doubting I would have missed him, but then I was preoccupied.

  “No, he’s friends with one of the bailiffs or something. I heard they brought him some evidence to try to get into, a computer or cell phone, I think.”

  “It was a tablet. Monica’s tablet. We think she might have kept a journal on it, but it’s password-protected, and no one’s been able to get into it. Actually, we didn’t even know it existed until Maxi accidentally let it slip during her cross.”

  “No kidding. Hang on, Gizmo’s here, too. Let me go get him.”

  As Farm stepped away, one of his waiters arrived with my order, giving me something to do for the few minutes he was gone. Ice cream—this, too, was a balm. I savored it, letting my mind forget my troubles and focusing instead on the sweet-salty waltz gliding across my tongue. I was never good at meditating, but I had no trouble staying in the moment while eating something wonderful. I closed my eyes and hummed my favorite mantra.

  “Yuuummmm.”

  I heard giggling and opened my eyes to find Farm standing there with Gizmo at his side. They sat down, Gizmo plopping his plate and drink down in front of him.

  “Mind if we join you?” he asked politely.

  “Be my guest. Farm wants trial gossip, and I wouldn’t mind hearing about your progress on the tablet.”

  “No progress. The bio-metric lock on that thingamajiggy is a Boss.”

  Gizmo didn’t mean it was awesome. He meant it was a big opponent, like the hard-to-beat non-player character in a video game. This was bad news.

  “We figured. That’s why we were trying to get the twin sister to open it,” I sai
d. “The device uses facial recognition, and Maxi, the twin, was apparently able to open it once already.”

  “Oh, how cool is that?” Farm said. “This Munch lady could have used her fingerprint scanner, or not have had a twin sister. Kind of lucky and ironic, too.”

  “Farm’s right,” Gizmo said. “We’re lucky in this instance that there’s a twin. I think that’s going to be the only way to get in.”

  “Can’t you brute force your way in, Giz’? Just crack the password?” I asked.

  “We can’t take the chance that she set the gadget to auto-erase after a set number of failed logins.”

  “Yup,” Farm said, “don’t wanna winch it.”

  Farm and Gizmo got all their jargon from movies and video games. This one was from Tremors and was a reference to the heroes rejecting the idea of using a winch on the remains of a giant worm because they didn’t want to risk tearing it up before they could capitalize on it. The line naturally mutated to “don’t wanna winch it” and became for Farm and Gizmo a kind of credo for figuring out non-destructive ways to retrieve something potentially lucrative.

  The endgame of any recovery project was to ensure that the method you use didn’t ruin your payload in the process. This was particularly true of electronic data. Any time you logged into a computer and accessed a file, you wrote new metadata to the system. If you weren’t careful, you wound up overwriting the very information you were trying to get. For this reason, data recovery usually began with a bit-stream dump of storage devices, which copied data bit-by-bit without having to access the operating system. Experts in computer forensics also used cryptographic hash values to identify files and confirm that they hadn’t been modified.

  I had learned these basics when I first started working as a private investigator. With the advent of computers, most of the things you wanted to find out about someone were available in a database, an email, a post on a social network, a digital video or some other type of electronic file. That’s why anyone these days who did detective work and didn’t know something about computers wasn’t going to be doing detective work for very long. Over the years, Gizmo had taught me how to collect the data. Even that process could ruin the integrity of the electronic files, however—which was why we handled collections as little as possible. Al and I collected the data only when stealth was required, like when a client asked us to retrieve data from a server or workstation at a branch location without letting the local manager know he or she was under investigation at the owner’s request.

  For this case, the data was stored on a single mobile device that had been hand-delivered to Gizmo by an officer of Judge Ota’s court. It should have been easy from there, but the security measures for protecting data had improved a lot over the years. And in Millsferry, the locals knew about and had access to the latest methods and devices by virtue of their ties with Mia-Tech. Millsferryzians were beta-testers for one of the most renown companies in the field of data security and computer forensics technology. Mia-Tech wasn’t known for half-measures, either. Products were devoid of backdoors—despite government requests for them—and security holes were patched as soon as they were discovered. An apt analogy would be if the world’s best locksmith invented an unbreakable mechanism without a master key. With no access to the single key designed for that lock, even its inventor would be locked out.

  With this kind of technology and under normal circumstances, the only person who would have been able to access Monica Munch’s tablet was Monica Munch herself because her face would have been the only key. The reason we still had any shot at unlocking the device was because a duplicate key, as it were, existed by virtue of the fact that Monica happened to have an identical twin.

  “Sorry, Nina,” Gizmo said with finality. “The only way you guys are getting into that tablet is by talking the sister into opening it. Her face is the only unlock code left.”

  “She’s already told me she has no intentions of opening that tablet,” I said.

  “How come?” Farm asked.

  “She wants to protect her sister’s privacy. She thinks we should be able to solve the case without the tablet. That we should be able to find some other evidence.”

  “And is there any other evidence?” he continued.

  “Nothing conclusive so far,” I said distractedly.

  “So no smoking gun?” Farm asked. “No witnesses? No hidden cameras showing whodunit?”

  I gasped. “Hidden cameras? Farm, you’re a genius!” I said remembering. “She had Snakstr!” I blurted.

  “Who did?” they both asked.

  “Monica. On her second refrigerator.”

  “She had a second refrigerator?” Farm asked impressed.

  “Yes, her bakery fridge—the one she used to store her customer orders and contest desserts. She kept a lock on it so her husband wouldn’t steal anything, but I also saw a Snakstr sticker on the side. Please tell me your videos go back that far.”

  “Well, storage is cheap,” Gizmo said. “So our video captures go back about six months.”

  “That’s within our time frame,” I said excitedly. “Do you have a way of downloading just the videos for Monica’s account, and are they searchable by date?”

  “Yes and yes. But don’t you need a warrant or something?”

  “Cops need warrants. I’m not a cop. And I could probably get Mason—or Loyal, for that matter—to issue a subpoena. Heck, Marvin Munch would probably sign an authorization himself. Pretty much all parties in this case want to know who’s behind the poisonings. But guys, come on. These are Snakstr videos. Isn’t the whole point to make them public?”

  “Not always,” Gizmo replied. “Some folks just open accounts so they can spy on family members. Based on your explanation of why Ms. Munch had it, she would fall into that category.”

  “Yeah, but like Nina says, everyone wants to see what’s in those videos,” Farm countered. “Don’t you?”

  “Yes, I guess I do. But our shareholders might disagree.”

  “Well, we own over 50% of the stocks between us. And Nina, don’t you own a piece of Snakstr?”

  “Yup, thirty-seven shares,” I said proudly.

  “That’s a weird number,” Gizmo observed.

  “It’s her lucky number. Long story. Don’t ask,” Farm said impatiently. “The important point is that we represent a majority of the shareholders. So, all those in favor of watching the videos, say ‘aye.’ ”

  “Aye,” we all said, hands raised high right there in that booth in the corner of Steamy’s main dining room.

  “The ‘ayes’ have it,” Farm said, barely able to contain himself. “We’re going to go to the movies,” he sang.

  13. Discovery

  We didn’t have to go far to view the videos. Soon after Gizmo and Farm bought the building for their restaurant, they had administrative offices constructed on the second floor, for which they spared no expense. They each took an expansive corner studio along the front of the building and furnished both areas with high-end computers, multiple screen displays, smoking-fast Internet access, and an assortment of creature comforts that indulged their respective tastes. Farm had a hammock in his office, which was designed like a cross between a loft and a kid’s playroom. Gizmo’s space was more of a workroom with tools and electronic components on various workbenches. Both had a mini-theater with four loungers facing a massive high-definition display for movie watching and gaming. We picked Gizmos’ office only because it was closer, although Farm did head down to his domain briefly to turn on the popcorn machine and bring back a couple of bags. It was almost a superstition with him. He never sat to watch a movie unless he had popcorn nearby. I wrote it off as one of those quirks of people who grow up in movie theaters. I settled into one of the leather loungers and accepted my bag of popcorn wondering what it would cost Al and me to have a setup like this for our office. This was by far the most comfortable surveillance video monitoring I’d ever done.

  “Okay, Nina, I’ve accessed
the Munch account videos. What dates are you interested in?” Gizmo asked.

  I started reviewing the digital timeline for the case. “We suspect the sugar in the refrigerator was tainted,” I said. “And we think Monica put it there.”

  “No kidding?!” Farm said. “Wouldn’t that mean that she offed herself?”

  “Yes, but only accidentally. We don’t know all the details, but we think she might have intended just to get Chloe disqualified or at least discredited at the bake-off. We also suspect she may have picked up some rhubarb leaves off a produce truck in mid-July.”

  “Why the leaves?” Gizmo asked.

  “That’s the toxic part of the rhubarb plant. Oxalic acid crystals can be extracted from the leaves. You can also make a pesticide from it, which would have a high concentration of oxalic acid.”

  “Sounds complicated,” Farm observed.

  I shrugged my shoulders still checking my tablet for dates. “Jeff Woo, the produce guy that Chloe got her rhubarb from, told us that someone matching Monica’s description picked up a bunch of rhubarb leaves from his truck. We got video from cameras at the farmers’ market, but it’s hard to tell who it is because she wore a disguise. For a while, we thought the woman was Maxi, the sister. That was July twelfth.”

  “Do you know what time?” Gizmo asked.

  “She was there about a quarter after eleven. If we’re lucky, maybe she stored the leaves in the fridge when she got back, until she could boil them. Oh, but Giz’, could you start it a bit earlier? There might be more we can use.”

  “Sure. Hedy, play 12 July of this year starting at 0900 hours.”

  “Whose ‘Heady’?” I asked, hearing a chime and seeing the screen come to life.