by J. A. Kerley
Maruyama made the motion of flicking a lighter. “No biggie. I just take them somewhere and burn them.”
Kubiac phoned and Cottrell’s receptionist answered. “He’s on another line. I can have him call you back later today.”
“Tell him it’s Adam.”
Ten seconds later Cottrell was on the line. “Adam, it’s good to hear from you.”
“I’m on my way.”
“Excellent.”
Kubiac entered the lawyer’s office fifteen minutes later, Cottrell ushering him through the door like they were old friends. The receptionist was absent. They went to Cottrell’s office, papers centering the desk. Cottrell sat as Kubiac forced a fake yawn.
“Didn’t my father say you had a daughter, Jeffrey?”
A nod. “Sure. She’s not much older than you. She’s in Spokane studying to be a teacher.”
Kubiac made a show of looking across Cottrell’s desk and credenza.
“Cool. Got a picture of her?”
“Uh, no. I have one, but the cleaning lady knocked it over. Glass broke. I’m having it reframed.”
Kubiac kept his face even. “Oh. Too bad.”
Cottrell changed the subject. “Where’s your girlfriend, Adam?”
“We’re doing this one alone, Jeff. Just you and me. Why do you want to know?”
The lawyer shrugged and turned the documents to face Kubiac. “You want a few minutes to read the revised will and the, um, other instruments?”
“I trust you, Jeff,” Kubiac said sardonically. “Where’s this land I’m buying?”
“A few miles below the San Carlos Reservation, a great speculative deal.”
“It’s a shitload of sand in the middle of nowhere, Jeffrey. What’d you pay per acre? And what am I paying per acre?”
A tight eye from Cottrell. “I suggest you get used to our deal, Adam. Anger’s not going to help either of us.” Cottrell pushed the pages toward Kubiac and held out a pen.
Twenty minutes later Adam Kubiac was back at Maruyama’s apartment. “Cottrell rewrote the will?” she asked.
“I get everything. Greed-boy just has to file it with the probate court to make it official, and he says he’s doing that now.” He paused. “What if he fucks something up?”
“He won’t. He thinks he’s gonna get rich.”
Adam spun his car keys around his finger. “Jeff lives north of Scottsdale. The houses are far apart. I want to go look at the asshole’s place.”
“I better drive in case he goes home. He’s seen your car.”
Maruyama drove the pair in her blue Miata.
Adam turned from the window. “I was thinking … what happens when Cottrell’s dead, Cat? Like, what happens to Zoe? I mean Brenda. What if she goes to the police? She hasn’t seen me in a day. She texted for a while, then just stopped.”
“Why would she go to the cops? She’d have to implicate herself in a scheme to steal your money. Plus if we do it right, there’s no way you can be a suspect. And don’t text or call Zoe. She’s bad news. She and that rapist were trying to steal your inheritance.”
“I’m never talking to that lying bitch again.” He paused, the worried look returning. “You’re sure about the cops? They scare me.”
Maruyama laughed. “Cops don’t like lawyers, Adam. Especially not ones like Cottrell. They’ll be happy someone whacked the bastard.”
“Whacked?”
A smile. “You need to watch more television.”
They came to Cottrell’s address, his house a one-story adobe with a tile roof, the yard landscaped with desert fauna. Set on five acres, it was raw desert on both sides. Adam had Maruyama twice drive slowly past as he slumped in the seat and studied the terrain through oversize sunglasses with a Phoenix Suns cap pulled low over the shades.
“Okay,” he said. “I know what I’m going to do.”
They returned to Maruyama’s apartment. Kubiac said: “You’re coming along, right, Cat? It would help me, like, if I get nervous or something.”
Maruyama shook her head. “I have to stay here and send e-mails and tweets and play games.”
“Why?”
“Our computers, phones and tablets will show us using them all night, like we never left here. You have to leave me your phone so I can pretend to be you.”
His face filled with panic. “No! I need to be able to talk to you when I’m—”
Maruyama reached in her purse and produced a pair of cheap burner phones, handing him one.
“They’ll keep us close, Adam. It’ll be like I’m standing right beside you. We’ll throw them away afterwards.” She kissed him on the cheek. “You won’t get nervous, Adam. You’re the strongest man I know.”
41
We sat in Novarro’s cubicle and shot the breeze with Kent for twenty minutes, Fishbach listening at the edge of the conversation. Then Solero’s door opened and he yelled, “You’ve got the court order, detectives. You can crack the Meridien files connected to the primary cases.”
Novarro shooed a cleaning woman out of a conference room and gestured for Kent to take a seat. The security expert removed his jacket and carefully hung it over the chairback. He sat, opened his brown briefcase and removed a laptop the size of portable computers in the nineties. He saw me looking.
“Big memory, big power. And fast like you wouldn’t believe.”
“About time things started moving fast around here,” Novarro said.
Kent plugged in the flash drive and began tapping keys. The screen showed ranks of symbols and numbers. “Still with a layer of encryption,” he said. “I’ll have to access the DataSĀF security system to remove it.”
“You’ll need my password to get on the net,” Novarro said. “Protection for our files, also in the cloud.”
Kent nodded. “DataSĀF stores the Phoenix Police Department files as part of their JurisFile division. I saw them when I was analyzing the DataSĀF systems.”
Novarro’s mouth fell open. “Wait … every time I put a report in the PPD system it went to DataSĀF?”
“At nearly the speed of light.” Kent said. “Don’t worry. They’re encrypted.” Kent started keyboarding.
“Hold on, Mr Kent,” Novarro said. “You’re saying Klebbin could have looked at the PPD files?”
A beat of consideration followed by a nod. “If Klebbin had the expertise and passwords to get into Dr Meridien’s files, she could likely go anywhere.”
“There was no mole in PPD,” Novarro hissed to me. “It was Klebbin. She was in the damned cloud and watching our every move. That means she’s in league with Escheverría.”
Kent wasn’t buying it. “That would be a huge amount of information to monitor, Detective. Even an hour’s worth of data from the PPD would be overwhelming: reports filed, images from the CCTVs in cruisers, prisoner intake, administrative data, accounting data, all constantly streaming in. It’s unlikely, unless …” his eyes turned inward as his voice trailed off.
“Unless what?”
“Can you tell me the name of a person that might appear in the files on your special case? Someone pivotal?”
“Everything revolves around a monster named Escheverría,” Novarro said. “Ramon Escheverría.” She spelled it out.
“Let me look at a few things,” Kent said, his fingers picking up speed on the keyboard. “You may want to get some coffee,” he said. “This might take a while.”
42
Harry Nautilus stared out his window at the gleaming, strident Miami skyline.
Maruyama … Maruyama …
It had taken two calls to Sky Harbor International Airport, one to the TSA, and one to an airline, to discover that a Hisao Maruyama and a Catherine Maruyama had boarded a flight from Phoenix to Tokyo six weeks ago. That was the easy part. But Carson wanted to know where they might have gone from there. And did Catherine Maruyama return to the States?
Jeez … how many Maruyamas are in Japan?
Nautilus took one more look at a blue sky dappled wit
h cumulus, then returned to sit at his desk and stare at the ceiling. Roy McDermott passed the door, stopped, looked inside.
“You look deep in thought, Harry.”
“Trying to think through a tracking problem, Roy.”
McDermott laced his big fingers together and spun his thumbs around one another. “Try twiddling your thumbs, Harry. Always works for me.”
McDermott grinned and scooted away. Nautilus thought a moment, then put his hands together and started twiddling.
* * *
Kubiac grinned and held the tattered paper target to Maruyama. Twenty-seven shots had echoed across the barren landscape, three finding the center ring of the target, seven in the secondary ring, the others clustered nearby.
“My god,” she said, hands clapping together, “you’re incredible, Adam.”
Kubiac tacked another target to the saguaro and they walked back toward his shooting position a hundred yards distant. There was nothing but wide and raw desert for a mile in any direction, the nearest highway on the other side of a jagged rise. The sky was cloudless, an opalescent bowl from horizon to horizon.
“I told you I knew how to shoot,” Kubiac said. “Hashtag: sharpshooter.”
“But where’d you ever learn to shoot so good? Just the hunting trips with your uncle?”
Kubiac’s face darkened and he punted a stone down the path. “Plus my old man yanked me outta junior high and put me in a military academy. Said it would make a man out of me.” He paused, thought a moment, and smiled. ‘I got kicked out after four months. The only thing I liked was marksmanship.”
Kubiac reached his shooting position, marked by boxes of ammunition and a small cooler with water, Red Bull, and egg-salad sandwiches from a convenience market. He steadied the rifle atop a boulder and flicked off the safety.
“Why are you shooting from the rock?” Maruyama asked.
“To steady the rifle. There’s a boulder just about this size on the east side of Cottrell’s property. And his front door is just about as far from here as the cactus is.”
“You think of everything,” Maruyama said, laying her forehead against Kubiac’s back and smiling with contentment.
Harry Nautilus was still twiddling his thumbs. He’d had to visit the DA to give a brief deposition in a case, but was now back and again pondering the problem. What might link Phoenix and Japan?
What do I do when I travel?
His thumbs ceased whirling. A widening smile on his face, he pulled a business card from his wallet and grabbed his phone.
“This is Sonya,” said a rich voice. “How may I help you?”
Nautilus pictured the ripe-bodied lawyer with the big eyes and rolling saunter. “Ms Burroughs, this is Harry—”
“Nautilus,” she completed. “How wonderful to hear from you.”
“I’ve been wanting to call, Ms Burroughs. Not on police business, but more of, uh, a personal nature.”
“Call anytime, Harry. And it’s Sonya.”
“I’ve been beating my head against a wall, Sonya. A case that’s got me bamboozled. As soon as I get it behind me, we can enjoy a drink, or a quiet meal.”
Her voice dropped to a purr. “How soon do you think you’ll be free?”
“It depends on how fast I can track down a person in Japan. Someone who was in Phoenix, but flew to Tokyo some weeks back.”
“I hope it goes quickly, real quickly …”
“I was thinking that generally, before I fly somewhere, business or pleasure, there’s phone calls between me and my destination … setting up lodging, car rental perhaps, or telling friends or family when I’ll arrive. That sort of thing.”
“Sure. I do that, too.”
“I was wondering, Sonya, given your inside ties …” he let it hang.
The woman was fast. “If I can speak to a counterpart in Phoenix and get phone records? I expect so, as long as I have the exchange of the person in Phoenix who made the calls.”
“They’ll do that? I mean, without me having to get a subpoena or court order?”
“I’ll do it through the billing department, mostly women.” She laughed, a throaty sound. “I call it the sister system.”
“How, uh, fast might that be done?”
“It’s four thirty here – three hours difference this time of year, so one thirty out there. I’ll find someone to help me, I mean you.”
“Us,” he said. “You and me. We’re partners on this.”
“Oh my, Harry. There’s a thought.”
When Kent called us back to his hacker’s lair, we were on our second cups of coffee. Outside the window a rare summer shower was blowing through, overhanging clouds dappling the valley with raindrops. I took it as a good sign.
“You were right, Detective,” Kent said to Novarro as we sat across from him. “You did have a mole in your system. Or a spybot, rather. A hidden piece of code that sent Candace Klebbin select data triggered by the name Escheverría. She received only what pertained to her specific needs and interests. No megabytes of material to review.”
Novarro shook her head. “So every time a report mentioned Ramon Escheverría …”
“The bot sent it to Ms Klebbin.”
“Which she passed on. Shit. No wonder Ramon stayed ahead. He must have been laughing his ass off.”
Kent re-perched his fingers on the keyboard. “Are we ready to open Dr Meridien’s files?”
I looked at our security expert. “Can you find what she wrote the last night of her life?”
Kent leaned forward and tapped keys. Instead of techno-gibberish, the screen filled with a dozen boxes with titles like Patient Files, Financial, Contact Info, Writings, Articles, and so forth. I sat beside Kent while Novarro, too nervous to sit, looked over his shoulder. Kent highlighted a line and double tapped Return. It opened to a secondary file named “Session Notes/Observations.”
“It was uploaded the night of her death,” said Novarro, almost breathless. I leaned over and saw the title of Meridien’s final entry:
The Kubiac Conundrum
Kent opened the file. It was small, just a few hundred words. “Read it, Tasha,” I said. She leaned forward and began her recitation.
“Adam Kubiac arrived at 9.30 p.m. tonight in an agitated state, angry, accusatory, and in the company of a young woman named Zoe. He somehow used his software expertise to open my gate and door. I expected his anger was somehow connected to the recent death of his father, and was proven correct, but not in a fashion I could have predicted …
“Two months ago Adam’s father (Elijah Kubiac) came to me with a misguided plan to gain a modicum of control over Adam. I tried to talk him out of it but was rebuffed. The father was adamant that the best way to control his son was the threat of disinheritance. He went so far as to have a false will drafted, one purporting to leave his son the sum of one dollar. To my understanding, the false will was only meant as a last-ditch threat if all other efforts at gaining at least some compliance failed. Elijah Kubiac repeated this several times.
“Then Adam told me things that made the entire scenario suspect. I think it’s possible Adam’s lawyer may be involved in some form of subterfuge. Or not. That’s the problem. I am (or perhaps was) Adam’s therapist, not his lawyer. I know nothing of the law and have not been privy to the actions of Elijah Kubiac and his legal representation. They had their own confidences.
“Should I call the police and explain my fears? To convey the matter to the authorities will necessitate offering insights into the relationship between the Kubiacs, as well as explaining how Adam’s almost infantile naiveté makes him particularly vulnerable to manipulation. Is that a violation of D/P privilege and a breach of ethics? And is it beyond my boundary? Should I just keep my nose out of things—?”
“There it is,” I said, “in the last paragraph. The ethical quandary. Keep going.”
“Thought: Call Angela Bowers in Miami and see what she thinks, and have her run the situation past her professor friend who studies these
things (Warbler? Warbley?) I’ll call tonight and proceed from knowledge gained. I have some time to figure this out.”
“Meridien didn’t have time,” Novarro said quietly. “She had about six hours.”
“Klebbin was monitoring Meridien’s account, maybe even as the information was uploaded to DataSĀF. Klebbin had to work fast in case Meridien decided to go to the police. So someone killed her eight hours later. Odds are 99.9 percent that it was Escheverría.”
“And Bowers and Warbley had two more days.”
“They had to die. Though Klebbin knew everything the doctor put in the cloud, she couldn’t listen in on phone conversations. She had no idea what they knew.”
“So Klebbin took out insurance,” I said. “Sending Escheverría to Miami to deliver the policy.”
“Cold. But it’s still cryptic. Nothing tells us why.”
“It’s somehow about keeping information secret. And that always comes back to money. Could you check Dr Meridien’s patient contact list, Mr Kent? There should be information on Adam Kubiac.”
Kent tapped for a few seconds. “Here’s a folder called Patient Information. Opening and … bingo! Address is in North Scottsdale. Phone numbers, home and cell.”
Novarro rang the home number and got a recording. “This is Eli Kubiac,” a smooth and self-assured older voice crooned. “I’m not in right now but …”
“The recently dead father,” I said, “Try the kid’s number.”
She dialed. I heard one ring, then the sound of an exchange switching. A recorded voice said, “this number is no longer in service.”
“Damn,” Novarro whispered.
Kent was hunched over the keyboard like a twenty-year-old hacker. He leaned forward and studied some symbols. “Well, this is interesting. I searched the doctor’s file for Candace Klebbin’s name, wondering if there was an indication how she and Dr Meridien might have crossed paths.”
“Good question,” I said because it was. “And?”
