Critical Vulnerability (An Aroostine Higgins Novel Book 1)

by Melissa F. Miller

  “He wants me to tell you he’s treating me appropriately.”

  “Is he, though?”

  She paused. “It’s not the Ritz, but I’m fine.”

  He thought she sounded weaker and wearier than she had four nights ago, but she’d never cop to discomfort.

  Tears stung Franklin’s eyes, and he gripped the phone so hard he was surprised it didn’t break in his hand. “I’m going to get you home, I promise.”

  “He wants the phone back. I love you, honey.”

  His mother’s voice faded, replaced by the harsh, ugly tones of her captor. “How touching.”

  Anger flared in Franklin’s belly, but he choked it back and said nothing.

  “Are you ready?”

  “Yes,” Franklin said neutrally.

  “Good. You are to monitor the attorney who filed the opposition. The Higgins woman.”

  “What do you mean by monitor?”

  The man huffed. “I mean to keep an open channel. I want you to keep track of when she arrives at work. When she leaves. Her incoming and outgoing phone calls. How long they are, who she speaks to, and what she says. When she logs onto her computer and what she does. What databases does she access? What websites does she visit? What documents does she create? What does she save? Print? Delete?”

  “You—you want me to spy on her all day?”

  “Precisely.”

  Franklin’s mind raced. How was he supposed to do that all day long without anyone else in the company noticing? It simply wasn’t possible.

  “I don’t think I have access to all that information,” he lied.

  “You disappoint me,” the man said quietly.

  There was a rustling noise, then Franklin heard a distant shrieking.

  The hated voice filled his ear again. “Shall I break your mother’s wrist then? To motivate you?”

  Franklin’s stomach roiled, and acid rose in his throat. “No, I’m sorry! Don’t hurt her—I’ll do it.”

  “Next time, there will be no negotiation, Franklin. Do not ever lie to me.”

  “I won’t. I won’t . . . Just, please, don’t hurt her,” Franklin panted.

  “Very well. Do you understand your assignment?”

  “Yes. Do you really want to know everything she does?”

  “Everything,” the man confirmed. “I will call you for regular reports. If, however, you see or hear something that you think will be of great interest to me and will hasten your mother’s return, then you may call this number.”

  “Wait! Wait—what’s of interest to you? I really don’t understand.”

  “Be creative, Franklin. Anything that provides leverage over Aroostine Higgins.”

  The line went dead.

  Leverage, Franklin repeated to himself silently.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Friday afternoon

  Joe stroked the silky fur of the mournful golden retriever sitting at his feet.

  “You miss her too, don’t you, boy?”

  Rufus cocked his head and gave Joe a look that said that was a stupid question.

  He sighed. Of course Rufus missed her. After all, she was the one who had found him, caked with mud and shivering in a cardboard box by the side of the road. She was his mistress—the one who’d taken him in, cleaned him up, and gone on long walks with him in the woods. As far as Rufus was concerned, Joe was just some guy who was handy with a can opener.

  Feeling increasingly stupid, he continued his one-sided conversation with the dog.

  “She’ll be back. You’ll see. She just needs to get this big city lawyer thing out of her system.”

  Rufus whimpered, and Joe scratched his long, soft ears.

  “You’d hate it in DC. Living in a cramped shoebox apartment. No backyard. No ducks to chase. No ponds to swim in. Dirty, crowded, noisy. Fast, impersonal, expensive.”

  Rufus nosed his hand, turned in two circles, then immediately fell asleep.

  Must be nice to be a dog, Joe thought, jealous of the canine’s uncomplicated emotional life.

  He stared sightlessly into the dying fire for a long time. She’d been gone for four months. Maybe it was time to face the fact that Aroostine wasn’t coming back.

  You could go there, he told himself. She’d asked him repeatedly to give it a try. He waffled, thinking of how much he’d like to see her liquid brown eyes and hear her throaty laugh. What harm could one visit do?

  No. He knew himself. He had no intention of uprooting his life and following her to DC. Even if Rufus wouldn’t feel penned in by city life, he would. And she was working all the time, anyway. A visit would confuse things and send the wrong message.

  What message is that? That you love her and miss her and you’re willing to support her dreams—the way you told her you would?

  Joe shook his head to get rid of the nagging, judgmental voice that sounded in his ears. His eyes fell on the papers from the lawyer’s office. He knew he needed to stop delaying the inevitable and deal with them, but right now, he couldn’t bear the thought.

  He picked up the phone from the nearby end table and punched in the area code for Washington, DC. Then he jabbed his finger down to disconnect the call. He bounced the heavy, old cordless phone in the palm of his hand and thought.

  It’s Frugal Friday, he realized. Ten-cent wings, fifty-cent drafts, and bad karaoke to country music at the Hole in the Wall would chase the ghosts away.

  He turned on the phone and dialed again, punching in the numbers quickly before he weakened and called her.

  Three rings.

  “Brent, man, you up for some beer and wings?”

  “You know it, my brother.”

  Joe exhaled, and relief at having narrowly avoided a pitiful show of weakness flowed over him like water or, better yet, a frosty glass of Yuengling.

  “Meet you there in twenty.”

  Rufus lifted one eyelid and eyed him disapprovingly. Then he pawed his nose, snorted, and went back to sleep.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Saturday morning

  Aroostine crouched alongside the creek and listened. Most of the trees were winter-bare, and their dried, fallen leaves blanketed the ground, covering twigs and rocks.

  There. A faint crunch sounded from the other side of the water.

  She scanned the opposite bank, her eyes narrowed and focusing hard, her head cocked. Another crunch, this one barely audible.

  It, whatever it was, was moving to the south.

  She slipped through the icy water, making no sound, causing no telltale splashes. As she stalked the animal through Rock Creek Park, she felt just a bit silly. Her behavior was ridiculously out of place for an urban park. But she had to do something to clear her mind and re-center after her disastrous workweek.

  Some people golfed. Others meditated or practiced yoga. Her adoptive mother knitted intricate, colorful sweaters and scarves and hats. Rosie, in an obvious display of mental imbalance, trained for and ran marathons. And Aroostine sat. She sat for hours in all sorts of weather in whatever wilderness environment she could reach and observed and tracked the wildlife. She was beginning to adjust to doing it in an urban park setting. She filtered out distant traffic noises and learned to disregard the occasional dog walkers or couples looking for privacy who ventured deep into the woods.

  It was worth it. The natural world was a balm to her heart. Peace. Oneness. A connection with the planet and all its beings.

  Joe had once observed that her tracking was the only piece of her heritage she’d taken along with her when she’d left her native culture behind. And as much as that statement had riled her, it was true.

  She’d learned to track at her grandfather’s elbow. From the time she could waddle behind him on unsteady toddler feet, she’d found refuge in the woods. It was quiet. It was calm. And he taught her that if she pai
d close attention, the woods would share all the secrets of the wild with her.

  She allowed herself a faint smile as she stepped carefully out of the creek and bent to examine the disturbed mud and gravel on the bank.

  The distinctive tracks gave the animal away. Raccoon. It had probably come to the water to wash its food and had slunk away into the woods when it spotted her.

  You can’t avoid the case forever, she admonished herself.

  But she needed this, she reasoned. She felt increasingly disconnected from nature the longer she lived in the dense, noisy city. One morning spent mucking around in the woods wasn’t going to tank the trial. Rosie’s contact in the Clerk’s Office would track down their wayward motion. The defendants’ own words would convict them. And maybe, just maybe, the quiet stillness of the winter woods would help her rid her mind of distractions, like Joe.

  She settled back on her haunches. The thin rays of sun fell on her upturned face. She closed her eyes, filled her lungs with the cold, fresh air, and emptied her mind.

  CHAPTER NINE

  “Do you understand?” the man asked in a cold voice.

  Franklin’s fear and worry masked his irritation at constantly being treated like an idiot. If this man thought Franklin was so stupid, why had he chosen him?

  “I understand.”

  “Good. It needs to start in her home office. That’s the second room on the left side of the hallway as you walk away from the door.”

  Franklin placed a finger on the square labeled “study” on her apartment’s floor plan.

  “I see it.”

  “Can you overload the circuit her computer is on, start a small electrical fire?”

  Of course he could.

  As Franklin was learning, as long as he didn’t care about societal rules and the law, he had the technical ability to do almost anything. The knowledge of how much power he possessed as long as he had a keyboard was nearly as frightening as the fact that the man on the other end of the phone held his mother’s life in his hands.

  “Yes.”

  “If possible, the damage should be confined to her apartment. If it is not possible, that is acceptable. What is the goal?”

  “The goal is to destroy her computer.”

  “Yes, very good. And you will override the sprinkler system.”

  “I will—to her apartment only.”

  “Very good. Do it.”

  The man hung up.

  Franklin pushed away the thought of what might happen if the lawyer was sleeping in and was overcome by smoke. He couldn’t get distracted worrying about other people. He had to do whatever was necessary to get his mom back safely.

  He tapped into the system that controlled the Delano Towers apartment building’s electrical systems and pulled up the detailed grid. He clicked on 609. A detailed plan of the apartment, with a blinking square to indicate every outlet currently being fed juice, filled his screen.

  He found the study on the map and enlarged it. There was no doubt which outlet powered her computer. The bar graph at the bottom of the screen showed the overwhelming majority of the electricity going to an outlet on the north wall. Franklin assumed a lawyer would be careful enough to purchase and use a decent surge protector.

  He scratched his chin. How the surge protector would work depended on whether she had one with a built-in fuse, a gas discharge arrestor, or a metal oxide varistor. Metal oxide varistors were by far the most common type. He’d just start there. A varistor worked by diverting excess voltage away from its protected load. But, by design, it worked best when it conducted electricity during a short spike or a transient surge. Exposure to a persistent overload, for as short a time as several seconds, should overwhelm it, overheat it, and cause it to burst into flames, even if she spent the money for an internal circuit breaker. He’d try that first and readjust if it failed.

  He pulsed power to the line, ramping up the load to 208 volts. Then he waited. He did not have long to wait.

  After about fifteen seconds, the building’s sprinkler system and hard-wired fire alarms began to light up. He minimized the electrical system window. With three clicks, he overrode the fire alarm and disconnected the system that would activate the sprinkler in the study of apartment 609.

  Her computer would literally melt. And the flames would take care of any papers sitting on or near the desk. The man would be pleased.

  He gnawed at a flap of jagged skin hanging near his thumb.

  “Please don’t let her try to be a hero,” he whispered aloud. The thought that the lawyer or one of her neighbors might rush into the burning apartment to save her work ate at him.

  He’d be responsible for anyone who was injured—or worse.

  Panicky tears filled his eyes.

  His mother had always worried that he was too soft to survive in the modern world. Maybe she was right. Maybe he was so soft and weak that he would fail to save her.

  Pull yourself together.

  He forced himself to slow his shallow breathing and punched in the man’s telephone number to let him know that he’d done it. He’d added arson to his growing list of crimes.

  The sense of tranquility that Aroostine had spent an entire morning cultivating evaporated in an instant when she rounded the corner onto her street and saw the crowd of residents huddling on the sidewalk and in the street near her apartment building. A small fire truck blocked the street, and parka-wearing police officers directed the mass of people to stay back.

  Aroostine spotted Mr. Cornhardt, who lived across the hall in 610, standing with the Indian couple from the end of the floor. He wasn’t wearing a coat but had a knitted afghan thrown over his shoulders. Peanut, his Westie, was whimpering in his arms. She noticed that, unlike his owner, Peanut was bundled into a jacket.

  “What happened?” she asked as she approached the group.

  The Indian woman’s eyes widened when she saw Aroostine.

  “Oh, Aroostine. There’s been a fire,” Mr. Cornhardt said, his voice trembling. At the sound, Peanut started to shake.

  “There, there, Peeny,” he soothed the dog.

  “A fire? Was anyone hurt?”

  “No, thank the Lord. But Mrs. Patel here says one of the building managers told her it started on our floor.”

  “In your unit actually,” Mrs. Patel said in a soft, apologetic voice.

  “My apartment caught fire?”

  Aroostine’s mind reeled. Where would she stay? How bad was the damage? Were her belongings all destroyed?

  “You have renter’s insurance, don’t you?” the Indian man—presumably, Mr. Patel—asked.

  “Yes,” she said numbly, trying to claw through the shock to remember her agent’s name.

  “That’s good. We heard it was an electrical fire. It started in the walls.”

  “But . . . I have a surge protector,” she said.

  Mr. Cornhardt shook his head. “It wasn’t a surge. Nobody else noticed anything out of the ordinary. I was watching Ocean’s Twelve with Peanut here. He likes that George Clooney. Ocean’s Eleven is a clearly superior movie, but the second one was free with my streaming account, and Peanut isn’t very picky. Anyway, my power never flickered or anything.”

  The Patels nodded their agreement.

  “But, how . . .”

  “I don’t know. You need to find someone from building management and get some answers. They’re crawling all over the place in a panic because your sprinkler malfunctioned.”

  Aroostine just stared at him wordlessly.

  “It’s true,” Mr. Patel chimed in, “the fire alarm didn’t go off and neither did the sprinkler.”

  “Are those . . . connected?” She didn’t think they would be, but she hadn’t ever had a reason to think about it. At the moment, her brain was struggling to make sense of the jumble of words her neighbors were throwing a
t her. Engineering details were definitely beyond her grasp.

  “Two different systems,” Mr. Cornhardt confirmed. “And they’ve tested them both. They’re both working properly now, including in your unit. So, why are we still freezing our butts off in the street? That’s the real question.”

  Mrs. Patel gave Aroostine a sympathetic smile. “You must have very bad luck. If they let us back in, you’ll join Ajit and me for dinner tonight.”

  “That’s very kind of you, Mrs. Patel.”

  “Call me Dia.”

  Aroostine forced her mouth into an approximation of a smile.

  “Thank you, Dia, but I’m afraid I have a case getting ready to go to trial, and I really need to work this evening. Can I get a rain check?”

  “Certainly,” Ajit said.

  “Thanks. Well, at least I finally met my neighbors,” she joked.

  Over Mr. Cornhardt’s shoulder, she spotted Mallory, one of the building managers, talking to a burly man wearing a Fire Department windbreaker. She excused herself and jogged over to them.

  You must have very bad luck.

  The matter-of-fact statement echoed in her head.

  First her missing document. And now this. It was certainly beginning to seem that if it weren’t for bad luck, she’d have no luck at all.

  She approached Mallory and the firefighter and cleared her throat.

  “Oh, Ms. Higgins,” Mallory squeaked when she noticed Aroostine standing there, “I’m so sorry to have to tell you this—”

  Aroostine took pity on her and finished the sentence, “My apartment caught on fire. I talked to the Patels and Mr. Cornhardt.”

  Mallory released the tension she’d been holding in her shoulders. “Obviously, the Delano will replace anything that’s been damaged or destroyed by the fire or smoke.”

  “Great.” Aroostine smiled weakly. “So, what exactly happened, and, more important, when can I get into my apartment?”

  “You 609?” the firefighter interrupted.

  “I guess so. My friends call me Aroostine, though.” She surprised herself with the lame attempt at a joke.