Mission Canyon

by Meg Gardiner

  However, I had to presume that Mako would limit log-in attempts, probably to three tries. How could I narrow down my guesses? If at least I knew how many characters the password protocol called for, I might be able to do it.

  Kenny, however, wasn’t going to leave that information lying around. He was too crafty.

  But Amber wasn’t.

  Did I have time? I would have to run.

  Don’t just sit here. Go.

  I dashed out. Sticking a piece of paper in the security door to keep it from locking, I hurried to the front desk, looked out the front door, and saw the guard flirting with Amber in the parking lot. Did these two have any clue how close they were to unemployment?

  I lifted Amber’s keyboard, ran my hand under the monitor, under the desk, and under her chair. Nothing. I looked outside again. Amber was getting in the car.

  And then I saw Mr. Frog, her stuffed animal, propped next to her monitor. Success. A Post-it was stuck on his little bottom. Dazl*ng. I hurried back to the computer.

  Kenny’s password was going to contain seven characters. And it would probably require a numeral or at least one character other than a letter of the alphabet.

  Think. Think about Kenny. What did he like? Himself. Cocaine. Dirty money, sex, cars.

  I put my fingers on the keyboard and typed, McQ4een. Incorrect password.

  Come on . . . Carrer*.

  Incorrect password.

  The Porsche, he loved that Porsche . . . the image returned to me of his vanity license plate. I counted the number of characters on my fingers. Typed it.

  KPS3CUR.

  The screen cleared. I’d done it.

  A new prompt appeared on the screen, and I remembered that Jax had mentioned multilevel security—the first password gave you nonprivileged access. A second password was then required for higher-level, privileged access.

  The prompt remained, the cursor blinking at me.

  Okay, Kenny. I vote for hubris. I think you believe nobody would get this far, and so you’ve made the rest of the trip easy for yourself. The prompt waited for me to type the password.

  I touched one key: return.

  I was in. A message on the screen said, 90 sec timeout returns keyboard to 10 min nonpriv mode. If I stopped typing for ninety seconds, the computer would automatically revert to nonprivileged mode for ten minutes before I could get back in again.

  I went to search and typed Segue. Three files appeared.

  The first folder was full of documents—letters, memos, correspondence—and spreadsheets. I opened them as fast as I could, listening for Len’s keys to jingle in the hallway. I skimmed the documents. Incorporation papers—from the Cayman Islands. Lists of company directors—Kenneth Rudenski, Maricela Vasquez de Diamond, and Mikhail Yago . . .

  Then I found the financials. Hundreds of thousands of dollars were running through this company: to Mako, from Mako, to a variety of other entities. They had techie names, venture capital names, and I bet that if I could access them, they would show the same directors as Segue.

  I breathed. Segue was indeed a shell corporation, attached to Mako. A slush fund for i-heist money. This was the stuff the FBI was after. The stuff Jesse needed.

  I-heist had plainly sunk their claws into Kenny Rudenski, deep. They were partners now, or maybe parasite and host. Was he doing it willingly, or under duress?

  I had to get this evidence to the police. Tonight. Once Kenny touched this computer, he would see that somebody had been looking at this file. And when he did that, he’d make sure that these files disappeared. Or maybe he’d make sure that the somebody disappeared.

  But I didn’t have a minidisk or a CD burner. And wouldn’t it be charming for the security guard to find me at Mako’s printer, collating and stapling confidential corporate documents?

  But I did have e-mail, and so did the FBI. I fished through my purse for Dale Van Heusen’s business card, but had left it at home. Plan B.

  Three cheers for Web-based e-mail. Punting caution aside, I connected to my account. I could delete the connection from Kenny’s browser history afterward, but any one of a dozen geeks down the hall in engineering could find it as easily as if I’d written my name in peanut butter across the screen. I didn’t care. Let him know it was me.

  I accessed my account, chose new message, and attached the Segue files.

  Jingling in the hallway again. Keys, and now I heard Len whistling. Could Dazzling Delicates lingerie truly be accounting for his and Amber’s happiness?

  The jingling stopped. Uh-oh. And I hadn’t had time to send the e-mail.

  Under the desk. Kenny’s executive model looked like a solid cube of walnut from the front, so I dove off the chair to hide beneath it.

  And saw my blunder. This big tank of a desk didn’t sit on the floor; it was raised about six inches above it on clawed feet. Someone standing in the doorway would be able to see my rear end on the carpet.

  Does my butt look big in this?

  I pressed my feet against one end of the well under the desk, pressed my back against the other, and shimmied off the ground. I heard the door open. My breathing echoed off the wood. The lights flipped on. Footsteps approached. What was he doing? My thighs started shuddering.

  Leave, I thought. Go away. Now.

  How long had I been away from the keyboard? After ninety seconds the computer reverted to nonprivileged mode. . . . If Len didn’t get out of here soon, I would be locked out of the system for ten minutes. And I hadn’t sent the e-mail file.

  Noise above. He was standing over me, punching buttons on the phone.

  ‘‘Harry? Len. You see a gal leave by the back door? About thirty, light brown hair . . . no, she came in without a visitor’s badge, was snooping around Junior’s office. She ain’t here now.’’

  I willed him not to walk around the desk.

  ‘‘Yeah, I’ll meet you by the loading dock.’’ He left without closing the door.

  I lowered myself to the floor. Scooted out, saw the screen still active. Staying crouched, I reached up to the keyboard and hit send.

  No time to stick around. I hoped this would get the ball rolling with Agent Van Heusen.

  I quit the browser program, ready to dash, and a new window popped open on the screen. It was labeled Mistryss Cam. It was a view from a Webcam. In grainy black-and -white, it showed a desk, and behind it picture windows opening onto a Spanish-style courtyard and driveway.

  It was a view of Kenny Rudenski’s study at home. Why had it unexpectedly appeared of its own volition?

  A message appeared on-screen: Front Door.

  I stared at the screen. Outside Kenny’s picture windows, somebody was at his door. I saw a Toyota pickup on the driveway, bright in the evening sun.

  Adam, get out of there.

  I heard the keys coming back.

  I rushed to the door. The only thing to do now was to get out ahead of him. I zipped into the hall and didn’t look back.

  Len’s voice. ‘‘Hey. Hey, you—’’

  I kept going through the security door into the lobby. Behind me the keys rang like wind chimes. I hustled outside and ran toward my car. Squealing out of the parking lot, I checked the rearview mirror and saw the guard writing down my license plate number.

  Screw it. I was in all the way now.

  I had to get to Kenny’s house. Kenny was in bed with i-heist, and if Adam confronted him, he was going to get hurt. Badly. I sped through Goleta, onto the freeway, and toward the elegant houses of Kenny’s foothills neighborhood. After twenty minutes, my hands tightened on the wheel. I braked around the switchback. Mistryss was golden in the sunset, with the mountains rising beyond.

  Adam’s truck was gone.

  I slowed, about to turn into the drive. But the Mistryss Cam system alerted Kenny that he had visitors. It showed up on his screen at the office—what about other screens? Perhaps on a laptop he kept elsewhere? I didn’t want him to know I was here. I idled on the road. And lookie there, the garage doo
r was up, and the Porsche was gone.

  In all the way. Why not do a water ballet with fountains and an orchestra?

  I turned the Explorer around and drove back downhill until I found a turnout, and a footpath that ran up the ravine behind Kenny’s house. I parked and jogged up the path toward Mistryss. After a while I angled up the side of the ravine, climbing a slope so steep I had to lean forward against the hillside, holding on to handfuls of tall grass to pull myself up. I was panting when I got to the top. I crouched behind a tree near the lip of the hill and peered across Kenny’s lawn.

  I saw no motion in the house, just lights on in the kitchen. I jogged across the lawn, past the pool, to the kitchen door. It was unlocked.

  Considering the extent of Kenny’s security system, I thought he had either run out on a quick errand or an emergency. Otherwise he wouldn’t have left the house unlocked. If it was an errand, he’d be back soon.

  I crept into the kitchen, grabbing a dish towel off the counter, and headed on down the hall until I found Kenny’s study. I draped the dish towel over the Webcam. Sliding the blinds shut, I sat down and turned to his computer.

  Search. Segue.

  Two items. I tried the first and the computer connected to an auction site. I felt as if a bug were crawling up my spine.

  This wasn’t an ordinary auction site. It was a morbid corner of the Net, specializing in the souvenirs of death. Bids, time left in the auction . . . it had all the earmarks of a legitimate site, except that the items being bid on were mementos from celebrity deaths. The movie star found drowned in his pool. The football player who took the curve too fast. The R & B singer whose plane crashed in a hailstorm. It was macabre.

  On-screen, a section called Bid Tracker automatically kept pace with Kenny’s bids. My stomach shrank when I read it.

  Yazminh/personal effects from crash site . . . $47,500 Bobby Kleig/Ferrari brake disk . . . $29,650 Alaska Air/misc . . . $74,900

  These were more than celebrity mementos. They were death relics, pieces left from the violent accidents that killed the singer, and the quarterback, and the passengers and crew of the Alaska Airlines jet that plunged into the sea off Point Mugu, fifty miles down the coast.

  Kenny was a ghoul.

  The walls around me seemed to shiver. The air felt like cold breath on my neck. I thought of him kneeling next to Yvette Vasquez’s grave, pressing his fingers along her name in the stone. I thought of the way he looked at Jesse, and how his fingers worked when he stared at the wheelchair, and his certainty that disability was my turn-on. I thought of the way he grabbed me at the cemetery, and my skin wanted to shrivel. My head was thumping.

  But what did all of this have to do with i-heist? The auction program had opened when I searched for Segue. Segue was a shell corporation, set up to run i-heist’s money through the high-tech markets . . . it was a laundering facility. And some of that money was running out again from Segue to this freakish online auction outfit.

  Was i-heist compensating Kenny for his services by helping him buy crash relics? That was their hold on him. Willing? He was an eager partner.

  I left the auction program. I searched again, for a name that should have been obvious from the start. Jesse Blackburn.

  The screen lit up with search hits. My mouth felt like cotton.

  Jesse’s life spread out on the screen before me: his financial records, mortgage balance, credit report. His medical records from the hit-and-run. His chart from the ER, admission records at the Rehabilitation Institute, even a psychological evaluation. Patient is 24-year-old male, T-10 incomplete para . . . survivor’s guilt and adjustment issues . . . possible clinical depression; coping mechanisms include sarcasm . . .

  There was enough information to rob him or manipulate him for years to come.

  Okay, in all the way. New search. Evan Delaney.

  I felt as brittle as cracked porcelain. Here were my own financial records. Here were credit card purchases and Web sites I visited from my home computer. I felt ill, clicking through the list. Here was an icon labeled D Cam. Delaney camera? I hit View.

  I leaned toward the screen and gasped.

  On the monitor were split-screen pictures of my house. Live. One feed looked out at my living room. Another, slightly warped, peered down on my bed. It had to be a fiber-optic camera hidden in the smoke detector in my bedroom. A third peered from above the medicine cabinet in my bathroom. Anger and understanding crawled through me. Kenny had set this up to watch me in the shower, and in bed.

  I remembered his leering face. Corporate America is Big Brother. Telling me he’d like to see me when I was really turned on. How did he install these things? When?

  I hunched, staring at the screen, clenching my jaw. ‘‘Oh, my God.’’

  The bedroom camera was focused on my grandmother’s patchwork quilt. It was moving.

  Writhing, in fact. Rhythmically. I leaned closer and heard sound. I heard the silky voice of Marvin Gaye— singing ‘‘Let’s Get It On.’’ I gaped at the humping quilt. Marvin Gaye, that was Jesse’s album. My head was pounding. He couldn’t; he wouldn’t. I squinted at the screen. Please, no, don’t let it be Harley, no—

  The quilt quivered and someone gave a little shriek. The blanket flew backward. A woman reared up onto her haunches. She arched her back and her breasts swelled into view, warping before the tiny fiber-optic camera.

  She shouted, ‘‘That’s it, baby. Buck me.’’

  I said, ‘‘Tater, you bitch.’’

  ‘‘I’m a broncobuster. Give it to me, you great big stallion.’’

  She wore a bandanna neckerchief and a pair of six-shooters. Nothing else. It was the Billy the Kid outfit. She raised an arm in the air like a rodeo cowboy hanging on for those eight seconds out of the chute.

  ‘‘Buck me, big man. Taylor loves your bucking!’’

  A grunt. I moved my eyes from the spectacle of Taylor’s gyrating breasts to the man pinned beneath her, laboring for breath. He was roped and tied to the bedposts, a sight that gave me a bizarre flush of relief. It couldn’t be Jesse, because he would never submit to bondage, would never let his arms be tied. No, it had to be Ed Eugene, and oh, lord, why couldn’t I tear my eyes away from this?

  ‘‘Oh. Oh . . .’’ Taylor whooped, bouncing on the saddlehorn, so to speak. . . .

  The man panted with effort. ‘‘Ride ’em, cowgirl. Dig in those spurs. Dale’s been a baaad horsey.’’

  My jaw dropped. It was Special Agent Dale Van Heusen, FBI. The man who wouldn’t bend his knees for fear of wrecking the crease in his trousers.

  Taylor rose up and pounded down again. ‘‘Red Rover, Red Rover, you are a naughty boy, let Taylor come over—’’

  Red Rover . . . Dale—Agent Van Heusen—bucked beneath her. And then . . .

  He whinnied.

  I put my hand over my mouth. Then over my eyes. Then I grabbed the computer mouse and swirled it around the screen, pointing and clicking, hoping to do . . . what? My God, how could I stop this?

  ‘‘That’s it, baby. That’s it. Don’t make me draw my six-shooters.’’

  And I heard a sound I recognized. It was a doorbell. My doorbell.

  On-screen, Taylor jerked upright. ‘‘Shh.’’

  But Dale was . . . in the moment.

  ‘‘Hitting . . . the finish line,’’ he wheezed. ‘‘Taylor, don’t stop—’’

  She slammed a hand over his mouth. The doorbell rang again. A moment later I heard pounding on my front door.

  A man called faintly, ‘‘Taylor? Open up.’’

  Wham, the quilt went sailing, and Taylor flew off of Van Heusen as though she’d been bucked right in the butt.

  Dale said, ‘‘What’s wrong?’’

  Taylor was running around the bedroom, grabbing her clothes. ‘‘It’s Ed Eugene.’’

  ‘‘Your husband?’’

  The pounding continued at the front door. ‘‘Taylor, I know you’re in there.’’

  Van Heusen said, ‘‘What’
s he doing here?’’

  ‘‘Fixing to kill you, if I don’t get out there.’’ She unbuckled her holster and threw it in the corner.

  The front door rattled. ‘‘Woman, get your ass out here.’’

  Van Heusen pulled against his restraints. ‘‘Untie me.’’

  ‘‘Quiet.’’ She pulled on her shirt and wriggled into panties and her skirt.

  ‘‘Let me loose.’’

  ‘‘Will you hush? If he finds you, he’ll go off.’’

  Van Heusen said, ‘‘Oh, God, get my gun out of your holster. It’s loaded—’’

  Taylor exhaled, a sound of disgust, and knelt on the bed.

  Ed Eugene was roaring. ‘‘Taylor!’’

  She dashed from the room, slamming the bedroom door behind her. I heard Ed Eugene shouting at her. I had to get over there before he killed Van Heusen. I saw the look in the FBI agent’s eyes: desperation. Taylor had left him tied to the bed, with a horse bit jammed in his mouth.

  The sound of an engine brought me back to Kenny’s house. I peeked out through the blinds and saw Mari Diamond’s white Jaguar parked in the driveway. She and Kenny and her dogs were climbing out.

  Adam walked toward his front door, keys in hand. He racked his brain. Kenny Rudenski wasn’t home—where else could the bastard be? Inside, the phone started ringing. He rattled the keys into the lock, went in. The answering machine picked up.

  A woman’s voice came on. ‘‘Dr. Sandoval, we’ve never spoken, but I know you’ve had a truckload of shit dumped on you. I want to tell you it’s gotten too heavy, and—’’

  He grabbed the phone. ‘‘Who is this?’’

  ‘‘Never mind. I’m calling to say I’m done with this game.’’

  ‘‘Is this’’—the name, her name—‘‘Cherry Lopez?’’

  ‘‘It doesn’t matter. The autopsy photos were too much. I’m out.’’

  ‘‘You’re working with Brand, aren’t you? I know it.’’

  ‘‘Not anymore. Not since he ripped us off. That’s why I’m calling you. To say he can have whatever’s coming to him. He is one sick fuck.’’