by Dale Mayer
When the coffee was done dripping, she poured herself a cup, walked over to the small balcony and stepped outside. The cool morning air brushed along her hair and her bare legs. She realized she hadn’t even gotten fully dressed. She was missing her pants and Oxford shirt, but she really didn’t want to get dressed again for work so soon. But the T-shirt she wore covered her butt. Probably. Matter of fact, maybe it didn’t. She stepped back inside.
Taylor wouldn’t be done for at least another ten minutes. She just needed a few minutes of peace and would have liked to stay outside longer, but she got some fresh air to start her day. Yet she was modest and had considered other people could see her outside on the balcony. She took several deep breaths as she returned to the kitchen, put her coffee cup on the kitchen table and did several stretches. That accomplished, she picked up her cup and headed to her bedroom, where she finished dressing. When she came back out, Taylor was stepping from his bedroom as well.
He glanced at her, noting she was fully dressed and said, “I couldn’t believe it when I saw you standing there just in a T-shirt. What if that guy had come back?”
She shot him a look. “I trusted you wouldn’t let him get anywhere near me,” she said calmly.
He let out his breath with a hard sigh. Then he gave a clipped nod. “Good,” he said, “but don’t ever take a chance like that again, please. As much as I may enjoy seeing those legs peeking out from under that T-shirt, I really don’t think you should be flaunting that sexuality.”
“It wasn’t even five-fifteen in the morning,” she said. “I highly doubt anybody was out and around.”
“Just that one guy to kill us,” he said drily.
“I took a photo of my door with your phone,” she said. “He left something in the doorknob, and the door itself is actually open.”
“You should have told me that earlier. He could have come back and gotten rid of the evidence.” Taylor opened the door and stepped out, with her trailing right behind him with her mug.
“Sorry.”
He waved away her apology and stepped in front of her apartment door and studied it. Then he pulled out his phone and called Detective Butler, putting the phone on Speaker so she could hear as well. When a sleepy voice answered, Taylor said, “Hey, you had an intruder at Midge’s apartment. He jammed the lock getting in, and the door is ajar. What I don’t know is if he was leaving or if he was arriving.”
“He was arriving,” Midge said. “Something woke me, like banging noises. I wasn’t sure what. I thought I heard something else soon afterward. And that’s when I saw him there through the peephole. Well, I’d assumed he’d just arrived but …”
He nodded at her.
The detective said, “Don’t touch anything. I won’t be there for at least an hour, but I’ll send somebody to stand guard.”
“Good enough. I’ll stay here until the guard arrives,” Taylor said, ending the call, as he motioned for her to step back into his place. Taylor stood with one foot in his apartment and the other in the hallway. “Can you tell me exactly what you heard?”
She shrugged. “Just what I said. Something woke me—banging noises, I think. Then I thought I heard more noises, some scratching or scraping. I don’t know really, just sounds of somebody doing something. Living on base, we all respect everyone else’s downtime and how we have shifts of people who work around-the-clock. Nobody should be making too much noise.”
Taylor frowned, concentrating. “And, if he was trying to get in, there shouldn’t have been any sounds besides whatever tool he was using to break the lock.”
“But, if he had a key,” she said, “why would he need to break it off in the lock?”
“I don’t know, and I’m not sure if he left behind a key or if it’s something else he made.”
“This is so confusing,” she said.
“It could also be a different person from our murderer of yesterday,” Taylor suggested.
“No! There can’t be two people after me.”
“It must be at least two, to count the guy breaking in this morning and his driver. Could be three different people if the murderer is not this guy or his driver. But why would they be after you?” he asked with interest in his voice.
“No reason that I can figure out.” She carefully put her cup on the coffee table and curled up in the corner of the couch, pulling her feet up close to her bum and hugging her knees. “None of this makes any sense.”
“Maybe it does once we know more,” he said. “Let the cops come. I didn’t pull that out of the doorknob in case he left behind any fingerprints to be found.”
She pointed to his phone and reminded him of the photos she took. He nodded and, looking at them, said, “It’s possible it’s a key broken off in the lock. It’s possible they made a copy and left the other key downstairs with the super, thinking the cops wouldn’t know why the couple was killed.”
“I never even thought about that,” she said. “It’s a pretty funny-looking key though.”
“Funny-looking keys are all over the place. Particularly if they’re making the keys themselves or if they have lock-picking equipment.”
She nodded. “Whatever. That’s all for the cops to sort out. Do you think they’ll go inside and figure out what they might have been after?”
“They will eventually,” he said, “but it certainly won’t be at the moment. They’ll send somebody to keep watch and after that there’ll be nothing for a while.”
“You woke up the detective, didn’t you?”
He nodded.
“He also could have been working late on the case, so we shouldn’t judge.”
He chuckled. “Hell, no need to judge. It’s not even six yet.”
She sighed and said, “It feels like I’ve been awake for hours.”
Just when he reached for his cup of coffee, his phone rang, and he said, “It’s Mason.”
She listened to the conversation, at least Taylor’s side, since he didn’t put it on Speaker. She thought that was odd at first, but Mason was probably Taylor’s boss, so why would he let her hear their conversation? She had heard tales about Mason, but she had figured they were all tall tales. Having learned more about Taylor, she wondered about that now.
As the conversation evolved, she realized they were talking about the breach at her office. She leaned forward, trying to listen. Taylor held up a hand, telling her just to wait.
When he finally hung up, he said, “It looks like the hacker went for access to the digital staff records. They didn’t seem to be all that good at it in the sense that their trail was easily followed. Yet maybe that’s what they intended. It looks like they opened over fifty files, and we don’t know which of those were important. A forensics team is working through the files to see if anything in there might connect us to the murders.”
She nodded. “And, by opening fifty, if they only wanted one, that muddies the water nicely.”
“Exactly. It doesn’t look like they altered anything necessarily, but they were all saved with changes.”
“What that means is, they had to have altered something,” she said.
“Yeah, or they added a space or a single character, only to confuse the issue.”
“I could see it if they wanted to add something or to take away something from a specific file,” she said. “But this is still a bizarre way to do it. Our records are supposed to be up to date, but honestly I can tell you that they’re not.”
*
“Of course I don’t want to hear that,” Taylor said with a laugh, smiling down at her. “Who would?”
She shrugged. “We do our best, but nothing gets done 100 percent in any one day at work. You know that.”
“And then, of course, that brings us back to Jenny,” he said, thinking about the murders. “She would have had access when she was still working there. She could have made all kinds of changes if she had wanted to alter the files.”
Midge nodded. “She could have, yes. It’s not like any ti
me we make a change to a file that an alert goes out. Yet making changes is what we’re doing. We are changing and updating files. I just finished working on several deceased members. Moving them from active to our deceased folder,” she said. “So it’s not as if Jenny editing a file would bring up any alert. We all have so much work to do, and we’re always several days behind.”
“So, say Jenny had made changes in the past, but now that she’s fired, and something has gone down, she wanted to go in and undo those changes. Could she?”
“If she still worked there, she certainly could,” Midge said slowly. “And I can’t understand under what circumstance that would make any sense. At least not any legal circumstances.”
“But three murders already is a hell of a long way from being legal,” he said, “so obviously something is going on. I just wish I could figure out what.”
“But she no longer has access.”
“Unless she hacked in.”
“Strange,” Midge said. “I don’t even know how hard it would be to hack in.”
“Unfortunately it can happen,” Taylor said. “Mason’s wife, Tesla, does IT work for the government. Mostly on defense contracts, but she certainly understands hackers.”
“But she’s probably not part of this investigation, right?”
“Not likely. She’s considered too valuable to waste her time on something like a mere hack into staff records,” he said in a dry tone.
She smiled and nodded. “So you do have friends in high places. Or well-placed, was it?”
“Yeah, that was it.” He chuckled, oddly happy she had remembered. “But I also work with Mason. We’re both in the same unit.”
“Oh.” She frowned, her mind sorting through the names. “That makes you—you’re a SEAL, aren’t you?”
He raised an eyebrow and stared at her. How did she know? He was sure he hadn’t told her.
She shrugged. “Remember? I deal with files all day long.”
“My name just came up?”
“No,” she said. “Not yours. Mason’s. But I can’t remember what it was all about.”
He frowned, wondering why she’d need to go into Mason’s file.
“Ah, I know what it was,” she said with a smile.
“What?” he asked curiously.
She shook her head. “I can’t tell you. Or at least not a whole lot of it. His clearance was upgraded. So his file was essentially put away, so other people can’t see parts of it.”
He chuckled. “Good for him. Mason’s a good guy. Hell, we all are. A lot of us bust our asses every day of the year to keep America safe. Yet it always seems that a lot of the damage from sabotage and terrorism comes from our home soil. Go figure.”
“You’re not supposed to work on home soil, are you?”
“Not necessarily,” he said. “Generally we deal with international strife and conflict. But that doesn’t mean, if somebody brings the fight to me, that I won’t fight back,” he said.
She nodded. “That sounds like you.”
“That sounds like all of us, including and especially Mason. He’s even up for promotion,” he said.
“I know. That’s partly why I was changing the files,” she said with a smirk.
He grinned at her, and then his smile widened as he realized what she was saying. “Perfect,” he said. “I don’t know anybody who deserves it more.”
“But that doesn’t help us with our current problem,” she said.
“Nope, it doesn’t. Are you going into work today?”
Her face fell. “What I’d like is to get back into my apartment so I can at least get some clothing.”
“We can arrange that whenever Butler arrives. Because you’ll probably have to go over there and see if anything else was damaged.”
“I wasn’t allowed in the first time,” she said.
“No, that’s not true,” he said. “You were allowed in for a quick look, but you couldn’t sort through anything because it was an active crime scene. Now that it’s been dealt with and hopefully forensics is done—”
“Or they’re on their way back,” she added, “and then they’ll keep me out of my own place for yet another day.”
“You need clothes,” he said. “We’ll arrange to get some of your things.”
“Good. And hopefully my phone too. I’m really missing my phone. I don’t know how many times I’ve reached for it.” She smiled. “Oh, and, to answer your question about work, I guess I should go in.”
“It would be helpful if you did,” he said thoughtfully. “And, while you’re at it, think about the people who work there and about those who worked there in the past. And the fact that somebody accessed fifty files.”
She nodded slowly. “Now you’re asking me to spy on my coworkers?”
“Well, if a disgruntled past employee didn’t have anything to do with this,” he said, “what do you think about a disgruntled current employee having something to do with it?”
She looked at him for a moment, then groaned. “Oh, fine. I’ll go spy on my coworkers.”
He laughed. “Good girl.”
Chapter 7
When Midge walked into work well over an hour late—after stopping at the police station at Detective Butler’s request and being asked another zillion questions—she felt like her insides were ragged. Although she wanted to unravel, something inside her locked it all down and tried to ignore the fact her life was falling to pieces.
At least Taylor had managed to get her phone back. Now she felt a little less like she was missing a part of herself.
When she stepped inside the office, she found complete chaos—file folders stacked on the four desks, the phones ringing incessantly, nobody here but her it seemed. She stood inside the door, bathed in an “I don’t want to be here” feeling.
“There you are,” her boss, Mr. Shorts, said, looking a little relieved. “We really need you now.”
She walked toward him, certainly not running, but she didn’t dawdle either. “What’s the problem?” she asked.
“Everything,” he snapped. “Two other people didn’t show up for work today.”
Her eyebrows shot up. “Why not?”
“I have no idea,” he roared. “How am I supposed to keep this department running if all the staff is out?”
“If people get sick, they get sick,” she said in exasperation. “Not a lot they can do about it.”
“Then why didn’t they call me and explain at least?” he shouted. He stopped, running his hands through his hair, leaving it sticking straight up, and seemed to pull himself back into control. “Look. I’m sorry. It’s been pretty hellish. I really got raked over the coals this morning for the breach as it is.”
“If it’s an IT breach, it’s hardly your fault,” she said.
“They’re not sure it was. Apparently the door was unlocked yesterday morning.”
“That’s not possible,” she said, turning to look. “These are locked doors.”
“And, therefore, they’re also unlocked doors,” he said. “It’s not like we’re keeping any top state secrets here. We don’t have five-star security. Sure, we have security, but nobody really expects anybody to come into the filing room,” he said with a disparaging tone.
He’d referred to the department like that a few times before. And she understood in a way because he’d tried to be promoted up and out but had never made it. Now he knew he was stuck here for life, and it was definitely not what he wanted. She walked over to her desk, dropped her purse into a file cabinet and hung her jacket on the back of her chair. “So, do we still have somebody answering the phones?”
He gave her a hard glare. “Yeah. Me.”
She stared at the phone console and could see all the flashing lights, which was what had prompted the question in the first place. “Can I presume all those are people on hold?”
He nodded and said with a wicked smile, “But you’re here now, thank God. I’ll put on a fresh pot of coffee.”
She wanted coffee herself, so she would hardly argue with him. She went through the phone calls and took messages, telling people she’d get back to them as soon as she could. Then she phoned both Bart and Terri to see if they were coming in. Neither answered their phones.
Not liking that one bit, she sent a text to Taylor, letting him know two more people in the department hadn’t shown up, including their names and phone numbers. She was sure it was probably a breach of confidentiality, but, considering everything else going on, she didn’t know where to draw that line just now. Then she logged on to her computer and changed her password.
With that done, she moved on to her emails and groaned to see so many messages had piled up. Part of her job in staff records involved responding to credit checks for anybody attempting to get credit cards, car loans, mortgages, etc. Confirmation of employment, pay scale, etc. And then personnel called or emailed about their plans and benefits, and the list went on.
And that was just people inquiring. A massive amount of updating was always needed to the files as well. It would be a very busy day. When her boss came back out again, he carried two coffee cups. He placed one on her desk and said, “I know I didn’t say anything earlier, but thank you very much for coming in today.”
She nodded and didn’t answer him.
“Did you go to the police?”
“Talked to them yesterday, last night and again this morning,” she said shortly.
When he hesitated, she looked up and said, “You really don’t want to know.”
He struggled, trying to figure out if he did or not, and finally he nodded and said, “You’re right. I probably don’t. I’ll be in my office, if anybody needs me.”
Then he walked down the hall. When she heard his office door go click, she sat back and sighed. He meant well, and he probably did have a lot of stuff to do in his office, but he rarely came out and helped them when they needed it. They were always expected to do their job regardless. But now it was down to just her, and that meant it would be a shitty day.
When she looked up again, she saw the main entrance door opening yet again. She frowned at the large man shutting the door, his back to her. And then he turned, and she saw his profile. “Good morning, Taylor,” she said. “What are you doing here?”
