Show Me the Money

by Connie Shelton

  Snapchat—same scenario. Twitter, the same, although she rarely added pictures there. Still, it was worth the time to check. She rarely posted anything on Facebook, but wasn’t sure if the others did. She browsed through all of their posts and saw that both Gracie and Sandy had shared the same photo. She shot a quick text off to each, letting them know to delete it.

  Hopefully, the social media links were now gone. She was fairly certain Cody had not yet made the connection between her and Pen and Sandy, but from what Sandy had told her, Cody knew their faces. It wouldn’t take much for him to add it up. They would need to be extra careful from here on, or they would run the risk he’d simply vanish.

  Her coffee mug was empty. She refilled it and carried the steaming brew to her new desk. Two computers were set up now—her personal one, which she still used for her own banking and social accounts. She needed to be sure her online presence seemed as normal as possible, in case the police should confiscate and examine it.

  The second machine was the loaner from Sandy, the one she was using for all things related to tracking Cody. Once they had nailed him, she would run the hard drive through a program that would triple-delete everything on it.

  And there was the matter of the other hard drive, the external one she’d used to copy everything from her B-G computer. Mary still had it, had assured Amber just last night that it was in her gym bag, which rarely left her sight unless it was locked away. Amber prayed that was true; she had to trust that Mary would never let her down.

  Amber leaned back in her chair, gently swiveling it slightly from side to side as she tried to decide what she could do now to work on solving this thing. Pen and Sandy had done their part, trekking around Europe. Now on the plane heading home, they couldn’t do anything. Mary was guarding the hard drive. She’d offered to kick Cody’s ass if they ever caught up with him, but this was all she could do for now. And Gracie—who could ask for better emotional support than Gracie had offered by bringing her home from jail and staying that one night with her? Right now, Amber felt it was up to her to come up with the answers, and her strength was right here in front of her. Computers.

  She slid the chair closer and booted up the borrowed laptop. She couldn’t help thinking that something tied back to Cody’s brief internship at Omni. Why would he have bothered to put his profile up on their website, unless he wanted it to be seen? Maybe there was something about his job there, something high-level which would bolster his resume.

  She started with the corporate website and learned who their web developer was. A couple of false leads, but eventually she was into the back channels she needed. Internal corporate memos began flooding onto her screen.

  “Whoa,” she said to the plant on her desk. “Lots of stuff here.”

  She paused the endless string of messages, long enough to figure out how to search for specific words. Entering Cody Brennan’s name narrowed the search to practically nothing. There was one memo when he was hired, a few during his limited time there, and a couple more when he’d apparently just ghosted the job. After several days without an appearance in the office, according to a manager, they’d terminated his internship and sent a notice off to the university to inform them.

  That there was no reply from that particular institution didn’t especially surprise Amber. The Ladies had already determined that Cody had never attended classes there.

  She went back to the long list of interdepartmental memos, debating what search terms to use next, when a familiar phrase caught her eye. Misappropriation of Funds. It was fancy-speak for embezzlement, and she knew this because the cop and her attorney had bandied it about a little when Amber was being questioned.

  Oh-ho. She searched that term among the memos and found it no less than sixty-three times. Top management and HR were discussing the fact that an internal audit had revealed money was missing. A chill went straight through her.

  Oh shit. I cannot be caught with this information about Omni in my possession. She quickly backed out and deleted the entire browsing history.

  Her mind whirled. What did this mean?

  Whatever it meant, it couldn’t be good. She called Gracie. “We need to meet.”

  They decided the best way to get the whole team together would be for Amber, Gracie and Mary to be at the airport tonight to meet Pen and Sandy’s flight.

  “I’ll call Mary. I need to get that external drive back from her,” Amber said.

  Itching to do more before this evening, Amber hid the borrowed computer, shut down her own, and headed down to the parking garage. She had research to do, research that would be better not showing up on any computer in her own home.

  Chapter 47

  Pen and Sandy walked through the frosted glass doors that deposited them out of the realm of international travel and into the everyday world of the bustling Phoenix airport. They seemed both surprised and delighted at the sight of their three friends.

  “I know you thought I’d be picking you up by myself,” Gracie said, offering to take the handle of Pen’s suitcase. “But we’ve had some exciting news.”

  “Well, I don’t know about exciting …” Amber said.

  “Somewhat juicy, anyway,” Mary added.

  Sandy seemed somewhat weary from the flight, but her blue eyes brightened at the idea of juicy news. “Tell us.”

  They walked through the terminal, making their way via Sky Train to the parking garage where Gracie’s minivan waited.

  “It’s Amber’s to tell,” Gracie said, stowing the bags in the back and inviting everyone to find seats.

  “Okay, bottom line is that Cody’s former employer got embezzled,” Amber said, her face animated.

  Amazed expressions all around. “And you’ve proved he did it,” Mary said.

  “Well, not really. I got into a series of internal memos about it, and the dates lined up with when he worked there. He quit without notice, just didn’t show up one day, and it was right about the time the money disappeared.”

  “Do we want to know how you got hold of internal memos at a company on the east coast?” Mary asked, handing over the B-G hard drive.

  “No. You do not.” Amber gave a significant glance toward Sandy. “I deleted my entire browsing history the moment I got that far.”

  “Thank goodness,” Pen said, from the front passenger seat.

  “I spent the afternoon at the library, using public computers, to look up news stories about the Omni case. Unfortunately, very little was said—almost exactly like what happened to me at B-G.”

  “Because big corporations don’t want their vulnerabilities broadcast to the world,” Sandy said.

  “Do you think Cody Brennan was behind both of these?” Mary asked.

  “It seems like something that would have been easy for him,” Amber told them. “If he was successful taking money from Omni, he might have figured out how to get into the system at B-G …”

  “Could you have done it?” Pen asked. “Once you were far enough into Omni’s company records, could you have gotten into their banking accounts?”

  “I hate to admit this, but yes. Easily.”

  “So, Cody could have done the same thing.”

  “He’s every bit as good with computers as I am.”

  Gracie steered the van up Pen’s hillside driveway and pulled into the circular loop at her front door. Pen turned in her seat to face those in the rear. “Be extremely careful, my girl. You cannot let yourself be drawn into his misdeeds.”

  Amber nodded.

  “At this point we do not know who we’re dealing with or who is behind him. A young man such as this Cody Brennan may only be the fingerprints on the keyboard, so to speak, and there could be a much darker mastermind behind him.”

  Amber looked solemn. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “We all must keep it in our minds.” Pen walked to the back of the van and took her suitcase. “Good night, all.”

  Gracie got into the driver’s seat and started the van, hea
ding back down the hill. “Mary and I should take any further surveillance,” she said. “He’ll know the rest of you.”

  “I wish we knew where to surveil him,” Sandy told them. “We had leads as long as we knew the banks where he had moved the money, but that has all changed. At the last bank we visited in Scotland we were told, on the down low, that he’d moved a lot of cash and the entire account balance into a multitude of other accounts. At this point we don’t know whether he’s still somewhere in Scotland, on continental Europe, or even back here in the US.”

  “I still have a connection,” Amber said. “It’s skimpy, though. He has texted me a few times.” She leaned back in her seat with a huge sigh. “I don’t know … It just really is starting to feel hopeless.”

  Gracie spoke up. “For now, just use the texts as a way to string him along. Keep flirting, make him believe you’re interested. Try a video chat like Facetime or something—maybe you’ll be able to spot some clues in his surroundings.”

  Amber nodded silently. “That’s a good idea, Gracie. But we don’t even know for sure who he is. None of our searches for Cody Brennan have turned up a real person with a history. There’s just the fake job, the probably fake social media.”

  “We’ll keep working on that,” Sandy said, laying a gentle hand on Amber’s arm.

  “I’d like to box his pretty little face,” Mary said, punching at the air and hoping to lighten the mood.

  “You’re my next stop, Amber,” Gracie said. “Unless you want to keep riding along for the company? You can always come home with me and spend the night if you’d like.”

  But Amber’s eyes had taken on a new spark. “No—home is fine. I just got an idea.”

  Chapter 48

  Cody sat at Pop’s breakfast table, the same metal and Formica thing that had sat in the very same spot since he could remember. If he were to look under the edge, he’d bet that wads of his old bubblegum would be stuck there. He resisted reaching underneath now to check. Yuck.

  Instead, he scrolled through the text messages from Amber. It would be after ten p.m. in Phoenix now, and he remembered she told him in Paris that she put her notifications on hold at night. Otherwise, she’d never get any rest.

  “What’s that?” Woody’s voice was right behind him.

  Cody jumped and nearly dropped the phone. He tried to hide the screen but the old man was quick, snatching it from his hand.

  “Jeez, boy. You still hung up on this?”

  Think fast. “Pop, I’m playing her along to see what’s going on back there. She got arrested for taking the money.”

  “Exactly as we planned.” Woody set the phone down on the table, a little too hard. “That’s what we wanted. We get the cash; she takes the blame.”

  He saw the regretful look cross his son’s face.

  “Hey! Don’t you start that!” Woody’s expression grew dark, his temper rising. “You know how this thing works. You pick the target who’s best for your purpose. This Amber chick is computer smart and she’s cute. You played up to that, appealed to her vanity. But you don’t get involved. Use ’em and skip out.”

  He shook his finger, and Cody felt every old lecture from his childhood roaring in his ears.

  “You want a woman in your life—fine. Get yourself a nice girl from the neighborhood, one that’ll cook and clean and give you some kids, but she don’t ask questions and she don’t get a share of what we earn.”

  Earn? When we steal everything we have? “Oh, like you did with Ma, huh?”

  Woody drew his arm back and Cody squeezed his eyes shut, waiting to get belted across the mouth. But it didn’t come. He peered through his lashes and saw his dad across the room, staring out the dark window above the sink.

  Cody stood up and pulled his backpack from the hook near the back door. “Here’s your damn checkbook,” he said, pulling out a packet of starter checks. “I’m outta here.”

  He stomped down the wooden steps to the sidewalk and took off into the night, not looking back. His mind whirled. As a kid he’d been oblivious to what his dad did, only that Ma and Pop fought a lot. By his teens, Ma had long since left the house. He got birthday cards from an address he recognized as his aunt Sally’s house in Rochester. Was Ma really sending the cards, or did Sally just take pity on a kid? He never checked and he never knew.

  Pop took it for granted that his quiet son who’d rather sit in front of a computer than go to the racetrack would just love the life of the con man. And for awhile it was a heady feeling, watching digital numbers move across the screen and knowing that it was real money, moving from somebody’s account into one of theirs.

  Pop was right, though. He should have never let his feelings develop for Amber Zeckis. She was the girl he’d pick if he’d done what Pop said, choose someone to settle down with. Except Amber was way smart and way too savvy. She’d know, within weeks, what he and Pop were up to. Somehow, he knew it wouldn’t sit well.

  He reached the end of the block and turned toward the bus station. He could get the shuttle to the airport and be in Phoenix by dawn. Would he be welcomed back at the job he’d walked out on? He had no idea, but he knew he wanted to be in the same city with Amber.

  Chapter 49

  Punch his pretty face. Mary’s statement was the last thing Amber heard before Gracie dropped her off at her condo. Face. That was the answer.

  Within five minutes after unlocking her door, she was on the computer—the borrowed one. Facial recognition software was available, although the highly rated ones weren’t cheap. They were designed for retail stores and governments that needed to catch flickering shots and identify criminals. Her needs weren’t quite that tricky. She had good photos. The challenge would be to get a program that would interface with official databases. She needed his real name.

  It was nearing midnight when she found what she wanted. She did a gulp as she entered a credit card for the purchase, and then began the download to install the new software. Partway through she wondered if this would have been easier if she’d just turned over her pictures to the cops and let them do the searching. But it was a done deal now.

  Plus, she didn’t know what would turn up. Until she cleared her name, she had no way of knowing if the police wouldn’t just believe she and Cody were in this embezzlement thing together. Especially considering how happy she and Cody looked in these photos.

  While the software installed and the computer updated, she seriously considered, for the first time, exactly how she was going to match his picture to something that would officially identify him. She’d already searched for him on social media and found Cody Brennan to be exactly who he’d said he was. And that made sense if he were building a false identity to scam people.

  She needed the truth.

  She started with an online forum, a place where hackers hung out, a somewhat dark place she had only visited once. To get in she had created a fictitious user name—badkitty. Everyone else on the site was using similar pseudonyms, and she pictured them as those loser guys you saw in the movies, the ones with a man-cave in their mother’s basement. Badkitty had only remained on the forum fifteen minutes on that visit. Scary stuff was being discussed.

  But she knew it was where she could find a lead for what she needed now—a way to hack a government database.

  It was nearly two a.m. and the room was crowded. She watched silently for a half hour, getting a feel for the topics and the characters. She had a hard time thinking of drdoom or madmax4 or whatsurgame as real people. At last she spotted a thread where someone was asking about getting into the FBI. Another user posted a link.

  Seriously, guys? You think the FBI isn’t going to have a way to watch you?

  But then there was another, less threatening one. The Department of Motor Vehicles for the state of Texas. That could be useful—not Texas, in particular, but a driver’s license photo would be a great way to match a person’s picture. She hoped.

  Whatsurgame posted an answer. It seemed a little c
omplicated, but Amber read the lines of code and figured where she could insert the name of any other state. She copied the code and sat back.

  Now, in which state would Cody have likely gotten his driver’s license? He had claimed to work for Omni, a company in New York. But lots of New Yorkers didn’t drive—public transportation was everywhere. Still, it was likely he’d gotten a license at some point.

  She went into the computer’s operating system and inserted the code she’d copied, gave a few other commands, and eventually came to a website. It required a password. Great.

  Back on the forum, the other user had obviously run up against the same thing, and had come back to whatsurgame for the answer. He gave what he claimed was a generic default entry name. Amber took her chances with it. It worked.

  From there it was a matter of figuring out how to get her new software to search for matches with photos. Dawn was showing at the edges of her drapes by the time she’d set up the thing to run automatically. Far cry from the way they show it on TV, she thought, rubbing at her burning eyes.

  Pictures were flicking across the screen at a dizzying rate, and she decided it was time for a break. She stood and stretched, checked the screen again, and knew there would be time for a shower and clean clothes. When she emerged from the bathroom, the program was still merrily whizzing through photos. Okay, then, coffee.

  She toasted a bagel and spread it with cream cheese, walked around the condo as she ate it, drank a second cup of coffee, debated whether the floors needed vacuuming. Each time she looked in on the computer, the same thing was happening—nothing.