Executive Dirt: A Sedona O'Hala Mystery

by Maria Schneider

  “It does seem like it would be easier to take the code back out than kill him.”

  “He was pretty annoying. Maybe the Pig Latin code was the last straw for someone.” I shrugged. “I forgot to tell you that Cary took credit for hiring Joe today.” I gave him more details about the patent meeting.

  “Was Cary smart enough to put the Pig Latin back in there? Perhaps he thought he’d get a patent?”

  “The Pig Latin angle on a patent probably didn’t occur to him before today because it isn’t patentable. He’s grasping at straws and trying to make a house out of them.”

  “Was Joe dumb enough to think he’d make it on a patent?”

  “I doubt he even knew anything about patents. He’s more the type to have thought he could use Pig Latin as a secret code to impress people. Huntington seemed to think Joe was involved in moving or selling stolen contraband. Maybe Joe thought it was worth talking someone into putting the code back in so that he could use it to set up the deliveries of the stolen goods.”

  “Considering these burglaries have been impossible to trace, I suspect the culprits are not counting on something as obvious as Pig Latin,” Mark said.

  “Probably not, but Joe was very proud of using it. And none of this really gives us a clue as to why someone murdered Joe.”

  “I’d feel better about your safety if it has something to do with the burglaries and nothing to do with Borgot.”

  “Maybe. But if that is the case, it’s very odd that he was killed at Borgot.”

  “True.”

  When we were finished eating, Mark lifted the serger back onto the table. “Looks like you already have this machine ready for your first project,” he noted.

  “I threaded them both if that’s what you mean. I’m not sure the serger will actually run, but it has enough threads in there to make a pair of pants by itself.”

  Mark grinned. “You sound like you’d like that.”

  “Better it than me.” I showed him the inside. “Can you believe this mess? Every time a thread breaks the instructions say to unthread every single one of these and start completely over. It’s like a bad joke.” I sat down at the controls, which in this case meant sitting in front of the machine with my foot over the pedal. I turned it on. “It’s set to do a rolled hem, but I haven’t tried it yet.”

  I pulled a small piece of blue cloth from the bag of odds and ends Barb had sold me. She had called it broadcloth, but this was only a “remnant” about the size of a large scarf. “Okay.” I stared at the blue cloth. I looked at Mark.

  “Are you going to try it now?” His bemused challenge was just short of a laugh.

  “Why not?”

  He didn’t answer. Neither did the machine. It sat silently, not telling me whether to first roll and press the hem and then stick it under there or just put material in and see what happened. I’m big on the “try and see” method of learning. “Rolled hem plate. Yup. Got that. Threads. Check. Light, check. Machine set to thin material. If I did it right, anyway.” The machine was as ready as it was going to get.

  “Looks good to me,” Mark said.

  “What do I have to lose? Other than fingers. Maybe my whole arm if the thing sucks me under there. My hair could get caught. If this thing hurts me, I’m going to set all of your brother’s clothes on fire,” I muttered.

  Mark laughed, filling the room with a warmth only he could ignite.

  I placed the end under the guide, feeling more confident with Mark there to save me should the machine decide to attack.

  Gently, I pressed the foot switch. The serger was loud. Very loud. It sounded like a plane was taking off. If Mark was still laughing, I could no longer hear him above the roar of the engine in this thing.

  Determined to show no fear, I pressed harder on the foot pedal.

  The machine grabbed the material and yanked it from my fingers. Needles pounded, and snapping noises filled in around the plane engine. The spools of thread jerked hard. Vibrations shivered across the table like thunder booming after a lightning strike.

  “Aaaagh.” As I scooted back in self-defense, my foot slammed down on the pedal, sealing the fate of the scrap of blue material. The needle slashed into the cloth like a knife, cutting it to certain death with threads.

  As soon as I remembered to take my foot off the pedal, the roaring beast stopped. There was no smoke, but the thread running through the needle had snapped under the pressure.

  Mark peered over my shoulder. “It isn’t a very straight hem.”

  “No, but it’s definitely rolled.” I tugged on the cloth tentatively. “You might even say it’s bunched.” The machine had not fed the material under and then out the back end. It had added a lot of thread to it though. “I think this piece may be bound to the machine permanently.”

  “Yeah. Sewn tight. Open and sewn case.” Mark grinned down at me. “Mom sews. She can help you with this.”

  “What?” I blinked. “The one who made the flowers for me?”

  “I only have one mom, so yes.”

  He must have sensed my fear. “You have to meet her anyway because Steve hired her to infiltrate. Before you go undercover on this one, it might be a good idea if she tells you all the right things to ask and gives you a few sewing pointers. I’ve been wanting you to meet her anyway.”

  My heart stuttered. “You have?”

  “She’s been asking to meet you for even longer.” His eyes softened with affection, a rare expression for him.

  I fingered the ruined material. It wasn’t budging from the machine. “Maybe it’s best if we not mention the sewing right away. I’d rather make a good first impression.” And a second and third. And anything to do with sewing would make me look like an incompetent idiot.

  He laughed and pulled me to my feet for a mind-numbing kiss, the kind that drove my brain from “meet his mother” to “Who cares?”

  It was going to be a long time before my head cleared. Maybe never. Mark was firmly under my skin and lodging more securely in my heart every day. Meet his mother, indeed.

  Chapter 11

  Tuesday I delved deeper into the server where the code was stored. Each engineer checked in his own segment. Once compiled and built, we loaded the newest code onto the phones for testing. I’d been a “build master” in the past. There was a lot of recordkeeping involved with the job, and there was always at least one engineer who managed to either load the wrong code, not be ready, or not have his piece working.

  Being the build master was a lot like herding cats; the cats don’t care and no matter how many times you put a cat where you want it, it’s going to go elsewhere. The code, nevertheless, had to be assembled eventually. Like a giant puzzle, all the pieces had to be in the right place.

  I had access to all the directories. The modules had archaic names, but there was no indication that Joe had ever written any of the code. Most of it had been written by Roscoe or Kovid. There were a few earlier modules written by Kevin, but he quit after a few months to become a snake charmer. Some of the basic phone functionality had been purchased from another company. That code covered phone calls, camera and non-unique functions.

  Joe had probably had access to the modules, but would he have bothered to put the Pig Latin back in? And could it have been just for his ego?

  Kovid worked in a line of cubes on the other side of mine, two down from Doll Baby. She was on the phone when I walked past. She had been talking to the same person for at least an hour.

  “Hey, Kovid,” I said.

  He looked up.

  “Did you take the Pig Latin out yet? I need to request another phone or two for testing, but I want the latest stuff before I bother to load the code.”

  The thunderous frown on his face stopped me from inventing more random excuses that were merely a ploy to obtain information from him. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “He wants it left in.”

  “Joe?”

  The frown vanished, replaced by astonishment. “Joe? H
e’s dead.” Kovid waved his hand in dismissal of our expired co-worker.

  “Then who are you talking about? I thought Joe must have put the Pig Latin back in after you took it out.”

  Kovid sighed. “Cary demanded I leave it in.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.” I lowered my voice, but only because Cary’s cube wasn’t very far away. I was starting to wish it were in Siberia.

  Kovid nodded. “I did the Pig Latin thing as a joke after Cary hired Joe. It was easy, quick. The translation worked with almost no failures because Pig Latin is merely a matter of rearranging letters. It was stupid, but something management could play with while we started the real language translations.”

  “And Cary really thinks that Pig Latin is enough to earn him a spot on the patent?”

  Kovid shrugged. “I don’t know if the Pig Latin was really his idea or not, but he’s not letting us eliminate anything that might give him a chance.”

  “But it’s not even original! And there’s nothing inventive about it!”

  “Agreed. But if we take the code out, he can’t even claim an idea. He’s now swearing he hired Joe for his language expertise to prove the concept.” His forehead wrinkled. “Or something like that. But I’m pretty sure I did the Pig Latin after hearing Joe interrupt a bunch of us engineers with his stupid phrases. No one suggested it as a real language for the phone. Honestly, I was making fun of him, which might not have been nice, but instead of shutting him up, he thought it made him important!”

  I groaned. “And now all the phones are going to ship with a Pig Latin option? I thought being hired at a startup company was supposed to mean working on cutting edge technology!”

  Kovid rubbed his forehead as though trying to erase a headache. “Right now, it’s a hidden option.”

  “He at least let you hide it?”

  Kovid shook his head. “That’s the weird part. I took that code out, I know I did. But whoever put it back in added a special key sequence to select it. Once it’s turned on, the phone will translate and answer questions in both Pig Latin and English.

  “All the other languages are selected by typing in the first four to six letters of the language after a verbal request. For Spanish, you say ‘Spanish,’ and then you type ‘S p a n.’ But when the modules were dropped back in, the Pig Latin was coded behind the words Joe Black. And the entire name had to be typed in, no spaces.”

  Goosebumps ran across my arms. “Joe must have put that Pig Latin stuff back in after you took it out.”

  He looked away, staring blankly at his screen. “Who else would bother?”

  My mind scrolled to Cary, but that didn’t make sense. Cary couldn’t have been planning the Pig Latin thing from day one because no one in their right mind would think it was patentable. “You can tell that the Pig Latin stuff was put back in before Joe died, right?”

  “Of course he had to have done it while still alive!!” He swallowed hard. “When I saw that in there...It was like a bhoot, the ghost of Joe, was standing right next to me.” His glance shifted behind me as though he might be able to see the bhoot right now. I rubbed at the goosebumps and had to force myself not to look.

  “I can tell from the date that the code was reinserted almost immediately after I took it out, but there have been two updates to the Pig Latin modules and one of them was yesterday.”

  From the look on his face, it was obvious he hadn’t done the updates. And Joe had already been dead for a couple of days by yesterday. I gulped. “Oh.”

  He nodded. “Yeah. The file had been accessed. Something changed because the date changed, but whoever made the changes didn’t update the change log.” He raised one hand helplessly and then shook himself. “Look, none of that matters. It’s just weird, is all. I’m almost finished with the code to allow the user to select the voice assistant name. If you don’t tell anyone, I’ll do a build with that code and you can start testing it. It will be in the official drop at the end of the week.”

  I straightened and backed out of the cube opening. “Thanks. Shoot me an email when you have the latest ready. Meanwhile I’ll brush up on my Pig Latin because if Cary gets his way, it will be our number one language.”

  Mind boggling. Just mind boggling.

  Chapter 12

  There were only so many nights I could continue to escape at a reasonable time, but tonight had to be one of them. My parents were leaving tomorrow, and I’d promised Mom I’d invite Mark over “for at least cake” before they left. Was it my fault they had been busy at Sean’s until the last night they were in town?

  I waited until Cary made his rounds just after five and then started a random test loop on one of the phones to run overnight. The battery would likely die long before the test finished, but running any test still counted.

  I also dutifully packed a phone to take home. Maybe I’d find a second or two to run a trial on it while I was brushing my teeth before bed. There weren’t likely to be any other available seconds because I had a cake to bake and people to entertain the rest of the evening.

  Just as I stood to head out, Cary’s voice drifted from somewhere down cube. I ducked, but clearly heard him say my name and something about, “Of course, we discussed the idea of letting the customer choose a name for their phone assistant! Sedona was already testing the idea at my request.”

  “Oh, for the love of patents, you liar.” Of course, now he’d come to my cube with some made-up test document. I didn’t have time for him. He probably wouldn’t let me leave until I agreed to sign an affidavit swearing the customer naming the phone assistant was his idea.

  I crouched lower, adjusted my backpack and duck-waddled over to Joe’s old cubicle. Monique was talking into her cell and walking out of her cube. If she glanced over the tops of the walls, she’d see me scurrying along like a mutant marine.

  I quickly grabbed my earlobe, but who had time to put earrings on in the morning? I was lucky to get my clothes on straight! The “lost my earring” excuse wouldn’t fly.

  Joe’s cube was as sterile and empty as every other cube in the building. No one had bothered to clean it after he died, although the police had taken his laptop. There was nothing but standard issue desk, chair and cabinet.

  I wasn’t desperate enough to climb in the cabinet to hide, was I?

  Cary’s voice closed in.

  With a grunt, I pulled Joe’s chair aside and scooted under the desk, my back to the hallway side. I yanked the chair back in with me. If Cary found me, he might be dumb enough to believe I was testing the cell phone reception under a desk. And if he didn’t believe me, who cared?

  I shifted my backpack around in order to scrunch further into the corner. My butt landed on one of the support bars, sending a shooting pain into my rear. As if Cary wasn’t enough of a pain in the ass without the extra jab.

  I kept quiet. Cary’s khaki pants were just visible as he walked past into my cube. I leaned my head away from the opening and held the phone to my ear just in case he caught me.

  There was the sound of papers being shuffled. He was either leaving me a note or wadding up his latest “plan for a patent” draft. I held my breath. There was nothing saving me but a thin cube wall.

  His cell phone buzzed. He must have had it set to vibrate mode, but this close, the sound was quite audible.

  After a silent moment, he said, “As soon as I find it. He wasn’t wearing it.” After another pause he said, “It’s hardly going to be discovered randomly, and even if it is, no one will know where it belongs.”

  I peeked around the side again just enough to glimpse one of his legs. Who was he talking to? Who cared? If he had to do some chore or other, he’d forget about me.

  His voice faded, accompanied by the sound of footsteps and slacks swishing.

  I pushed the chair the tiniest bit. No sound of anyone. I scooted and had to clamp down on a squeal. The support post was either following me out or I’d sat on something that had moved with me, bruising more of my butt.

/>   I felt along the floor until I located the offensive object. It wasn’t too dark to recognize Joe’s watch because it lit up when my hand hit one of the buttons. “Eww.”

  I had never noticed much about the watch other than suspecting Joe used it to help him translate Pig Latin faster. The thing obviously did more than tell the time, but the leather watchband was stretched oddly as though forced to fit the watch. The holes for the buckling prong were very distorted.

  A closer inspection revealed that the space between two of the holes was cut, forming one larger hole. The watch must have fallen off his arm because it wasn’t possible to securely buckle the broken band anymore.

  I gulped. Had he raised his arm in defense and the leather been sliced with a knife meant for his head? I stuffed it in my backpack. I didn’t want to think too hard about it. My hand froze as the conversation I’d just overheard played in my head. “He wasn’t wearing it.” Who wasn’t wearing what?

  I fingered the watch. Obviously, Joe wasn’t wearing it when he died. Ick. I dropped it in the pack. Cary couldn’t have been talking about Joe’s watch. Why would he care about a watch? Like it or not, I was obligated to return this to Joe’s heirs. I guess that meant his mother. Oh wait. His mother could be involved in illegal dealings just like her son. Yeah. I did not want to involve myself with her any more than I had to. Well, Huntington could give it to her, maybe after he arrested her.

  I peeked around the chair. A pair of jeans went by without stopping. From that attire, it could have been any of the engineers, including me, except I was huddled under a desk like a fool. Why hadn’t I just run for the exit? It was well after five. I had a right to leave!

  With a sigh, I pushed my way out. Would it be overkill if I crouched down on my way out of the rat maze?

  Probably.

  Roscoe and Kovid were chatting just outside cube city. I gave them a weak smile and dodged around them on my way to the stairs. My walk was not a run, but it might have won a few races.