TWENTY-THREE
“You swear on the graves of your family members in Greenwood Cemetery that you aren’t a silent partner in Sterling Webster’s VIP entry?” I asked Tex.
“Is that really necessary?”
“Considering the day I’ve had? Yes.”
Tex pulled out his wallet and opened it up to his detective badge. He set the wallet face up on the corner of my bed. “I don’t like swearing on graves. Bad juju.” He pointed at his badge. “I swear on that and you of all people know what that signifies to me.”
I sank down onto my bed and looked up at him. “Sit down, Tex. I have a lot to tell you.”
His eyes moved from me to the bed and back to me. “Maybe we should move to a different room.”
The adrenaline and the fight and the nervous energy that had kept me going for the past twenty-four hours eeked out of my system. A single fat tear formed in the corner of my eye and spilled onto my cheek. I kept my head tipped down because I didn’t want Tex to see me cry, but when the droplet fell from my chin and landed on my rumpled cream turtleneck, I could no longer hide it.
He sat down and put his arm around my shoulders. “What’s going on, Night?”
I stared at the floor. “When did life get so complicated? Every day, I do battle. I count on people and they let me down.”
Tex turned me toward him and wiped the residue from my cheek. He put both arms around me and pulled me close and I rested my head on his shoulder. “I make a friend, she’s murdered. I try to have a relationship and it fizzles out. I call the police to report a possible break-in at Posh Pit and I end up in an interrogation room while a detective tries to get a judge to issue a warrant for my arrest.”
Tex’s arms stiffened. He shifted his hands to my upper arms and separated us enough to see my face. “You were arrested?”
“I was taken in for questioning. It wasn’t official, but it sure didn’t feel like having dinner with a friend.”
“Henning?”
I nodded. “He knows everything. He knows Jane and I had a fight, and he said he can’t verify my alibi, and he has two witnesses who place me in that powder room with her when she died.”
“Where did Henning find you? When he called me earlier today, he was out of leads.”
“He called you? What did you tell him?”
“I told him I hadn’t talked to you for the past five months and twenty-three days and couldn’t help him out.” Tex’s eyes moved from my face to my clothes, rumpled from the rain saturation and subsequent air-dry-and-prison-blanket one-two punch. He looked back at me. “You were held in a police facility and you didn’t call me.”
“I was mad at you.”
He stood up. “You said you don’t trust me. When you think you’re past that, let me know. We have a lot to talk about.” He walked to the door.
“‘Moonlighting’?” I said to his back as he was halfway through the door. “Ninety-five percent of the public wouldn’t get that reference.”
He turned around and grinned. “You did.”
“I’m special.” I smiled, my first genuine smile in days, while he stood in the doorway staring back at me. Neither of us said a word for several seconds.
“Don’t worry, Night. It’s going to be okay.” He pulled the door shut behind him.
I’d hoped a shower would reinvigorate me, but it had the opposite effect. I climbed out and dried off, wrapped my head in a towel and slipped on fresh undies and an Olympic blue track suit I’d acquired from the estate of Ingrid Vitalis. She’d been an alternate on the 1964 USA Olympic Track and Field team, and amongst her belongings, I’d found the blue zip-front track jacket with USA stitched on in red and white and matching elastic waist pants. My own style ran along more feminine lines. Thanks to a torn ACL several years ago and a string of follow-up injuries before the joint had a chance to heal properly, running wasn’t part of my routine. But tonight, I wanted to channel the athlete’s physical strength. Yet despite the best of intentions, I fell asleep on top of my pink coverlet before I had a chance to pull on a matching pair of tube socks.
I woke to bright, uninterrupted sunlight streaming through my bedroom curtains. I was under the covers and the towel that I’d wrapped over my hair was wedged under my neck. A vague sense of unease tickled at the fringes of my now-fading dreams, until I realized my dreams had nothing to do with it. The memories I’d hoped were nightmares were real. I flung back the covers and got up, pushed my feet into fluffy white faux fur slippers, and descended the stairs. Tex was on my sofa. Rocky was with him. My laptop was on the table in front of Tex and a stack of handwritten notes were taped to the wall. The two paintings that normally hung there were propped in front of an old, tube TV that still required rabbit ears to get acceptable reception.
“You came back,” I said.
“I never left,” he said. He glanced up at me and did a double take.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing. Just never saw you do the Sporty Spice thing before.”
“Just when you thought you knew me too.” I went to the kitchen and poured coffee into an empty white mug that sat on the counter, carried an owl-shaped trivet and the electric pot into the living room, and refreshed Tex’s cup. “What’s all this?” I asked.
“I should ask you the same question,” he said. He turned the laptop toward me. The screen was open to the cloud storage and displayed numerous file folders. I immediately recognized them as my own, the very same files that had been wiped from the computer yesterday.
I sat down next to him and, using the touch pad, opened and closed the folders. I turned to Tex. “These folders were empty yesterday. I thought the hacker wiped my hard drive.”
“These are your files?”
I nodded. “Effie—you remember her, right? College girl who used to live in the apartment building I owned?” This time he nodded. “She’s doing what she can to update the way I do business. Six months ago, she convinced me to move my files to the cloud and move my inventory to an online database. I would have thought you’d be impressed by my willingness to modernize.” I wrapped my hands around the mug and took a tentative sip.
“Cloud storage is a good idea. That’s not what I’m asking about.” He tapped the screen. “I want to know how you got this.”
“Hold on,” I said. I stood up and scanned the room until I spotted a pair of reading glasses on the hutch. I retrieved them and pointed to Tex. “No cracks about my age.”
Tex’s lack of joke at my expense threw me off. I sat back down next to him and leaned closer to the screen, and that’s when I realized why he wasn’t cracking jokes.
The file Tex was looking at was in the folder I’d forwarded from Jane Strong’s computer. Alongside client files and mood boards was a file marked “V-Day Is Coming.” I double clicked the file. A spreadsheet opened. Along the top it said, “Viruses Launched.” Below the title was a list of names and corresponding numbers, both mine and Tex’s among them.
“Those are IP addresses, aren’t they?” I asked Tex.
“Yep.”
“A hacker needs an IP address to target a specific computer, don’t they?”
“It’s one way to get in.”
“Which means that could be a list of the computers that were hacked. Right?”
“Night, at what point are you going to tell me why this list is on your computer?”
I stared at the screen while information clicked together. The reality struck me like the copper clapper of a church bell. “I copied those files from Jane Strong’s computer at Posh Pit,” I said. “But Jane was dead before the hackings started. And her assistant was attacked and is in the hospital. Somebody used Jane’s connection to VIP to tag the rest of us and then they killed her.”
“Back up. Jane’s assistant is in the hospital? How do you know that?”
I sighed. “M
ake room for me. I’ve got a lot to tell you before we get to that, and I’d rather be comfortable.” Now that I was back to trusting Tex, the idea of confiding in him felt cathartic.
He shifted to the right and I sat down. “I’m not sure where to start. I think this all connects back to the VIP competition. You said you already knew all about that, right?”
“Tell me why you thought I was Sterling Webster’s partner. I want to know who’s spreading rumors about me.”
“It’s not as simple as that.”
“This is no time to protect your source, Night. Whoever told you that was lying to turn you against me and I want to know why.”
I stood up and got my phone, and I tapped the screen until I found the picture Nasty had shared with me. “Brace yourself, because you’re the one who sent this particular truth to my door.” I handed him my phone.
He magnified the screen and moved the enlarged image around a few times. I saw the tips of his ears turn red and his jaw clench. “Nasty?”
I nodded. “She came to Mad for Mod to tell me why she was at your apartment. She said the note she left on your nightstand had to do with removing the virus from your computer, not…not what it looked like it had to do with.” I took my phone back from Tex. “She took this screenshot. It’s pretty obvious you gave Sterling Webster twenty thousand dollars to invest in his entry.”
“Night, I haven’t given that man a dime.”
“Then where did this come from? It’s a clear paper trail that leads back to you. Unless…”
“What?”
“Nasty told me the personality virus creates backdoor access to a computer. She explained how it works like this: the virus makes a mirror image of the computer’s hard drive and then slowly steals the copies, not the original. So even if you detect the virus and get rid of it, the person who launched it still has everything they duped. But what if she was wrong?”
“Nasty’s not usually wrong about stuff like that.”
“That’s not what I mean.” I thought for a moment about how to explain my suspicion. “You know how in caper movies they show the criminals making a recording of the surveillance feed and then they patch it over the regular surveillance feed in a loop? What if whoever is watching the cameras thinks things are normal while really criminals are running around robbing a bank?”
“Those are movies. Nothing to do with real life.”
“I’m not talking about the plot device, I’m talking about the principle. What if the virus did everything Nasty said it did, but it left the copy on the original hard drive so everything looked normal, while giving the hacker full backdoor access to the original files? That would let someone manipulate all sorts of things between computers, right?”
Tex looked angry. “Right.”
“But why would somebody want to hack into a bunch of decorator databases? We’re not known for our criminal tendencies.”
“Speak for yourself,” Tex said. He launched an internet window and accessed a police bulletin that under normal circumstances I’d have no reason to see.
The headline of the page said everything I needed to know. Hacker’s Interference in Police Database Corrupts Pending Case Files.
I looked from the computer to Tex. “Somebody connected to the VIP competition has something to hide.”
TWENTY-FOUR
Tex handed me my phone. “Call Nasty and get her over here. I want to know what she knows too.”
The last person I ever thought I’d invite into my house was Officer Nasty, but desperate times called for desperate measures. I picked up my cell phone and left the room.
“Where are you going?” Tex asked.
“You don’t need to hear this conversation.” I headed toward the door and Rocky got up from his spot by Tex’s feet and followed me. I made him wait in the solarium, closing the storm door behind me. Yes, I wanted privacy to call Nasty, but I also wanted to deal with the mess of broken glass I’d made last night before Rocky’s tender paws had a chance to come into contact with it.
But there was no mess. The broken vase I expected to find scattered about the patio, the thorny lilac roses, and the ferns and baby’s breath had all been cleared. I approached the black trash receptacle and lifted the lid. Plastic bags, knotted off at the top, sat inside. I lifted the top one and heard glass shards shift against each other. Someone had cleaned up after me, and from the looks of things, that someone was Tex. I glanced up at the kitchen window and saw him watching me. I smiled my thanks and he nodded once.
My turn to return the favor. I turned my back on him and called Nasty.
“Big Brother Security,” she answered.
“It’s Madison.” I waited for a response.
“I’m kind of busy here. What do you want?”
Yep, about the response I expected. “More hackings?”
“Yeah. At this rate I’ll be driving a Lamborghini by Christmas.”
“I wouldn’t overdo it. Remember how you explained the virus to me? How it makes a duplicate of my hard drive and then slowly steals the duplicate files?”
“I didn’t think you were paying attention.”
I turned around and kicked my toe against the bottom of the storm cellar doors. “Would you shut up and listen to me for a moment?”
“Go.”
“You were only half right about how the virus works. Yes, it makes a duplicate copy of the hard drive, but the copy is what’s left on the computer, not the originals. Whoever’s been doing this has backdoor access to every computer he’s hacked.”
Nasty was quiet. This, right here, was what I hated about phone conversations. Without the benefit of seeing her expression, I didn’t know what she was thinking or how much else she knew. “You need to notify the police,” she said.
“I already did. Tex is here at my house.”
“The one on Monticello?”
“Yes.”
“Wait there. I’m on my way.”
Nasty arrived less than ten minutes later. I invited her in and turned my back on her before seeing her reaction to my newly renovated yellow kitchen.
“You got any coffee, or do you freebase sunshine?”
Grrrrr. “The coffee is in the living room with Captain Allen. I’ll get you a mug.”
We joined Tex. Whatever welcome I would have predicted he give Nasty, it wasn’t the one she got. He stood up and approached her. She backed up. He was angrier than I’d ever seen him before and I’d had plenty of opportunities to see him angry.
“What did you do?” he asked, his voice a borderline growl. Rocky jumped on the sofa, turned himself around, and then faced Nasty and barked twice.
“I did my job,” she said to Tex, ignoring his canine backup. “I engineered a patch that blocks the hacker’s access to the IP in question. Madison was my guinea pig. I uploaded it to her system first and when it worked, I knew I had gold. Nobody else in the city of Dallas was ready for this.”
“Why were you?” I asked. It was something that had been bothering me from the minute she’d claimed to fix my problem. Nasty turned her head and looked at me like she’d forgotten I was in the room. “According to everybody I’ve talked to, this is a brand-new breach. We all have some sort of firewall on our computers and the personality virus got through. How is it you were ready for a virus that nobody even knew existed?”
“Answer the question, Nasty,” Tex said.
She put both arms up and flung Tex’s hands off of her. She turned her back to him and took two steps away, and then turned back and looked at him first, and then me. “I got tipped off, okay? Somebody sent me a flash drive with the virus on it and said I stood to make a lot of money if I wrote the code to remove it.”
I wasn’t buying Nasty’s act. “The way I see it, you’re the one person with the most financial gain from what happened. How do we know you’re not behind it?�
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“Don’t be stupid.”
Tex stepped forward and I put out a hand and pushed him back. “I can handle this,” I said. I turned back to Nasty. “Prove it. There’s got to be something that shows you are as much of a pawn in this mess as we are, or else I call the detective who’s trying to get a warrant for my arrest and I give him everything I know, including the photos you took of a police captain’s files when you were mucking around inside his computer.”
She looked at Tex. He pointed to me. “It’s her game right now, Nasty, and if I were you, I’d play ball.”
Nasty cursed and then walked over to the sofa. She pulled a laptop out of the messenger bag she’d worn slung across her body and ran a power cord to the wall. The computer powered on quickly. Her fingers flew over the keys, typing commands onto a root menu. She looked up at me and pointed at my laptop on the coffee table. “This one’s yours?”
I nodded. She shifted and typed something on my computer. My heartbeat picked up, pounding solidly against my rib cage. Giving Nasty access to my computer felt a little like Fox Mulder working with Alex Krycek, but if the truth was out there, then this was what I had to do to find it. My eyes moved back and forth between the two screens, trying to make sense of what she was doing. She turned back to her own computer and hit the enter key several times. The screens were nearly identical.
Nasty leaned forward and appeared to compare the two screens. And then suddenly, she slammed her computer shut, flipped it over, and popped out the battery.
“What?” I asked. “Why’d you do that? What did you see?”
She looked up at me and leaned back against the sofa cushions. The bravado and confidence were gone. “You were right,” she said.
“About what?” I asked.
“I’m behind the virus. Call Detective Henning and tell him I’ll cooperate as best as I can.”
“Hold on,” I said. As much as I’d really, really love for Nasty to be the bad guy here, it didn’t make sense. “How’s that possible?”
LOVER COME HACK Page 15
