LOVER COME HACK

by Diane Vallere

  “You think he has a better chance of winning without her than with her?” I asked.

  “He has a solid reputation and an established design aesthetic. Jane hated designing unimaginative properties when she worked for me. They would have butted heads out of the gate.”

  “Then why would he have said yes?”

  “Madison, even you must know how hard it is to say no to a lover.”

  THIRTY-FOUR

  “But Jane was married to you at the time,” I said.

  “Yes, she was. Unfortunately, to her, our marriage vows were neither a promise nor a guarantee of fidelity. Jane had more than one affair while we were married, and Sterling was one of them,” Gerry said.

  “That didn’t bother you?”

  “I’m twenty years older than her. I looked the other way because I valued her companionship. Her affairs started hitting too close to home, but they allowed me to see the writing on the wall.”

  “She told me she asked you for a divorce,” I said. “If you knew about her indiscretions, why didn’t you divorce her?”

  He sighed. “I wanted the woman to be happy. I thought in my own way, I was giving her that. I just wish—” he stopped abruptly.

  “What?”

  He stared at the papers on the desk. “Once the divorce was final, her future was her choice. There wasn’t anything I could do to stop her from making mistakes.”

  The thought of Sterling Webster taking advantage of Jane’s vulnerability made me sick to my stomach. Sterling was the worst kind of predator, the kind who wanted to own people. If there was anything positive to say about Jane’s murder, it was that she was free of people like him. I couldn’t begin to understand why she’d slept with him or even why she’d signed on to be part of his VIP team.

  And then it hit me. Sterling had a history with Jane. A history nobody else knew about. Gerry said Jane and Sterling had different design perspectives and that Sterling’s team was better off without her. But he’d also said that her affairs hit too close to home. Affairs. Had Gerry known about more than one? I already suspected Kip Bledsoe as being a notch on Jane’s bedpost. How many men in the design community had Jane been entangled with aside from her husband?

  I’d recognized the bloom of independence in her, the same one I’d felt when I first moved to Dallas. Jane’s divorce from Gerry had given her a sort of power. It must have been why she felt comfortable confronting Gerry about his decision to disqualify her face to face. She wouldn’t have backed down, not easily, not without analyzing everything she stood to lose.

  But there was that night that she’d called me in tears. She refused to tell me who the man was who had hurt her, but that night I saw Jane’s vulnerability. I remember thinking that maybe the vulnerability was what I lacked—what kept me from fully entering a relationship with hopes for the best. I didn’t want to get hurt again. Jane, fresh from her divorce, had allowed herself to be hurt too soon and it had been what killed her. Perhaps it was Sterling who hurt her. Perhaps it was her ex-husband. Perhaps it was someone else.

  As my suspicions grew, so did my fears. Already this competition, that I’d entered to expand the horizons of Mad for Mod, felt like a rugby scrim with me in the center. There was a reason I’d chosen to play baseball and not more of a contact sport. I liked playing the field.

  Scratch that thought. People like Sterling Webster played the field. I was nothing like Sterling Webster. Or was I? We were both here on the last possible day to make changes to our team roster. That had to mean something. And right now, it meant less about any similarities between me and the cocky designer and more about his ability to know where I was and what I was doing. All information he could get by hacking into my computer.

  In fact, every single thing Sterling knew about me could have come from my computer. The personality virus had generated a profile, but my designs, my team, my timetable, and my inventory were all there for the picking. Any privacy I’d thought I had behind a firewall had been more like a smokescreen, and where there’s smoke, there’s fire.

  A flush of heat climbed my neck under my cape and crawled up to my hairline. Angry righteousness was even less welcome now that I’d experienced the occasional hot flash. I left the DIDI offices and made a quick trip to the ladies’ room.

  I entered the room, shaking off the memory of Jane’s body on the cold, tile floor, and held my hands underneath the stream of cool water for several seconds. When I looked up at my reflection, I noticed the stalls behind me. Two of the doors were open and one was out of order. The same one that had been closed the day Jane died.

  And then I remembered, in a series of fragmented memories, that Jane had been sick before she’d died. Her shoes, under the neighboring stall, pointing the wrong direction for normal bathroom business. The sounds of her nausea. Tapping on the door to see if she was okay. Her tossing her cookies when she opened the door.

  I’d thought we were alone, but a witness had come forward and claimed to have been in the bathroom with us. And the only place that witness could have been was in the closed stall.

  Feeling foolish, I said out loud, “Come out of that stall.”

  The door swung open and Sterling Webster’s reflection stared back at me.

  “Shhhhh,” he said, with one finger held up in front of pursed lips. “Don’t make any noise. It’ll be okay.”

  “Stay away from me,” I said. I put a hand out in front of me and stepped back.

  “Madison, wait. I need to talk to you.” It was five o’clock, the same time Jane had been in here. The DIDI offices closed at five. The rest of the building would be on skeleton staff as well. I didn’t know what the protocol was for checking the restrooms before locking up, but with Delbert home for the day, and the staff being sent home early, it was best to assume I was on my own, just like Jane had been.

  Was this what Jane’s final moments had been like? A man coming out of a stall in the bathroom, bludgeoning her and then hiding while I went for help? Had Jane trusted him? Or had she passed out and not been aware of his presence?

  None of that mattered, because I wasn’t Jane.

  Sterling came out of the stall and put his hand on my arm. “Hear me out,” he said. “I know who killed Jane.”

  It was the one thing he could have said to make me want to listen. The identity of the real killer was what I needed to be out from under Henning’s suspicions. But I didn’t trust Sterling Webster. Not enough to chance my life.

  The water was still running. I cupped as much as I could catch in my hands and flung it at Sterling’s face. It was enough to startle him. I kept my hands on the sink edges and then the wall, and then the door, and then the hallway, half stumbling and half leaning against the textured wallpaper until I reached the elevators. I slapped the buttons, up and down, not caring which arrived first. Two cars arrived within seconds of each other. I sent the Down car down and jumped into the Up hoping to create a diversion and buy myself some time. The doors closed, and I hit the buttons for the higher floors. I’d get off and find help.

  The adrenaline rush left me alert. When the elevator car slowed onto the thirty-third floor, I got off. “Help!” I called out. There was no answer. I moved through the halls. The offices were empty.

  Was the building really conducting tests of the computer systems? I didn’t know. I didn’t care. I had to get out. As I returned to the elevator wells, the bell announced a car arriving on my floor. I ducked into the stairwell and pushed the door closed behind me. How long until Sterling found me in here? I didn’t know, and I didn’t wait to find out. I grabbed the banister and moved down the stairs as quickly and quietly as I could. My bad knee screamed out in pain after four flights. I had twenty-nine to go. This definitely wasn’t the time to whine about being a victim.

  I kept moving down, down, down until the pain leveled me at the seventeenth floor. I sat on the top step and pressed
my hands around my swollen knee joint and then stood back up and tried the door. It was locked.

  As was the door on the sixteenth, fifteenth, and fourteenth floors. I was thankful the architect and builder hadn’t put in a thirteenth floor. One less flight of misery.

  By the time I found an unlocked door on the fourth floor, my knee was the size of a cantaloupe. I stumbled into the hallway and toward the elevator. The Up and Down buttons both glowed and, according to the display above them, the cars were in motion on the floors high above me. A security camera in the corner was aimed at where I stood. Despite my choice of powder blue dress and boots, cape and cone hat, I knew I looked a fright. I faced the camera and said, “Help me.”

  I looked back at the elevator indicators. The car to my right started a rapid decent through the floors. The bell dinged. The doors opened in front of me.

  I wanted to get on. I wanted to get out of the building. I wanted to get as far away from the threat of Sterling as I could. But I couldn’t. Because Sterling was face down in the elevator car, and even more scary than the sight of his unconscious body was the open laptop next to him that flashed the words YOU’RE NEXT.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Everything about the scene screamed trap. The elevators I had previously considered my way out seemed too predictable. What if Sterling was faking being hurt and was waiting for me to get in so he could kill me? My mind jumped to crazy conclusions and the only thing I knew was that I didn’t know anything.

  But if Sterling was hurt, if there was a chance he was alive, I had to help him.

  I kept one foot wedged next to the elevator doors to keep them from closing and bent down to feel for a pulse on Sterling’s neck. He grabbed my ankle. I screamed.

  I kicked his hand off. The elevator doors jerked. I pulled away and they started to close. No! I grabbed the laptop and rolled out of the elevator in a sideways somersault favoring my knee as best as I could. As soon as I was on the other side of the elevator doors, I crawled directly under the surveillance camera—the one place I figured I’d be invisible.

  I rested the laptop on my thighs and hit the ESC key. Nothing happened. I hit Alt and then Tab to see if there were any other open screens.

  There it was. It was a split screen that showed the position of each of the four elevators. I checked the screen and then looked at the display above the elevator bays on the floor where I sat. They matched. Whoever was behind this—the murders, the computer hackings, the building evacuation, and now the destination of the elevators—was the owner of the laptop. I didn’t know how to find out who it belonged to, but I knew one person who would.

  I pulled out my cell phone. My battery was below ten percent. The police would have been the smart call, but I needed more specific help.

  “Nasty, this is Madison.”

  “What do you want now?” she asked.

  I rushed ahead. “I’m trapped on the fourth floor of Republic Tower. I found a laptop that I think belongs to the hacker. Is there a way to find out who owns it?”

  Her tone changed. “Where did you find it?”

  “Planted in an elevator next to Sterling Webster. I thought he was dead or injured but he grabbed me—”

  “Get out of that building.”

  “I’m trying to! The laptop is monitoring the elevators. Can you help me?”

  “Maybe if I had the serial number or could find a way to get deep inside the computer—hold on. You said the laptop was overriding the building elevators?”

  “Yes.”

  “Listen to me carefully. If this guy has that kind of control from a laptop, then he’s close. You need to shut down the computer to sever his connection to the network. The elevators will return to the first floor for an automatic reset and then they’ll operate as normal.”

  “And I can just walk out of here?”

  “Well, there’s a catch.” She paused. “As soon as you sever the connection, the hacker is going to know what you did. You won’t have a lot of time.”

  “I already don’t have a lot of time.”

  “Just remove the battery and get out of there.” She hung up.

  Normally, I would have chalked Nasty’s abrupt sign-off up to her Nasty personality. This time, she sounded scared. And while I could say a lot of things about her, the one thing I couldn’t say was that she was easily scared.

  I slammed the computer shut. I flipped it over and popped out the battery and threw it into the trash. I was about to make a break for the stairs when I realized if my phone died, the laptop might be my only way to call for help. I lifted the lid from the trash and reached inside, past old newspapers and coffee takeout cups and pulled the battery out. It was as I was wiping my hand on my now soiled dress that I realized what I’d just seen.

  Coffee cups. Paxton. He was in his shop in the subbasement. The employees of Republic Tower had been told to leave the building, but Paxton’s shop was attached. He had no idea something was going on in the building above him. I had to get him out too.

  I watched the elevator indicator lights as each car dropped down to the first floor. I could wait for them to land, reset, and then come up to my floor, but I’d have to come out from under the security camera to push the button. But as soon as I called an elevator to the fourth floor, the hacker would know that’s where I was.

  I unfastened my cape. It was almost a full circle, light blue double-knit polyester backed with ivory. The color mattered less than the size and density of it. With the flair of a bullfighter in training, I flung it over my head and let go. It caught on the back of the security camera, slid a few inches, and rested on top.

  I stumbled back to the stairs. I made it down the remaining flights and burst through the doors into parking level one. My car was where I’d left it, next to the coffeehouse. I went inside and looked for Paxton. When I didn’t see him, I went behind the counter to the storage room where he kept the coffee.

  Except it wasn’t a room filled with coffee.

  Paxton Brannigan sat facing a table filled with computers. Multiple screens monitored everything from the elevators to the front entrance to the lobby.

  “What is all this?” I asked.

  Paxton swiveled his chair toward me. “What are you doing down here? You were supposed to get on an elevator and leave like everybody else. Get out!”

  Reality dawned on me and I realized how wrong I’d been. “You,” I said. “You’re behind the hackings,” I said. “But you’re not connected to the design competition.”

  “Jane made a mistake. I had to fix it.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I hacked into the DIDI computers and replaced her entry with files from her husband’s company. They disqualified her.”

  “You destroyed her chances of success. What could you have wanted to gain?”

  “I needed her to need me. If she made it on her own, she never would have come back to me. I would have lost her to that world.” He slapped his hand on the counter. “I’ve been a very patient man. I was there through her marriage and her flings. It was my time. I could have been anything—anybody—she wanted me to be.”

  That’s what the personality virus had done. It combed through a person’s computer and built a profile. The way Paxton spoke made it sound like that’s what he was doing with himself. Trying to be what Jane wanted him to be instead of seeing the value in who he was.

  “Why did you hack the police department?”

  “Diversion. When they thought their hacked files were connected to Jane’s murder, this investigation became priority number one.”

  “And the other local business?”

  “Wasn’t it obvious? Every hacked computer was related to the design community. Keep the police focused. At first, I wanted Sterling or Gerry to take the fall, but you were too perfect. You’re just like her, but you’re not her. You’ll never be her.”<
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  I heard the weight of Paxton’s emotions for Jane in his voice. This wasn’t a spontaneous plan or a temporary crush. He’d imagined an alternate reality of his future with Jane, and when she hadn’t cooperated, he’d killed her as easily as if he were terminating a computer program. “How did Delbert fit in?”

  “It pays to know people’s secrets. Once I knew about Delbert’s past, I knew I could get him to do anything I wanted. Maybe he would have felt loyalty toward Gerry or Sterling, but he wasn’t going to go out on a limb for you.”

  “How long have you felt this way about Jane?” I asked softly.

  “Since college. We met in the computer lab. That was my major. I wrote her programs to design interiors and she—” he blushed. “She paid me back in other ways.”

  It was then that I noticed the smallest of the laptops on the desk. The images on the screen showed Jane. A younger Jane than I’d known. Like me, she’d maintained her youthful appearance while aging. If she’d been wearing clothes, I’d bet they would have identified the decade as the eighties. But instead, she was wrapped in a bedsheet, with tousled hair and a smile.

  “She should have been with me. But after we graduated, she met Gerry Rose and married him. Twenty-five years I’ve waited. For twenty-five years, I’ve made her vanilla lattes and listened to her talk about her unfulfilled dreams and desires. It was my turn. Mine. When she finally asked for a divorce, I thought we’d be together.”

  “But you found out Jane hadn’t been faithful to her husband. She’d been with other men the whole time. Only never you.”

  Paxton’s face contorted, and tears streamed down his cheeks. “She told me she married him for security. I had to let her know I could take care of her too. I needed her to need me. She had to cut all ties from the design world and she wasn’t willing to do it. Once she felt like she had nothing left, she’d see I was willing to give her anything she needed.”