by Ray Daniel
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Terminated © 2014 Ray Daniel
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dedication
For Jeff and Rachel.
You’re the best!
acknowledgments
I would list everyone who has helped create Terminated, but the list would be longer than the novel. My friends, family, coworkers, and fellow writers have supported me in every way that it’s possible to support an author. Thank you all!
When I told my wife Karen that I wanted to be a writer, she thought it was a great idea and continues to think it is a great idea regardless of the challenges. No matter how things went in the writing world, I knew I could come home to a big smile and someone who would say “I know you can do it.” Thank you, Karen. I love you!
Thank you to my first writing group: D.C. Harrell, Kristin Janz, Joan Kosmachuk, and Christian Powers. They were the first people to meet Tucker and their insights, comments, and monthly deadline helped me launch my writing career.
Thank you to my second writing group: Sibylle Barrasso, Shelly Dickson Carr, Hans Copek, Judy Copek, Bob Long, Carol Lynn, Wynter Snow, and Paula Steffen for our weekly sessions. You helped Tucker and me find our voices.
Thank you to my agent Eric Ruben at the Ruben Agency and my editor Terri Bischoff at Midnight Ink. Your faith in my abilities and in the Tucker Mysteries mean the world to me.
Janet Rosen, thank you for helping me give Tucker his emotion and humanity.
Thank you Joseph Finder for taking the time to give me advice about my career and about writing. You’ve helped so many people in the Boston writing scene and I’m grateful to be one of them.
Clair Lamb, thank you for helping me get Terminated over the finish line. You are an outstanding editor.
Thanks to Gary Braver, Mike Cooper, William Martin, Tim McIntire, Daniel Palmer, and Steve Ulfelder for reading the early edition of Terminated and providing blush-worthy review comments.
Thank you Hallie Ephron for being the little editorial voice in my head that keeps me on the right path.
Hank Phillippi Ryan, I always feel good about where I’ve been and where I’m going after I talk to you. Thank you for your friendship and support.
Finally, thank you to the members of Mystery Writers of America of New England, Sisters in Crime of New England, and Grub Street. You all make Boston a wonderful place to write. I love Boston and I love writing with you.
sunday
one
Morning sex is, in fact, everything it’s cracked up to be. The languid sharing of pre-caffeine pleasure, the gentle moaning in a sunlit room, and the natural hormonal cycles of a healthy thirty-three-year-old male combine to create one of life’s optimal experiences. Sadly, my chances at living the dream evaporated when my best friend told me that he had figured out how to catch my wife’s killer.
I had been standing in the galley kitchen of my shotgun condominium in Boston’s South End, sipping orange juice and rallying myself from a night of tequila and unexpected pleasure. I was thinking about Maggie and how she had murmured that I should get back to bed as soon as possible. I sipped my juice and felt my blood sugar rise.
Click and Clack, my hermit crabs, scuttled around on their pink sand. Hermit crabs were the perfect pets. They didn’t poop on the rug, they listened well, and they added life to a bachelor apartment. I had wanted to get a pair when I was married, but Carol thought they were gross. She called them cockroaches in mobile homes, which was quite unkind.
Clack was wearing a new shell that I had picked up for him at Revere Beach. He had discarded his original shell, a fluorescent orange monstrosity that some sadist had covered with sparkles.
“You’re looking good, my friend,” I said to Clack and toasted him with orange juice.
I reached for my BlackBerry. It was locked, so I entered the password and opened the Twitter app. What should I tweet? Oh what a night was too obvious, and Back in the saddle again was too crass. I hit upon it:
It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood.
But then my stomach churned, and I added:
I hate tequila mornings.
I once had been a big Facebook guy, maintaining a group of friends who didn’t mind the fact that I only communicated with them in the two or three minutes where I was waiting for software to compile.
I quit Facebook soon after Carol died. The constant messages of condolence and “How are you doing?” felt like an invasion. The barrage of Farmville requests, “Repost this if you care about …” messages, and pictures of cute kittens went from being annoying to painful. I switched to Twitter, where the conversations were short.
I had downed my orange juice and was heading back to bed when the door boomed behind me. It crossed my eyes. I turned and stumbled toward the living room looking for my pants. The door boomed again. I thought about Maggie trying to sleep and said, “Coming!” The booming stopped.
My pants were piled in front of the door, still inside out from when Maggie had torn them off. I righted them, pulled them on, and looked through the peephole, expecting to see a neighbor. Instead, I saw my best friend, Kevin.
I pulled the door open, took a step back, and swept my arm in a come in gesture. Then I belched and bolted to the john as my stomach roiled. I stood over the toilet, hands on knees, catching my breath.
Kevin and I had been roommates at MIT. We were an unlikely pair. I was a smart kid from Wellesley, and he was a smart kid from Revere. We worked great together. He put up with my late nights of drinking. I put up with his late nights of studying. We had both slept as late as possible.
Kevin closed the door and followed me. He stood in the small space where my bathroom and bedroom met kitty corner at the end of the apartment. “Good God, T
ucker. What happened to you?”
“Tequila.”
“You can’t drink tequila.”
“I can if I’m motivated.”
“Sure you can.”
Kevin dressed like a banker and exuded the wholesome energy of a guy who had run five miles before breakfast. His skin shone, his eyes were clear, and his spiky cropped hair was perfect. He crossed his arms and looked at me as if I were a puppy tangled in its own leash.
My stomach decided to keep its contents. I stood up and squeezed past Kevin to get back to the kitchenette. I popped open the carton of orange juice and poured myself another glass.
Kevin said, “I will never get used to you doing that.”
“Doing what?”
“Drinking orange juice when you’re hung over.”
“What should I drink?”
“Pepsi. Nice, warm Pepsi.”
“That’s disgusting.” My gut lurched again. I put my hand to my mouth and collected myself.
Kevin said, “You OK?”
“I’m fine. Now scoot. I have to go back to bed.”
“Why?”
As if in answer, the door opened and Maggie peeked her head around the corner. She pulled it back when she saw Kevin and said, “Tucker, I need to get to the shower.”
I remembered that Maggie’s clothes were also in the living room. I took Kevin by the arm and led him to the door. I gave him a little push and said, “Sorry Kev, you’ve got to go now.”
Kevin resisted my push. He said, “We need to talk.”
I said, “Fine, we’ll talk later. How about dinner?”
“No. We need to talk now. In my office.”
“Why can’t we talk here?”
“It’s official business.”
“FBI business?”
“Yeah,” said Kevin, and he turned toward the front door.
Apparently Maggie needed more than the shower, because as soon as Kevin’s back was turned, she made a naked dash across the two feet that separated the bedroom from the bathroom. She looked great, even at high speed.
I was getting peeved. I opened the door and pulled Kevin into the hallway.
“Can’t you see what’s going on here?” I asked.
“Of course,” said Kevin. “I have excellent observation skills. I’m a trained investigator.”
“Dude, you’re in the cybercrimes division at the FBI. I don’ t think it makes you an investigator. You’re a hacker with a badge.”
“And you’re a hacker with a girl,” said Kevin.
“Exactly. And when was the last time that happened?”
Kevin closed my apartment door, and we stood on the little landing. He said, “I feel bad, Tucker, I really do. But this is about finding Carol’s killer. I have a lead.”
Carol and I had worked together at a security software company called MantaSoft. We were both programmers. I ran the project, called Rosetta, and she worked on it. It ended badly.
I said, “Tell me more about this lead.”
“I will when we’re in my office. I don’t want to do this in a hallway.”
My thoughts of Maggie and morning sex disappeared, burned off by memories of the impotent rage that had coursed through me when I had found my wife, dead in the kitchen. “You’re not screwing with me, right, Kevin? This is real.”
“It’s a shot. I can’t promise anything.”
“OK,” I said. “Wait for me downstairs. I’ll need about ten minutes.”
Kevin smiled. “You won’t regret it.” He turned and trotted down the stairs.
When I entered the apartment, Maggie was sitting in front of the galley kitchen, wearing a towel and sipping orange juice. She asked, “Is he gone?”
“Yup.”
Maggie stood and dropped her towel to the floor. I could feel my eyes dilating. Her small breasts stood at attention. Drops of water glistened on her toned legs. She was the best-looking fifty-year-old woman I had ever seen. She walked toward me and pressed herself against my bare chest. Her short, spiky, salt-and-pepper hair tickled my nose. Her fingers ran down my spine as she kissed my nipple and asked, “Shall we go back to bed?”
I hugged her close, feeling the lats and trapezius muscles. If this was what my body would look like when I was in my fifties, I’d be ecstatic. I kissed her on the cheek and stepped back, disengaging myself.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ve got to go. Do you think we’ll see each other again?”
Maggie held my face in her hands and said, “You can be sure of it, dear.”
two
FBI Headquarters sits in a curved building across the street from Government Center, the plaza where Boston fans celebrate Patriot Super Bowl wins. We have duck-boat parades for the Red Sox, Celtics, and Bruins championships. I think all championship trophies should just be renamed “The Boston Cup.”
Kevin and I rode up the elevator from the parking garage. We had said nothing on the drive over. I’d asked him about the clue, but he said to wait until we reached his office. Now I had nothing to think about but my hangover.
I said, “I shouldn’t be upright. I think I’m gonna puke.”
“It’s your own fault.”
“I could have slept this off. But you had to show up at the crack of dawn.”
“Crack of dawn? It was 9:30.”
“Exactly.”
Kevin’s office was a spare government-issue cave. I slumped into a guest chair made of chrome and fake leather. Kevin’s desk was made of chrome and fake wood, and held a computer and a picture of his wife and kids. A basketball poster hung from the wall over a wire-mesh wastepaper basket with a little net and a Boston Celtics backboard. The trashcan was about five feet from Kevin’s desk. Wads of paper were scattered on the floor around the basket.
I pointed at the wads. “That’s just pathetic. I hope you investigate better than you shoot.”
Kevin handed me a folder and said, “These are confidential, but they’re definitely connected to Carol.”
The folder contained pictures of a naked woman in what looked like a hotel room. She was lying on the bed, facing away from me. Duct tape bound her arms and wrists behind her back. More duct tape bound her knees and ankles. The gray tape looked like steel. The pictures gave me an unpleasant sexual jolt.
I closed the folder and said, “Thanks, but no thanks. I can download my own porn.”
“That’s not porn. Keep looking.”
It sure looked like porn. The naked woman faced one way, then another. Closeup pictures, faraway pictures. All the pictures showed the same woman, the same bed, the same duct tape, and the woman lying in the same position. She wasn’t moving.
I asked, “Is she dead?”
Kevin said, “Yes.”
“Who is she?”
“You don’t know?”
I found pictures of the woman’s face. Her nose and mouth were covered with tape. She must have suffocated. My stomach rolled. This was sick. After the pictures of her head from the front and back with the tape on it, I came to a picture of her face with the tape removed.
“Holy shit. That’s Alice Barton,” I said. Alice was a nervous, mousy woman Carol had hired to help her manage the software code on our project. We were supposed to have a hiring freeze, but that didn’t stop Carol. She had gone right to Jack Kennings, the CEO, and gotten her requisition approved. That was Carol’s way; even the CEO couldn’t resist her.
“Alice Barton,” I repeated. “Do you know who killed her?”
“Someone at your old office says that maybe you did.”
“Who?”
“I can’t tell you. It’s confidential.”
“Someone accuses me of murder and you won’t tell me who it was?”
“Well … I can’t.”
“This is bullshit,” I said. I was pissed
off. The police had investigated me for months after Carol was murdered. I didn’t want to go back under the microscope.
“It doesn’t matter, anyway,” said Kevin. “I know you didn’t do it.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because at the time of death, you were drinking tequila with your lady friend.”
How did Kevin know that?
Sherlock Holmes claimed that we solve puzzles by deduction and come to the answer through a linear string of logic. That’s crap. You really solve puzzles through a flash of insight. Then you work your way back through the logic so you can explain it to others. After years of debugging software, I was good at generating flashes of insight.
My programmer brain cranked on the Mystery of the Tequila Girl Alibi and came up with the answer. I remembered that I had tweeted last night while Maggie and I were eating dinner and doing shots.
Is it tequila then lime then salt, or the other way around?
“You read my tequila tweet,” I said. “You saw that I was in my apartment.”
“Yup. I keep telling you to turn off that location feature. It’s creepy. The tweet had a map that pointed at your house. And it had a time stamp. So I know where you were at the time of the murder. By the way, who was that woman? I’ll need it for my report.”
“Maggie.”
“And her last name?”
My brain kerchunked. She had never told me her last name.
“I don’t know.”
“Did she tell you her age?”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“When she peeked at me from the bedroom, I saw a flash of gray.”
I crossed my arms and said, “Your observation skills at work again?”
“It’s my superpower.”
“Oh, I see. You’re Nosy Man, invader of privacy.”
“You didn’t answer my question.”
“I don’t know. Fifties, I guess?”
Kevin broke into a wide smile. “You, my friend, are cougar bait!”
“Har. Har.”
“Where did you meet her? Water aerobics?”
