Conflict of Interest

by Nancy Taylor Rosenberg

  When it came to security, the only comparisons Joanne could think of fell along the lines of the White House, the Pentagon, or the Vatican. The entrance ran parallel to the railroad tracks and the 101 Freeway. An armed guard sat at the gate twenty-four hours a day, and no one was allowed inside unless the resident was notified. Because a number of judges and government officials had homes inside Sea-cliff Point, their security requirements surpassed that of the average home owner. To enhance their protection, none of the houses had numbers or identifying markings. An intruder who managed to slip past the guards would be hopelessly lost. The area was so densely wooded that many of the individuals who lived there had trouble finding their own homes. They’d have one drink too many at the Cove and find themselves driving around for hours on the narrow, dark roads. There were no streetlights. When people walked to a neighbor’s house after dark or took a moonlit stroll on the beach, they carried flashlights.

  The cliffs on either side of the entrance were far too high and treacherous to be scaled by anyone other than an expert mountain climber. The land jutted out into the ocean, a triangular-shaped peninsula. Occasionally the body of a swimmer or surfer would wash up on one particular section of the beach. Even when the sea was perfectly calm, the undercurrents anywhere close to the cliffs were deadly. The town’s association had placed ropes and buoys around the areas where it was safe to swim. When a body surfaced on the beach, some of the parents took their children to look at it. Insisting that a young person face the consequences of swimming past the roped-off areas wasn’t all that cruel in light of the alternative.

  “Please, Mom,” Mike pleaded, “don’t say I can’t go. This party means a lot to me. All we’re going to do is build a bonfire, roast some hotdogs, maybe tell scary stories. You know, the kind of stuff you do at Boy Scout camp.”

  Removing her backpack, Joanne let it fall to the floor with a thud. “Boy Scout camp, huh?” she said, eyeing him warily. “I was your age once, remember? I don’t doubt that you’re planning to cook some hot-dogs or even tell a few stories. I’d bet my right arm, though, that someone’s trying to figure out a way to sneak in a keg of beer. I’ve heard about the kind of parties that go on around here.”

  “You’re impossible,” Mike said, flopping down on the sofa and staring at the TV screen. “Leah took the car last night, I didn’t. Now I’m the one who’s being punished. That’s not fair.”

  “You’re not being punished.”

  “Yeah, right,” the boy said. “Dad let us do whatever we wanted. You treat us like we’re in kindergarten.”

  His mother started to remind him that his father was in jail, then stopped herself. As Joanne headed toward the kitchen to speak with Leah and figure out what she was going to prepare for dinner, Mike started up again.

  “There’s nothing to do around here,” he said, depressing a button on the remote control. “We don’t even have cable TV. All the other people who live here have satellites with zillions of channels. But not us. We have to live like the Flintstones.”

  Joanne massaged her forehead. Her head was throbbing, and her son was using the same tactics that Arnold Dreiser had applied to wear her down that afternoon. Now that she thought about it, Arnold and Mike had similar personalities. Arnold Dreiser was similarly shrewd and relentless, yet underneath, she sensed a kind and sensitive individual. Mike would argue for hours, then break down and cry if he saw a dead dog on the road or watched a sad movie. Joanne’s son was a determined, intelligent young man. She wondered if he might follow in her footsteps one day and become a litigator. Compassion and sensitivity were character traits that didn’t spring forth strictly due to adversity. Many people who found themselves faced with tragedy became bitter and hard. Arnold Dreiser wasn’t bitter, just devastated as any parent would be over the loss of their child.

  “Cable isn’t available here,” Joanne told him. “And I can’t have a satellite dish installed in Judge Spencer’s home. We’re going to be moving in three months.”

  “Where?” he asked. I’m just beginning to make friends here. Our lives have been messed up for years. Man, when is it ever going to stop?”

  “I told you from the start that we couldn’t live here forever,” Joanne said, dropping down in a brown leather chair adjacent to the sofa. “You’re the one who’s not being fair.” She pointed at her chest. “Don’t tell me you blame me for the things that have happened?”

  “i don’t want to talk about Dad,” Mike said, frowning.

  “Neither do I,” Joanne told him. “I could have bought another house when you and Leah came back, maybe not in an area like this, but at least we would have owned our own home. We’ve discussed all this before. It seemed more important to spend the money on you and your sister’s education. Waldorf is an expensive school, but they have small classes and excellent teachers. We tried to enroll you in the public school, remember? But, because your father had you tutored at home for the two years you were with him to prevent me from finding you, the public school refused to allow you and Leah to attend classes at your grade level. Waldorf was willing to bend the rules based on your scores on their enrollment tests. When you start applying to colleges, you’ll thank me.”

  Mike sneered. “I’m only twelve. Mom.”

  “What might not seem important to you now could change the course of your life,” Joanne answered, picking up a glass off the end table to carry to the kitchen. “Just because things are tough right now doesn’t mean they’re going to remain this way forever. Give me a chance, Mike.”

  They both remained silent. Mike fiddled with the remote, then placed it on the sofa beside him.

  With the exception of summers and holidays, there were only about twenty young people who lived at Seacliff Point. The majority of the home owners dispatched their offspring to boarding schools. The remaining kids attended public school in Camarillo, a city located between Ventura and Seacliff Point.

  “About this party,” Joanne continued. “Who invited you?”

  “Susan Goldstein.”

  “I see,” his mother said. “Isn’t Susan almost eighteen? This must be a party for the high school crowd. Why would they invite you? You’re still in junior high.”

  “They don’t know,” Mike answered, excited at the possibility that his mother was weakening.

  “You’ve lost me,” Joanne said, confused. “What don’t they know?”

  Mike leaned forward over his knees. “No one here knows how old I am, see. They think I’m sixteen because I’m so big. Please, Mom, if you let me go to this party, I promise I won’t drink or do anything wrong. I just want to have some fun. With all this stuff with Dad going on…”

  Joanne narrowed her eyes. “I thought you didn’t want to talk about your father”

  “I don’t,” Mike said sharply. “That’s why I don’t want to sit around the house all the time and stare at the walls. How can I not think about him, huh? He called from jail only a few minutes before you got home.”

  Joanne felt her temper flare. “Didn’t I tell you not to accept any collect calls from him? How did he get the Spencers’ number?” Her husband must have people working for him outside the jail, a friend with similar technical skills and no ethics.

  Mike looked down at the floor “Talk to Leah,” he said. “I didn’t give him our number. And he’s not calling collect. Mom. I guess he has a calling card or something.” He lowered his voice, glancing toward the kitchen. “Don’t tell Leah I told you, but Dad calls here almost every day, usually around the time we get home from school.”

  “You have my permission to go to the party,” Joanne said, deciding honesty deserved some type of reward. “I expect you to be home no later than ten o’clock. I’ll be waiting up for you. One hint of alcohol or anything else and you can kiss your bike good-bye. Are we clear?”

  “Thank you, God!” Mike threw his arms in the air in a sign of victory. “I can’t believe I get to go! You’re the greatest Mom in the whole wide world. I won’t let you
down, I promise.”

  Joanne’s shoulders rolled forward. At least her son had something to look forward to that weekend. She hadn’t been to a party in years. When she wasn’t working, she was taking care of the children or cycling through the chain of events that had caused what had once been a loving family to end up in shambles. During the time her children had lived with their father, the man had let them run wild. Resurrecting innocence and instilling discipline was a trying task.

  Terrified his children might figure out that he’d wrecked their lives to protect himself, Doug had decided to make certain that neither of the children developed even an iota of resentment toward him. Not only had he home-schooled them, he hadn’t set curfews. A housekeeper had cleaned their rooms and cooked their meals. Doug had squandered enormous amounts of money on them, buying them the best clothes, handing them wads of cash, setting up the latest computer and video games in their rooms so that they became the envy of all their friends. The money her former husband had used to buy their love had been embezzled from not one but dozens of companies. With all the wrongs Doug had committed, the one thing Joanne could never forgive was the fact that he had convinced Mike and Leah that their own mother had abandoned them. To ease their pain, Leah had once told her, she and her brother told everyone that their mother was dead.

  Joanne tried to muster up the energy to prepare dinner. She felt herself sinking back into the chair. Right now, they should be sitting down together as a family. Instead, the father of her children was in jail, and she was still attempting to break down the barriers he had created.

  The situation was both ironic and tragic. Doug was a genius in his own field. While Joanne had been battling criminals in the courtroom, her husband had been developing the future, designing programs that were now mainstays in almost every home and office. Greed and ambition had played a primary role in his downfall, along with the fact that it wasn’t uncommon for people with his energy and ingenuity to become bored in a corporate environment. The same qualities that caused Joanne to fall in love with him had ultimately destroyed him—his adventurous and reckless spirit.

  Night after night, Joanne had cooked the meals, helped the children with their schoolwork, cleaned the house, and handled the other household chores while her husband sequestered himself in a spare bedroom filled with computer terminals. He seldom made love to her. They didn’t have anything even vaguely resembling a social life. Many times they went weeks without having more than five-minute conversations. He’d started coming to bed later and later, until she would wake up to go to work and find her husband still locked inside his room.

  As the situation worsened, Joanne had asked herself if he was having an affair, began to believe she was no longer appealing, even suggested they go for marriage counseling. When Doug had gone from a keylock to a dead bolt on the door to his home office, she’d started to question his sanity. Her concern turned into suspicion when she opened her mail one day and saw a seven-hundred-dollar phone bill.

  Since Telinx provided their top-level employees with a phone line by which they could remotely access their office computers, her husband’s claim that he was working on company projects no longer appeared valid.

  The next day Joanne stayed home from work and called a locksmith to open the door to her husband’s office. After eight hours of effort, she still couldn’t bypass the myriad of passwords Doug had installed to protect anyone from accessing his computer systems. Before things had spun out of control, Joanne had used one of the computers to catch up on some of her own work. Now none of their regular passwords worked.

  To make certain her husband didn’t suspect anything, Joanne put everything back in the same order, even touching up the paint on the door where the dead bolt was located. She now had a key, however, and the following day, she contacted a computer consulting firm. The technician who came to the house advised that the way her husband had his computers configured, even the most sophisticated hacker wouldn’t be able to open his files. Refusing to give up, Joanne had asked Gene Stone to do her a favor and take a look. Stone was in charge of the technicians who maintained the computer systems at the courthouse. Since these systems were linked to the Department of Justice, the FBI, the CIA, Interpol, and every law enforcement agency in the country, she was certain Gene could get the job done.

  Joanne had recently attended an emergency security conference in Washington where Gene Stone had given a seminar. The conference had been called after the DNA and Forensic database had been hacked into, and the entire criminal justice system had panicked. An isolated incident had alerted an entire nation to the perils of advanced technology. A man with ties to organized crime had been falsely cleared in the rape and murder of a young woman. Hiring a brilliant but embittered former government employee with insider knowledge and skills, the killer’s DNA records had been successfully altered a few weeks before his case was brought up on appeal, causing the appellate court to rule in his favor and overturn his previous conviction. A hardened killer had been released. As far as Joanne knew, he had not yet been reapprehended.

  “The only way to disable the BIOS password,” Gene Stone told her, “is to open the metal case on your husband’s computers and remove the batteries from the motherboards. The battery is basically a memory chip where information is stored. Once we do this, though, the original factory defaults will be restored. When your husband boots up his computer, he’ll know instantly that someone has tampered with it because all his passwords will be gone.”

  “This technology stuff is over my head,” Joanne said, releasing a long sigh. “What’s a BIOS password?”

  “Here,” he said, “I’ll show you.”

  Gene Stone sat down at her husband’s desk, booted up what appeared to be his main computer, then almost immediately hit the delete key. This caused another screen to appear where a person could enable or disable various passwords and internal settings. When the computer asked for the password, Gene typed in all the passwords Joanne and her husband had previously used as well as several permutations without having any luck. “There’s an ethical issue to be considered,” he told her. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t breaking into a person’s computer similar to burglarizing their house? I mean, you’re the legal expert so I’ll let you make that determination.”

  This question was certainly valid. Joanne paused to give it some thought. “Everything in this room is community property.”

  “Are you and your husband in the process of getting a divorce?” He glanced down at the floor, then looked back up at her, fearing he had overstepped his limits. “You don’t have to answer, Joanne,” he said. “I’m just trying to help you.”

  “No,” Joanne said, her eyes misting over. “At least, not to my knowledge.”

  “Call the numbers.”

  “What numbers?”

  “Didn’t you tell me that this first came to light because of your phone bill?” Gene asked. “Then call the numbers.”

  “I tried that already,” Joanne said, holding up the phone bill with checkmarks next to each number. “Most of the numbers are on-line access numbers.” She was angry that her husband had placed her in such an embarrassing position. When someone came to your home, though, a degree of intimacy developed. She’d also known Gene Stone for ten years, and due to the type of work he did, she felt assured that whatever she told him wouldn’t be repeated. She tossed the thick stack of papers back on her husband’s desk.

  “Some of these numbers aren’t even in the country.”

  “Outside of taking a baseball bat to him,” Gene told her, speaking bluntly, “disabling the BIOS password is the only way you’re going to find out what’s inside these machines.”

  “Do it,” Joanne told him. “Either that, or I’m going to crack the damn thing open with a hammer.”

  Gene was intrigued. He’d never been asked to come to a prosecutor’s home to check out a personal computer. Judging from the amount of equipment he saw, Joanne Kuhlman’s husband wa
s doing more than surfing the Web and playing the stock market. The first thing that came to mind was some type of trafficking in pornographic material. Joanne was too sophisticated, however, not to have already considered this possibility.

  After removing the battery on all five computers. Gene stood and dusted off his clothing. It had been a long time since he’d done what he referred to as grunt work, actually getting down on the floor and disassembling a machine. He had a contract with the county, but his employees did the work. Gene spent almost every waking hour of his day either lecturing, or locked in a room writing programs in an attempt to keep up with the galloping speed of technology.

  Gene Stone brushed his hair off his sweaty brow. I’m sorry I suggested this,” he told her, glancing at the nuts, bolts, and motherboards strewn all over the floor. “You’ll never be able to recover the data inside these computers without the precise code sequences your husband used to safeguard his intellectual properties.”

  “But I thought you said this would work,” Joanne said, wondering if Stone was as knowledgeable as she had thought.

  “We got into his computers,” Gene explained. “The problem is we can’t open any of the files. Every one of them is encrypted.”

  The next day, Joanne’s father suffered a heart attack and she’d taken a plane to St. Louis. When she returned, her children, her husband, and all his computer equipment were gone. The police had finally uncovered the secret Doug had so desperately tried to keep hidden. Her husband had become a compulsive gambler. At the time, Joanne wasn’t even aware that such a thing as Internet gambling existed. A person could now sell their soul over the internet.

  The chain of events was fairly simple.