by Sara Rosett
“Oscar won’t do anything.” Jack’s tone was steady. “He wants your cooperation. Those photos are a reminder, to keep you—us—focused.”
“I can’t let him hurt Helen.”
“Hurting her gains him nothing. If anything, it would distract us from getting the painting. He doesn’t want that. Every move he and Gray make is calculated. They’re not psychopaths attacking women for the thrill of it. Gray wants his painting, and he thinks you can get it. If you get distracted worrying about Helen and get sucked into telling her everything that’s going on, it will only slow us down.”
Jack was right. Sometimes she hated it when he was right. So logical and reasoned. She wanted to do something. “Okay. No call—yet.” Zoe punched the doorbell with more force than was necessary, wishing it was Oscar’s nose.
“Keeping her out of the loop is the best thing you can do for her.”
A slim woman in her twenties with an upturned nose, dark brown eyes, and pale blond hair caught up in a ponytail opened the door. She wore dark jeans, pointy-toed cowboy boots, and a loose, gauzy shirt that floated around her as she stepped back, waving them inside. “Zoe,” she exclaimed, “You didn’t have to bring dinner.”
Zoe forced herself to switch her thoughts away from the photos to Carla. “It’s the least we could do, barging in on you like this at the last minute.”
“And you must be the elusive Jack. Come in. I’m Carla.” As she closed the door, she stepped close to Zoe and murmured, “Nice,” with raised eyebrows.
A girl about five years old in a pink leotard and tights whizzed by. “This is my niece, Emma,” Carla said at normal volume. “Stop running for a minute and say hello to my friends, Emma.”
Emma skidded to a stop on the tile floor, whispered hello, and scampered off again, flitting like a hummingbird collecting nectar.
“My sister had a meeting, so I took Emma to dance class tonight,” Carla explained as she led the way through the open plan living room decorated in shades of gray, white, and navy blue to a kitchen painted a sunny yellow with white cabinets. She placed the food on a rectangular wooden dining table positioned along a row of tall windows that looked out onto her patio and fenced backyard.
“Her mom will be along soon, but we should go ahead and eat.” She opened a cabinet and began removing glasses.
While her back was turned, Jack sent Zoe a doubtful look.
“What?” she mouthed at him, and he gave a pointed glance at Carla’s back, then around the room. “Are you sure about Carla?” he asked in an undertone.
Carla turned from the cabinet, carrying several glasses. She had one in her right hand and pointed it at Jack. “I know that look.” She plunked the glasses down on the table and turned to Zoe. “I swear I should go back to the Goth look. No one takes me seriously. I think it’s the hair.” She swiped a hand down her blond ponytail. She switched her attention back to Jack. “You think I’m some suburbanite who spends half her days in yoga pants at the gym and the other half on Pinterest, right?”
“Ah—no. I, um...”
“You don’t think I could hack into my own email account, much less a high-tech website with layers of security protocols. Am I right?”
Jack cleared his throat and put his hands out, palms up. “Sorry. I apologize. I made assumptions based on your surroundings. I have to admit that I didn’t expect a hacker to have such a...homey place.” He gestured at a potted orange Gerbera daisy in the center of the table.
“Don’t worry. I won’t hold it against you.” She gave him a stack of napkins—white polka dots on yellow—and opened a drawer for silverware. “And technically, I’m an information technology and security consultant.” She cocked her head to one side. “Do you think if I lived in a grungy, dark studio apartment strewn with empty pizza boxes, I’d have more clients?”
Zoe looked around. “Definitely.”
Carla crunched up her shoulders. “I could never do it. I love this house.”
“You could always rent office space. You could use it only to meet clients. Make it nice and dreary. Paint the walls a dark gray, keep the blinds closed, and scatter around lots of computer equipment and extension cords. I bet your client list would double. I’d let you try it for free for a few weeks next time someone moves out of one of my office suites.”
“Maybe.”
Emma climbed into a chair, and they sat down to eat. By the time they had the boxes open, Emma was deep into an interrogation of Jack. “What’s your favorite color?”
Jack paused with his chopsticks poised over his fried rice. “I’d have to say blue.”
“Like your eyes,” Emma said. “Mine is purple.”
“Not pink?” Jack asked.
“No. Pink is for babies. I have to wear it for ballet.”
“I see.”
Carla cleared her throat. “Don’t forget to eat your shrimp, Emma.”
Jack turned to Carla. “So Goth?”
Zoe looked pointedly at the daffodil yellow kitchen. “It is hard to believe, isn’t it?”
“I was. Get Zoe to show you my picture junior year. I look like something out of a bad horror movie. Jet-black hair, thick eyeliner, and I already had the pallor because I was so fair-skinned. I hung out with the stoners behind the Quick-Mart.” She looped a noodle around her chopsticks. “Senior year I took a programming class and that was it for the Goth thing. I’d found myself. Turns out I’m a geek.”
Emma said, “I have a turtle.”
“What’s your turtle’s name?” Zoe asked.
“Speedy. Daddy says it’s moronic.”
“I think you mean ironic, sweetie,” Carla corrected, hiding a smile behind her glass.
Emma shrugged. She focused her attention on Jack. “We did have a parrot, but we had to find him a new home because he said bad words.”
“I wonder where the parrot learned those words?” Zoe said, widening her eyes as she looked at Carla.
“It’s a mystery.” Carla stood and began closing the food containers.
“We don’t say bad words,” Emma informed them in a grave tone.
“That’s right. We don’t say bad words.” In an undertone, Carla added, “Not anymore.”
Zoe watched Emma out of the corner of her eye, struggling to break open a plastic fortune cookie wrapper. Jack offered to help. Emma put it in his hand, and he ripped it open. Zoe grabbed the empty container of fried rice and followed Carla into the kitchen.
“That stuff I told you about on the phone, the favor I need, forget it.”
Carla closed the refrigerator door and turned to her. “What are you talking about?
“Of course I’ll help you.”
“I know, but I don’t want to put you in a bad position.” Zoe looked to the table where Jack was reading Emma’s fortune to her. “I can’t ask you to take a risk for me. You’re not a hacker anymore. I can’t ask you to break the law for me.”
“It’s true that I’ve come back from—the dark side, let’s say—but I didn’t do it because I was afraid I’d get caught. I decided I wanted to do something more significant with my life than try to create a virus that made millions of people curse at their monitors.”
“There you go. I can’t ask you to bend your standards. It’s been great seeing you. We’ll get out of your hair. Forget I ever asked.”
Carla dumped the leftover sauce packets into the trash and let the lid clang shut. “I stopped hacking because I decided to use my powers for good, not evil, as the cliché goes. It sounds like you could use my help. You said you can’t go to the police, right?”
“No, not now.” Zoe hadn’t told her the details of what had happened, only that she was in trouble and needed information that she couldn’t find herself.
“Okay, then. Let me work my magic and worry about my conscience. Sometimes you have to bend the rules a bit to get at the truth. That’s the old hacker in me talking, but there is some truth there. Come on, you like to live on the edge, don’t you understand?”
“Of course, I understand taking risks. That’s practically my motto, but I don’t want to put anyone else at risk.”
“Zoe, I’m not going to get caught. What you need is easy-peasy. Child’s play. I’m not going to take any chances that would put me in a bad position. But I’m not going to stand by and let things get worse for you either, not when I can take a teeny, tiny peek and—possibly—give you some answers.”
“I don’t know...” Emma had left the table, and Jack was gathering up the last of the food boxes and chopsticks while Emma jumped on the couch like it was a diving board.
Carla crossed her arms. “Zoe, you already told me what you need to know.”
Zoe sighed. “And you’re curious now, so you’re going to look it up anyway whether or not I try and talk you out of it.”
“Yep. That’s about the size of it.”
Zoe thought of the photos of Helen going about her day, completely unaware that Oscar was shadowing her. “Okay, you win. You can hack for me.”
***
EMMA'S mom arrived shortly after dinner. After waving good-bye to them, Carla motioned for Zoe and Jack to follow her into a spare bedroom she’d made into an office. She bypassed the large glass desk with its sleek computer and opened the folding closet doors, revealing a second work area with several monitors, CPUs, and a tangle of cords. “My special work space,” she explained.
Zoe took a seat in the rolling office chair at the glass desk and Jack leaned against the room’s doorframe with his arms crossed. Carla swiveled her chair side-to-side, fingers poised on the keyboard. “Let’s see what we can do. Okay, so we’ve got the name Anna Whitmore and a physical description. No phone number, address, friends, family, or business ties.”
A gloomy sense of the impossibility of the task she’d asked Carla to accomplish settled on Zoe. “It’s a pathetically small amount of info, I know.” It was worse than looking for a needle in a haystack. This was like looking for a needle in Montana.
“She said something once that made me think she was from the Pacific Northwest. What was it?” Jack frowned at the floor. “It was snowing—really coming down.” His head popped up. “She said at least it wasn’t rain. After four years in Seattle, she’d take snow over rain any day.”
“That’s good,” Carla said, and then went quiet as she typed away for a bit. Eventually, she pushed back so they could both see the monitor. “Any of these people look like her?”
Zoe and Jack both moved closer to the monitor. “Facebook?” Zoe asked, skimming the list of faces.
“Yep. It’s a good place to start. So many people have profiles—even if they’re not active on the site. It’s a gold mine of information,” Carla said. “The name Anna Whitmore isn’t that common, and I narrowed the results by region. Nothing here? Okay, next page.”
Zoe shook her head as Carla scrolled through two more pages.
“Wait.” Zoe pointed at a photo of an attractive woman with dark hair. “I think that’s her. Her hair is longer than when I saw her, but the face is the same.”
“Looks like her profile is private. Let me see what I can do.” Carla hummed a few bars of Smoke on the Water as she typed. Zoe eased back a few steps so she wouldn’t be looming over Carla, but she was completely focused on the computer, her fingers tapping away at the keys. Jack sent Zoe a raised eyebrow look. Zoe shrugged.
After a few minutes, Carla leaned back. “We’re in.” Zoe and Jack closed the distance and looked over Carla’s shoulder as she read, “Hometown, Chicago. College at the University of Washington,” she said with a nod at Jack. “Her last employer is listed as ComTech in San Bernardino, California.”
“Must have wanted some sun after all that rain,” Zoe said. “What else?”
“Nothing recent. She hasn’t posted a status update since she went on a vacation almost three years ago. The last updates are photos of her on a beach in Saint-Tropez.” Carla switched to the contact information page. “Excellent.” A smile spread across her face. “Email addresses, just what we need.”
“The Facebook.com address probably doesn’t have much,” she said, her fingers already tapping the keyboard. “I don’t know anyone who actually uses their Facebook email address. I’ll concentrate on the Yahoo address.” She typed a few strokes, paused, then said under her breath, “Okay, let’s try it another way.”
Finally, she hit ENTER like a concert pianist striking the final key during a performance of Beethoven’s Fifth and spun toward them, eyes shining. “What did I tell you? Easy-peasy. You’re in luck. Looks like she still uses this email account.”
“What are her most recent emails?” Jack asked.
“Um...well, I think we can assume she’s a shopper. Maybe a shopaholic. She’s got emails in here from Nordstrom, Neiman Marcus, Gucci, Versace, Dolce & Gabbana, and Armani as well as a couple of other ones that I haven’t heard of, but I bet they’re expensive.” Her voice changed. “Now this is interesting. Some airline ticket confirmations. Four days ago she was scheduled to fly from Naples, Italy to Paris.”
Zoe and Jack exchanged a glance. “It fits with what Oscar told us,” Jack said.
“But Naples?” Zoe said, “Do you think she’s there?”
“No idea,” Jack said, “but it’s a start.”
“Naples,” Zoe muttered. “It always seems to come back to Naples.” She and Jack had traveled to Naples last year in an attempt to discover who was behind the fraud at Jack’s company.
She thumped down in the other office chair. “It’s a start, but Naples is huge. Can you narrow down where she’s sending the emails from? Can you get a location on her computer...or something?”
Carla shook her head. “Nope, I already checked. She’s a little lax on password security—that’s how I got into her account, but she does use a virtual private network to hide her IP address. I traced it back through a couple of European servers to a location in Nevada, but couldn’t get farther than that. I can work on it though.”
“Don’t sound so eager,” Zoe said. “I think you’d better step away from the computer. I feel a bit like I’ve bought a drink for an alcoholic who’s been on the wagon.”
“It was fun. I haven’t done anything like that in years. But you’re right, I don’t want to go back there,” she said with a sigh. “Not if I want to keep my day job, anyway. There’s a second airline reservation. She’s flying into Paris again. Departs Naples on the fifteenth and returns on the sixteenth.”
“The fifteenth? That’s tomorrow.” Zoe and Jack exchanged a look. Zoe hopped up and crossed the room so she could study the computer herself. “She arrives at six. She could be going back to the gallery. Do you think we can do it?”
Carla looked back and forth between them. “Do what?”
“It’s probably our best chance,” Jack said. “If we can make a flight tonight we could arrive about the same time as her.”
“But the tickets. They’d be outrageous.”
“We’ll charge them.”
“But they have to be paid off sometime,” Zoe said.
“I’ll cover it. You’d do the same thing for me. In fact, you have done the same thing for me.”
Carla had been watching their conversation like a spectator at a tennis match, her gaze bobbing back and forth between them. “Y’all aren’t talking about flying to Paris, are you? Tonight? That’s crazy.”
Jack said, “Come on, Zoe. I have some money in savings and a credit card that hasn’t been used in months. I couldn’t touch it or the money while I was under the radar, but there’s nothing stopping me from using it now. How much can two last minute tickets to Paris cost?”
“A couple of thousand, at least.”
“I’ll cover it. You can pay me back, if it makes you feel better.”
“Okay,” Zoe said reluctantly.
“You can’t fly to Paris tonight,” Carla said.
“Why not? We both have passports,” Zoe said. “Dallas is an international hub. There will be plenty of fli
ghts. And for once, the FBI couldn’t care less if I left the country.”
“Not yet anyway,” Jack said. “And we want to keep it that way. How much are the tickets, Carla? Can you look it up for us?”
“And could you print her most recent emails for us?” Zoe added. “I can look through them on the flight, see if I can find anything else.”
Carla turned back to the computer. “You’re both crazy. You don’t just book an international trip and hop on a plane a couple of hours later. You need time. You have to buy guidebooks, plan your itinerary. You don’t even know what electrical adaptors you need.”
“Don’t worry. I’m getting used to it,” Zoe said.
***
SATO pressed the doorbell again. The Kid waited behind his shoulder, glancing at his phone. It was late, and Sato knew The Kid wanted to get home. An issue with another case had consumed the rest of the afternoon and early evening. They hadn’t been able to get out of the office until after six-thirty. Sato had told The Kid to go on...that he could handle the check in with Zoe Hunter on his own, but The Kid had said he wanted to meet the “cyber thief.”
After a few minutes, Sato went around back, pounded on the kitchen door. No answer. He hadn’t called, not wanting to give Zoe Hunter or the newly cleared Mr. Andrews any warning he was coming. He cupped his hand around his eyes and looked in the window over the sink.
A wadded dishtowel sat on the counter. Two tall glasses along with a few pieces of silverware rested in the sink. A smattering of paper, which looked like envelopes, trailed across the island as if someone had tossed them down on the way in from the mailbox. “Apparently, they are both out.” He stepped away, then went back and peered at the kitchen ceiling. Yep, the gaping hole in the drywall was finally fixed. Unfortunately, he didn’t think he could take that as confirmation that Zoe had taken millions of dollars from a scam and hid it in a well-disguised bank account.
Sato turned from the window and surveyed the backyard where The Kid was pacing, checking the signal on his phone. “Looks like they’ve done some landscaping, too,” Sato commented.
“So you think she took the money?” The Kid asked with a nod of his head toward the house and a doubtful look.
