She headed to her office so she could check her email before the meeting started. She was thrown off-stride by the large bouquet of flowers sitting on her desk.
Thank you for a most unusual weekend, the card read. Looking forward to the next flight—Vilma
“We’re all wondering who sent those,” AJ said. “Whoever she is must have had to pull some major strings to arrange a delivery so early.”
Brooklyn dropped the note card in her purse but didn’t bother to say who had written it. “I don’t kiss and tell,” she said as she logged into her computer.
“Are you allowed to say if your meeting with the investor went well, or is that off-limits, too?”
“It was promising.”
AJ lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “So there’s a chance we might be going public soon?”
“That depends on the outcome of today’s meeting.”
“Charlie always said you could be cagey when you wanted to be.”
Brooklyn looked up from her email long enough to meet AJ’s eye. “You and Charlie talked about me?”
“You were one of her favorite subjects.” AJ blushed. “Actually, what she called your ‘pathetic excuse for a love life’ was.”
“Yep,” Brooklyn said with a laugh, “that sounds like Charlie.”
“Did she know about—” AJ jerked her chin toward the bouquet of flowers.
“No.” Brooklyn felt a pang of melancholy when she realized Charlie and Vilma would never meet. Would they have gotten along, or would they have ended up butting heads? It was sad to think she would never know. “Because there’s nothing to tell. Not yet, anyway.”
“Got it. If you need a sounding board, you know where to find me.”
“Thanks, AJ.” Brooklyn regarded her for a moment. Aside from company functions, they hadn’t spent much time together outside the office. Brooklyn had gleaned a few details about her over the years, but she knew more about the contents of her personnel file than her personal life. The main thing they had in common was Charlie. And now that link was gone. “Are you free for lunch today?”
“Yes.”
“Perfect. Let’s grab a bite in the café downstairs. Is one o’clock good for you?”
“I’ll have to check my schedule, but I think I might be able to fit you in.”
“I’m happy to hear that. See you in a few.”
“Sure thing, boss.”
Brooklyn responded to a few emails and flagged the ones she needed to follow up on later. Then she checked the clock. She had just enough time to send Vilma a quick text.
The flowers are beautiful, she wrote. I’ll do my best to deserve them.
Vilma’s response came a few minutes later. You already have.
Looking forward to Saturday night, Brooklyn wrote back. Any hints about where we’re going?
Brooklyn waited anxiously for the ellipses on the phone’s display to turn into words.
You’ll find out when we get there.
Brooklyn hated mysteries because she always figured them out way too soon. Vilma Bautista was a mystery she hadn’t come close to solving, but, damn, if she didn’t enjoy trying.
She strode into the conference room and took her seat at the head of the table. The chair to her right, the one Charlie had always occupied, had been left empty. She was touched by the show of respect.
“You guys are a good team.” She watched everyone’s faces light up at the compliment before she finished her thought. “But I recently met someone who made me realize that being good isn’t good enough. I want us to be great. That’s the only thing that’s going to separate us from the rest of the pack. If you can do that, BDV won’t be known as the fun place to work. It will be the place to work. Today, I’m not only challenging you to make that happen, I’m also challenging myself.”
She paused to look each team member in the eye.
“Are you ready to meet that challenge? I think you are. Now prove to me that you have as much confidence in yourselves as I have in you. Who wants to go first?”
She leaned back in her seat and waited for someone to take the lead. Everyone looked around, but no one spoke. She had expected them to fight for the chance to kick things off. Instead, no one seemed willing to subject their ideas to external scrutiny.
After a few moments of awkward silence, Trevor Gleason raised his hand
“What’s your idea, Trev?”
“It’s an app along the lines of—”
Brooklyn held up her hand. “Stop right there. This is for all of you, not just Trev. Don’t give me an idea that’s like something else on the market but better. Give me something I haven’t seen before but can’t live without.”
“If that’s your criteria, it’s back to the drawing board for me.”
Trevor’s comment prompted a chorus of similar ones. More disappointed than frustrated, Brooklyn turned to AJ. “What do you have for me?”
“You want to hear my idea now?”
“There’s no time like the present. Do you need time to get set up?”
“No, I’m good.”
AJ quickly hooked her laptop into the projection system and opened the file Brooklyn had seen her working on the previous afternoon.
“I’m sure this isn’t news to you, but advances in machine learning and AI have sparked a renewed interest in CUI. Most people would rather utilize conversational user interfaces than take the time to type a command. This allows us to use conversation as the primary mode of interaction with technology.”
“What’s so groundbreaking about that?” Trevor asked. “Google, Amazon, and Microsoft introduced that capability years ago. At this point, Siri and Alexa are household names because everyone and his sister owns one.”
Brooklyn prepared to step in to protect AJ from Trevor’s verbal assault, but AJ stood her ground.
“But they don’t own this.”
Brooklyn turned to look at the image on the screen.
“Meet Newton.”
“What the hell is that?” someone asked.
“A CUI that interacts with both new and existing technology. With it, anything can be upgraded from manual to verbal control. Once the app is downloaded, you can use it to control anything in your home from your TV to the telephone to the electrical system.”
“Like a modern-day version of the Clapper?” Trevor asked. “My grandparents had one of those.”
“Mine, too,” AJ said, “but this is a hundred times better. In essence, it’s a voice-activated universal remote that controls an entire house, not just a TV. What do you think, boss?”
Brooklyn stared at the presentation as she weighed the app’s obvious merits against its potential for abuse. “We would have to include a top-notch security system to lessen the chance the system could be compromised.”
“Naturally,” AJ said. “Does that mean you like it?”
“I do. I’m not crazy about the name, but I love the idea itself.”
“Great. I’m also working on something else.”
“You’ve been busy,” Brooklyn said as AJ cycled through screens on her computer.
“That’s what happens when you don’t have a social life.”
Brooklyn admired AJ’s ability to laugh at herself, a valuable asset in this or any other high-stakes business.
“Technically, what I’m working on might not meet your criteria since it improves on already existing technology, but I’ve developed a search engine that—”
“Wait,” Trevor said. “Are you seriously trying to say you want to take on Google? They’re so big they’ve practically cornered the market on search engines. Every time someone tries to take them on, they either crush them or buy them out.”
“Either way, we win,” Brooklyn said.
“How so?” Trevor asked.
“Whether the product goes down in flames or is a spectacular success, we’d make a name for ourselves. In this industry, product quality is the key to retaining customers, but name recognition is vital
for earning new ones. Why do you think the marketing department gets such a huge chunk of our budget each year? No risk, no reward.” Brooklyn waited for the members of her team to connect the dots before she continued the meeting. “Show me what you’ve got, AJ.”
“The working title is Finders Keepers, which I admit is a bit cutesy. I’m still looking for the perfect fit. But here’s how it works.”
She demoed a product that was lightning fast, visually appealing, and user-friendly.
“I assume advertisers’ websites would receive priority positioning on the initial results page,” Brooklyn said when AJ was done.
“I know that practice provides valuable ad revenue, but I’ve always found it disingenuous. And, to put it bluntly, it annoys the crap out of me. Whenever I run a search, I skip the results labeled as ads or sponsored on general principle.”
Brooklyn smiled to herself as she noticed several people nodding in agreement. They had finally stopped sniping at each other long enough to find something to agree on,
“We are in the business of making money,” she said, playing devil’s advocate, “so how do you propose we do that in this instance?”
“I figured I’d leave that part up to you. It’s my job to write the software. It’s your job to find a way to make it profitable.”
“So it is.” And AJ had just given her two promising ideas to work with. She reached across the table to give her a fist bump. “Looks like our lunch has turned into a celebration. Does anyone else want to join the party?”
After AJ set the bar, the ideas started flowing fast and furious. Brooklyn dismissed some for lack of originality or because of the prohibitive cost of production, but she thought a few others held potential. By the end of the meeting, her lunch for two had turned into a party of five.
“Good work, everyone,” she said as she brought the meeting to a close. “If I had known all I needed to do was ply you with free food to prompt you to give me your very best, I would have done it years ago.”
“Free food’s good,” AJ said after everyone else filed out of the room, “but a big, fat bonus would be even better.”
“If your products go over as well as I expect them to, you just earned yours.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence.”
“I’m not trying to blow smoke up your ass, AJ. The ideas you pitched today aren’t the only things that have potential. You do, too. Pretty soon, you’re going to be treating me to lunch instead of the other way around.”
“I hope you’re right.”
“I know I am. Just promise you’ll save me a seat at the table.”
“Always.”
A few days ago, Brooklyn had been wracked with doubts about the future. As she smelled the flowers Vilma had given her and watched her team work on bringing their ideas to fruition, she had never felt more confident about what the future held. For her company or for herself.
* * *
Santana listened attentively as Brooklyn told her about her first day back at work since her best friend’s death. Even though they weren’t in the same room, she could feel the excitement flowing off of Brooklyn in waves. Brooklyn’s cadence of speech grew faster and faster as she talked about the staff meeting she had held that morning and the working lunch she had treated several employees to that afternoon. She wouldn’t divulge the details of some of the projects she had greenlit, but Santana could sense her obvious enthusiasm for them.
“I knew AJ had promise,” Brooklyn said when she finally paused to take a breath. “After today’s meeting, I was able to identify several other potential top producers as well. Now I’m looking through the files Charlie stored in the cloud to see if there are any ideas she was kicking around that might bear fruit. It’s all your fault, you know.”
Santana turned away from her view of the city so she could focus more fully on the conversation. “How so?”
“If you hadn’t thrown down the gauntlet this weekend, I wouldn’t have convinced myself to get out of the rather comfortable rut I had fallen into.”
“Is this the way you usually respond to a challenge? By tackling it head-on?”
“Let’s put it this way. When playing Truth or Dare, I’m the one who always opts for the dare.”
“Because you have an aversion to the truth, or because you have a fondness for thrill-seeking?”
“Neither. The truth is I’m a terrible liar. I always have been. If you ask me a question, my response will be unfailingly honest every time. But when it comes down to it, anything I have to divulge is guaranteed to be boring. That’s why I invented Brooke in the first place. Her adventures are a lot more interesting than mine. An armchair psychologist might say I would rather perform for my audience than reveal myself to them.”
Santana was guilty of the same thing. Perhaps that was why she and Brooklyn got along so well. Because they had much more in common than she had initially realized.
“Did you have an epiphany?” she asked after the faint clack of keyboard keys that had underscored their conversation to that point abruptly ended.
“No, but I think I might have found something.”
“Another future project?”
“No, the person who killed Charlie.”
Santana felt her blood run cold. She had always thought the expression was just a cliché until she experienced it for herself. If Brooklyn had uncovered the information she had been unable to, she might be placing herself in the line of fire. Literally.
“Who do you think it is?” she asked.
“One of Charlie’s pet projects was an app that allows law enforcement officials to identify human traffickers as well as victims. We didn’t get a chance to bring it to market because a nonprofit spearheaded by a former teen idol perfected it first. Charlie must have continued working on her version of the software in her spare time, though, because it seems she put it through a couple of test runs in a live environment.”
“Did she find something?”
“It appears so. I’m looking at a list of suspect names. I recognize the one at the top. Eve Thao was arrested a few months ago after an anonymous tip led police officers to a couple of properties she owned in the Garment District. A sweat shop that employed dozens of undocumented workers, and the squalid apartment building she forced them to live in while they tried to work off the insurmountable debt she claimed they owed her for smuggling them into the country. She hasn’t gone to trial yet, but her properties have been seized and her accounts have been frozen.”
“And you think Charlie was the person who called in the tip?”
“I can’t tell based on the notes in her files. If she was the informant, Eve must have found out about it somehow and sent her henchmen to silence her. Does that sound plausible, or am I grasping at straws here?”
“It is a long shot, but it also seems reasonable,” Santana said. “With her domestic accounts locked down, Thao could have used an offshore account to arrange the hit. Charlie’s death would serve two purposes. It would allow Thao to exact revenge on the person she blamed for her downfall and it would also intimidate potential witnesses so they would be too afraid to testify when she finally has her day in court.”
“I guess Detective Barnett wasn’t too far off base when he suggested Charlie might have enemies. I should call him so he can direct his forensics team to investigate what I’ve found. But what if I’m wrong? He’ll probably think I’m a crackpot. He might even laugh in my face.”
“It’s more likely he could end up thanking you for helping him break the case. If the lead doesn’t pan out, no harm, no foul. Every bit of information helps.”
“I suppose so,” Brooklyn said doubtfully. “I’ll call him as soon as I can remember where I put his business card. I was in a daze when he gave it to me. I hope it didn’t wind up in the trash. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
“Are we still on for this weekend?”
“We’d better be. I bought a dress this afternoon you’ve got to see to believe.”
>
Santana pictured Brooklyn wearing a sleek and sexy gown that hugged her curves. The image made her mouth water. “I can’t wait.”
“Neither can I. Have a good night.”
“You, too.
After Brooklyn ended the call, Santana felt a sense of relief mixed with trepidation. If Eve Thao had paid to have Charlie killed, it would confirm her suspicions that the hit was personal. It would also mean that, most likely, Brooklyn was safe from harm since she had played no part in Thao’s arrest. But what if Brooklyn was wrong?
Eve Thao felt like a logical suspect, but she didn’t feel like the right one. She was already facing a potentially long sentence. Why would she risk having additional time tacked onto it? Additionally, the fee Winslow had collected for the hit on Charlotte Evans was much lower than he would normally charge someone with pockets as deep as Thao’s. That meant he had either performed a favor for a friend or given a deep discount to a first-time client for whom he hoped to perform more lucrative tasks in the future.
Santana had never gotten involved in the business side of things. Lee Townsend looked after the accounts while she and others like her performed the dirty work. Lee had never been one of her biggest fans—he bristled each time Winslow gave her even a semblance of positive reinforcement—so she knew she couldn’t count on him to let her see the details of the transaction.
She hoped Brooklyn’s hunch panned out because if it didn’t, they would be back to square one.
She picked up the remote and flipped through channels on the television. She stopped on a movie featuring laughable special effects, atrocious acting, and even worse dialogue. The film was supposed to be a horror film instead of a comedy, but she was more amused than frightened. No matter. She didn’t plan on watching any of it. She simply wanted noise in the background while she looked into the friends and associates who hadn’t attended Charlotte Evans’s funeral services.
She checked out Charlotte’s social media first. The pages were still active for the time being and were filled with messages from and tributes by her devastated friends. Some of the posts seemed heartfelt. Others seemed designed to garner sympathy for the author rather than express any for the deceased.
Heart of a Killer Page 11
