Executive Dirt: A Sedona O'Hala Mystery (10 page)

I sighed. “I was much cleaner
before
I found this mess.” I waved my hand at the taped off area.  “Those prize blueberries cannot be replaced. My dad looked high and low before he found the varieties he wanted.”  I refused to acknowledge that my voice was shaking. “I don’t imagine Cary is feeling all that fixable either.” 

Truth to tell, I was probably sorrier about the work lost.  The gardening had been something Dad had helped me with, and after the police were done sifting through each molecule of dirt, I’d be left with nothing but sifted mud.

“No, looks like his next job will be manning the compost bin,” Detective Saunders said with a smirk.

Both Mark and I glared at him. His comment might be a good gardening joke, but it was in extremely poor taste.

Saunders wasn’t the least bit perturbed. “No sign that anyone was inside your house?” he asked.

“No.  Nothing inside was disturbed. The place was still locked up.”

“We found drag marks from the front,” he said. “Looks like they came in from the side gate.”

At least they hadn’t broken out a window and swished him through the living room.

“You know of any reason someone would want to leave a dead body in your yard?  Revenge?  A warning of some kind?”

I shook my head, searching my yard for a reason, but not finding one. “No,” I said softly.

“Well, someone doesn’t like you very much,” Saunders drawled. “You’ll want to watch your back.”

If the body was meant to warn me away from something...Borgot?  Did someone want me to quit? The person who had disliked me most was probably Cary, and I doubted he’d buried himself in my yard to prove it.

Mark tightened his arm around me, and we withdrew inside. A detective was just finishing up an inspection.

Before I could change clothes, the doorbell rang.

Turbo waited on the porch, his hair uncombed and his shirt looking like he might have grabbed it off a hobo.  For him, programmer extraordinaire, this fashionable attire was entirely normal.  My old boss from Strandfrost was silent for a moment as his brain assessed all the data in front of him. Finally, he let out a huge sigh of relief. “I heard about the body on the police scanner.”  He gulped. “They didn’t say if it was the owner of the house or not.”

“Come on in, Turbo.  I’m fine.  Thanks for worrying.  I didn’t know you had a police scanner.”

He blinked at me a few times and adjusted his glasses.  “How else do you get accurate news?”

He was such a geek. I didn’t bother to explain to him that I didn’t have
time
for news, not from any source, really.  There was another knock on the front door just then, saving me from what was sure to be a lecture on the best scanners from Turbo. 

It was Radar.  He was staring down at his watch, one that reminded me of Joe’s watch because the display was flashing information so fast, it looked like blue Christmas lights. As soon as Radar saw me in one piece, he nodded happily.

“Let me guess,” I said.  “Police scanner.”

“Nah.  Well, sort of. My smartwatch hooks to Twitter via my phone to pick up certain feeds, like police scans pertaining to certain addresses or keywords.  I need something more sophisticated to sort the tweets though so I’m working on the code.”

“What program do you use for voice recognition to create the tweets from the scanner?” Turbo asked. “Even with the best scanners it must come across garbled. The police communication equipment is shit at the front end.”

“It is,” Radar agreed.  “I run it through a transcribing program and a signal processing program to remove some of the noise.  An alert then goes to my smartwatch with the text,” he held up his fancy watch. “If the tweet looks interesting enough, I can check my phone for more detailed info.  Heard there was a dead body here.”

Mark eyed the two of them warily, but Turbo didn’t notice.  Turbo was more interested in peppering Radar with questions about the setup for getting text messages of police scans.  “Is that a Pebble Smartwatch? Is it advanced enough for what you’re doing?”

Radar babbled the specs of his watch, along with more of his plans. “It will function okay for me until the Netflix Smartwatch comes out.  That one has a bigger screen and a more powerful processor.  But for now, not only does this one handle text messages without me having to pull my phone out, I can see who is calling and text back one of six standard replies. The watch handles maps, the weather and can even control a camera or video recorder remotely.”

“Those two are kind of scary, aren’t they?” Mark said to me.

I worried my friends would be insulted by his question, but neither engineer noticed.  They were too busy scribbling notes on a stray piece of sewing cloth they had grabbed from the kitchen table.

“I need to change clothes,” I said with a sigh.

“Do you have any cookies?” Turbo asked.

“There’s some cookie dough in the freezer.” They hadn’t even asked who the body was after discovering it wasn’t me. Should I be flattered or dismayed?

I changed into clean pants and a shirt, bagged the dirty ones, and handed them out the back door to be labeled and taken away.

Only then did I locate some cookie dough.  It didn’t take long to chop the brick into individual pieces.  Someone had turned on the oven.

Even though no one had asked, I told them about the garden and the body I’d stumbled across.

When I was finished, Turbo and Radar both stood up from the kitchen table and stared out the back door.  “There’s a fence.  How’d they haul the body over the fence?”

“Blood is actually good for growing plants. But the cops probably hauled it all away as evidence,” was Radar’s contribution.

Mark shook his head. I checked the cookies.

“Did whoever it was who murdered your boss really think you wouldn’t find the body when you started planting?” Turbo asked.  “Sure, you had fresh dirt back there, but you were bound to notice.”

“Maybe they didn’t know it was Sedona living here,” Radar said. “If it was a little old lady, maybe she wouldn’t pay as much attention as Sedona does to weird things.”

Abruptly, Turbo opened the door.  Radar followed him out.

Detective Saunders demanded they retreat.  The two of them stopped at the edge of the porch, ignoring him.  The investigative team was keeping to the raised bed and the side of the house, having decided that only I had gone from the back door to the raised bed.  The whole area had already been photographed, including the spot where my final water shoe had been abandoned. It was gone now, probably bagged.

“Those cookies ready yet?” Mark asked.

I checked, took them out and scooped a cookie off the pan, but it squished and collapsed.  “Too hot yet.” I handed Mark the squashed mess on a small plate.

He blew on it and ate it as it cooled. In the backyard, my two friends walked around the police tape and discussed...scarecrows?

“She’ll need to rebuild this part and there should be fencing. Without a scarecrow or a cat or something the birds will eat all the blueberries.”

“Hey,” Radar’s face lit up, “I have this cool robot! It doesn’t do much yet, but all the arm and leg movements have been completed.  I’ve been looking for a project! This is perfect.”  He rubbed his hands together.

He and Turbo kept talking, planning and waving their arms like two mad scientists on speed.  Turbo asked something about “protection in case of invaders” and “karate chops or just spinning.”

“They’re definitely scary.” Mark put his arm around my shoulders.

“Nah, they’re just being engineers. They’re good guys.”

“Whatever you say.”  He nudged me inside with him and then scraped another cookie from the pan. “I’m not sure, but I think they are talking about booby trapping your backyard.”

My brow wrinkled in concern.  Not that they wouldn’t do a good job.  But how did they plan to keep
me
from setting off their traps? 

Chapter 15

What with one thing and another, we never did eat dinner.  And there certainly wasn’t any dessert.

Because I had to provide another statement at the police station with my lawyer present on Thursday morning, I called in at eight to tell Kovid that I’d be working from home as time allowed. “I don’t know who else to notify that I’m not coming in,” I explained. “It could take a while before they decide who will replace Cary.”

Kovid disagreed.  “Got an email first thing from John, the CEO. Monique got the job.”

“Marketing Monique?  Doll Baby on the back of her pants, Monique?”

“We don’t have any other people working here with that name, so yeah, her.”

Monique was mid-thirties; maybe a tad younger if she had aged badly. She wasn’t old, but her outfits painted an unflattering image of a woman desperate to attract a man before it was too late.  In the corporate world, dressing like she did was an invitation for innuendos and attention of the wrong kind from guys who assumed the attire was an attempt at a promotion. Despite all that and talking on the phone all the time, she did get her job done.  That didn’t mean she deserved a management position over the engineering department.  Then again, Cary hadn’t really deserved the job either.

“Huh.  How did she get the job in charge of engineering and test?  She’s in marketing!”

Kovid grunted.  “We have a hiring freeze so they couldn’t go outside the company. They aren’t even going to replace Joe. No hiring.”

It was very polite of him to mention that as an excuse, but I knew what he was thinking, because unkind though it was, I was thinking the same thing.  She was sleeping with the executive attorney.  Lawrence had to have pulled some strings, because there was no logic that would put her in charge of engineering.

After Kovid hung up, I asked my Borgot voice assistant for her number.  The test phone didn’t know so I had to call Kovid back. I pointed out that my test phone was flawed because it didn’t know Monique’s number.  My job was to test these things, after all.

“She’s not in your contacts list, right?” he asked.

“Shouldn’t all the company numbers be in there?”

“No.  Not unless you specifically add them.  We aren’t Facebook here, grabbing every phone number we can get our greedy hands on.”

“Okay, okay.”

I called her number, but the line was busy and went to voice mail. Huge surprise, just huge.  I left a message and tossed the phone in my backpack on my way out the door.

* * *

Sean was an experienced lawyer, and he’d assisted the police department often enough that many of the guys knew him.  He had me in and out of there in an hour.  Since he had been sitting beside me while I told the story twice, I didn’t bother to defend or explain myself as we left.

“I’m sewing a baby bib for Samantha,” I said instead, to break the chilly silence.

“Hard to believe you have the time.”

I didn’t, not really. “Sean, I was at Borgot all day Wednesday. I did not have anything to do with either of those bodies.”

“Are you working for Huntington again?”

I shrugged. “Not exactly.  After the first guy showed up dead, Mark decided to investigate. He doesn’t like the idea of me working in a dangerous environment.”

Sean stared at me and sputtered. “Stay away from Brenda and the baby until they arrest the guy who did this!” He stalked off to his beat-up Accord.

While it would have been possible to make it into work, I drove home. Out of sheer guilt, I dug through my backpack for the Borgot phone to run some tests.  To my dismay, I found Joe’s forgotten watch instead.

“Ugly thing.” Unlike Radar’s timepiece, this watch resembled a prototype with cheap plastic and a big outer rubber piece holding it together.  I stared at it for a while before I dared try it.

“Borgot? Joe?”  For the phones to activate Pig Latin, his entire name had to be typed in. But this thing had a relatively small screen, making it difficult to use. “Joe Black?” I guessed.

Nothing.

My mind ran through what Radar had said about speech recognition. That sort of thing was exactly what Borgot hoped to be very good at, in addition to providing translations for foreign languages. Radar had also said his smartwatch was essentially just a watch without his mobile phone.  The cell phone was the brains; the watch was just spitting out text messages or supplying basic information that his phone had already obtained.

Joe had a phone that talked Pig Latin.  If this watch worked with that phone, it probably had some of the same basic functionality loaded. “Oh-Jay?”

“Owhay, ayay oingday?” the watch asked in Joe’s voice.

Chills ran up my arm, freezing my teeth shut.  I set the watch down rather than fling it across the room.  As often as I’d been forced to hear Joe’s voice after he was dead, it felt like his ghost was stalking me.  “How ya doing,” I translated in a whisper.  Louder, I said, “Better than you.”

I swallowed, studying the watch.  “Burglaries.  Was he stealing high-end watches?” Huntington hadn’t exactly specified why he wanted Joe’s mother questioned. This watch didn’t look high-end anything, either.

“What is the current temperature in Denton, Colorado?”

“Sixty-two degrees.”

The watch responded to the same question asked in Pig Latin.  This thing was definitely set up to work with Borgot code.

I played with questions and features.  The watch appeared to try to synch to a phone or other smart device more than once.  Without the right phone in close proximity the functions were very limited.

I needed Radar and the code from Joe’s phone.  Maybe there were calendar events or other meaningful appointments we could access once the watch connected to the phone.

I called Radar and told him what I’d found.

“If there were appointments on the smartwatch, they’d be on the phone too,” he said. “And that phone didn’t contain anything very useful.  From what I can tell, it may have been his personal phone, but the only real difference between it and any other Borgot test phone is that his voice was used for a lot of the commands.”

“That’s the same with the watch,” I said.

“What kind is it?  There aren’t that many smartwatches out there. They are very expensive and the more capabilities, the more the watch will cost you.”