Executive Dirt: A Sedona O'Hala Mystery (11 page)

I checked, but there was nothing on the watch casing, no name, no insignia.

“I’ll come by in a couple of hours,” Radar promised.

While I waited for Radar to stop by, I called Mark and left him a message about the smartwatch.

Since neither he nor Radar was available right away, rather than chew my fingernails asking a watch stupid questions, I started on the baby bibs and the bra.  It had to be easier to cut the patterns all at once.

Then too, maybe I was procrastinating using the sewing machines because once those patterns were cut, I downloaded and cut out a t-shirt pattern. I messed up the sleeves, so decided it was going to be a tank top.  “Everyone needs a tank top.”

I checked the time on Joe’s watch.  It had only been an hour.

“Fine.”  I sat down and shoved the first bib under the regular machine. Sewing a back to the front meant I didn’t have to put a binding along the edges.  Binding looked hard and time consuming.

The bib turned out more rounded than square.  That is to say, the corners were funky diagonal edges.  And one diagonal was way larger than the other.  “I’ll make a round bib instead.”

I cut some off the edges and sewed it again.

It was now rounder, but extremely lopsided with one side higher than the other.  “Well, Auntie Sedona made it, right?  The next one will be better.”  I added straps to tie around the neck, but boy did they make the edges bulge where they fit against the bib.

Since I was practicing and learning, I tried to use the finishing machine for the top. According to the pattern, that part should have the mystery binding sewn across it and then made into the ties, but I’d already affixed ties.

The serger was every bit as noisy as before.  It was possibly faster.  It cut straight through one of the ties I had just sewn on.

I checked the pattern and instructions again. Apparently the top was supposed to be done
before
adding the ties.  And the instructions didn’t say anything about correcting for ties that might have gotten cut off.

The thing now had one tie, was crooked, uneven and ugly. “Maybe I better start over. Then again, Samantha is too young to know the difference between a washcloth with a string and a bib.  Hey, maybe this is one of those things you tie to the high chair and use to wipe her mouth.  Yeah.  I’m an inventor.  No ordinary bibs for this family.”  Not at the rate I was sewing anyway.

The doorbell rang, providing a reprieve, at least until I discovered it was Huntington and not Mark or Radar.

“What?” I asked.

His eyes narrowed.  “Mark said I owed you some replacement plants because you lost some kind of heirloom blueberries working on the case.  I don’t see how that is possible since you haven’t even attended a single garden club meeting yet.”

“Mark is correct. But more important than blueberries, I need surveillance equipment.  You have access to the good stuff that works at night, right?” 

“At night?  What are you up to, and what makes you think I can provide that kind of thing?”

I rolled my eyes.  Not only had I caught Mark installing cameras during one of our cases, both brothers did investigative work at the highest levels.  “You run a company that involves high-tech companies.  Are you telling me you don’t have the latest and greatest espionage equipment?”

“Are you crazy?” he asked. “Of course you are.”  Another thought occurred to him.  “Who do you want watched?”

“I want it installed in my backyard.”

His eyes flicked to the back door before he strode over. “You think someone is planning to bury another dead body there?  I did order you more dirt from the same place your dad ordered from.”  He stepped outside.  “I don’t think you have to worry about this happening again.”

I just glared at him.  He sighed. “You’re in more danger of a squirrel digging up your plants than another dead body finding its way here. There is no way you need state of the art equipment to catch a squirrel digging up a tomato plant.”

“A squirrel did not put Cary in that garden bed.”  I pointed out.

“I am not wasting my time or equipment on—can’t you just set an alarm every hour, run outside and check on the garden until you get over your unreasonable fear that people intend to make this a cemetery?”

Leave it to Huntington to decide my sleep was unimportant. “No. This gardening thing was your idea, you know.”

He snorted. “Fine.  I’ll install some equipment. But we are not even.”

I agreed heartily.  “Damn straight.  You owe me way more than this.”

His eyes narrowed, but I didn’t drop my gaze.  He finally asked,  “Do you know the names of the blueberry plants?”

“I’ll text them to you.  The detectives took all four plants. Two of them were Sunshine Blue, but I don’t know the other two.  I’ll ask Dad.”

Huntington snagged two cookies when he stepped back into the kitchen.

“Were smartwatches part of the contraband you think Joe was stealing?” I asked.

“What makes you ask that?”

I was just about to tell him about the watch when the doorbell rang. It was Radar and Mark.  Their timely appearance meant I only had to tell my story once.

“This is an odd looking watch,” Radar declared after a quick inspection. “Yet it runs high-end code.  It has Pig Latin on it?”

“Just like the Borgot phones, but Borgot isn’t producing a smartwatch to run with its phones.”

“Joe couldn’t have loaded all the Borgot code on here, but if the Pig Latin is on here, that means at least part of the phone code runs on this without the phone being nearby. And I don’t recognize this watch model.”  He held up his own very snazzy unit.

“By ‘not recognize,’ I assume that means you have considered purchasing every smartwatch available, memorized the list of specifications, and know the price of all of them?”

He grinned.  “The price is the least useful because they are all expensive.  The good ones start at around three-fifty and run to well over a thousand dollars. I got in on the first Kickstarter for my Pebble so I actually only paid a hundred and fifty, but it is barely a prototype compared to what the newer models can do.”

“Joe’s watch doesn’t look high-end,” I said slowly.

“No.  And it will be very interesting to see what this watch can actually do when it’s running with his phone nearby. Was he smart enough to integrate the Borgot phone with a smartwatch?”

“He didn’t code. Ever.” I shrugged, nodded and then shook my head. “I suppose it’s possible he kept his talent hidden. I avoided him for the most part.”

“I’ll check it out and get back to you.  Meanwhile, can you get me the raw code you’re testing now and a Borgot phone?”

“Why?”

“If Joe’s phone worked with this watch, I can check the raw code to see if it has any kind of support for a watch.  If it doesn’t, that means someone added it to whatever was running on his phone.”

“Okay, sure.” I grabbed my backpack and took out one of the Borgot test phones and the SD chip Cary had given me.  “This isn’t the absolute latest code drop, but it’s close.”

Radar blinked. He looked from the card to me. “You transfer test code on an SD card?”

“We can download code easily at work over wifi just like any kind of phone update, but the early phones locked up sometimes. We often transferred the code the old fashioned way using the SD card to transfer it.  Cary handed out the SD cards when he gave us phones to test on the weekend, but I never loaded this drop because Joe’s phone started talking, and we realized it was probably his personal phone.  But the code on this card is pretty current for all our other test units.”

Radar took the phone and stared at the slot on the side where the SD card would fit. “You transfer valuable code on a card.”  He nodded. “That would make it very easy to hand off the latest version of Borgot code by slipping someone this little card.  Give them the phone as well, and they have everything they need to code another device, including a competitor phone or a smartwatch.”

“But he didn’t code!”

“He could have given it to someone who knew how to code a smartwatch, all without any kind of email or download that could be traced.”  He smiled. “No trace. They have the code if they want to make it work with a watch and sell the watch without Borgot ever being the wiser.”

“But who would he give it to?”

Radar wasn’t listening.  He was already halfway to the door.

Mark and Steve followed him. “I need to make some calls,” Huntington said, already frowning over his phone.

“Don’t forget you promised to add cameras to my yard!” I yelled after him.

He ignored me, of course.  Mark gave me a quick kiss. “I need to follow up with Steve on a couple of things and make sure I stay in the loop.  The heists he was working on don’t look like the real problem here.”

I sighed and watched him go.

Chapter 16

Having taken most of the previous day off, I was behind on my testing. So, of course, there was a mandatory meeting taking up the entire morning.  Monique came by to remind me and to hand me a copy of the new product launch schedule.

“This schedule is also attached to the email with the meeting plan.  I want to make sure when we leave that room everyone has agreed to this more aggressive product ship date.”

I didn’t even need to look at the schedule to know it was a disaster. “Uh, Monique, did you run this by Roscoe and Kovid?”

“What for?”

“They are the ones who have to code the phone features. They know how long it takes.  I can’t test until they are done coding.  The schedule Cary was touting was overly optimistic.  We haven’t hit a single date on it yet.”

She blinked and stared down at the paper in her hand.  “That’s one reason I did it over. I want to make sure we meet my schedule.”

“But if you didn’t ask Kovid or Roscoe how long it would take them to add the features, how do you expect us to stay on schedule?”

“Wait.”  She put one hand on her hip. “Are you saying I should come to you and ask how long these tasks take and
then
come up with a schedule?”

I nodded. “Well, yeah.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.  We’ll never get stuff done if we just let you decide on the schedule!”

She flounced off.

At least her management style wasn’t any different than Cary’s. There would be no adjustment curve.

The meeting did not start off with donuts or other goodies.  Monique dug right into the schedule without even mentioning that she had taken over Cary’s position. Of course, several emails had informed us of the change so there really wasn’t a need to dwell on it.  We could move straight to the arguing.

“There is no way we can code all this by next month.”  Kovid didn’t even glance at the display at the front of the room. “To meet the first ship date, we already had to take out all the foreign language support except Spanish.”

“What?!?” Monique shook her head so emphatically, her hairspray was in danger of flinging off onto the walls. “The languages are what sets our product apart! We can’t not have them. We need every single one.”

“Nothing patentable without at least one foreign language,” Howard, the lawyer assistant, intoned. “A patent would give us a stronger case with the venture capitalists for more funding, and if we have a patent, the company would always have that asset to sell, whether the company survives or not.”

Roscoe pounded his fist on the table. “Last meeting Cary insisted we put Pig Latin back in. That was doable. Some of the Spanish is functioning, but that was assuming the old date.” He pointed at the PowerPoint slides on the display.  “If you move those dates in where you want them, you won’t even get the Spanish finished.”

“Do not ask me to consider writing a patent for the Pig Latin,” Howard said. “I already told Cary no dice, and it’s still a no go, I don’t care who asks me to do it.”

“None of the Spanish language has even been loaded on the phones for testing,” I added.

The good news was that since neither of the programmers would agree to the ship dates, Monique didn’t care about the test dates.  I sat through most of the meeting wondering who had killed Cary.  Had he died because the programmers were sick of his bad schedules?  Kovid never showed anger, but he wasn’t backing down from Monique’s demands. Roscoe’s face turned beet red, and he had no problem shouting Monique down, yelling about his expertise not being properly appreciated.  Had either of them hated Joe because Joe never did a lick of work?  In fact, with his Pig Latin claims, he only added to the workload.

Monique tried pulling rank.  She even offered bonuses.  That did quiet the room, at least temporarily. Since Lawrence had sent his assistant and not shown up himself, I had to wonder if anyone in this room even had the authority to offer a bonus.

“What kind of bonus are you offering?” Roscoe demanded. “Cary once suggested he’d throw in a thousand dollars per language, like we were dogs that would snap at stale and rotting bones.”

“If you take out all language support other than English, we can get a phone out close to that date,” Kovid said. “We can add in languages one at a time after that.”

“That would be a nice marketing move,” I inserted.  “Just think.  More announcements, more press releases about our fabulous phone.”

“No language, no patent,” Howard snapped. “Why not just shut the company doors now and save the venture capitalists the trouble?”

“We must have at least Spanish!” Monique wailed.

Roscoe’s neck was still a dangerous purple, but the rest of his face had toned down. “It’s not ready. Testing hasn’t even started on it.”

Oh sure, throw the ball at me. “I haven’t seen any code with language support other than Pig Latin. Cary hadn’t even finished the test plan for the other languages.”  I lobbed the ball back at Monique.

She was in marketing. She didn’t even duck. “You’ll need to create the test plan now that he’s gone. Hopefully he left you some notes.”

How had his job become mine?  I hadn’t been promoted, she had! Rather than point out her manipulation I merely said, “If the code isn’t in the phones, I can’t test.”

The meeting went on for another hour, but the code didn’t exist.  Monique lost her cool babe look long before we adjourned.