Executive Dirt: A Sedona O'Hala Mystery (23 page)

LeAnn had helpfully sorted all the thread and fabrics by color.  Neat little stacks had been stowed in bags she must have sewn while I cooked.  “Thanks,” I said.

She shook out the tank top, eyed me and then the top. “I think it will fit.”

I hadn’t even noticed the tank, but I smiled and accepted it before addressing Mark. “The driver escaped, didn’t he?”

“Clean as a whistle. He didn’t drive far before he ducked into a side road, pushed the casket out and liberated the watch.”  Mark turned his accusing gaze on his mother. “It might have been better if Joe hadn’t been wearing a watch in the first place.”

“Nonsense,” I said. “It was a great plan. It just didn’t happen quite as expected. It does prove that the guilty party was in attendance because someone noticed that watch and wanted it.”

“Don’t worry, dear.”  LeAnn stood on her tiptoes and kissed his cheek. “I wasn’t at risk and neither was Sedona. I didn’t tell her what I was up to.”

He glanced at me.  I nodded.  I hadn’t had any idea she had planned to add a watch to Joe.

“I have to get home,” she said. “I was hoping you’d run the guy to ground.  Do you think the pie is ready?” she asked me.

It wasn’t, but mousse was just as good lumped in a container for later as it was firmed up.  I boxed up a generous piece.

After LeAnn left, Mark helped himself to a piece of the soft pie. “If she had invited you along to sneak that watch on the corpse, you’d have gone, wouldn’t you?”

I pretended to ponder the question, my eyes sliding up and down. I drummed my fingers on the table.  “You know how women sometimes ask whether a particular outfit makes their butt look fat?”

He blinked and then frowned. “Yeah, why?”

“You know how you’re smart enough to avoid or not answer that kind of question?”

He nodded.

I nodded.  “Me too,” I said.

The confusion on his face cleared.  He grunted and shook his head. “I think that’s a yes.  But I knew that before I asked.”

The phone Radar and Turbo had left sitting on my counter beeped.

I about jumped out of my skin.  Mark went for his gun. He positioned himself next to the back door in the blink of an eye. “Can you shut the security features off?” he asked quietly.  “Before Miley starts dancing out there?”

With the lights on in the kitchen, it was impossible to see anything in the dark yard outside. I crab-crawled to the phone on the kitchen counter.  The watch had lit up and “Security Breach” showed on the face.

Luckily, per my request, there was a list of instructions taped to the phone. Unluckily, the phone emitted a second warning beep. Hurriedly, I read through the instructions and figured out what to press to disable the various features.  I punched each icon and then selected “disable,” while Mark attempted to see out the bedroom window.

He was back by the door very quickly. “Can you turn on the floodlights without any of the water or dancing? On the count of three?”  He crouched, one hand on the knob.

I sat, cross-legged and scanned the list. “Okay, on three.  Start counting.”

Luckily, I recognized the floodlight icon. By the time he would have said four, the floodlights came on, and he had rolled out the door, coming up ready to fire.

Somehow, Miley must have also come on because the sudden noise from out back was very loud.  “Crap.” Had I not disabled her?  Frantically, I punched the disable for the robot, but the chatter and screaming hoots continued at full pitch.

Mark rolled back inside the door and slammed it shut.  He stayed on the floor, breathing harder than normal.

“Are you hurt?” I dropped the phone and scurried over, frantic.

“Ra...ccoons.”

“What?”

“Raccoons,” he repeated.  “Those damn things are worse than rabid dogs. I didn’t want to have to shoot them.”

I stretched up in order to peek through the window.  Sure enough, the floodlights illuminated three raccoons the size of small German Shepherds scampering about the backyard.  They were responsible for the shrill noises, not Miley.

While I watched, one returned to excavating the garden. Blast his hide, there was already a hole large enough for me to fall into and be swallowed.  There were two smaller holes nearby and enough other spots to make the whole plot resemble a whack-a-mole game.

“Beasts.”  I dove for the phone again.

“Miley might be enough to frighten them off,” Mark said, standing so he could watch.

“They’d probably just tear her arms off.  Radar made the thing so that the arms and legs detach easily. They can be replaced with other tools.”

“How do you know that?”

I held up the list. “Precise instructions.”  I punched in the manual start for the last icon.  The sprinklers, which were more like blasts from a paintball gun, gushed.

The raccoons bellowed more protests, but they did leave.  Mark watched them waddle away, noting that one climbed the fence and the other two wedged through a spot behind a bush.  “I’ll fix that fence in the morning.  But it might not keep them out.”

I worked on shutting off the security features before my neighbor called.

Chapter 32

Next morning, before I even got out of bed, Mark propositioned me.  “Too bad you have to go to work,” he said. Unfortunately, he was not snuggled suggestively next to me. He stared up at the ceiling with his hands behind his head.

“Hmm. What did you have in mind?”

“I want to check out the Clockworks place this morning. I haven’t had much time for research, but I’ve checked the security on the place.  There’s enough traffic and more than one company in the building. We can blend in easily.” He grabbed his phone from above his head where it rested on my bookcase headboard and began typing.

“Good idea. I’ll text in sick, indigestion from rice cakes.”

He stopped swiping at his phone. “What rice cakes?”

“They served some at the ballet lessons the other day, and they’ve been sitting on the counter in the break room ever since.”

He lifted up on one elbow and scanned my face. “You didn’t eat rice cakes.”

“Of course not.”

“This job isn’t working out very well for you, is it?”

“How can it possibly last? Two people were murdered the same week, someone is selling the bread and butter code to another company, and the lead lawyer is ordering ballet lessons for the programmers.”

“When you put it that way, it doesn’t sound much like a dream job.”

I shrugged. “I can find another one.”

“Maybe we should stop finding you jobs and let you actually find your own.”

I grinned.  “There’s an idea.”

He looked down and studied his phone for a few more seconds. “Did you know Clockworks is out by Dave’s Garden?”

I started to shake my head, but changed my mind. “I wonder if it’s in the new office building across the street.  There’s a huge fancy clock with the building directory underneath.”

He nodded.  “That’s the place.  Top floor. The news cycle I just checked says it has gone bankrupt. It will be interesting to see who still works there or who has been picking up phones. The location would make it very easy for someone from Clockworks to have met Joe at Dave’s Garden during a garden meeting. Anyone from that building could walk across the road and pick up a phone with rogue code on it.”

“And who would notice such a clandestine meeting, especially if it took place during a legitimate lunch break?” I hopped out of bed, made my excuses to work via text, and showered.

* * *

Had I been nosing about Clockworks for information by myself, I’d have stopped at the reception desk first and nervously asked a bunch of nosy questions about the company.  It was vastly more fun to watch Mark in action.  He barely glanced at the reception desk, other than to give the guy sitting there a short nod.  He didn’t keep his head down to avoid the cameras, nor did he change his smooth stride. He didn’t try to appear “important businessman” even though it was a look he could pull off if he cared to.

He just strode to the elevators without checking the directory, like he’d been here before and had no interest in anything special.

When the door closed behind us, he put his arm around me and pretended to nuzzle my neck.  “There is a back exit if you walk past the elevators.  If we leave in a hurry, we take that route.”

I had seen the doors. Mark was rubbing off on me in more ways than one.

When the bell chimed for three, we exited.  In front of us, there was a glass door, locked.  Behind it, there were other solid doors that likely led to offices.  Light from a big window at the end of the hall lit the place. Maybe because Clockworks was supposedly bankrupt, only every other fluorescent light was illuminated.

Mark patted his pockets. There was a badge scanner to the right of the door. The scanner light was off. I wasn’t surprised when Mark pulled out his keys, the ones with his lock picks.  He made it look as though he was trying more than one key while he picked the lock.  Then, very politely, he held the door for me. He was always prepared.

I started counting the minutes.  If the guard behind the reception desk was watching camera monitors, he’d have seen us enter. He probably couldn’t tell a pick from a key on the camera feed, and Mark was quick with the lock picks.

My heart still beat faster.  Maybe I should have stayed downstairs and chatted with the guy while Mark came up here to see what he could learn. “When you said Clockworks went bankrupt, I didn’t expect the place to be completely shut down.”  I kept my voice very low.

“Me either. Not with phones being delivered to the reception desk.”

There were no visible cameras inside the area, but the doors were locked, two pairs on either side of the hallway. Mark unlocked the first and we slipped inside.  There was an open space that had partially torn down cubicles with a few offices along the outside wall.

I checked the office doors.  They weren’t locked, but the rooms were empty except for giant dustballs drifting aimlessly.

We checked the area in silence, opening the remaining cubicle desks to look for remnants and glancing at the squiggles on the white boards. The few pens and paperclips left were not the types of things that offered extensive clues.

We exited.  I checked the bathrooms while Mark opened one of the doors on the other side of the main hallway.  The remaining door at the far end was a fire exit stairwell. Mark pointed to it to make sure I saw it.

The other side of the office hallway wasn’t as empty as the first area, but the equipment made little sense. While there were two laptops sitting on a table, the rest of the place looked like a wizard’s laboratory.  Two giant five-gallon office water bottles contained some kind of brown murky sludge. If it was meant to be fresh water for the office, it had gone seriously bad.  The place had a musty smell, almost like bread, or maybe there were questionable contents leaking from the fridge against the wall.

“Beer brewing,” Mark said quietly, but not without a slight question in his voice.

Now that he pointed that out, I noted the case of empty beer bottles and what looked suspiciously like a keg. My mind had associated those items with one hell of an office party, not brewing.

I headed for the computers, bumping the one laptop so that it came out of sleep mode. On the table with the two laptops, five watches and three Borgot phones were scattered about.  The watches were replicas of the one Joe had worn, but only one had a band.  It was a silicone band unlike the worn leather one on Joe’s watch.

Had Joe somehow gotten in here, and stolen the watch when he dropped off code?

The Borgot phones made sense.  Smartwatches worked with a phone—showing who was calling, showing text messages, and if whoever ran this place had any say, the smartwatch would run Borgot’s translation programs. The table also contained an iPhone and a Samsung phone.  Whoever was working on this project wanted the translation code to work on more than just Borgot phones.

Since the computer was sitting there, I used it to do a quick search on Clockworks while Mark finished searching and took inventory of the rest of the place to make sure we hadn’t missed anything.

The place certainly looked as though someone was using the empty building to finish the smartwatch project. I didn’t see how they thought they could manufacture the things with two or three test watches, but then, not being of a criminal mind, there were probably a lot of things about stealing programming code that I didn’t understand.

The internet told me that Clockworks hadn’t been a public company. It was a startup funded by the usual “angel” investors. The venture capitalists hadn’t given it more than two years before funding dried up.  The company had disbanded at the end of last year.

At least one employee hadn’t given up on the idea of a smartwatch.  Now that the project lacked legit funding and engineers, that someone had decided to just steal the code from Borgot and brew beer in the extra space.

I wrinkled my nose.  The smell of yeast and whatnot wasn’t really unpleasant, but there was definitely an odor to it. The equipment took up more room than the laptop and watches.  Maybe Joe had been in on the beer stuff, and when he moved back in with his mother, he couldn’t take it with him so he moved it here.

I frowned.  Joe didn’t have the experience or ambition to brew beer.  You had to know how to follow specific recipes and buy the grains and hops and...hops.

Mark caught my wide-eyed stare.  He moved closer in a hurry.

“You need hops for beer, right?” I asked quietly.

“Yeah, why?” he whispered back.

“I think I know who is working here on the sly.”

Chapter 33

We drove straight over to Dave’s Garden.  My heart was racing. Was Dave’s new assistant guilty of murder?  Would he shoot us in broad daylight?

I wiped one sweaty palm down my jeans as Mark pulled the SUV into the parking lot.  Dave’s Garden opened early.  It should be easy for Mark to get a good look at Rohit.

“Rohit is definitely the guy who talked Dave into carrying brewery supplies,” I said. “Dave also mentioned he was lucky to have been able to hire him because he had been laid off at the end of last year. The timing fits.”