How to Succeed in Murder (15 page)

Chapter Twenty-five

Bob Adams. Vice president of Quality Assurance for the past two years, having risen through the ranks of code testers. Graduated from Brown—had everyone at Zakdan? Unmarried.

And not in his office when he was supposed to be.

I stepped inside the door. The entire wall along the corridor was glass, so I didn’t think it was a good idea to actively snoop, but I did want to listen.

Lalit Kumar’s office was next door, and there were two people in it. I’d seen them when I’d passed it on the way to Bob’s. A man and a woman, who were apparently cleaning out the dead executive’s personal items. Were they police? They seemed to be dressed a little more conservatively than most of the Zakdan crowd.

They were speaking quietly, but I could still hear the murmur of their voices, and I could tell one from the other. I was reasonably sure that if someone—say, Jack—had been speaking in a normal tone of voice into a cell phone, he could easily have been heard by whoever was in the adjoining rooms.

Of course, anyone could have been in those rooms. But they belonged to Bob, Jim Stoddard, and Troy Patterson.

The three men who were now my lead suspects.

***

I thought standing in an empty office might draw unwanted attention, so I decided to wander around the fourth floor executive offices, figuring Bob would probably show up eventually, and that I might learn something incriminating somewhere else in the meanwhile.

Since there seemed to be an espresso machine every ten feet or so, it wasn’t hard to find gathering places. I went into the nearest break room, already occupied by two guys I hadn’t met.

They both looked to be in their mid-thirties, shaggy-haired tee-shirt-and-cargo-pants types, which I recognized by then as the uniform of the software professional.

They were in the middle of an intense discussion, which left them oblivious to my presence. It wasn’t difficult to eavesdrop as I made a cup of tea.

“Come, on—you can’t be serious!”

“I’m totally serious. And I’m right, and you just won’t admit it.”

“But it’s
wrong
! It’s just wrong on so many levels I can’t even begin to catalogue how wrong it is!”

What was wrong? Had I stumbled into a confession about someone planting bugs in the Zakdan software?

“Dude, just hear me out—”

“I’m not listening. You’re insane, or you’re high. And I hope for your sake you’re high, because—”

“I am not high, and ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ is a perfectly legitimate rock anthem.”

Damn. Not a confession.

“It is not! How can you even say that? ‘Born to Run’ is a rock anthem. ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ is a rock anthem. Hell, ‘Bohemian’ fucking ‘Rhapsody’ is a fucking rock anthem—”

The other guy shook his head violently. “No, no, no. Listen, it takes three things to be a rock anthem. One: it has to be a voice of its own time—”

A late arrival brought the highly intellectual debate to a screeching halt.

“What’s going on, guys?”

I jumped, not having noticed Bob Adams at the door.

“Hi, Bob,” said the advocate for Nirvana.

“Hi, Bob,” echoed the classic rock holdout.

“What are you guys talking about? Music?” He smiled too eagerly.

It was almost painful to watch. He was making such a strained attempt to show he was one of the guys, and the guys were so very clearly not interested.

“Yeah, something like that.” Looking at the floor.

“Well, we’d better get back to work.” With a brief, tight smile.

They began shuffling toward the door.

“Yeah, hey—any time you want to check out my CD collection, just come on by my office. I’ve got some killer stuff.”

They’d moved past him, so he probably didn’t see the look they exchanged. But I did, and I gathered they were not going to check out his killer stuff any time soon.

“Okay, see ya!” He turned to me, his overly bright grin still in place. “Great guys, huh? Oh! Sorry! I should have introduced you!”

I waved my hand. “Don’t worry about it.”

But he was worried. I couldn’t tell if it was about his social faux pas, or the fact that I’d just seen him snubbed by the cool kids, or something else. But I got a definite whiff of something. And it didn’t smell like teen spirit.

It smelled like desperation.

***

“Why? What’s he hiding?” Eileen quizzed me.

We’d gathered back in the conference room after our afternoon interviews. Brenda, Eileen, Simon and I were at the table, Eileen typing our notes into her laptop. She planned on emailing them to Jack when she’d compiled them.

Flank walked the perimeter of the two glass walls—one the length of the room and the other, with the door, the width. This was his way of discouraging people from lingering outside or looking in.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “But he’s all bluster and no core, if you know what I mean.”

Brenda nodded. “I see that a lot at school. It’s usually someone who wants desperately to be perceived differently from how he sees himself.”

“Doesn’t everyone?” Simon asked.

I thought about the hour or so I’d spent with the Quality exec. “All through our conversation, Bob kept up this sort of double-edged attitude. I mean, he wanted me to see him as one of the guys. He mentioned several times that he couldn’t believe he was a VP, because he still thinks of himself as a tester. But at the same time, it seemed really important to him that I walk away from the meeting believing that he’s brilliant and a natural executive.”

“So, if he’s putting modest and brilliant up as his false front, does that mean he’s really ambitious and stupid?” Simon enquired.

“Ambitious and stupid is a dangerous combination,” Eileen observed. I’m not sure if she included that in the notes. “Anything else? Did he say anything concrete?”

I shook my head. “Nothing incriminating. He has this annoying habit of looking at you like he knows much more than he’s telling you, but I wouldn’t bet he actually does.”

“What does he do when you press him on something?” Brenda asked.

“Just gets increasingly enigmatic. Which, come to think of it, did have the effect of getting me to change the topic…”

“But nothing concrete?” Eileen reiterated.

I sighed. “No.”

Simon had already told us he hadn’t been able to get anything from Jim Stoddard that we hadn’t. And he seemed just slightly miffed that he hadn’t gotten propositioned, but he chalked it up to the engineer’s narrow-mindedness.

“How did you get along with MoM?” I asked Eileen.

She made a face. “I’ve already written up my notes, so you can look over the details with Jack and Mike later. The short version,” she told us, “is that I think she’s a corporate snake, but I don’t know if she’s capable of murder.”

“Why not?” Simon asked.

“She seems…opportunistic,” Eileen said thoughtfully. “Apparently, she’s latched on to every new initiative to hit Zakdan in the last five years. But she’s savvy—she can smell failure early, so she distances herself from doomed projects and gets out before they take her down with them. She’d make a good stock trader, but I don’t know if plotting and planning are her strengths, and you need that to get away with murder, don’t you?”

“I think the idea of us being here is that the killer won’t get away with it,” I reminded her.

“True.” She paused and frowned. “But what about this—MoM isn’t technical. For all her flitting around the highest ranks of the company, she has no programming experience and has never worked directly with the code. So if we believe Clara was killed because she discovered something about the bug planted in the software, and Lalit was killed because she told him about it—” which had become our working theory once I’d told them about Clara’s meeting with Lalit on the day before her death “—I don’t think MoM could be behind it.”

“Great,” I said. “So we have a couple cases of borderline personality disorder, but no valid suspects yet. Unless…” I turned to Brenda. “Did you get any good dirt in Human Resources?”

Brenda gave me a worried look. “I’m not sure I should tell you.”

That sounded promising.

“Of course you should. What did Tonya tell you? Do you know who Clara was going to fire?”

“Yes.” She still looked doubtful. “But I don’t think we should leap to the conclusion that that person is the killer.”

“Who was it?” Eileen demanded.

“Come on, Brenda,” Simon encouraged. “Tell us.”

She took a deep breath. “Okay, but seriously, let’s not go rushing off—”

“Fine, fine, fine.” I waved her concern away. “Who is it?”

I could tell she didn’t like it, but she told us.

“Krissy.”

We all took a while to recover from the news. None of us had the impression that Clara’s replacement was a brain trust, but we hadn’t pegged her to be the one walking the corporate plank.

“Why?” Eileen recovered first. “What were the charges against Krissy?”

“It seems to boil down to incompetence,” Brenda told us. “Clara thought that Krissy had been promoted beyond her abilities, so she tried to give her extra training, but Krissy’s attitude about that wasn’t good. So Clara put her on a written improvement plan, and unless she lived up to the terms of it, she was on her way out.”

“What were the terms?” Eileen had become sharply attentive.

Brenda shook her head. “Tonya put up a brick wall again. I could tell she didn’t want to tell me as much as she had, but she had to talk to someone. It seemed like it was killing her that she knew Clara had been so close to firing Krissy, and now it looks like she’ll get Clara’s job.”

“Doesn’t Morgan know about this?” Simon asked. “Wouldn’t Clara have told him?”

“Tonya didn’t think so,” Brenda told us. “She said Clara wanted to keep it strictly between her and Krissy and HR.”

Eileen typed furiously on the laptop. If she wasn’t careful, she’d be needing one of those wrist braces I saw every other person wearing.

“How long did Krissy have before Clara would have pulled the plug?”

But an answer to my question was preempted by an alarmingly strangled sound from the large man near the door.

“Yes, Flank?”

He gestured with his head, and we saw the danger: Jim Stoddard on fast approach. He hadn’t come into the long hallway through the lobby door, so I wondered if there was a back door to the area somewhere. You never know when that sort of thing can come in handy.

Stoddard opened the glass conference room door and said, “Knock knock!”

Surprisingly, nobody said, “Who’s there?”

Jim glanced uneasily at Flank, who stood menacingly at close range. He couldn’t help the menacing part, but the closeness was definitely deliberate. Flank, apparently, wasn’t a Jim Stoddard fan.

“Listen, there’s a party tonight to celebrate shipping 7.3.”

Which was largely meaningless, but we all made vague congratulatory sounds.

“You’re all invited, and I hope you’ll come.”

How could he possibly look lasciviously at both Eileen and me simultaneously?

Simon apparently felt left out. “Where are we going?”

“Edinburgh Castle. Do you know it?”

One of the great dive bars of San Francisco. Of course we knew it.

“Seven o’clock, and Papa Zak is buying. Don’t be late.” He winked and left.

“Are we going?” Simon asked.

“It would be a good opportunity to observe people away from the office,” Brenda said, but she didn’t look thrilled at the prospect. “Although…”

“Although I’d sooner be poked in the eye with a sharp stick,” Eileen finished for her. “I’ve had just about all I can take of that guy for one day.”

Brenda nodded in complete agreement.

“Well, I suppose we don’t
all
need to go…” Simon looked at me.

Ugh. “All right, I’ll go. But I have to pick up Jack first and then I’m going home to change.” Although I had no idea how to dress for a geek celebration. “I’ll meet you there later. In the meanwhile, just take good notes.”

“Notes! Right! I’m your man!”

Assuming we wanted our report on cocktail napkins.

Chapter Twenty-six

I’d gotten an email from Jack telling me that he and Harry had decided to get in some afternoon golfing in Lincoln Park. Since the Lexus was in the shop, and likely to be there for some time, he’d asked me to pick him up when I got off work.

My initial reaction had been…golf? It seemed a little damp for that sort of thing to me. Then again, the way Harry plays, more time was likely to be spent at the clubhouse bar than on the course.

I left Flank guarding the gang as they wrapped up for the day, and I headed across town in my little VW—which was starting to grow on me, but I’d never have admitted as much to my husband.

Something about driving in the fog made me thoughtful. Maybe it was the way the mist swirled around the streetlights in the evening dark, or just the fact that I was driving across town, in the city of noir, trying to figure out if I’d spoken with a murderer that day. In any case, my mind started wandering, and I found myself thinking about nerds.

Not to sound like a thirty-something-year-old fogey, but in my day nerds were nerds. Even at young ages, they were clearly identifiable by their short-sleeved dress shirts—worn all the way buttoned up—and their mechanical pencils. Some throwbacks still even sported those five-pound HP calculators with hundreds of colored function buttons.

Don’t even get me started on their glasses.

The more advanced of them walked the halls of junior high discussing what they’d done on their Atari the night before, and exchanging computer printouts of Snoopy or the Starship Enterprise composed entirely of asterisks and dashes.

How times change.

The nerds had won the culture wars, and now geek chic was in. You only had to look at current trends in eyewear to know that.

But I couldn’t help wondering, for someone like Jim Stoddard or Bob Adams—who were old enough to have been there for the origin of the species—was it all sweet revenge? Or was part of them still stuck in high school, watching the football players score with the pretty girls and seething with resentment?

I thought of Bob Adams’ expression as the younger and infinitely hipper engineers had dismissed him in the break room. Even though he was an exec and they were lowly whatevers, he wanted their approval. He wanted to be cool.

Did he want it bad enough to kill?

The phone rang and I nearly swerved into an oncoming bus.

“Hi, Pumpkin.”

“Hi yourself.” I escaped with my life and made the turn from Van Ness onto Geary. “I should be there in ten or fifteen minutes, depending on traffic.” And barring further disasters.

“Great. But I’m not at the clubhouse. They close at six. I walked up to the Palace of the Legion of Honor. I’m sitting on the front steps, so I’ll see you when you get here.”

“I’ll try not to confuse you with the
Thinker
.” Rodin’s furrowed-browed figure was stationed in the outdoor courtyard of the museum.

“That should be easy. I’m in better shape.”

I hung up on him.

***

The fog got thicker as I headed out toward the ocean. The museum sits on a hill in Lincoln Park overlooking the Golden Gate Bridge and much of the city. A circular drive in front of it—complete with a fountain—has to be the classiest parking lot in the city. On a clear day the views are spectacular.

This was not a clear day.

I turned on my wipers once or twice before I got to the park entrance. I went up the hill through the golf course, and when I got to the top I could see that the fountain was off and the parking lot was practically deserted. What I didn’t see was Jack on the front steps.

I checked the mirror to make sure nobody was behind me, then put the car in Park. I didn’t really feel like getting out in the cold to go husband hunting.

The main entrance to the museum is at the far end of the
Thinker
’s courtyard, and an open portico is at the front. The portico is supported by a double row of columns, the rear of which has security fencing to keep people from wandering around when the museum is closed. There’s a wide central walkway up to the building, with lawns, flowerbeds, and large horsy sculptures on either side.

I finally spotted Jack. He was on the portico, which presumably gave him some shelter. And he hadn’t yet noticed me because he was shadowboxing, moving lightly on his feet and jabbing at the air.

He was probably only doing it to stay warm, but I had to admit he looked good in motion. He has this athletic grace thing, and—

I lost my train of thought, such as it was, when I saw something weird happen to the column just left of Jack. It was like a little puff of dust came off it, sparkling in the museum’s floodlights. He hadn’t noticed, but it happened again, this time a little higher, and I suddenly knew what it was.

Someone was shooting at Jack.

Another puff appeared on the column, this time taking out a chunk of it. “Jack!” I yelled as I put the car in gear.

There were iron posts at the end of the walkway, so I gave the wheel a sharp turn to the left and gunned the engine. I took out a floodlight, went sailing over five shallow steps, and tore up the lawn to the building. I slammed on the brakes and came skidding to a halt just in front of the portico.

“Get in!” I shouted. Which is when all the glass in the car exploded.

“Get out!” Jack yelled, pulling a gun from under his jacket and opening fire on something behind me.

I dove out of the car and stumbled to the portico. I took cover behind a column, staying low. Ridiculously, I had the car keys in my hand.

“Jack—”

“Stay down!” he shouted. “Are you hurt?”

I took a quick survey. Scraped in a couple of places, but not seriously. “No! Jack, who is it?”

He didn’t answer. He was too busy shooting.

A bullet zinged by and chipped a corner off the large marble base of the
Thinker
behind us.

“Jack, they could hit the statue!”

He took a second to look at me like I was insane, then crouched behind the column next to mine as the shooter opened fire again. “I hardly think art preservation is our main concern right now, Pumpkin.”

I winced as bits of marble fell between us. Maybe he had a point.

“How many bullets do you have left?”

“One.”

Not the answer I was hoping for.

“What are we going to do?”

More bits of marble, coming from a different column. The shooter was moving.

Jack didn’t answer. He just pointed the gun and shot.

Directly into the museum door, at the far end of the courtyard.

“Jack!” I couldn’t believe he’d wasted his last bullet. But then the sirens went off and I got it.

Lights flashed, bells clanged, air horns went “whoop-whoop.” It was fabulous.

In the middle of all of it, I thought I heard an engine fire up. Jack took a split-second look down the drive, then fell back against the column, the tension leaving his body.

He looked over at me. “Ready to go?”

I nodded.

He stood first, and waved an arm from behind the column. The theory behind which, I supposed, was that if it wasn’t shot off we could proceed with our departure.

It wasn’t shot off.

I stood shakily. When I turned and looked at the bullet-riddled little bug, I nearly sank down again.

Jack caught me. He held on for a moment, then said, “We have to get out of here.”

I nodded again. I could do that.

He took the keys from my hand. “Maybe I’ll drive.”

Probably a good idea.