There is No Cloud

by Kat Wheeler

  Regardless, it was Saturday. Her office was closed until Monday, so even if she wanted to, there wasn’t anything she could do about it now.

  Once she decided to put it out of her mind, she did her best to forget everything HTH related and get on with her day. Shaking out of the mental wormhole she’d sucked herself into, she went back to the original plan for her day. She took a later yoga class and hit the farmers market after. She still had flashes of thought about the endless nefarious possibilities of that extra chip, but doing her best to put it behind her, she made herself a nice dinner and went to bed early.

  Relaxed and less worried about the chip in her living room, Cameron woke up on Sunday feeling refreshed and ready for football. It was NFL day, and the Giants actually had a team this year. She threw on her jeans, an Eli hoodie, and stepped into her flats that she’d left by the door. Pulling her long brown hair up into a ponytail, and not interested in taking the time to put in her contacts, she grabbed her glasses and headed to the bodega downstairs.

  They made a killer breakfast sandwich, and the coffee was pretty good too. In the five years she’d lived in her building, she had become a regular fixture.

  “Hey, Eytan,” she called in greeting to the owner as she walked in the door to the little shop.

  “The usual?” he asked, ignoring the line of customers in front of the counter. It paid to be a regular sometimes.

  Her usual was a bacon and egg sandwich and vanilla latte.

  “You bet,” she replied. It was nice to be known here. Feel a sense of community in a big city she was still learning, even after half a decade of residency. She’d never regretted moving to New York, but it was hard at first not knowing anyone. Having the guy at the bodega know your name and what you liked was a small thing, but it went a long way into making her feel like she belonged.

  Cameron browsed the shop while she waited for her sandwich and coffee to be made. She needed to replenish some spices if she was going to make her famous chili that day. It was mid-November, and the weather was finally cold enough to make the first chili of the season.

  Making chili on Sunday during the NFL games always made Cameron think of her father. It was his secret recipe she used. Now that he had passed away, it was shared only with her brother and her. Rush Caldwell was an accomplished attorney in his day. Cameron remembered that growing up, she thought her father was the smartest man in the world. He finished the New York Times Sunday crossword puzzles, and he did it in pen. He knew all the answers on Jeopardy! and he read books constantly. Those memories made his disease even worse. Rush had suffered from dementia in the last years of his life, and the memory loss and confusion were hard for him to take. It was hard for the whole family. The regression she saw her father take was rapid. Drastically changing his personality what felt like overnight. But he would like this though, she thought. He was always proud of his chili, entering it in local chili cookoffs and mostly winning. He’d like that she still made it when the weather turned cool, and that it reminded her of him.

  Smiling to herself and happy with her memories, Cameron realized she hadn’t thought about the dismantled HTH in her apartment since she left there. As she walked to the counter to pay for and collect her breakfast, she grabbed a copy of the Post, then prepared to snag one of the five stools the bodega kept in the window to eat and watch the world go by on a Sunday morning. That was until she saw the headline on the front page of the Post.

  Twenty-eight-year-old genius and HomeTech Hub inventor Matteo Rodriguez found murdered in Synergistic office Saturday morning; police have no leads.

  Then she froze and knew no matter what she tried to tell herself, something was very wrong with the HomeTech Hubs.

  Chapter Nine

  Everybody’s working weekends

  Sunday brought nothing but pain for Will and his partner. Stuck in the conference room at the 10th precinct waiting on his boss, Will was not pleased to be there. Saturday had been a long day for them at the SE offices. After the discovery of the body, the ME and crime scene investigators descended to do their work while Will and Alan interviewed the member of the cleaning staff who discovered the body. She was a sixty-two-year-old woman who was traumatized and seemed to know nothing of consequence to their investigation. There were a few staff members on hand they spoke to, none who had been there last Friday night or entered the victim’s office. All did seem to agree on one thing: they needed to speak to Trey, aka Wilson Howell III and the owner of the company. Barring that, they needed either Trey’s best friend and firm attorney, Brandon Reece, or the VP of sales, Tessa Wells.

  With a small bit of detecting work, they discovered all the officers and most of the staff were at a party in the Hamptons that weekend. They were at a company celebration for the sale of the ten millionth HomeTech Hub. Which only begged the question as to why the inventor wasn’t there himself?

  Luckily, Will didn’t have to make the notification to the next of kin. Since the victim’s family was from Texas, they’d worked with a local police officer to handle the notification there. Both parents would be flying to New York the following day, and Will and Alan would meet with them then. Never a pleasant part of the job.

  Captain Gil Lovett barged into the conference room in his usual loud manner. Everything about the thirty-year NYPD veteran was loud. His talk, his manners, and his attitude. He was an old-school kind of cop who didn’t believe in a lot of bullshit, either giving or receiving, and Will liked that about him. He appreciated that Captain Lovett didn’t kowtow to the politicians the way some others did. It meant he’d never again move up in rank. But Will didn’t suppose that mattered much to Gil. He was more interested in catching criminals. A tall, attractive man in his sixties, Gil Lovett was still a ladies’ man, never having settled down. He claimed to be too married to his job. It was possible, when looking at his captain, that Will was seeing himself in twenty years.

  Lovett slammed a copy of the New York Post on the table with authority and simply stated, “This one is going to be a real mess, boys. What’ve you got?”

  “The ME placed the time of death somewhere between seven and midnight Friday night. We’ll know more after the autopsy. The medical examiner agreed to come in today to do it. We’re meeting him down there at noon.” Alan began laying out what they’d learned for the captain. He rose out of his chair and stood in front of the large dry erase board they’d begun compiling information on, gesturing to it as he went. “Initial report, blunt force trauma to the head. The weapon was a crowbar, no prints, no unique identifiers. There was construction on the second floor of the building. The weapon probably came from there, so no leads.”

  “Discovered by a member of the cleaning crew the following morning,” Will chimed in, wanting to be useful before they reached the technical part he didn’t understand. “No help, didn’t see anything, didn’t hear anything. Wasn’t in the office the previous evening. We’ll run the standard checks, but she wasn’t involved.”

  “So, what do you know?”

  “Unfortunately, not much,” Will replied. “What we have now is a lot of questions. First, why was the victim in his office? Most everyone else from the company was at the owner’s house in the Hamptons for a company party. Why wasn’t such an integral member of the team there? And why didn’t anyone notice his absence? We’ve been unable to communicate with any of the employees from SE due to their travel, but they’ll all be back in the city tomorrow, and we have interviews with the top three executives with their attorneys. We’ll see where that takes us before we start interviewing the other employees. At last count, SE employed over 500 people, though most of them in overseas factories. Only about 150 at the New York office. Alan will have to tell you about the technical part.”

  “Lawyered up already, huh?” Captain Lovett commented, annoyed at having hoops to jump through this early in the investigation.

  “Whoever did this was very tech
savvy. They disabled all the cameras in the building. Which, with what SE does and what I could glean looking at their system, is very advanced. We’ll know more tomorrow when we speak to them, but this wasn’t your average burglar. They also reformatted his computer, deleting everything on it. Did the same to his phone, destroyed his cloud account, and broke into the server room and stole some of the hard drives stored there. If I had to guess, it’s likely we’ll discover those were the victim's backup drives. We’ll wait and see. But he didn’t stop there. It looks like all the other drives were attacked. Most likely with a degausser.”

  “A what?” the captain asked, rubbing the space between his eyes. This case was already starting to get complicated.

  “It’s like a magnet you can use for destroying data. It’s not 100 percent successful in a situation like this where most likely the plates will have something to protect them from magnetic attacks. However, some damage was done, though a lot will be recoverable with a lot of time and expense. We can offer to help SE with this if they let us near the drives, which they probably won’t, but I think it’s a waste of time. The killer was looking for and trying to get rid of something of the victim’s. The attack on the other servers was just a secondary action. A smokescreen, if you will. He got rid of all the victim's data. That’s all that mattered to him. Whether he took it with him or destroyed it all, we don’t know.

  “Basically, to sum it all up for you, Captain, a very technically oriented person went to a lot of trouble to kill Matt Rodriguez and get rid of all his data. What the killer was looking for, we don’t know. We don’t know who saw him last, we don’t know if he was troubled or working on anything new. And the only people who can tell us are all also very technically adept people who’ve already lawyered up. Primarily the owner, one William Howell III, aka Trey, who’s something of an enigma in the tech industry. A Massachusetts blue blood who chose to shun the family business of banking and enter the world of technology. Undoubtedly a genius. His success at Synergistic was in no small part to his family’s influence. His grandfather, William the first, was a Massachusetts senator. His father, Will Two, was a banking titan. And even though his family cut him off financially when he chose to go his own path, the name still opened doors for Trey. So yeah, this one is going to be messy.”

  The captain rose from the chair where he’d been sitting, staring at the murder board and listening. He stood there for a minute with his head down toward the table before he looked up at them and spoke.

  “You don’t know much,” he commented. “Before you head to the autopsy, reach out to the ADA. I know you guys can handle yourselves, but with the types of attorneys these guys have, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to have a chat before you head over there tomorrow. Just to get an idea of what you’ll be able to get a warrant for, etc. Mind your p’s and q’s on this one, boys. I’ve already received a call from One Police Plaza, and it’s still the weekend. This thing is going to blow up tomorrow, so let’s get all our ducks in a row and do this one by the book. I want updates twice a day. Do your best to close this one fast.”

  With that, the captain slammed out the door, and Will sighed. He met eyes with his partner across the ancient conference table and did something he swore he’d never do again. He called the cell phone of Kim Goodrich, the acting ADA, as instructed by the captain.

  Kim was a very smart, driven, and beautiful woman… and an ex-girlfriend of Will’s. Kim was a prep-school-taught Yale grad who was slumming it in the DA’s office as so many do before making a run at a political career. She had it in her head that marrying a middle-class policeman would give her some street cred. Will didn’t agree, and the breakup was volatile. The relationship was three years over, and Kim was now married to some hedge-fund guy, but that didn’t stop her from making his life miserable every chance she could get.

  Alan smirked at him as the phone rang. He’d never liked Kim and had tried to warn Will away many times during their relationship. He never verbally said, “I told you so,” but those looks told a different story.

  Will also wanted to dig into the lives of the three principals of SE. It was always good to be prepared for situations like this, and he had a feeling he’d need to be on his best game tomorrow. Not only in dealing with Kim but with their top three suspects as well.

  Chapter Ten

  Lone means one

  It took everything Cameron had to be patient and wait until 9:00 a.m. Monday to go to the SmartTech offices. She did her Monday morning conference call with all the other SmartTech reps and her boss on mute, only half paying attention on her drive to the office. Her nerves finally started receding as she turned onto SmartTech Drive and began passing all the buildings her company owned. SmartTechs main facility was a gleaming monolith of glass and metal shining at the end of the drive. But to get there you had to pass all the R&D, production, shipping, and warehousing facilities. Fifteen massive buildings lining the street stretching for miles so by the time you reached the main office you were already suitably impressed with the grandeur of the company. The effect was a useful tool and she’d seen it work on customers. Their awe growing as they rode down the drive and were confronted with the reality of just how massive SmartTech was and that’s just the way Steve designed it.

  To say she was freaked out would be an understatement. After her discovery Sunday morning, she sat on the couch, TV on, football games and chili forgotten, and tried to come up with a plan. First, she had to know what the transmitter did. She couldn’t do anything based on supposition. That’s why she was at the office first thing on a Monday. Which anyone who knew her would know was an anomaly for her. For one thing, she worked remotely, visiting dealers in the field, and hardly went to her office at all, unless her day included giving end users a tour of the showroom on-site to close a sale. Mondays were also the day of the weekly team sales call. Eight o’clock sharp every Monday morning, the whole crew from every division logged on to get reamed out by their boss. No matter what their numbers were. On days she didn’t have meetings, she worked from her home office, preferring it to sitting in traffic to drive to New Jersey where SmartTech was located and the distractions that came with an office setting. She was also not an early riser. Cameron was a night owl. If she had a choice, she’d rather stay up late and sleep for as long as she could.

  On days like today, she’d sleep until seven forty-five before she’d roll out of bed, brush her teeth, and, without changing out of her pajamas, pop open her laptop and begin the day. But this Monday saw her up, showered, and in her Jeep by 6:30 a.m., ensuring no matter how bad traffic was, she’d get to the office so she could go in as soon as she was finished with her call, and Casey would already be there. She’d packed up the HomeTech Hubs, put on one of her best suits like she always did when any of her bosses might see her, and headed to New Jersey.

  Barely stopping to greet Melissa, the receptionist, she hustled up the stairs of the main office to the second floor, which housed the tech support team. Rushing past the cubicles where the customer service team sat, she was relieved to see Casey in his office with his customary morning Mountain Dew. Casey Keane was a Stanford grad with little ambition and a mind for gadgets, which was what led him to SmartTech. After years of writing his own code and building computers, smart home integration was no challenge for him. Things Cameron could never comprehend were simple for Casey. And he liked his job of managing the tech support team. He only had to interact with his team and sales reps these days. He didn’t take support calls anymore unless they were a particular challenge, which was best, as he was not the most patient or personable fellow. But Cameron liked him. She’d intentionally cultivated a good working relationship with him when she’d started so she’d have someone she could lean on in the support department. He’d also seemed to chill out a bit over the years, becoming especially more approachable in the last few months as he and his wife had welcomed their first baby. And although unambitious, he wasn’t lazy,
and he never let her down. She hoped today wouldn’t be the first time.

  She walked into his office holding the two HTH boxes, setting them down on his desk, and not for the first time noticed the lack of any decoration in his little corner of the building. No pictures or tchotchkes to disrupt the space. Just an old-fashioned coffeepot. She’d offered to buy him a Keurig before when he’d helped her have a particularly good month, but he’d turned her down. She dropped her purse in one of the chairs that sat around the small table in front of his desk.

  He looked up at her, and before even saying good morning, he said, “If those are for Barry Issacs, I told you we’re not touching them.” He sat back in his desk chair, crossing his arms over his chest, firm in his stance. “I’m not changing my mind.”

  Cameron put a finger to her mouth, motioning for him to stay quiet, then reached into her messenger bag, pulled out a single piece of paper, and handed it to him. She mouthed, “Read,” while he looked at her quizzically.

  “Let’s go smoke a cigarette,” she said, staring at him and shaking her head when he looked like he was beginning to speak. She gestured to the paper she’d handed him and made a show of reaching in her back pocket, grabbing her cell phone, and laying it on the desk. Then she slowly reached for her left arm and removed her fitness tracker, laying it on his desk as well. He stared at them for another few seconds before he finally looked at the note she’d handed him.

  Don’t say anything. Just remove any piece of technology you have on you, set it on your desk, and come outside with me.

  She’d spent all day Sunday trying to come up with a plan to figure out what the chip could do. She knew Casey could figure it out, but she didn’t know how to explain it to him in front of the hub. If it was a transmitter, was it recording? Would it still transmit after she’d removed it from the Hub? Would it still wirelessly connect with the mic in the HTH and record anything she said? If it did, how could she tell him without it hearing her? And if it linked to other devices nearby, as it was designed to do, would her phone or fitness tracker relay information as well? She didn’t want to overact and behave like a conspiracy nut, but the best way to be safe was to remove all her devices and get away from technology. The worst that could happen was he’d think she was crazy, and she could live with that.