by Kat Wheeler
“Do what you need to do, just don’t take that thing home with you.”
Chapter Thirteen
I’m like a ninja
Cameron was frustrated. She’d been able to get into Mark Minsky’s network, and gaining access to all his device information was a cakewalk. She’d done everything she’d told Casey she would, but she still hadn’t moved her car from where she’d parked it. She’d pulled off on a strip of road that was maybe once a driveway for a piece of property connecting to the Minskys’. Or maybe it was for access to an old barn she saw up the way. Regardless, it wasn’t important. What was important was the internal dialog she’d been having with herself the last ten minutes.
She was thinking about breaking into the house. It was an insane idea, but no matter how much she thought about it, she always ended up at the same conclusion.
She had to get inside.
Growing up, Cameron had always been a bit of a wild child. She’d cleaned up her act as an adult, and those days were long gone, but even in her wildest days, she’d never broken into a house.
She wanted the hard drive from his network video recorder, not just his network map. It was a stupid idea. She had no idea how much data storage he had, or how long the recordings were saved on the hard drive. It was most likely there would be no useful information to get, but she still couldn’t talk herself out of it. What if the device was planted on-site? There could be a video of someone installing it.
During her initial scan of Mr. Minsky’s network, she discovered he had cameras covering the whole property. Cameras she could tap into, but that would do no good. To access the stored data recordings on the hard drive, she’d have to physically take it. She knew where it was. The pictures in the Hamptons Magazine article gave a clear layout. She knew exactly where the NVR was located in the equipment rack and where it was in the house. She knew the model of the product, and a quick google search told her the hard drives were hot-swappable, so she wouldn’t even need tools to get it out. She could do this.
The only issue was getting into the house itself. A quick check of the lighting and HVAC system confirmed no one was home at the summer house. He had smart locks, and while the access code wasn’t available to her, she was sure the techs at Digital Lifestyles had them. She could call and get them, but they’d want to know why. And that would leave a trail, so that wasn’t an option.
She could try to guess the code, but that would take forever, and she might never get it.
She checked the layout of the cameras on the blueprints she had. There was no way she would be able to approach that house without getting caught on at least one camera. No worries if she made it inside and got the hard drive; all evidence of her entry would be erased. But if she didn’t, she’d be caught. Luckily, he didn’t seem to have an alarm monitoring system set up, so at least the cops wouldn’t be called if she did break in.
She had another idea. It was kind of crazy, but it could work. Though was it worth the risk? She wasn’t a cop. She and Casey had done way more than most would just digging this far into the strange chip she found. But that’s what happened, she supposed, when you put a mystery in front of a bunch of nerds. They couldn’t wait to solve the puzzle.
She checked her laptop again, confirmed her suspicions, and took a deep breath. She knew she’d already made her decision.
Sliding out of her car, she popped the trunk and grabbed some equipment out of her cache of demo gear. She ditched her jacket, throwing it in the back seat, and swapped her heels for an extra pair of flats. Then she clicked the locks and started down the old path that would lead her behind the property. Like most houses in the Hamptons, Mark Minsky had invested heavily in large shrubs that surrounded his property, blocking it from prying eyes. Pretentiously manicured topiaries lined the whole estate.
The greenery thinned out once she reached the back and some maintenance sheds. She got down on her hands and knees and pushed through the dense foliage into the backyard. She had a scratch on her face and had dirtied herself up a bit but came through not too much worse for the wear. She wasn’t dressed for cat burglary, but never in a million years did she think this would be where she’d end up when she got dressed that morning.
The yard was spacious, and over the landscaping, she got her first glimpse of the house. It was typical in that elegant, relaxed-coastal-living style all Hamptons houses were. He even had the requisite large ridiculous sculpture in the yard, she noted. His was a giraffe. Tall and absurd-looking in the middle of his vast ornamentation, it somehow reminded her of the topiaries. So contrived in their placement.
The problem was there was no cover to the house from her place stuck to the side of the maintenance shed. It was a wide-open space of perfectly trimmed lawn, done in a checkerboard pattern. It had to be at least the length of a football field. His monthly lawn maintenance bill had to be obscene. Once she stepped onto that lawn, there was no turning back. She either got the hard drive, or she was caught.
With a deep breath, she made her decision and sprinted toward the pool house with everything she had.
Cameron crashed into the back of the pool house panting, completely out of breath. She had to get back to the gym. Weekly yoga was obviously doing nothing for her cardio. Grass stuck to the bottom of her pants, and she was glad she’d switched to flats and left her suit jacket in the car. She was sweating enough as it was even though it was cool out.
She peeked out from around the building and spied a door close to her on the long side of the pool. Taking a minute to catch her breath, she began making her way to the door.
Scurry, scurry, scurry.
Slide, duck, slide.
Back to the wall, ducking under the windows, crawling on occasion, she began humming the Mission Impossible theme in her head to try to alleviate some of her anxiety. She must look like an idiot, but if she got inside, she’d take the evidence and no one would ever see this stellar display of stupidity.
Reaching the back door, she took a look into the open-floor-plan living room and kitchen, searching for what she needed. She found it sitting on the kitchen countertop: a brand-new HTH. This was her Hail Mary. It was a shot in the dark, but if they had integrated the door locks into the entire system, she had a way to unlock the numeric keypad on the door without having the code.
She hesitated for a moment but realized it was far too late to back out. She’d for sure already been caught on camera. Regardless of her attempt to stay hidden, she knew her attempts at concealment crossing the yard were insufficient. So there was nothing left to do but more forward.
Closing her eyes to center herself for what she was about to do, she took a deep breath. Reaching into her backpack, she pulled out two devices: one, the laser from her fiber termination kit, the other a connecting device for her phone. Her phone that, per Casey’s advice, she’d disconnected from both cellular and Wi-Fi access. It wouldn’t ping off any local cell towers or connect to any network now.
She’d learned this trick from one of her dealers. Apparently, someone had discovered a hack using laser light to send audio signals to voice-controlled devices, and it worked over long distances. How it worked was well out of her paygrade, but she’d learned to do it. Thank God for bored AV techs who spent way too much time on YouTube.
She hooked it all together the way she was taught and pointed the laser in the direction of the HTH she could see through the glass door.
Here goes nothing.
She hit the button and calmly spoke into her phone. “AIME, unlock back door.”
Please have named it “back door.”
The hub lit up blue on the counter, meaning her command had been heard, and the lock before her flashed as well. In the silence of the afternoon, she heard the deadbolt turn and unlock the door. Holy shit, it worked. She made a mental note to buy the guys who taught her the trick a beer. They’d earned it. Now only one more hurdle before she could enter th
e house.
“AIME, alarm off.” She waited a minute, and nothing happened.
So she tried again. “AIME, turn off alarm.” That time she heard the corresponding beeping she associated with an alarm panel turning off.
She put her hand in her sleeve and pushed the now unlocked door open. She smiled. She was in.
And now she was officially a burglar.
Chapter Fourteen
GD cookie season
Once inside the house, there was thankfully no more need for trying to sneak around. She strolled through the living room bold as you please to the hallway on the opposite side of the kitchen. She’d studied the magazine article to reference the floor plan in her search for the equipment room and determined it was in a closet off the hallway, but there were a lot of doors. She’d greatly underestimated the size of the house.
After a few rounds of trial and error, she found it behind the fourth door she opened. Bigger than she’d imagined, she was grateful the room was the size of a walk-in closet. A Hamptons-sized walk-in closet was way more spacious than a city-sized version, of course. She’d have room to work. Shutting the door behind when she entered, she flipped on the lights and surveyed the gear.
Taking in the scene, she was grateful for Digital Lifestyles’ dedication to making clean racks. The Minskys’ system was impeccably built, and it had all the extras. Lots of fans for cooling, USB lights to plug in for delicate work, and a designated laptop for working on the system.
They almost made it too easy.
She logged into the laptop. They used the same password she’d used for the Wi-Fi. When all this was over, she was going to have a talk with Barry about security protocols for protecting his customers. But for now, she focused on the immediate need. She logged into the system programming and checked the notification settings on the NVR. Score, no one was set to receive motion notifications. That meant she’d gotten in clean; nobody would know she was there, and she could take her time. Well, theoretically, as long as someone wasn’t watching the camera feed in real time. But the odds of that were slim, so she was reasonably sure she was okay. She disabled motion recording. The unit would continue to function for live viewing, it just wouldn’t record, and nobody would notice the difference until they tried to pull up any stored footage. Hopefully, with no one being in residence at the summer house, that wouldn’t be any time soon. At the very least, it’d be plenty of time for her to get out of the house, and that was all that really mattered.
She then set out to accomplish the task she’d come to do. Taking the Raspberry PI out of her bag, she plugged it into the network. Accessing the menu on the device, she opened the setting to scan for all ports and did a scan of the entire network, quickly collecting all data on his system and every device that had ever been connected to it. It would give her a complete blueprint of all technology in the house, everything the chip in the HTH would’ve had access to—just in case she missed anything in her remote scan. When they turned the info over to the police, it may help determine what whoever put it there had been looking for.
It was easy for Cameron to find the NVR. She quickly located the hard drive and removed it, then slid it into the backpack she brought with her. She zipped up the backpack and was preparing to leave when she saw it. An ethernet cable was running out of the NVR in a different direction than all the others. It didn’t appear to connect to the POE switch that was powering the cameras. She traced it down and discovered an external hard drive. He must have added it for additional storage space. Sneaky, and she almost missed it. That would’ve been a disaster. All the evidence of her crime would’ve been stored there for anyone to see.
She was unhooking the external hard drive and preparing to remove it from the rack a melodic ringing echoed throughout the house. Someone had rung the doorbell. Cameron’s heart skipped a beat and then began pounding in earnest. She could almost hear her heart as her fear had her frozen in place. She held stone still for what felt like forever but was most likely a minute at most. Not moving, barely breathing.
After a few minutes passed, she blew out a deep breath and began to relax. Everything was okay; they must have left. She reached back down to finish removing the drive.
Ding-dong.
There it went again. Whoever was at the door hadn’t gone away. She hoped it wasn’t a neighbor or someone who had seen her sneaking through the yard and came to check it out. Reaching up, Cameron grabbed the laptop for the equipment rack and sat on the floor. She logged into the web viewer for the cameras and tried to find a clear view of the front door.
C’mon, she thought, clicking rapidly, how many cameras can one house have?
Searching through all the cameras in the system, she finally found the view of the front door and sighed in relief. It was a little girl with a woman Cameron could only assume was her mother. She recognized the familiar Girl Scout uniform; it must have been cookie time. She watched patiently from the floor of the equipment room until the little cookie pusher was on her way, waiting until the pair had made their way completely down the front drive before she made her move to leave. She grabbed her backpack with both hard drives off the floor, checked the computer once more to be sure she’d deleted all traces of her break-in, and casually left the property, locking the door behind her.
Her first crime was a success.
Chapter Fifteen
First, you know, with the lawyers
Monday saw Detectives Justus back at the Synergistic offices, and he didn’t have much enthusiasm about it. Partially because the ADA had insisted on coming with him instead of Alan and being in Kim Goodrich’s company was an annoyance he never wanted.
Smartly dressed as always, without a hair out of place, Kim was an attractive woman. But what had always seemed to get in Will’s way was her near-constant sour expression and the way her smiles never looked real. He didn’t know what it would take to make Kim Goodrich laugh, like out-and-out belly laugh, and after their brief relationship, he didn’t waste any thought on it anymore. When he saw her these days, her expression favored smirks and an air of superiority. If he were honest with himself, it did seem like a more natural fit, and he sometimes wondered why she even bothered faking when there were together. She couldn’t be happy constantly putting on a front, or so he thought. He knew he couldn’t live that way, and not for the first time, he wondered why she had even wasted so much of her time with him.
Will watched her hold that expression the entire elevator ride up to the office where their meeting was to be held. “Remember, this is an informal meeting only. We have no legal right to compel or detain them, so tread lightly.”
Will fought to hold in his eye roll. Lawyers were never fun company, and today they would have two of them, plus Kim. They were there to interview the three remaining principals of Synergistic, and Will would’ve preferred to do it at the precinct. He and Alan had discussed it at length the previous day and grudgingly decided to conduct the initial interviews at SE. It offered them less control, but hopefully the familiar surroundings would make the principals more comfortable and more likely to share information. There was also the fact that, at this point in the investigation, they had no leverage to get them to the station, and if the suspects declined their invitation, they’d just end up at the SE offices anyway and lose the upper hand, as Kim had reminded him so very often on the trip over. Assuming they had the upper hand in the first place, which Will doubted very much. He also doubted the principals would say anything useful. But a lot could be learned by witnessing their dynamic. After researching the background of the people involved, Will had to admit he was interested in seeing how this group interacted with each other.
His suspicion grew as they were shown into Trey Howell's office. The first thing he noticed was the size. It was larger than his apartment. It was professionally decorated and styled, but that didn’t hold his attention. What struck him most was that the three occ
upants seemed to be professionally styled as well. From their positioning to their wardrobes, they could have been posing for a photo shoot. Evenly spaced throughout the room, they were staged in a way he couldn’t fully explain, and he wondered if Kim noticed.
Trying to keep his preconceived notions about the group out of his head, he took his first real look at the technology icons who made up Synergistic Engineering.
Tall, dark, and handsome seemed a cliché made for Trey Howell. He was dressed in what Will assumed was his usual office wear: a graphic tee and jeans with a blazer. A sort of “I may be a suit, but I’m still cool” outfit. Will wasn’t impressed; he could see through it and saw it was calculated. Designed to class it up enough for the business side and the press but not enough to isolate him from the technical staff. His marketing team probably crafted the look for him to keep him on brand.
He was sitting in a chair facing a couch, holding the hand of his VP of sales, Tessa Wells. Tears glistened in her eyes, and it was impossible to tell at first glance whether her grief was genuine or not. Will suspected not. She reminded him a bit of Kim, though he couldn’t put his finger on why exactly. Both women were striking but in very different ways. Where Kim gave off a strong “don’t mess with me” vibe, it seemed Tessa looked fragile, younger than her years—doll faced and innocent looking, even though he knew from her arrest records that she was a bit of a party girl and had seen her share of trouble. Looking at them, he felt a strange urge to rescue her. It was a misplaced notion, and in a moment of clarity, he realized what about her reminded him of Kim. It was the fact that it was all fake. A role she was playing. If that had anything to do with her guilt or innocence in this matter, he didn’t know, but it was interesting nonetheless.
Trey and Tessa looked to be closer than coworkers, and from his research, he knew they had dated off and on in the past. Heads close together, Trey wiped a tear from her eye. Again, he found himself wondering just how much was real and what was for show. Looked like maybe they might be on again if the way she looked at him was anything to go by.