There is No Cloud

by Kat Wheeler

  Will smiled, savoring the moment. Usually, he wasn’t this vindictive, or at least he didn’t like to think so, but he was going to enjoy putting Tessa Wells away. She’d tried to kill Cameron, and that didn’t sit well with him. Plus, her continued defiance grated on him. She truly believed she was above all of this and that she’d be walking out of here free and clear. Well, it was time to dissuade her of that notion for good.

  “That could be true except for one thing, Tessa. When Matt discovered your chips, he didn’t get rid of his HomeTech Hub. He took it to his office. Cameras in the SE offices recorded you murdering him, and the HTH uploaded the data and transmitted it at midnight as you programmed it to do. You deleted the local NVR information from the camera at SE, but the info had already been shared with your chip in the HomeTech Hub. The file was still there when our techs got in. I don’t know if you overlooked it, or if you’re sick enough to have wanted to watch it yourself. You caught yourself, Tessa. Game over.”

  The look on her face was priceless.

  Kim wasted no time. She turned to the attorney, completely overlooking Tessa. She was of no use to her now. Her social status gone; there was no reason for Kim to be interested in her. “We’ll be charging her with murder one. She’ll get life, no possibility of parole.”

  With that, Will and Kim both got up to leave.

  That was when Tessa finally lost it. She began screaming at them as her attorney tried to hold her back. It was a lot of “You can’t do this to me” and “Don’t you know who I am?” Things Will had heard before. They didn’t stop or acknowledge her; he just walked out of the room and nodded at the officer waiting there. He waited for them to exit, then made his way in to arrest her. He’d get her processed, and she’d be in a cell tonight. It was doubtful she’d get bail or ever breathe free again. It was a good day’s work. He could put the case to rest and leave Kim to handle it from here on. He was confident she’d get a conviction. The evidence was solid. It wasn’t every day they had a video of the murder. It’d be a big case for Kim, and high-profile cases were what she lived for.

  They got back to the conference room, and Cameron and Alan were waiting for them.

  “I’m going to head on to my office,” Kim said, hovering in the doorway, not quite entering the room. “I want to get everything set for the arraignment. That bitch isn’t getting bail if I can help it. It’s been good seeing you, Will, Alan. Cameron, my office will be in touch. You’ll have to testify.”

  And with that, she was gone.

  Looking at his watch, Will noted there was time for Kim to give a statement for the afternoon news. Typical. He imagined they’d see a lot of her in the media over the next few months. She’d love that.

  “Well, that should be pleasant,” Cameron said from her spot at the table. “So, is it over?”

  “It’s over.” Will nodded. “You’re safe now.”

  Relief filled Cameron’s features, and she blew out a deep breath. “Thank you.”

  “I’m going to go grab the rest of those evidence logs, Will. I’ll be back in a bit. Cameron, good to meet you, and thank you for the help.” Alan reached out to shake her hand. “You’re one tough lady.”

  He walked out the door, leaving them alone.

  Uncomfortable in the silence, Cameron moved to start gathering up her things.

  “I was thinking,” Will said, stopping her. “Tomorrow's Friday, and my caseload has suddenly lightened up. You aren’t working. Maybe you’d like to grab lunch?”

  “That’d be great,” she said, smiling back at him.

  ***

  She was feeling good as she boarded the elevator at the station. Casey's murderer was caught; she was as safe as she could be. She could begin to put this whole thing behind her, and Will wanted to see her again. That was an unexpected bonus. She’d go to the funeral on Saturday, mourn with their friends, and Monday she’d go see Steve about getting her job back. Things weren’t perfect. It would take her a while to work through everything that had happened. But now she could see the light at the end of the tunnel. She’d never thought much about justice before, but there was a sense of relief that came with knowing the murderer was caught. She wished all victims could feel this way.

  She boarded the elevator without paying much attention until someone spoke to her.

  “You’re Cameron, aren’t you?” she heard from the back of the elevator. “Cameron Caldwell?”

  “Yeah,” she answered, turning. And found herself face-to-face with Trey Howell.

  He must have seen the panic on her face because he was quick to reassure her.

  “Don’t be upset. I’m sorry. I’m just…,” he said, exhaling and leaning back against the rear of the elevator. “I’m just… well, they told me what happened, what she did. I guess I’m just trying to get my head around it. I don’t understand. This will ruin us. She destroyed everything. And for what? I just don’t get it.”

  Cameron stopped and considered him for a minute. He seemed genuinely distraught. Gone was the polished professional she’d watched in the interrogation room.

  “I don’t know that you’ll ever find a satisfactory answer,” she said cautiously. “You probably knew her best, but from everything they found, it seemed she was a very sad woman. And very lonely. She just wanted a family and went about it the wrong way.”

  He was nodding along. “Her father messed her up. She’d talk about him sometimes, you know. She spent all her holidays with my family growing up, and we weren’t the most stable. Looking back, it seems to make some sense, I guess. But how could she do this to me? To the company? To everything we built? We worked so hard, and now it’s over. No one will want a HomeTech Hub after this gets out. Synergistic is ruined.”

  The doors opened out onto the main floor, and Cameron was relieved. She didn’t know what else to say to him, and it was an uncomfortable conversation to be having with a man she’d never met before.

  “Thanks for listening. I’m sorry to just let it out on you like that,” he said, composing himself, then giving a short laugh. “Unreal. She recorded herself killing him, and she saved it? Unbelievable.”

  And then he walked away. Trey Howell would have a lot to deal with come morning. But whatever became of Synergistic Engineering was no longer her problem.

  He was right about one thing. If she stopped to consider it, Tessa Wells recording herself committing murder was unbelievable.

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Loose ends sink ships

  Cameron was on edge before meeting Will for lunch at her favorite restaurant in the Flatiron district. She’d spent the night before getting her apartment back in order. Which mostly consisted of her throwing things out. She’d lost count of how many trash bags she’d taken to the garbage room. It was going to be hard replacing everything she’d lost without the income from her job. Hopefully her homeowner’s insurance would cover some of the damage, but she wasn’t sure if her policy covered crazed murderers.

  She was hoping her meeting on Monday with Steve would go well and she could get her life back on track. They could easily spin SmartTech’s involvement in the HTH scandal in a positive manner. SmartTech, so secure they identified and shut down a billion-dollar product market just to keep their customers safe from hacking. The marketing spin practically wrote itself, which was a bonus because SmartTech’s marketing team wasn’t known as the best in the industry.

  It also helped that Mark Minsky wasn’t making a fuss. Wasn’t even upset. He was thanking Barry and SmartTech by extension for their diligence in finding his security breach. Barry was thrilled. He had a client for life and referrals galore. His business would skyrocket. Everyone was coming out of this well. Except for her. And Casey.

  She shook off those thoughts as she dug her hands deeper into her coat pockets. The weather had taken a colder turn heading into the weekend, and she’d been unable to find her glo
ves in all the mess. It was earlier in the season than she usually used them as it was, but with the mess in her apartment, finding anything was a lost cause.

  She saw Will waiting in front of the restaurant as she turned the corner and took a minute to take him in. He was standing off to the side of the door, scanning the crowd as people passed. She was sure it was a side effect of his profession or a holdover from his military years. Always a cop searching for anomalies in the herd.

  She greeted him with a smile, and he opened the door for her, ushering her into the restaurant with a hand on her back. He even pulled out her chair for her when the hostess sat them, waving her away from the task, choosing to do it himself. She liked it. The gentlemanly gestures were so foreign to her. She hadn’t had a man treat her with that sort of deference in longer than she could remember.

  They made pleasantries for a bit, and she waited until they ordered to broach the subject that had been on her mind all night.

  “I met Trey Howell yesterday in the elevator leaving your office,” she said casually.

  “Oh really?” he asked curiously. “How did that go?”

  “It was odd. He seemed upset, but he said some things that got me thinking.”

  “Like what?” He raised an eyebrow at her.

  “Well, for one thing, how did he know who I was? I never actually met anyone from Synergistic. I can’t imagine anyone on your team would’ve told him of my involvement, so how did he know?”

  Will thought for a minute and sipped his tea. “Mark Minsky,” he answered confidently. “He knew. We told him as much during our first interview, and he could’ve gotten more information from your customer at Digital Lifestyles. It wouldn’t have been hard for someone like Trey to put the pieces together.”

  She considered it for a moment and then conceded his point. It made sense. A logical solution.

  “Okay, then tell me this. The last thing he said to me was that it was unbelievable that Tessa got rid of all the electronic evidence of her crime but left the recording from the HomeTech Hub. It is kind of hard to get my head around. She was so careful to erase all the video, his hard drive, and all their servers. Why leave that piece of evidence?”

  “Maybe she didn’t know it was recorded?”

  “She had to if she was the one reviewing the data from the chips. She went after Matt because he’d discovered the chips. To know that, she’d have to have been tracking his hub and known that he’d taken it from his apartment back to his office. It’s not rational to think she wouldn’t have seen it and gotten rid of the data when it uploaded to her cloud.”

  “Maybe she didn’t look at Matt’s uploads since she murdered him and had no idea he’d even brought the hub to the office? It follows, then, that she wouldn’t have even know it passed along the recording. She didn’t have any reason to look at his data anymore. And why would she think an HTH in his office would be significant if she did see it? They have to have them all over the place. They all look identical, and she didn’t have all night to mess around at the scene. She had to get back to the party in the Hamptons before anyone missed her.”

  “True, but that’s the other thing. How realistic is it that neither Trey nor Brandon noticed her gone from the party for so long? In everything we found about them, it showed they were thick as thieves. I can’t see how she was gone for three hours and they didn’t notice.”

  “What are you saying? You think they were in it together?”

  “They had to be. At least two of them,” she stated confidently. “She may have been able to design and program the chip, but to put it all together like that, it would’ve taken more than her basic skills.”

  “She confessed, Cameron. She didn’t implicate anyone else. It’s over.”

  She stared at him for a minute, not appreciating his dismissive tone. “And then there’s this.” She reached into her bag and pulled out a copy of an article.

  “What is this?” he asked, taking it from her.

  “It’s an article I found. It was written for the school newspaper at MIT when Trey Howell was a student. It’s a review of a roundtable they had about the effects of technology and privacy laws. It focused on the government’s inability to keep up with necessary legislation because technology evolves too quickly to be properly regulated.”

  “So?” he said, skimming the article.

  “Trey Howell was a panelist. They quoted him. I highlighted it for you.”

  He looked down at the paper and began to read the section she’d indicated. “Government will always be a step behind technology. With the general public’s fascination increasing at an astronomical rate, the law will continue to fall farther and farther behind. With the advent of more home technology than ever before, it’s most likely that we’ll see a future where individual privacy is nothing more than an illusion. And this will happen sooner than you would think.”

  He finished reading and looked at her.

  “He was describing using the HomeTech Hub as spyware, and he did it fifteen years ago,” she said excitedly. “He did this.”

  “Cameron, this is an old article. Lots of MIT students probably said the same thing. It doesn’t mean anything.” He said it patiently, but she found it condescending.

  “He did this. Tessa is in love with him. She’d cover for him. Maybe she was sleeping with the others to try to make him jealous, looking for data from the hubs to put cracks in their relationships. Create division, bring Trey closer to her. But whatever the reason she was doing it, he was talking about using home technology as spyware fifteen years ago. He recruited Matt Rodriguez for this. He was planning this. You said it yourself, he’s the leader. The others just followed him. But Matt didn’t know about the plan, and they had to get him out of the way. Tessa was just the means to the end.”

  “There’s no proof, Cameron. We have the video. She confessed. It’s over. You need to let this go. You sound like a conspiracy theorist raving about little green men. Like those guys on The X-Files.”

  She snorted, rolling her eyes. “The Lone Gunmen,” she stated wistfully.

  “No, there were three of them.”

  She shook her head at him, disappointed by his unwillingness to believe her and saddened by the reminder of her banter with Casey. “Then answer me this. Why delete all of Matt’s files, the hard drives, all of it? Did Tessa ever say what he found? He had something, some proof. Find that and you can nail Trey Howell. Tessa’s insecurity and her family issues are just a red herring. There’s something else going on here.”

  “A red herring? Now you’ve moved away from Law and Order and entered Agatha Christie territory.” He must have noticed the anger rising in her expression, as he hurriedly moved on. “It doesn’t matter anyway. There’s nothing left to find.”

  “Look, I know technology isn’t your thing, but it’s mine. This chip, this whole concept. Implanting spyware in a device that can access every bit of data you touch. Most people aren’t even aware they’re providing it. This has tremendously far-reaching implications. Huge financial implications. There is no way that this was all about one woman’s jealousy. I’m back to my original theory. This was a beta test. Once they had accurate data over a period of time from several devices, they could sell this. Calculate accurately how much storage they’d need to make it efficient, put a budget in place for staff, etc. This was the beginning of a business plan. Trey Howell had this idea before he recruited Matt Rodriguez to Synergistic. They just used his HTH as a delivery system. It was the perfect Trojan horse. He created this with Tessa, but he was the one receiving the data. That’s why she didn’t know the murder had been recorded. He set her up to take the fall. And she’s so brainwashed by love or whatever, she’s doing it. I don’t know what the master plan here is, but I bet Matt found out. If we can find out what he knew, you’ll have them. You have to find his cloud account.”

  “Yes, they got th
at too.”

  “All of them?” she asked.

  “What do you mean, all of them? He only had one.”

  “Was it a personal or business account?”

  “It was a Synergistic account, why?”

  “Then he had at least one other account,” she stated confidently.

  “We checked. He didn’t have any other cloud accounts registered to him on any service we could find.”

  “He had another one. Trust me, Will, he had a personal account.”

  He sighed, and it irked her. It felt patronizing. He took a deep breath, and she knew whatever he had to say next wasn’t because he believed her, it was because he was placating her.

  “How can you be so sure?”

  She was right. That even, still tone he used was filled with pity, and it was condescending. She didn’t need to know him long to recognize that.

  “Because,” she snapped back, suddenly furious, “everybody has a personal cloud account. It’s where you keep all your documents, your taxes, leases, insurance stuff. Stuff you don’t want your boss to see, porn. No one, especially someone as technically astute as Matt Rodriguez, wouldn’t. You do it in case you change jobs and lose access to your work account. Salespeople always save a client list in case they get fired and don’t want to lose all their contacts. Maybe your guys couldn’t find it, but it’s out there, and the proof you need is on it. Plus, I’m positive he had an account in college. He went to MIT, for God’s sake. All students have one. It’s probably still active.”

  He seemed a little shocked at her vehemence, and maybe she was being a little too aggressive. But the truth was she knew there was more to this story than cyberstalking. And the more Will dismissed her, the more frustrated she got.

  “Don’t you want to know what Matt found? What got him killed?” she asked softly. “Even if it wasn’t Trey, and Tessa acted alone, don’t you want to know why?”

  He stared at her for a minute, not speaking, assessing. “We know why, Cameron. She was obsessed. She’s not sane. She was so paranoid the men in her life were going to leave her, she had to track their every movement just to feel secure in her position with them. And Matt found out and tried to take it all away. That’s why she killed him. It’s just that simple. Look, I know you’re at loose ends. You lost your job, you lost a friend, and being involved this week has helped. Been cathartic for you. But it’s over now. You need to let it go.”