by Kat Wheeler
He smiled. “Of course. First rule of the Northeast sales team: what happens in team meetings stays in team meetings.”
She laughed. “It means a lot that you believed me. I appreciate the support.”
“Anytime.”
“Got it,” Bill announced and handed her a flash drive.
“Well, that was quick,” Phil commented.
“He’s a good dude, and I gave him a massive discount on his last lighting project, so he owed me one.”
Chapter Forty
Discovery
She headed home after leaving the restaurant. She wanted to up her look to match that of the luxury building so she’d blend in easier, and she couldn’t do it in her funeral clothes. Plus, she wanted to drop her rental car off at her building. The only unknown was how long the password program would take to run. There were too many variables in this plan for her to feel confident. Too many assumptions that almost drove her crazy on the short subway ride to 59th Street. Did the cloud account even exist? She had all his personal account information from the police files, so she had usernames to check. It was crazy how easy people made it to get access to their data. But then again, that’s what had been at the root of all of this madness to begin with, so she shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, she managed to break into the Minskys’ house with very little trouble. She could do this. Looked like her life of crime was just getting started.
She called Bill as she was walking the two blocks from her subway stop to his building. “I’m here.”
“Okay,” he answered. “Be careful, don’t take any risks, and call me as soon as you’re out. I checked into a hotel by your place. Come right here when you’ve got it.”
She saw a group walking up to the doors and her heart soared. Perfect timing.
She nodded at the doorman, who was conveniently distracted by a resident and some dry cleaning, and pointed to the group in front of her. He nodded back, and she hustled to get in the elevator with them. Phase one complete. She was nervous as hell. In her state of near panic, she started humming the Mission Impossible theme song in her head again, trying to once again soothe her anxiety as she exited the elevator and made her way down the corridor on Matt’s floor. She passed a few apartments but not the one she was looking for. Finally, she found it. Luckily, it was the last unit at the end of the hall. She glanced back the way she had come to confirm she was alone. She couldn’t see anyone. She was good to go.
Pulling a jar of some old powder foundation she’d found in the back of a drawer out of her purse, she knelt down to get a better look at the keypad. She could see smudges on the screen. Perfect, it hadn’t been cleaned. She unscrewed the cap and poured a light layer of the powder over the face of the keypad, then took a deep breath and blew it all off. Peering intently at what remained she broke into a huge grin. Only four numbers had residue left. She knew he lived alone but was worried he may have given additional codes to cleaning staff and such. Looked like there was only one code. Having a four-number limit narrowed the possibilities exponentially. Four numbers, ten thousand possibilities.
She leaned against the wall next to the door, trying to affect a casual stance. Nothing weird going on here, just waiting for a friend. Pulling out her phone, she opened an app to get a list of all possible combinations. Ten thousand tries would take forever. Taking a minute to think, she then went in a different direction. Pulling up her cloud storage and opening the police files on Matt Rodriguez, she initiated a search on the digits she found. Bingo, parents’ home address: 1430. Score. She’d get in on the first try.
This was too easy. Maybe she and Casey should’ve forgotten all of this a week ago and really tried to rob a bank. She seemed to have the aptitude for it.
With one more quick glance down the hallway confirming she was alone, she keyed the code into the touch panel and hit the check mark. The lock disengaged. She was in.
She opened the door and silently let herself in, closing it behind her and reengaging the lock. She made her way by the moonlight filtering through the large open windows in his living room and looked around. It was a beautiful apartment, if sparsely furnished. Gleaming hardwood floors throughout told her he had a maid. The space was mostly open except for the standard bachelor leather couch and big TV. No clutter, so he was neat. Open to the kitchen and a dining area. She didn’t bother turning on any lights as she made her way down the hallway; there was enough light from the windows to see perfectly. She was having flashbacks to Mark Minsky’s house. Walking in a stranger’s house, opening doors looking for electronics.
First door closet, second half bath. She hit pay dirt on the third. What was probably meant to be the second bedroom was a home office. Computer on the table and electronics stacked neatly on shelves covering both walls. Cables in plastic bins. She could’ve been in any of her customers’ workrooms.
Her nerves faded as she sat down at the computer, at home in her natural environment. It booted up quickly, and she immediately saw the icon on the homepage for his login.
Letting that go for the time being, she followed the cables connecting to the terminal and found what she was looking for. Servers. Three of them. Looked like Matt did store his own backups. Now to see if they were connected or if she’d have to go in directly.
She went back to the computer and noted the time and realized she’d only been in the apartment for two minutes. This was going well. Now she just had to hold it together for the hard part. She pulled the thumb drive out of her pocket and inserted it into the PC. Clicking onto the access screen, she began running the password program. This was the part that worried her. It could take one minute, or it could take hours to crack the password on his computer. So she waited.
But waiting was not Cameron’s strong suit. No one would ever call her a patient person. As the minutes ticked by, she almost drove herself crazy imagining what would happen if she were caught. She’d go to jail for sure. Breaking and entering. Computer hacking. That was probably pretty bad, but the guy was dead, so did it matter?
After ten minutes ticked by, Cameron had bitten her fingernails down to the quick. After fifteen minutes, she was ready to say screw it and run out the door. Finally, after twenty minutes, when she was almost out the door, the program finished running. She was in.
Walking to the machine, she felt like she was in a haze. She immediately located the directory to see all attached drives. They were there. Three external storage units. Take that, Detective. They did exist. Now to see if there was any info regarding the HomeTech Hub on there. Opening the files, she blessed Matt Rodriguez for being an organized guy. Everything in his account was divided into folders and subfolders, and his subfolders had subfolders. It was beautifully laid out. She found what she was looking for in seconds.
There was a file marked with last Friday’s date, the night Matt was killed, titled “HTH Anomaly.” She wanted more than anything to open the file and finally get answers, but she knew this wasn’t the place. She checked the storage on the thumb drive. Seeing it had a terabyte of storage available, she mentally thanked Bill and began copying the files. She also logged onto the internet, opened her cloud account, and began transferring everything stored in Matt’s cloud account there too. A little backup never hurt.
The downloads were moving rapidly, but she was still anxious to get out of there as she waited. Things had gone smoothly to this point, but any second she knew things could change.
In the next moment, they did. She noticed the light from the hallway disappear as an object moved in front of the doorway. She swiveled in the chair when she heard someone enter the room.
Chapter Forty-one
I told you so
“Holy shit, it was you” was all that came out of her mouth when she saw the man standing inside the door. He shut it behind him when he entered, and now she was trapped. Blocked in this room, in the dark, with a man she was pretty sure was goin
g to kill her.
“Bet you thought it would’ve been Trey,” Brandon Reece said as he took a step farther into the room.
“I did,” she admitted. “To be honest, I thought you might have known about it, but I didn’t expect you to show up here. How’d you find me?”
“Trey was a little nervous after he spoke to Mark about how you discovered our little project and told the police. Pretty pissed too. You caused us a lot of problems.”
“Sorry,” she said sarcastically, “but you killed my friend.”
“No I didn’t,” he answered, moving another step closer to her. “Tessa hired someone to kill your friend. But back to why I’m here. Trey and I weren’t satisfied that Matteo hadn’t stored the information somewhere else. Probably just like you were. And he knew the police couldn't figure it out. After Tessa’s confession, they were satisfied. The ADA certainly was with all the publicity and an open-and-shut case. With video, no less! But after meeting you in the elevator at the police station, Trey began to worry about you. I mean, you were the only one involved who had enough technical knowledge to question anything. So, Trey hacked your phone. When we saw you were headed to this building, it all came together, and Trey realized what you’d come here for. So, I decided to meet you here. See what you found.”
She didn’t bother to answer that snarky statement. He’d slowly been moving closer to her as he’d been speaking, and while it was a large room, he was closing the space between them pretty quickly. She was getting really scared. She couldn’t bank on someone hearing her if she screamed—surely in a building like, this they had pretty good insulation—so it looked like she’d have to figure another way out of this. She’d been glancing around for anything to use as a weapon, but there wasn’t anything obvious. Why couldn’t Matt have been into baseball or something? Would it have hurt for him to have a bat laying nearby? The best she could come up with was the keyboard. If you brained someone with that, it could do some damage. At least enough to get around him and out the door. It would take a few seconds, but if she hit him hard enough, she might have enough time.
The computer behind her beeped. The download was complete. She met his eyes and knew he knew it too.
“I guess you got what you came for, huh? Your proof?”
“I don’t know yet. I haven’t had a chance to look through the files.”
“But you got it. That’s pretty good. Matteo wasn’t a slouch when it came to security. That’s why we recruited him for the project.”
“Why do you call him Matteo and everyone else called him Matt?”
Keep him talking. Just buy a little more time.
The question seemed to stump him, and he stopped moving forward while he answered. “I didn’t care for the guy. Trey liked him a lot, and Tessa messed around with him, but she messed around with everyone. He wasn’t our kind of people. After Trey hired him, he was always around, like Trey's freaking puppy or something. He was a necessary evil to me, not a friend. We needed his device as a delivery system. Trey saw the value in it. It didn’t mean much to me when he finally caught on to what we were doing and he had to die. He was way too moral to go along with our plan. You know he told Trey? Like he wouldn’t know about it. He wanted to have a meeting, pull all the units from the shelves. The kid signed his own death warrant if you ask me.”
“But you didn’t kill him?” she asked.
“Nope, the video’s legit. Tessa did it. I would’ve—hell, I wanted to—but with a few sweet words, Trey had Tessa all wound up and ready to do his bidding. He could’ve made her do anything. I still can’t believe she’s taking the fall for him. Bitches are stupid. He doesn’t even love her.”
He began to inch closer to her again and was getting close to striking distance. She knew the conversation was almost over when he reached into his pocket to pull out a wicked-looking knife.
“And that’s why I have to die too?” she asked. “Because bitches are stupid?”
“Pretty much, yeah. Plus, you think we’re rich now? Wait until we get this up and running,” he replied, looking at the knife and then back at her. “This is going to be messy, which is disappointing, but a gun would be too loud. You should’ve let it go, but bitches like you, man, you sure are stupid.”
And with that final barb, he lunged at her. Cameron had been waiting for that move, and in one motion she stood, grabbed the keyboard from the desk, and swung it at his head. She immediately realized her mistake as she felt her momentum jerk backward. It wasn’t a wireless keyboard; she was being pulled back by the cord. She did not anticipate that. She’d assumed that was too old-school for somebody like Matt.
The change in momentum was enough to make her lose her balance and send her careening backward, falling toward the desk. But it must have been enough of a change to throw off Brandon’s aim, because when she felt the knife enter her body, it was on her side. Probably not where he was aiming. She hit her head on the desk behind her, her feet flying up in the air as she fell, landing an awkward kick to Brandon’s knee. Then she crumpled to the ground.
Her head hurt as she tried to assess her situation from her position on the ground almost underneath the desk she’d been using. Brandon was on the ground a few feet away, holding his knee and rolling on the floor. The knife was on the rug next to her. He didn’t get enough leverage to lodge it into her during her acrobatic fall. As she reached down to the pain in her side, her hand came away wet. He still did some damage. She reached over and picked up the knife with her bloody hand, then pushed herself to her feet. She had trouble staying upright but did her best to veer around him as she headed for the door.
“You fucking bitch!” Brandon screamed from his place on the floor. He was shuffling around and trying to crawl after her. “Get back here.”
Yeah right, like I’m going back.
She kept hobbling forward, the door blurring in and out of focus. She must have messed up her head, or else the stab wound in her side was worse than she thought. Maybe she was losing too much blood. It didn’t matter either way. She was determined to get out of the apartment and get help before he could get it together and come for her again. She didn’t know if she had it in her to use the knife and stab another person, and she hoped she didn’t have to find out.
She made it to the hallway, leaning against it as she moved, smearing blood all over the white walls. What felt like a short distance to the front door on her entry now felt like miles, the pain scorching with each step. With each little shuffle, she got closer to the exit, and she could hear Brandon behind her, moving, cursing, trying to come after her.
She took a quick pause about halfway down to catch her breath and chanced a glance back. Stupid, you never look back, you just keep running. Rule number one in every horror movie she’d ever seen. But she saw Brandon on the floor, head poking through the doorway into the hall as he tried to crawl after her.
She turned and resumed her slow staggered pace to the front door. Finally, after what felt like hours, she made it. She was spent. She had used all her energy getting there. She pressed herself against the front door, hand on the handle, and when it opened, she fell through with it.
Bracing herself for the impact hitting the floor would cause, she was surprised when someone caught her. Looking up, she saw a familiar face.
“I….” She tried to talk, but her field of vision was getting narrower, and vertigo was starting to creep in. “I… I told you so.”
Then she promptly passed out.
Chapter Forty-two
Now it’s over
Cameron came to again in what she slowly realized was a hospital room. Sunlight was streaming through the window, so she felt sure she’d missed a lot of hours somewhere. She took stock of herself—all limbs accounted for and movable. Most of her pain was localized to her right side and her stomach, where she assumed she'd been stabbed. She also had the dull thudding of a slight headache
, probably from where she whacked her head on the table. She glanced to her right and saw Bill sitting in the chair beside her bed.
“Hey,” she croaked. Her voice was hoarse and her throat dry.
“Hey,” he said, scooting closer. “You’re awake.”
“Yep, and it appears I still have all my body parts, so that feels like a win.”
“You scared the shit out of us, Cameron. When I didn’t hear back from you after a few hours, I started calling and nothing. Eventually, I had Phil track down the detective from the NYPD that you worked with. We got his number, and he told us where you were.”
“Detective Justus? How did he know where I was?”
“You don’t remember? He was there last night. He found you. He arrested Brandon Reece after you took him down.”
Cameron stretched her memory, but she had no recollection of Will from last night. “I remember Brandon doing his villain monologue. I remember falling, but nothing after that.”
“It’s not surprising. You took quite a bump on the head and got a nasty concussion. But you’re going to be okay. The stab wound in your side was the main thing. You lost a lot of blood and had to have a transfusion. They stitched you up, and there was no major organ damage. You should be out of here in a day or two. I don’t think you’ll be ready to be alone for a while, so I’ll stay at your place until you recover fully.”
“You said I took Brandon down? How did that happen?”
Bill’s smile grew wider, and she could tell he was trying to hold in a laugh. “It was fantastic. Matt had security cameras. I’ve seen the footage.” His laugh grew full out at that.
“What? What’s so funny?”
Bill could barely get through the explanation, he was laughing so hard. “You did this acrobatic… thing. I don’t know, you… like….” And then he made some insane gesture, flinging his hands around. “No, seriously, you tried to hit him with a keyboard, but it was plugged into the desktop you were using. I guess you put a lot of leverage into it, because when the cable caught, you did this… this… well, you launched into the air and nailed him in the knee. On the way down is when you cracked your head on the desk.”