Family Can Be Murder

by Karen Singer

  “Philly, when was the last time you had a vacation?”

  “I don’t even remember man. Stay safe and watch your back Robbie.”

  “Will do.”

  Robbie hung up his phone and went back to watching the women shoot. Shirley was doing much better this time than she had a few days ago. He suspected it had something to do with the shooting last week where she really needed that gun. Jenni on the other hand, was simply afraid of the gun.

  --- §§§§§§§§§§ ---

  Pasha arrived late in the afternoon. He parked his car two blocks away and walked back to the same alleyway across the street. He waited. A few people went into the building, and those same people came out again. A little after four-thirty, the artist left the building. At five-o’clock, the architect went home, carrying the same round tubes with him. Pasha waited. He saw no movement from anyone else. At six-fifteen, he decided not to wait any longer, he ran across the street and entered the building, his hand already holding the gun in his pocket. He walked slowly and quietly up the stairs. At the top, he turned toward the Bosch Investigating office. The door was closed. He tried the handle but it was locked.

  Cursing, he ran back down the steps and hurried to his car. Once inside, he pulled out his phone. “They’re not there, Uncle,” he said as soon as Vahram answered.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I waited, but after everyone else left the building, I went upstairs to their office and checked. The door is locked. They’re not there.”

  “And you said she walked to work this morning?”

  “Yes, Uncle.”

  Vahram shook his head. “Then we’ll have to try again tomorrow. If she walked to work and they all went out together, then there’s a good chance that they dropped her off at home when they were done.”

  “I tried Uncle,” Pasha told him.

  “I know you did Pasha. You did exactly what I asked you to do.”

  “But I didn’t kill her yet.”

  “Not yet. Patience Pasha. Allah will grant us the opportunity when the time is right. You will simply have to try again tomorrow.”

  “Yes, Uncle. I will.” He thought of something. “Uncle.”

  “Yes?”

  “I think tomorrow I will wait for her further down the street. Perhaps I can find out where she lives that way, or I can at least get a better idea of which way she’s coming from when she leaves home.”

  Vahram smiled. “You always were the smart one Pasha.”

  --- §§§§§§§§§§ ---

  Sally heard the door opening.

  “Aunt Sally?”

  “I’m in the kitchen, Jenni,” she called back. She smiled as she saw her niece enter the kitchen. She glanced at the new bag she was carrying. “New purse?” she asked. “I’m surprised you bought that instead of some other things. You already had a purse.”

  “Yeah,” Jenni replied, throwing the new purse along with her old smaller purse on the table. She sat heavily in the chair.

  Sally saw the troubled look on Jenni’s face. “Jenni, what’s wrong?”

  “Wrong? I’m not sure anything is wrong. In fact, some things are better than ever. I had an incredible day. There’s just a few…uh…little things now.”

  “Like what?”

  “Um…” Jenni shook her head, then smiled at her aunt. “Guess what. Mr. B and Shirley hired me full time today. And when I got to work this morning, there as a new desk and chair already waiting for me.”

  “You weren’t working full time before?”

  “No. Mr. B just paid me according to whatever research I did for him. But now, I’ve got a weekly salary and everything. Except he already gave me a hundred dollars this morning that he’s going to deduct from my next paycheck.”

  Sally jumped up out of her seat and hugged her. “Jenni. That’s wonderful. Congratulations dear.”

  “Thanks, Aunt Sally,” Jenni replied.

  “So why the long face when you came in.”

  “Well, the job also kind of came with a condition I’m not so happy about.”

  “What?”

  “Something new that Mr. Bosch dreamed up while we were down in the keys.”

  “Jenni, what?”

  Jenni pulled her new larger purse over to her and opened it. She pulled out the new gun Mr. B had just bought her. She set it on the table in front of her.

  Sally stared at the gun. She was still staring at it as she slowly sank back into her seat.

  “According to Mr. B and Shirley, someone tried to kill them twice last week while we were away. And it was related to them trying to kill me on the island. So from now on, Mr. B wants everyone who works with him carrying a gun. And according to him, all the time.”

  Sally looked from the gun up into Jenni’s troubled eyes. “Jenni. After the way things were down there. Maybe…carrying that thing around with you for a while wouldn’t be a bad idea.”

  Chapter 18

  Pasha waited along the sidewalk, five blocks away. In the distance, he could just make out the block where Bosch Investigating had their office. He had seen the architect come into work. He had seen Bosch and his wife come into work. He hadn’t seen the artist yet. He looked both ways along the sidewalk, but he didn’t see the skinny woman he had seen the day before either. He hadn’t really looked that closely at her then, so he was hoping he would still be able to recognize her.

  Three blocks further away, he noticed a bus pulling up to the curb. He looked away, not paying it any more attention. He gazed back at the block where the office building was instead. Seeing nothing, he turned his head to look the other way again. The bus was just leaving. He was about to turn his head back again, when he caught sight of a woman among the few people now walking his way along the sidewalk. Was that her? Was that the Jennifer woman? He couldn’t be sure, especially not from this distance.

  He pulled his cellphone out of his pocket and pretended to hold a conversation, occasionally turning this way and that. Trying to make it seem like he wasn’t carefully watching everyone who walked by. In time, he saw her clearly. Skinny – yes! Nice face, but that was about it. Something about her just seemed…different. Wrong perhaps. He put it out of his head. He continued to watch her from behind. If there weren’t so many people walking that way just then, he would have killed her right away. Shot her in the back and then got out of there. But there were too many people around. He followed her and watched her go into the office building. It must have been her! So that was the Jennifer woman. Not much to look at. But there was one troubling thing he had just discovered about her. She didn’t live nearby at all. She took the bus to work.

  --- §§§§§§§§§§ ---

  “Agent Conifer?”

  Conifer looked up to see one of the FBI technicians standing in the door to his office. “Yes?”

  “We just found a possible match to some of the items that Proto Dynamic Industries said might have been on the hard drive they lost.”

  “Some of the items? Not one?” Conifer asked.

  “Three that we noticed. They’re all being auctioned separately out on the dark web.’”

  That wasn’t good. “Okay. Get me all the details you can. And I especially need you to try to track down who’s selling them.”

  “We’re already on it. We’re just now looking at the sample pieces from each of the projects. I’ll send you copies and let you know what our analysts think as soon as they get a chance to go through it all.”

  “Thanks,” Conifer replied, dismissing the technician. He sat staring at his empty office doorway. The theft had been about industrial espionage, just by someone who wanted to auction everything off to the highest bidder. As he already suspected, he was sure now that somebody knew in advance what Granger was selling so they would know what to steal, not to mention when to steal it. Had Granger himself told whoever had the hard drive now what was on it? With Granger dead, that possible lead was a total dead end.

  --- §§§§§§§§§§ ---

&
nbsp; Vahram entered his workshop and headed straight for the long wooden butcherblock counter that stretched along most of the back wall. It was his primary workbench. The place he spent most of his time. As a young man back in Iraq, his father had decided that he needed to be trained in computers and electronics. Vahram had spent four years in the United States back then, going to school. He couldn’t return to his homeland fast enough. For four long years he had learned, but he had learned even more that all the teachings of the elders had been right. America was a barbaric wasteland. Or it should be a wasteland. Drop a few hundred nuclear bombs across the entire country, and the entire world would soon find itself living in peace and harmony under Allah’s competent hand. His biggest dream in life was to help make that happen.

  His thoughts momentarily strayed back to that time when he was in school. Unbidden, the face of the woman he had loved swam before his eyes. Jamileh. She had been lovely. A proper Iraqi woman – despite her family sending her to this cursed country to learn. Women didn’t need to learn things like that. If she had stayed home where she belonged, she would never have been killed. Murdered during his third year in school. Killed, only because she was from Iraq. The police all said it was a mugging gone bad, but he knew better. His anger over it still filled his heart.

  But there were bigger issues with this cursed land than the murder of his beloved. Issues he had learned about time and time again back home, long before he had ever come here. And living here for those four long years had done nothing but let him see how true all his teachings had been. America needed to be demolished. Completely.

  He chased the unwanted thoughts from his head. His contacts in Miami had shipped him a laptop computer. Supposedly, the computer that had belonged to the Jennifer woman. It had arrived late yesterday afternoon. It was an older machine. He guessed at least six or seven years. Possibly more. Didn’t Americans get newer electronics all the time? What was wrong with her?

  Because of the age of the computer, he had no doubt that his password cracking program would have no problem with the machine. Last night, before he went to bed, he had set his program working on it. The program usually took a long time to run. The monitor screen now said it was done. The program made a listing of all the usernames and passwords for all of the user accounts on the machine. This time, there were only two. One for someone named Kyle, and the second one that was listed as JenniFinch. He wasn’t the least bit interested in the Kyle account, although he would look through it later. It was the JenniFinch account he used as he logged into the machine. As expected, his password cracking program had done a good job. He had no problem getting in at all.

  --- §§§§§§§§§§ ---

  Jenni spent almost an hour setting up her new laptop. Well, it wasn’t exactly hers since it was another company computer, but it was now hers to use. She didn’t remember Mr. B saying anything about not being able to use it for any personal things either. But she didn’t have much personal stuff she needed to do with it right now. Hopefully, soon though. As soon as she got her next paycheck in fact. If there was enough left over after that initial hundred dollars she had gotten.

  Once she was ready, she got up from her new desk and went into Robbie Bosch’s office. “I’ve got the computer ready now,” she told him. “What did you want me to work on?”

  Robbie nodded, then stood up. “Let’s all talk about this together,” he said as he headed out of his office. Jenni took a seat at her new desk while Robbie stood just outside of his office. Just him standing there like that was enough to grab not only Jenni’s attention, but Shirley’s too.

  “Right now,” Robbie said, “we’ve got a divorce case, and this morning I accepted a possible stalker case for us to work on. As much as things have been going crazy here lately, we’ve still got to pay the bills. Like it or not, we need these cases, and every case we can get that’s just like them. The problem is that someone tried twice now to kill Shirley and me, and they also tried twice to kill you Jenni down in the keys. That’s a little hard for me to overlook, no matter how you slice it.

  “Unfortunately, I haven’t got a clue where to start looking for whoever seems bound and determined to kill us. I don’t think the police or the FBI have a clue either. So here’s what I want to do. I’m going to work the divorce and the stalker cases myself, and I want you two to figure out some way we can find whoever’s after us. Find me something. Anything. No matter how silly or tenuous you may think it may be. Right now, we’ve got nothing…except we know that someone wants us dead. All of us!”

  Jenni immediately felt scared again. “If the police and the FBI don’t know where to look, how can we?”

  “I don’t have a clue Jenni. Put your head together with Shirley’s and come up with something. I won’t lie to you. I’m scared, for not only myself, but for you and Shirley too. In fact, I’m even more concerned about both of you. So go crazy with your ideas. You never know when something might pop out that can help us.”

  “What do we know so far?” Shirley asked. “Facts and…whatever you and the police suspect?”

  “Good question,” Robbie replied as he took a seat on top of Jenni’s desk. “Let’s see if we can take this from the start and put it all together. Can one of you list everything somewhere for us?”

  “I’ve got it,” Jenni offered as she turned toward her new computer.

  “First off,” Robbie said, “We know they were ripping off houses. Stealing mostly electronics and jewelry. Things that they could probably sell pretty easily.”

  “Maybe they needed money?” Jenni suggested. “If they stole the hard drive Granger had, it was probably to sell whatever was on it.”

  “Good Jenni,” Robbie replied. “Maybe the electronics and stuff was their way of making money before, and then this opportunity came along for them to make a whole lot more, all at once.”

  “Pawn shops?” Shirley suggested.

  “To look for what? The only stolen stuff we know for sure that they took was all in that garage. There’s so much of that stuff that gets ripped off every day and then sold later that it would be impossible to know if it was them or not.”

  “Okay, so what’s next?” Shirley asked.

  “Jenni hopped on the back of their truck and found that storage garage.”

  “No!” Jenni interrupted. “They broke into Frederick Granger’s house and stole his things, along with that hard drive. No! Wait! Before that…um…Granger had to decide he was going to steal whatever was on that hard drive, and he put it on that drive. Then Todd Granger and his friends broke into his house and stole everything. I don’t know if Todd knew his uncle’s alarm code before his uncle had taken the drive home or not.”

  “It probably doesn’t matter,” Robbie told her. “Go on. What was next?”

  “Um…then I hitched a ride on their truck and almost killed myself in the process.”

  “Damn right,” Robbie muttered as he shook his head. “You sent me the pictures and videos, and I bypassed Granger and sent them straight to my old partner, Detective Phillips, before I notified Granger.”

  “And you tried to keep me away from here for a long time,” Jenni added.

  “It’s probably a good thing I did. They arrested Todd Granger pretty quick, but Todd wouldn’t give up the names of whoever he was working with. His uncle, believe it or not, bailed him out of jail a few days later.”

  “Why would his uncle do that, after Todd broke in and stole everything?”

  “Who knows? But my guess is that it had something to do with that hard drive. I’d bet Granger was desperate enough to get it back that he arranged Todd’s bail just to find out. Once he had that drive with all the information on it out of the company, he could have easily copied it off, returned the hard drive back to the company, and nobody would have been the wiser. Todd and his buddies just happened to come along at the wrong time and ripped it off, which put Granger in a really bad position.”

  “So how did Todd know when his uncle brought th
e hard drive home from work?”

  “That, Jenni, is a great question.”

  “So what happened next?”

  “You decided to try becoming a beach bunny for a while.”

  “A…” Jenni laughed.

  “Did you ever spend any time on the beach?” Shirley asked.

  “Ask me latter,” Jenni replied. “When we’re alone.”

  Robbie rolled his eyes. “Okay,” he said, trying to get everyone back on track. “The next thing I knew, Shirley and I were looking down the gun barrels of Todd Granger’s two friends while they tried to question us as to how we knew about the storage garage and the missing hard drive.”

  “That wasn’t fun!” Shirley added.

  “No,” Robbie agreed. “That was bad. Very, very bad! If Philly hadn’t come along just then and shot one of them, we both would have been dead.”

  “Was my grandfather’s murder before or after that?” Jenni asked.

  “Before, but I can’t see any reason why that would have any bearing at all on the rest of what’s been happening.”

  “I’ll put it on the list too,” Jenni replied. “Just in case.”

  Robbie nodded. “That’s fine. Then the next thing I knew…”

  “Did you say once that the police were never able to identify the one that Detective Phillips shot?” Shirley asked.

  “Yes, that’s right. They weren’t able to find him in any system anywhere.”

  “That’s not hard to believe,” Jenni replied.

  “No. As much computer information as we’ve got in this country now on just about everyone, there’s still a lot of people who aren’t in the system. When they’re not there, more often than not, the cases wind up in the dead-end files.”

  “Do you think this could wind up that way?” Jenni asked.

  “I hope not Jenni. I really hope not. Because if it does, I’m afraid we’ll be looking over our shoulders forever.”