Runaway Fate: Moonstone Cove Book One

by Hunter, Elizabeth

  “Yeah. Uh, we got notifications pushed through depending on our role. The study participants got their visualization prompts and reminders to log. Grad students just got reminders, messages from the professors, stuff like that.”

  “Who designed it?” Baxter asked. “Was it Alice?”

  Kaylee nodded. “Professor Kraft and Greg. And Greg was the admin on the system.”

  Katherine didn’t want to alarm Kaylee, but she didn’t want to ignore possible danger either. “It’s possible that something they put on the app—maybe unintentionally—has triggered these episodes.”

  Kaylee laughed a little. “I mean… that seems a little far-fetched. It’s just an app. And it’s not even a fancy one. It’s kind of clunky, to be honest, but it gets the job done.”

  “Just…” She clasped her hands in front of her. “For me. Please. The study is off, so please just delete it. To be safe.”

  Kaylee frowned. “The study is off?”

  Baxter nodded. “I can’t tell you details, but please delete the app.”

  “Okay.” Kaylee shrugged. “I mean, it’s not like it’ll delete any important data so—”

  “Wait.” Katherine had a realization. “Yes, you will.”

  “Will what?”

  “Delete important data. We need to look at it before you delete it.”

  Baxter frowned. “Darling—”

  “There could be information on it.” She looked at Kaylee. “Have you cleared your notifications lately?”

  “I don’t think so. I usually get them and I just open my phone and they go away.”

  “The roof happened Thursday and today is Saturday.” Katherine frowned. “Really? It’s only been two days?”

  “Katherine, focus.”

  “Right. Unless you’ve cleared your notifications, we should be able to see them, which would show us if anything was sent to you before you went onto the rooftop. I also want to check it for spyware and make sure there’s nothing on there that could be monitoring you. It’s possible that someone has gained access to your phone via the app.”

  Kaylee’s eyes widened. “Okay, I promise I’ll keep my phone off until I finish here. And then—”

  “Meet me at the North Beach Coffee Company as soon as you’re done here. What time?”

  She shrugged. “Maybe around three? I’ll text you when—”

  “No,” Baxter said. “Don’t text. Don’t turn on your phone at all until Katherine can look at it. Don’t turn it on, and don’t tell Greg or Professor Kraft what we talked about here.”

  “Tell them I needed to talk to you about something at the Fred lab,” Katherine said. “They know they can’t butt into that.”

  Kaylee nodded. “Okay. I’ll try to get away by three.”

  “Just be careful,” Katherine said. “Don’t do anything suspicious. I’ll wait for you there.”

  * * *

  It was nearly four by the time Kaylee arrived at the North Beach Coffee Company, and Katherine and Toni were on their second coffee. The fog had rolled in early, so the beach was nearly deserted except for a clutch of surfers bobbing off the point.

  “Hey.” Kaylee sat at the table in the corner that looked over the ocean. “You’re Katherine’s friend! I can’t remember your name though.” She held her hand out to Toni. “I’m Kaylee.”

  “No worries. I’m Toni.” Toni took her hand and held it slightly longer than she normally would. “You’re worried about something. Don’t be. Katherine’s the smartest person I know.”

  Kaylee’s eyes were round. “Do I look worried?”

  Katherine jumped in. “Toni usually has a really good sense about people. How did the rest of the day with Greg and Professor Kraft go?”

  “Greg was, like, super curious what we were talking about. He kept trying to bring it up. Professor Kraft was curious too, but you know her. She’s strictly business all the time.”

  “Do you have your phone?”

  “I do.” She reached in her back and grabbed a phone in an aquamarine case. “I haven’t turned it on, not even when Professor Kraft and Greg got theirs out. It was kind of weird.”

  “How so?”

  “So we finish and we’re packing up, and they both get their phones out to, like, check their messages and stuff. I didn’t, and Professor Kraft noticed. She told me, ‘Kaylee, you can check your phone now.’ But I didn’t. I told her I was almost out of battery and needed to charge it.”

  “Good thinking.”

  “Greg noticed too. He looked… weird.” She took a deep breath. “Katherine, if I think about who could have manipulated things in the study—”

  “You think Greg has something to do with it,” Toni said. “And you’re afraid of him.”

  Kaylee blushed a little. “I mean, I wouldn’t say I’m afraid.”

  “He intimidates you, and you don’t know why.” Toni thought. “He pushes your buttons. Makes you react to stuff you normally wouldn’t.”

  “Yes.” Kaylee was clearly annoyed. “Every stinking time I’m with that guy, I find myself doubting myself. Like… questioning my methods, second-guessing the answer to something. It’s so annoying! I’m not like that with anyone else. But there’s just something about that guy that always gets to me.”

  “Interesting.” Toni narrowed her eyes. “Has he always been that way?”

  “I only started working with him on this study with Professor Shaver, but I know he’s kind of a loner. No one likes working with him.”

  “Except Alice Kraft,” Katherine added. “Greg mentioned that she’s been working with him on his thesis project as well. Did she pick him to administer the app?”

  “Yes. I just thought it made sense because, according to Greg, they were already working on something together.” Kaylee rolled her eyes. “All the guys in the program were like… jealous or something. I don’t know.”

  “Why?”

  Kaylee looked to the side. “Well, it’s Professor Kraft. They get like that.”

  “Why?” Katherine thought about the willowy redheaded professor who was often mistaken for a student. Alice Kraft generally wore casual clothing, jeans or leggings, T-shirts, and a jacket as a nod to professionalism. Katherine had admired her jackets more than once.

  “All the guys talk about how hot she is.”

  “Really?” Katherine turned to Toni. “There was a website for a while that rated professors by their looks. I think those who were deemed the most attractive were given a chili pepper as a rating. Because chilies are hot.”

  “Yeah, I got that.” Toni rolled her eyes. “I’m so sorry I didn’t listen to my mom and go to college. Imagine all the really deep, important stuff I missed.”

  Kaylee said, “They don’t rate them with chili peppers anymore but… I mean, they still rate their hotness.”

  “Of course they do.”

  Katherine held out her hand. “Let me see your phone.” She brought out her laptop and opened it. “I’m going to clone it so I can see the data completely.”

  “What?” Kaylee nearly squealed.

  She held up a hand. “Purely to get the information we’re looking for and to make sure you’re not carrying any spyware. I’ll grab the data from the reporting app; then you can watch me delete everything else, okay?”

  “Okay, I guess.”

  Toni took a drink of her coffee. “Do you think Greg and this professor had something going on?”

  Kaylee cocked her head. “I mean… I try to stay away from gossip because so much of it is stupid and—at least in my department—totally about creating drama. I don’t have time for that. But yeah, there were rumors about Greg and Professor Kraft.”

  “What kind of rumors?”

  “Just that he kind of pursued her. And they kind of have a thing. But nobody says anything because it’s not like what happened with Professor Boehner or anything.”

  Toni looked at Katherine. “What happened with Professor Boehner? Other than having a really shitty name.”

&nb
sp; “A name he totally deserves,” Kaylee said. “So gross.”

  Katherine said, “Albert Boehner was fired last year for trading sexual favors for grades with undergraduates. It had been going on for years and people mostly looked the other way.”

  “Gross.” Toni turned to Kaylee. “But Professor Kraft and Greg, no one saw it the same way?”

  “I mean, he was pretty clearly going after her. And you could tell he was proud of himself.”

  “Still highly inappropriate,” Katherine said. “She will be fired if she is or was having an affair with a student, but… I don’t think the affair is her biggest problem.” She turned her computer screen toward Kaylee. “You received two notifications from the app on Thursday, one fifteen minutes before you walked on that roof, and one ten minutes later. Do you remember them?”

  “No.” Her eyes were the size of saucers. “I don’t remember anything about that at all.”

  Chapter 26

  “Have you been able to determine what the notifications led to?” Anita Mehdi was on the speakerphone in Katherine and Baxter’s dining room.

  Katherine had been granted permission by Kaylee to fill Anita Mehdi in on her experience with the app since her phone was the only proof they had that someone was using the reporting app to manipulate students.

  “No. I am not an app designer, but the size of the app was way too big for what it was supposed to do, even if Kaylee got a version intended for grad students. Plus there were data mining programs integrated into it.”

  “So the app was spying on the students and gathering data it shouldn’t?”

  “Yes. But whatever message or task it directed Kaylee toward on Thursday, I can’t tell you.” Katherine rubbed her temple. “I clicked on the notifications again, but they just led to the app’s home screen.”

  “So someone is covering their tracks,” Baxter said. “Trying to hide what they did to Kaylee.”

  “What kind of data was it gathering? Like… social security numbers?”

  Baxter continued. “Nothing that simple. It gathered all sorts of things about students. Locations of where they were, their internet search history, their personal financial information, all of it.”

  “Well, where did it go? I haven’t seen any data like that.”

  “I imagine it went to a different server than the one dealing with the biofeedback study.”

  This was all getting to be so sordid. Students committing violent acts, an app that looked like it was solely created to spy on users, an affair between a professor and a student.

  “Everyone who has the app needs to delete it,” Katherine said. “But that would also destroy evidence, so I don’t know what to do.”

  “They’re probably already deleting it. I spoke to Alice about it this morning.”

  Katherine covered her face and tried not to scream. Baxter put a hand on her shoulder and said, “I’m afraid that wasn’t a good idea, Anita. See, Alice Kraft is the one who designed the app. Which means she may be the one gathering data on the students, which is in violation of the IRB guidelines, which means that she has a vested interest in making sure any evidence of that disappears.”

  “What?” Anita sighed. “Well, I just don’t know what to do at this point. Nothing seems right.”

  “No.” Katherine opened her eyes. “No. You did the right thing. The safety of the students is the most important thing. We have to make sure none of them can be influenced in this way again.”

  “What should we do now?”

  Baxter said, “Why don’t we meet at school? I’ll help you put together a report for the IRB to submit Monday.”

  Katherine rose. “While you do that, I’m going to contact Justin and Abby’s families and see if they still have their phones. And I’ll try to contact Detective Bisset and tell him what we know so far about the app and the study.”

  Baxter said, “Tell him we can email him a copy of the report tomorrow. The university will have to work with the police on this. I don’t know what crimes have been committed, but I imagine there is more than one. Plus they may have a forensic computing team that can take a look at the program that was on Kaylee’s phone. They might have run into something like this before.”

  * * *

  “Thank you for driving.” Katherine glanced at Megan from the corner of her eye.

  “No problem. I don’t think Justin’s parents or lawyer would talk to you without me anyway.”

  It was Sunday morning, and Megan’s face was pale. The armor of makeup and accessories she normally donned was absent, and she was wearing a tracksuit. It was color-coordinated with her shoes and nail polish though, so Katherine had no doubt her vibrant friend was still there.

  “How are you doing?”

  “Well,” she began, “neither me nor any of my three children have heard from the cheating bastard in three days. I have transferred fifty percent of all our accounts into a separate one in my name only, so that’s taken care of for a little while.”

  “Do you have savings?”

  “I have all my business accounts that were always my own, which he hated, but I am so grateful to have that now.”

  “Good.” Katherine’s heart ached more than a little.

  They were driving down to Santa Maria because that’s where the McCabe family made their home. Megan had offered to drive when Katherine told her she wanted to look at Justin McCabe’s phone if it was available. Megan called the lawyer and arranged a meeting with Justin’s parents, who would hand over his phone.

  “So you don’t think your marriage with Rodney is salvable?”

  Megan took a deep breath before she spoke again. “This isn’t the first time, Katherine. When the kids were little, Rodney had an affair. I found out, kicked him out, he groveled, we did counseling and managed to put things back together. I thought it was a one-off. He claimed it was. Now I’m wondering just how much a fool I was.”

  “You’re not a fool. Don’t say that.”

  “Doesn’t matter either way. I told him years ago if he ever did that to me and the kids again, he was gone. So I’m done. I uprooted my entire life to support him and he does this to me? That’s not a slipup. We started living completely separate lives once we moved out here, and I’m starting to think that was his intention.”

  “How are the kids?”

  “Upset, Adam and Cami especially. Trina remembers the first time, so she gets it. I don’t even think she’s that surprised.”

  “And how are you?”

  “Hell, Katherine, I don’t know. My mama flew in yesterday, which is good and bad. My kids are glommed onto her and she’s cooking up a storm, which is how all good Southern women deal with family upheaval. British people have tea; we have my mother’s chicken pot pie.”

  “That sounds delicious.”

  “It is. And the house smells amazing all the time. Of course, my mother immediately started criticizing my lack of seasonal decorating, which is just… so on brand.”

  “Seasonal decorating?”

  “Seasonal. Decorating.” Megan’s eyes turned steely as she watched the road. “Let’s begin in January, keeping in mind there’s probably gonna be some holdover from Christmas still hanging around. Nothing too churchy, but anything generally wintery—snowflakes, snowmen, stuff like that—you’re still good.”

  “Okay…” Why did Katherine feel like a storm was approaching?

  “For February, you’re gonna want to liven that up with some hearts and flowers. Maybe a red wreath of some kind for Valentine’s Day of course. It’s not a church holiday, but everyone likes red hearts, and how else you gonna remind your man that he’s gotta get those flowers ordered? March is Saint Patrick’s Day, but depending on timing, you might just be skipping ahead to Easter. Now, you can’t skimp on Easter.”

  Katherine’s head was already spinning, and they weren’t even halfway through the year. “What if you don’t celebrate Easter?”

  “Secular holiday now, Katherine, you’re out of luck. That’s
right, lots of church stuff for the Baptists. Crosses and angels and whatnot, but don’t forget the eggs and bunnies too. You will be expected to host a combination brunch and egg hunt, and you will be judged on how well your children have kept those Easter whites clean.”

  “Oh my God.”

  As she spoke, Megan’s voice became ever so slightly more manic. “We’re not even halfway there, but take a breath. Put your feet up for a hot minute because you have a brief respite in May before you go all out for Independence Day. Now, if you do a good enough job integrating your Fourth of July stuff into general summer seasonality, that should last you until the end of August. But once September hits, you’re looking at harvest festival madness, my friend.”

  “I am so afraid of where this is going.”

  “We’re talking decorative corn and enough pumpkins to sink a battleship, Professor Bassi. And pumpkin-spice candles through your entire damn house—don’t argue, it’s the law.”

  “Should I mention that it’s seventy degrees here on the coast? And sunny?”

  “Doesn’t matter because this is Seasonal… Decorating.” She emphasized each word like a single sentence. “You’re gonna throw a few cutesy bats and ghosts over that harvest glory to get ready for Halloween, but as soon as that ship leaves the harbor, the real marathon begins. You’re gonna have to transition the harvest glory into a suitable bridge through Thanksgiving—go ahead and add some turkeys to all those pumpkins—but get ready because as soon as bowl-game kickoffs happens, it’s the Super Bowl of seasonal decorating. The Olympics and the World Cup all rolled into one.”

  “Christmas?”

  “Bet your booty, Bassi. We’re talking yard displays, house displays, roof displays, lights, trees, poinsettias, and enough gold-painted crap to make it look like Midas went on a bender in your living room.”

  Katherine was speechless. Slightly horrified. But mostly speechless.

  “Now, I haven’t done any of that nonsense since we moved out here because my kids are teenagers and they don’t really care. Plus all the friends I would decorate with—the only part that made it a little bit fun—are back in Atlanta. But if my mother is staying through Easter like she’s threatening—”