by J. A. Jance
Roger recognized the words—Eloise McGeary’s words. Months earlier, during a course of psychiatric treatment, he had recalled them all and written them down verbatim in a document for his therapist, Dr. Amelia Cannon. She had assured him that writing out exactly what his mother had said would be a healing exercise—a way of recognizing his mother’s meanness and spite for what it was as well as a way of negating Eloise’s powerful hold over him.
At the beginning of Roger’s senior year in high school, Eloise had uprooted her son and moved to L.A. Lost in an unfamiliar situation—overwhelmed and unable to cope—he’d barely managed to graduate. A little over a week after commencement, Roger McGeary had attempted suicide. Deeming him a danger to himself and others, Eloise had made it her business to have her son locked away in a mental institution where he had remained for the next ten years of his life. It was only in the past few years, at Aunt Julia’s urging, that he’d finally gone for counseling. It had been in the course of his supposedly confidential sessions with Dr. Cannon that Roger had written down these very words—ones that now seemed to have developed a life of their own on the screen of his cell phone.
Roger’s hands trembled. If the words he had written for Dr. Cannon could surface here, that meant they could surface in other places as well. They were out in the world somewhere, most likely all over the Internet, where eventually they were bound to be used against him. Somewhere down the line, some boss—a guy somewhere far up the chain of command—would bring those words to bear and use them to imply that Roger was mentally unstable; that, if he was undergoing therapy, he most likely couldn’t be trusted with the kinds of security clearances necessary to perform his duties. He’d be done for—out of a job, unemployed and unemployable.
And in that moment, on a night that should have counted as a social triumph, Roger found himself sliding back into the same kind of blinding despair that had kept him in a state of mental paralysis for the better part of ten years. He wouldn’t go there. He would not. He couldn’t. He had fought so hard to climb out of that snake pit of unending darkness that he couldn’t stand the idea of falling back into it again. Could. Not. Stand. It.
The words had stopped scrolling, and suddenly the screen went blank. He punched the power button and the phone came to life, starting over from scratch—as if it had been completely powered off. When the start-up sequence finished, Roger went straight to the texting app, looking for the message he’d just seen, but it wasn’t there. There was no sign of it at all.
So where had the words come from, then? If he hadn’t seen them—if he’d just imagined them—maybe he really had gone nuts. Again. And that was something else he could not and would not endure.
By then he was soaked to the skin, but that didn’t matter. Making up his mind, he put the phone down on the lanai’s patio table and then pulled one of the deck chairs over to the railing. He clambered up onto the chair and then stood for a moment—hearing the words again—not as they had appeared on the screen but as he had heard them more than two decades ago, in his mother’s shrill voice. He was still hearing them as he plunged over the side of the ship and into the black water far below, with no one on board the ship any the wiser. And it was only then, as the icy sea closed over him, that Roger McGeary finally moved beyond the reach of his mother’s earthly torment.
Abandoned on the lanai’s small patio table, the phone remained there for some time, glowing silently in the dark, before finally shutting down for good.
It was Reynaldo, coming the next morning to deliver Roger’s breakfast, who found the sliding door open and the carpeting inside the stateroom soaked by lashing rain. Out on the lanai, a spray-soaked cell phone lay face up on the table. The butler immediately tossed a life vest over the rail before calling in to sound the alarm: man overboard.
By then, of course, it was far too late.
• • •
Half a world away, in a basement lined with electronics racks filled with hundreds of computer blades, a man sat hunched over a single screen. Alive with anticipation, he watched the action and listened to the dialogue. This was his show, after all. He was the director, producer, sound engineer, and cameraman, if not the star. He didn’t consider himself a cyber bully. He was more a cyber god. He liked to think of himself as Odin, and Frigg was his all-knowing artificial intelligence sidekick and companion.
He was jacked up on coffee and speed. That was what it took to stay awake and alert when you were tuned in to a life that was spinning toward the drainpipe eight or nine time zones ahead of you. Odin had chosen to let the game play out tonight—on the night of the cruise ship’s formal dinner. For a time, listening in through the remote access malware he’d inserted into Roger’s phone, Odin had worried that one of the women might opt to go back to Roger’s room with him or, worse, that he’d go to hers. Luckily that hadn’t happened. Odin was aware that if things didn’t come to a head tonight, the ship’s data-throttling capability might come into play and make him have to give up on the project altogether for the time being. It was also possible that if Roger noticed the unexpected power drain on his phone, he might suspect there was a problem.
Odin remembered being told once that it was always the shoemaker’s kids and the blacksmith’s horse who had to make do without new shoes. With Roger McGeary, a rock star in terms of corporate cyber security, his phone should have been completely impenetrable. Odin had had zero luck in accessing his work accounts, but an overlooked security issue on Roger’s personal cell phone had left the device vulnerable to attack.
Odin had paid a small fortune to procure powerful new malware that had been developed in Israel. Once installed on a smart device of any kind, it allowed full access to everything on it—keystrokes, e-mails, texts, cameras, and GPS locations, as well as recording devices. Customers paid a hefty six-figure installation fee for the software and then continuing fees based on the number of people being monitored by the program.
Theoretically the system was only sold to properly vetted entities—usually government agencies of some kind. Searching the dark Web, Odin had found a disenchanted software engineer, one the software developers who had been fired for cause, had been more than willing to sell him a black market copy. Since Frigg was available and fully capable of handling all necessary monitoring requirements, Odin was able to keep the whole operation in-house without incurring any ongoing fees.
Tuning back into the distant conversation—the laughter and the clinking of glasses—Odin heard Roger excuse himself to go to the restroom, except he didn’t. The next sounds he heard had nothing to do with someone taking a piss or washing his hands. There was the distinctive ding of an arriving elevator followed by a recorded voice saying, “You are on deck seven.” After that, Odin heard a strange series of thumps followed eventually by the slamming of a door. Moments after that, there were hurried footsteps pounding on a metal surface. The footsteps ended with the noise of someone heaving his guts out.
The noises made sense then. Roger, probably drunker than he had ever been in his life, had rushed headlong into his cabin, unlatched the lock on the slider, and then made for the rail before being sick. All of which meant that Roger McGeary was exactly where Odin had wanted and needed him to be for this final chapter—outside and alone on the cabin’s balcony.
Odin gave Roger some time to recover his wits before launching the attack. While the texted words scrolled silently across the screen, Odin watched the pallid face, captured by the cell phone’s camera, as it registered first astonishment followed by hopelessness and finally utter despair.
Odin couldn’t help smiling at that. It was exactly what happened to weak people when their darkest secrets were exposed to the light of day . . . or, as in this case, the light of night.
Odin felt his own heartbeat quicken. He may have been the one holding the gun, but the final decision was really up to Roger. Would he pull the trigger or not? Waiting for the man to choose
seemed to take forever. Later, reviewing the video, Odin would measure the elapsed time with his stopwatch. All told it was little more than a minute from beginning to end, although it seemed much longer. At one minute twenty-seconds, Roger set the phone down on something. He did so carefully and with drunken deliberation. Odin couldn’t see exactly where the phone had been placed, but fortunately it was still face up—on a patio table, maybe? From Odin’s vantage point, all he could see was a light-colored overhead surface of some kind—probably the ceiling area of Roger’s balcony, formed by the floor of the one above his.
Odin leaned closer to his computer and upped the volume. There was a lot of noise in the background with raindrops showing on the face of the phone, so he suspected it was stormy with plenty of wind and rain. After a few moments, Odin heard some kind of grating sound—wood on metal, maybe?—followed by a grunt of exertion followed by nothing—nothing at all.
Odin felt vaguely disappointed. He had wanted to witness firsthand Roger’s despairing headlong plunge into the sea, but the unfortunate camera angle on the cell phone robbed him of that. Oh well.
Just to be on the safe side, Odin gave it five minutes—five long minutes of wind and rain and nothing else. There was no way to know for sure if it had worked. Either Roger McGeary had thrown himself off the ship or he had not, and that meant it was far too soon for Odin to gloat over a job well done. Hours from now someone would notice if Roger McGeary was really missing. In the meantime, Odin saved the video file for his private collection and then waited for as long as it took for his remotely installed malware to perform its self-deleting exit program.
Once the purge was complete, Odin finally gave himself permission to stand up, stretch, and look around. By then it was coming up on five o’clock in the afternoon. He’d been up and at the computer for close to twenty-four hours. Even so, he needed to shower and dress for dinner. His mother was fine with him spending his days and nights behind the locked doors of the computer lab inside his spacious basement apartment. Irene didn’t seem to mind what her son did during the day as long as he showed up promptly each evening just as dinner was being served.
As far as Odin was concerned, spending an hour and a half each day with his annoying mother was a small price to pay for having virtually unlimited funds as well as unlimited freedom. Besides, he didn’t need to be there in the lab personally keeping watch. He’d done his part. The rest was up to Frigg. If and when the man-overboard alarm went out on board the Whispering Star, either now or hours from now, Frigg would be among the first to know, and once Frigg knew, so would Odin.
In the months leading up to this night, Odin, with Frigg’s very capable help, had learned everything there was to know about Roger McGeary, including all the telling details necessary to pull the underpinnings out from under him. Odin would wait until tomorrow. Once Roger’s death was confirmed, it would be time for Odin and Frigg to go hunting again.
Odin had every confidence another victim was out there just waiting to be found—someone who, with the benefit of enough information and a little encouragement on his part, would be more than willing to end it all, with Odin on hand to watch the performance to the bitter end. If that wasn’t the perfect way to commit murder, Owen Hansen didn’t know what was.
1
On the Tuesday morning after Labor Day, Ali Reynolds pulled into her reserved parking spot outside High Noon Enterprises in Cottonwood, Arizona, just as a dust-covered aging Dodge Ram pickup came to a stop in one of the two designated visitor slots. Since High Noon specialized in cyber security—specifically international cyber security—visitor spaces at the company’s headquarters often remained empty. Occasionally a salesman dropped by, and sometimes Ali’s retired parents showed up unannounced for a visit, but that was pretty much it.
The woman who exited the truck was tall and spare, six feet tall at least. She was dressed in worn jeans, dusty, down-at-the-heels cowboy boots, and a sweat-stained Stetson. She went around to the back of the truck, opened the cargo door, and pulled out a banker’s box. It was cumbersome enough that she had to set the box down on the ground before reaching up to close the tailgate.
Exiting her Cayenne, Ali approached the visitor. The sun-bronzed face beneath the Stetson’s wide brim resembled tanned leather. The road map of wrinkles around her mouth and cheeks hinted that she was probably a lifelong smoker. Her most striking feature, however, was a penetrating pair of bright blue eyes.
“The box looks heavy,” Ali observed. “Can I help you with that?”
“This High Noon Enterprises?” the newcomer asked, hefting the box onto her shoulder with the ease of someone who most likely carried bales of hay in the same fashion.
“Yes,” Ali answered. “That’s us.”
“This is the right place, then,” the woman said. “I’m here to see a fellow by the name of Stuart Ramey. And I can carry the box by myself, thank you very much.”
As they started toward the entrance, Ali hurried ahead. Opening the door with her key card, she allowed the visitor to enter. High Noon’s newly hired receptionist secretary, Shirley Malone, looked up with a smile. “Good morning,” she said to the guest while nodding in Ali’s direction. “May I help you?” she asked.
“I’m here to see Stuart Ramey,” the woman repeated, unceremoniously plopping the box down on the countertop. “Is he in?”
Shirley’s blink of surprise mirrored Ali’s. In her experience no one had ever shown up on the doorstep specifically asking to see Stuart Ramey.
High Noon Enterprises was the brainchild of Ali’s husband, B. Simpson. Stu, B.’s second-in-command, was a brilliant software guy with the social skills of an onion. Camille Lee, a recent college graduate and someone ostensibly hired to be Stuart’s assistant, was a capable computer geek in her own right, but her primary duty—one at which she had proved to be uncommonly adept—was keeping the less than personable and somewhat skittish Stuart from veering off into the weeds.
For a long time the reception area at High Noon had been left unattended. On those rare occasions when visitors did arrive, security cameras had allowed Stu Ramey and Cami to see who was at the door and let them into the building, with Cami usually designated to handle whatever needed handling. Lately, though, with Cami’s technical skills focused on more complex tasks, B. and Ali had opted to hire Shirley, an action they had taken over Stu’s strenuous objections.
He had only just barely adjusted to having Cami’s presence added to the mix. Having Ali and B. add in a fifty-something woman with a loud brassy laugh and a bawdy sense of humor was completely outside his comfort zone. The way things were now, Stu stayed in the back while Shirley stayed out front, with Cami shuttling back and forth between the two as needed.
Before Shirley could respond, Ali hijacked the conversation. “My name is Ali Reynolds,” she said to the visitor. “My husband, B. Simpson, and I own High Noon. Mr. Ramey is one of our employees. And you are?”
“Name’s Julia,” the woman said gruffly, holding out a work-callused hand. “Julia Miller.”
“I’m quite sure Stuart is in,” Ali said. “May I tell him what this is about?”
Since Stu lived in a studio apartment addition that had been built onto the far side of the computer lab, there wasn’t much chance that he wouldn’t be there.
“It’s about my nephew, Roger McGeary,” Julia said. “He and Stuart were friends a long time ago, back in junior high and high school.”
“And . . . ?” Ali prompted.
“Roger’s dead,” Julia said abruptly. Clearly she wasn’t someone accustomed to mincing words. “I want to hire High Noon to find out what happened to him.”
“I’m so sorry for your loss, Mrs. Miller,” Ali began.
“Ms., if you please,” Julia corrected. “Never married and never intend to be married, either.”
“Of course,” Ali said with a nod. “Ms. Miller, then. But High Noon is
a cyber security company rather than a private investigation firm. I’m sure Stuart will be sorry to hear about his friend, but—”
“Roger was in the same business as you folks are,” Julia interrupted. “Cyber Resources Unlimited of San Jose, California. That’s the name of the outfit he worked for. I think someone there may be behind what happened. I think he did something or found out something that offended someone else, and they decided to get rid of him.”
“Why?” Ali asked. “What did happen to him?”
“He supposedly committed suicide on a cruise ship three months ago, but I’m not buying that BS, not for a minute. The investigator just now closed the case and sent me Rog’s personal effects. Since no suicide note was found, the final determination appears to be ‘death by misadventure,’ whatever that’s supposed to mean.”
“When did he die?” Ali asked.
“Back in June. The early hours of June third to be exact, in the English Channel somewhere between Southampton and Bruges.”
Ali turned to Shirley. “Would you tell Stuart there’s a Julia Miller here to see him? Ask him to meet us in the conference room. This way,” she said to the visitor.
Nodding, Julia picked up the box and brought it along.
Ali led the way past B.’s office and her own as well and into the so-called conference room, which doubled as a break room. Julia set the box down on one of the two tables with a resounding thump.
“And those are?” Ali asked.
“Roger’s personal effects, except for his clothing,” Julia replied. “From both his office and the cruise ship. Of course, I wasn’t allowed anywhere near his office. Someone packed up his cubicle and sent me whatever was inside it. Ditto for the Panamanian cops.”
“Panama?” Ali asked.
“He was on an Italian ship operating under the Panamanian flag, so officers from there were the ones who actually investigated the incident.”