by L. T. Vargus
Charlie realized that both Brandon and Vivien had mentioned Dutch carrying around a small book. If he’d written the safe combination in it, maybe he’d also kept the computer password there.
“Any idea where the book is now?”
“I haven’t seen it since before he died,” Brandon said. “I guess I assumed Gloria had it. She didn’t mention it?”
Charlie shook her head.
A moment later, Brandon snapped his fingers.
“What about Red Sabazios?”
Charlie had no idea what he was talking about, but Vivien nodded enthusiastically.
“Oh, that’s a good one.”
“It was the name of his favorite horse,” Brandon explained and then spelled it out for her.
Charlie typed in the letters and hit enter.
Incorrect login information.
“Damn,” Vivien said. “OK, what was that phrase in Latin he liked so much? The one about wolves and dogs.”
“Lupus non timet canem latrantem. No wolf fears a barking dog.”
Charlie used her phone to look up the spelling of the Latin to make sure she entered it correctly.
Her finger hovered over the enter key this time, hesitating.
Incorrect login information. This device has been locked.
She glanced from Vivien to Brandon and then back at the computer.
“Well, shit.”
“Now what?” Brandon asked. “There has to be a way to get in even without the password. I mean, this must happen all the time these days.”
Charlie smiled.
“I know a guy.”
FORTY-EIGHT
After returning Vivien to her gala with a promise to keep her updated if anything exciting developed, Charlie swung by her apartment to change into normal clothes and remove some of the many layers of makeup caked on her face. Satisfied, she went back down to her car and drove over to meet Mason.
Her mind wandered along the way. If she’d gone into the gala thinking of Vivien as a viable suspect in the recent Carmichael deaths, she thought it no longer. Numerous holes had been poked in any motivation the mistress might have had to kill Dutch, and when it came down to it, Charlie’s gut just didn’t buy it. She liked Vivien.
Unfortunately, that left Dutch’s own children as the primary suspects going forward, a thought she was glad she didn’t have to dwell on just now. She’d arrived at her destination.
Mason Resnik ran Dank of America, a marijuana dispensary that bordered on futuristic. No novelty bongs. No hemp necklaces. Mason’s establishment was a high-tech marvel. Retina scanners and hydroponic gadgetry set among plate-glass sliding doors that looked like something from an Alex Garland movie—sleek and, above all, professional. Mason also happened to be Frank’s main computer guy, and now, Charlie’s as well.
Charlie showed her ID to the security guard at the entrance of the building. The laptop felt warm tucked under her arm. Her palm and fingers wrapped around the underside of the metal case like strange barnacle growths.
Her eyes lingered on the mystery box while she waited—the matte black rectangle with a chrome Gigagbyte logo standing out from the center. She’d looked up the brand, as she hadn’t recognized it. Gigabyte was a Taiwanese computer hardware company primarily known for producing motherboards. They also manufactured high-end gaming laptops, some of the more expensive and powerful models on the market. That seemed curious. This piece of gear packed far more computing power than Dutch Carmichael would ever need, unless he wanted to play Fortnite at the highest possible frame rate, which Charlie doubted.
Handing her license back, the guard buzzed her through the doors. A woman with short spiky hair was waiting for her.
“Charlie Winters?”
Charlie nodded.
“Mason said I should bring you up to his office,” the woman said, using her fingerprint to unlock a door that swept aside with a pneumatic whooshing sound. “I’m Lisa, by the way.”
She beckoned Charlie through before leading the way down a glass-walled passage that bisected the showroom slash grow room.
Green was the first thing Charlie saw. Healthy-looking marijuana plants thrust their leaves in all directions, bushy-looking things that had been organized in neat rows from one end of the huge space to the other. The ultimate cash crop now that the laws had changed. Something about the neatness of the plants made her think of one of those hedge animals—the green cropped, manicured, and coiffed into the shape of an elephant or giraffe.
Lisa guided her through the corridor and Charlie’s shoes clattered on the smooth cement floor. The sound echoed around the giant chamber of this factory turned dispensary, whispers and flutters bouncing everywhere like scattered applause.
Rustic brick walls spoke to the building’s past when it had been a dry goods warehouse at the turn of the previous century. But these days, the plants and gadgetry made these industrial details seem modern. Hip. Everything was clean and functional and somehow hooked up to the Wi-Fi with a little blinking light to prove it. It looked like a trendy brewery or coffee shop in Brooklyn or something, Charlie thought.
Stepping through the high-tech gates and into this industrial yet luxe setting, Charlie couldn’t help but feel like she was walking into a spy movie. This would be the villain’s lair, she supposed.
“No, Mr. Bond. I expect you to hit the vape,” Allie said in one of her terrible accents.
The door to Mason’s office was closed when Charlie reached it. She rapped her knuckles lightly against the wood.
“Enter,” a voice said from inside. It sounded like Mason’s voice, but the delivery seemed odd. Formal.
She eased the door open and stepped into the room.
At first it looked like there was no one there, the space beyond the large desk vacant. The oversized office chair faced away from her, with only the back visible. A large fish tank gurgled on the wall beyond that, bright orange and yellow fish darting around everywhere inside, but otherwise the room lay silent. Motionless.
“Hello?” Charlie said after a second.
Mason swiveled the chair around to face her and then leaned back. An odd smile quirked the corners of his mouth. Charlie realized he was messing with her.
“Well, well, well. Charlie Winters, I presume.” He drummed his fingers like one of the James Bond villains she’d been thinking about only moments before. “And what brings you to my humble multi-million-dollar marijuana dispensary?”
“Hey, Mason.”
When she didn’t play along, he dropped the act. His posture went back to normal, and he scooted his chair up to the desk. His eyes fell to the little black box in her hand.
“So this is the laptop you texted me about?”
“Dutch Carmichael’s laptop, at your service.”
He sniffed a little laugh.
“The Billionaire’s Secret Laptop could be a pretty good romance title, I bet. You’d need to load it with Fifty Shades of Grey-style fornication, or whatever the ladies are into these days, but… Anyway, let’s have a look.”
She set the laptop on Mason’s desk, and he spun it around to face him.
“Gigabyte, huh? Pretty sweet rig for an old man.”
“That’s what I thought,” Charlie said.
“Guess he could afford it. It’d be kind of disappointing if he had an Acer or something.”
He opened the laptop. Powered it on. Little blue lights blinked to life along the front of it.
“So, not to rush you or anything, but how long does this kind of thing usually take?” she asked.
Mason leaned back in his chair.
“It depends. If all he’s got is the standard out-of-the-box security that comes with Windows, it could take literally a minute.” Mason pulled a flash drive from a drawer in his desk and connected it to the laptop. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”
Charlie slumped down in the chair opposite him. It felt good to get off her feet after marching around in heels for half of the day.
�
�Interesting,” Mason said from across the desk.
“What is it?”
“I managed to bypass the main login, but someone was a stickler for encrypting their files,” Mason said, still tapping away at the keyboard as he spoke.
“That sounds good for security. Bad for us.”
“Yes and no. Trying to hack the encryption itself would take far too long. But if we figure out the key, then we don’t need to hack the encryption.”
“And you can do that?”
Mason’s own computer was also on the desk, and he slid it closer and typed something into it.
“Depends on how long the password is. Could be two hours. Or ten. Or never, if it’s long enough.” Mason paused to grin over at her. “The good news is that his Windows password was only eight characters, and people are creatures of habit.”
Moving to a bookcase built into one wall, Mason removed a third laptop from one of the shelves. He brought the computer to his desk and arranged the three machines in a semicircle around himself.
“Anyway, all we can do is try. If I can’t crack it in the next twelve hours or so, it’s probably a lost cause, but I’m feeling pretty confident.”
“Are you sure you’re up for this now?” Charlie asked.
“I’m looking forward to it, actually. Makes me feel like I’m in college again, pulling an all-nighter before finals.” He gestured at a wet bar in the corner. “You want anything to drink? There’s a fridge behind you. Coconut water and Monster, mostly.”
“Like it could have been anything but coconut water and Monster,” Allie said.
“And there are snacks and stuff in the cabinets next to that.”
Mason didn’t break eye contact with the computers even as he spoke to her. That little smile quirked his lips again, and excitement gleamed from behind his glasses. He rolled up his sleeves. Cracked his knuckles.
“Let’s do this.”
FORTY-NINE
Mason’s fingers clattered at the keyboard, pounding out strange, stuttering rhythms. The little clicks reminded Charlie of drumbeats in some foreign musical genre. Exotic. A little alien.
His eyes never stopped moving, even if his hands did. He squinted in concentration, eyebrows expressing every little frustration and glimmer of hope. His dilated pupils flicked back and forth from screen to screen. He looked like a predator closing on his prey.
Charlie sipped at a coconut water as the hacker worked his trade. She’d sat across from him for about forty minutes now, watching him drawn deeper and deeper into a trance as he worked. They’d conversed a little at first, but his side of the dialogue shrank from normal sentences to choppy fragments to monosyllabic murmurs and finally to nothing as his mind sank into the task at hand. He hadn’t said a word in at least twenty minutes. Charlie didn’t think he was actually aware of her presence in the room anymore, let alone able to hear anything she said.
Charlie stood. Stretched. Her stomach grumbled a little, so she wandered over to the cabinets next to the mini-fridge.
A full kitchen’s worth of cabinetry occupied this side of the office, cupboards rounding a corner and running floor to ceiling. That seemed excessive. Charlie opened a couple of the doors, curiosity twitching in her skull now.
A rainbow of brightly colored bags stared back from the cabinet shelves, and she and Allie both laughed a little at what they’d found. She quickly checked the other cupboards, confirming her suspicion. Every cupboard, top and bottom, held pretty much the same thing: Doritos. Seemingly every Dorito flavor imaginable tucked inside in full-sized bags, stacked at least ten deep in rows as neat as the plants out on the main floor.
“This might be the most extreme flavor I’ve ever seen in one place,” Allie said.
Nacho Cheese, Cool Ranch, Flamin’ Hot Limón, Blaze, Spicy Sweet Chili, Poppin’ Jalapeño, Salsa Verde, and the oddly intriguing Flamas, which featured a giant chili pepper and a couple of angry red Doritos engulfed in flames on the bag.
“I guess this is on brand for both the stoner and hacker sides of your personality, eh?” Charlie said.
Mason didn’t respond. His eyebrows jumped and then crunched down into a wrinkled knot that slowly released, and his fingers continued to tap out those endless, lurching rhythms.
Charlie’s phone buzzed, and she pulled it from her pocket to find a text from Brandon.
Find anything yet?
Charlie typed out a four-letter response.
Nope.
As she moved to return the phone to her pocket, it buzzed again.
Well, can you let me know?
Charlie tucked the phone back in her pocket without responding. She didn’t want to make any promises right now, to Brandon or anyone. Not until she knew what was on the computer.
Selecting a bag of Flamas Doritos and another bottle of coconut water, Charlie settled into the sofa positioned near the snack bar. It didn’t look like much. A big blocky thing in dark gray velvet. But as Charlie sank into it, she quickly decided it was the most comfortable piece of furniture ever.
The Doritos had a surprising kick to them, which was followed by a subtle citrusy aftertaste that vaguely reminded Charlie of Froot Loops, for some reason.
She watched Mason for a while, shoveling chips into her mouth and timing the seconds between his blinks. Thirty-four seconds. Forty-eight seconds. A minute and six seconds.
Eventually her phone rang. She expected it to be Brandon, bugging her about the computer again, but instead, it was Frank.
“Are you busy?”
Charlie glanced down at the bag of chips in her lap.
“Not particularly.”
“Well, I think I’ve got a solution to our problem with Paige’s father, but I could use some backup.”
“Now?” Charlie asked.
“If you can,” Frank said. “It shouldn’t take more than an hour.”
Charlie’s gaze slid over to where Mason was still fixated on the computer. He probably wouldn’t even notice she was gone, and it wasn’t like she was playing an important role in his work.
“That shouldn’t be a problem. I’m having Mason check something out for me. Can you pick me up at the dispensary?”
“I’ll be there in ten minutes,” Frank said.
Frank hunched over the steering wheel, spine looking crooked, body looking withered. He still hadn’t regained the bulk he’d had before chemo. Charlie wondered if he ever would.
But if his frame showed signs of age, the bright gleam in his eyes portrayed the opposite. Intensity. Zeal. Life.
“Did I ever tell you about Big Jim Driskell?” Frank asked, eyes flicking from the road for just a second.
Charlie chuckled before she answered.
“No, and I kind of think I’d remember the name.”
“Well, the nickname isn’t ironic. He’s a walking, talking side of beef. Probably six foot five, two-fifty or two-sixty. Anyway, he was a war hero way back when. Saved a bunch of lives in the first Gulf War, I believe it was. Lost an eye in the process. A side of beef with an eyepatch.”
A faint smile played at Frank’s lips as he talked.
“He’s a nice enough guy. Stoic, though. No real sense of humor to speak of. But he’s always been good to me. Anyway, I’ve seen what happens when people cross him. Just once. A group of mouthy frat boys at the tavern. An argument over a game of pool, yeah?”
Charlie nodded.
“Big Jim just leveled this mob of college boys. Five of ’em. Looked like something from a comic book. Right hook knocked the first one out cold. Left uppercut lifted the next one straight up and then dropped him in a heap. The third and fourth converged on him and he cracked their heads together like coconuts.”
Charlie couldn’t help but picture it like a superhero movie. A hulking Goliath wearing an eyepatch knocking frat guys about.
Frank went on.
“And then the fifth guy? He tried to run. Jim wasn’t having that. He went at him with a broken beer bottle. Thankfully a group of guys pu
lled Jim off before he could spear the guy in the neck, which looked for all the world like what he was aiming to do.”
Frank shook his head.
“This was ten years ago, but he hasn’t lost that fire.”
“And why is this coming up now?” Charlie asked.
Frank tossed a manila envelope in Charlie’s lap. She opened it and found a handful of eight-by-ten photographs of a man and woman in a variety of romantic poses. Holding hands, kissing. In one, the man even had his hand on the girl’s ass.
Charlie recognized the man in the pictures as Paige’s father, Henry Naughton. But the girl was a stranger to her.
“Who’s the girl?”
“A nineteen-year-old college student by the name of Cindy Driskell,” Frank said, raising an eyebrow.
“Big Jim’s daughter?”
“That’s right. And I can tell you right now that Jim wouldn’t be amused to find her running around with a married man twenty-five years her senior.”
They pulled up into the driveway outside Henry’s place. The house was blue with white shutters and a row of hydrangeas planted in front of the porch. The garage door was open, and Charlie could see someone standing over the open hood of an old Ford truck. Paige’s father sported a white undershirt smudged with grease.
Frank climbed out of the car, and Charlie followed his lead. She checked that her trusty stun gun was within easy reach in her bag, just in case.
Paige’s father watched them approach. Unblinking. He smeared a greasy hand over his shirt and sipped his Miller High Life.
“Henry Naughton?” Frank said, and Charlie thought she could hear the adrenaline in his voice.
“Who wants to know?”
“I’m Frank Winters. I work with your daughter.”
Some of the tension seemed to sag from Henry’s rigid figure, but his glare didn’t break. He still hadn’t blinked since they’d pulled up.
“That’s right. The professional snoop.” He sipped his beer before he went on. “If you’re out looking for a lost kitty, I haven’t seen it.”
“No,” Frank said. He stopped a few paces shy of the garage door. “No lost cats today. We’re here to tell you to leave Paige alone. No calls. No visits. She doesn’t want to hear from you. Doesn’t want to know you. Doesn’t want anything to do with you at all.”