Foolproof (Iris Thorne Mysteries Book 4)

by Dianne Emley

  Kip pulled off the rubber band and sorted through the black diskettes. They made a slight clicking noise in his palm. Each had a handwritten adhesive label numbering it. “Let’s see what you’ve got.” He walked to one of the long tables and pressed the switch on a power strip, turning on a computer. He rolled a chair over and indicated that Banzai should do the same.

  Kip put the first diskette into the drive. “Install?”

  “Yeah.”

  Kip loaded all the diskettes.

  “To run it, enter A, C, C, E, L,” Banzai said. “I haven’t added sound yet.” His knobby knees protruded from underneath his long shorts.

  Kip typed in the command. Shortly, an image came on the screen of the steering wheel and front end of a long, shiny black car, presented from the point of view of the driver. A country road meandered in front of the car. “Arrow keys, control, space bar, the usual?”

  Banzai’s eyes were riveted on the screen. “Yeah.”

  Kip pressed the arrow keys to maneuver the car down the road, avoiding obstacles, killing enemies, going through dark tunnels and mazes. He didn’t say anything. The work was competent, even clever at points, but it wasn’t extraordinary. The influence of the Slade Slayer games was obvious.

  Banzai divined his thoughts. “It starts a little slow.” He jerked along with the screen image and anxiously shot glances at Kip as he impassively worked the keyboard.

  On the screen, a group of men clad in green Army fatigues leapt from behind a clump of trees and started shooting at the car.

  Banzai was on the edge of his seat. “Get ‘em!”

  Kip was late firing his weapon and didn’t seem to care.

  The car, its tires shot out, flipped end over end and sailed off the side of a cliff, expelling the driver. The image turned topsy-turvy as the driver fell, legs and arms spinning, his body colliding against the cliff. The driver’s hands clutched passing shrubs, pulling them free. The image did not disintegrate as the point of view neared the cliff or as the scene spun wildly. Everything held. Kip was getting motion sick. It was wonderful.

  Banzai detected Kip’s heightened interest and grinned. “I worked forever on that algorithm.”

  Kip shook his head to try and clear the vertigo, then watched as far beneath the driver, the car hit the ground and exploded into leaping flames. The driver headed right into the flames and wreckage. Kip pressed the arrow keys to no avail. As the flames touched the driver, his flesh began to burn and melt. The image froze.

  Kip sat staring at the screen, his hands on the keyboard.

  “That’s the end of that segment,” Banzai said. “There’s a parachute and oxygen shield on the road that you can pick up. Can I?”

  Kip moved the chair out of the way and turned the keyboard over to Banzai, who demonstrated the game’s finer features, as proud as a new father showing off baby pictures. “If you activate the oxygen shield you can survive the fire, see?” He looked at Kip for approval.

  Kip silently watched, his crossed arms over his chest, rocking slightly back and forth as he stroked his eyebrow. He commented circumspectly. “It’s not bad. You’ve got some good ideas.”

  “Really? You think so?” Banzai nervously looped a lock of his long hair behind his ear. “A friend of mine helped with the graphics, but the coding is basically mine. Let me show you the side road. Took me forever.”

  “It’s got possibilities. Like you said, it’s kind of rough.” Kip continued to slowly rock back and forth. “The sequence when the car was going down the cliff, how did you do that?”

  Banzai opened his tiny eyes wide. “You want to see the source code?”

  Kip stopped rocking. “You have it with you?”

  “Yeah, man!” Banzai dug inside his backpack and pulled out several bundles of rubber-banded diskettes. “I carry it around with me. I don’t want my roommates getting any ideas about ripping me off. Especially my algorithm for the cliff dive. That’s my signature piece. But I’ll show it to you, man. I’d be honored to show it to you.” He breathlessly exited the game and started copying up the diskettes.

  “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-one.”

  “You go to school?”

  “I kind of took a leave of absence. That’s what I told my parents, anyway. I really sort of dropped out. I need the space to do my own stuff. I told my parents I’m going back.” He shrugged as if it wasn’t likely. “Hey, Jobs and Gates dropped out of college.” He smiled broadly at Kip. “And so did you.”

  Lines of code filled the screen, spinning past in a blur as Banzai scrolled through them. Reaching the section he wanted to show Kip, he began clicking through it line by line, describing how he’d designed the sequence of the car and driver crashing and burning.

  Kip intently studied the screen, periodically frowning, raising his eyebrows, and nodding. There was one section he found particularly interesting. He scooted closer.

  Banzai babbled on. “This is so great. I’m so honored that you’d even look at my work. So, you think I could work here?”

  Kip held up his hand, indicating he wanted silence, and continued studying the screen.

  Banzai didn’t get the message. “So, man, you think, like, I could work for you?”

  Kip still studied the screen.

  “I could start out testing software or something. I don’t expect to start at the top. Dude, what do you think?”

  Kip leaned back from the screen and looked at Banzai as if he’d forgotten he was there. “Oh, yeah. Uh, let me…let me think about it, okay?” He deleted the files from his hard disk, gathered Banzai’s diskettes, and handed them to him.

  “You don’t have to delete it, man. Show it to Today Rhea or something. It’s sort of like my résumé.”

  “I don’t want it hanging around.”

  “You’re so right, man. Like my old man says, it’s a dog-eat-dog world.”

  “It sure as hell is.”

  Banzai tightly clutched the diskettes. “So, Kip, what do you say?” He paused, then went on, “About a job?”

  “I’ll call you, okay?” Kip stood.

  “Great. I am so stoked.” Banzai stood and awkwardly held out his palm. “Even if nothing comes of this, you’ve totally made my day.”

  Kip shook his hand. “I’ll show you out.”

  Banzai put up both hands. “No, man. I can find my way. I don’t want to bother you anymore. I’ve taken enough of your time.” He put the diskettes into his backpack and slipped one of the straps over his shoulder. At the door to Kip’s office, he jutted one thumb into the air. “Keep the faith, man. We’re behind you.”

  Kip smiled. “Thanks.”

  Banzai left the office, giving Kip another thumbs-up through the window before walking out of view. The tall kid was wearing sneakers, but his footsteps were still loud on the wood catwalk.

  Before Banzai’s footsteps had faded, Kip had started coding.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  “The G-string goes over the garter belt.”

  “Over?”

  “Think about it.”

  Iris did. “Okay.”

  “Get it?”

  “I got it.”

  Liz picked up a bottle of low-cal salad dressing and pulsed the pump top, spraying it on her salad. “What else did he send you from Victoria’s Secret?” She stabbed her fork into a clear plastic clamshell container, then shoveled a mountain of greens into her mouth.

  “All sorts of things. The box was crammed with wonderful lacy nothings.”

  “He’s courting you, lady.” Liz gazed dreamily out the window. “How romantic.”

  Iris’s container of salad was on her desk. She drank a swig of diet peach Snapple from the bottle. “Definitely.”

  Liz picked a radish from her salad and gingerly bit it in half, retracting her lips to avoid smudging her lipstick. “This market! Down again—eighty points.” She crunched the remaining radish half and shook her head with dismay. “I’m fighting clients all day long, advising t
hem not to sell at the same time I’m grabbing as much McDonald’s, GM, and IBM as I can get.”

  “Doesn’t bode well for my IPO.” Iris swirled a carrot stick through the gooey dressing that had coagulated at the bottom of the container.

  “What’s up with that, anyway?”

  “I’m having a cocktail party for some venture capital groups tonight at the Edward Club.” Iris peered out the door into the suite. “Garland used his membership to arrange for the room. I need to get funds into Pandora and fast. It’s hemorrhaging money.”

  “What’s the party for? A sniff test?”

  Iris nodded. “But three of the VC firms I invited canceled, giving flimsy excuses.”

  Liz craned her neck, trying to see what Iris was looking at. Evan Finn was hanging his suit jacket in his cubicle.

  “Top Gun is back from lunch,” Iris said, returning her attention to her salad. “His two-hour lunch.”

  Liz shook her head. “That man is constantly and flagrantly violating your rule about being in the office during market hours.” She bit into a celery stick. “Pretty arrogant for a guy that’s only been on the job three days.”

  “And he always puts on his jacket before he leaves. What’s that about? Tells me he’s not just going to the rest room.”

  “He is a smoker,” Liz commented. “He carries a pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket, and I’ve seen him with a lovely Dunhill lighter. Think he has a drug problem?”

  “He doesn’t look or act like it, but I’ve been fooled before. Something about this stinks.” Iris attacked the dressing at the bottom of her salad with a sesame seed breadstick. “I mean, Sam Eastman doing anything to help me? What was I thinking?”

  “Sam boxed you into a corner. Besides, you said that Louise verified everything in Evan’s résumé. The man is P-oh-P.”

  “Perfect on paper. Garland says he casually knows Yale Huxley, the managing partner of Huxley Investments where Evan worked for the past five years. He’s going to call Huxley and see if he can get any off-the-record skinny on Evan. Louise did find something odd with Evan’s degree. He graduated from Harvard six years ago, summa cum laude, but the alumni office’s records show that he passed away last year.”

  “Hmmm. What about his licenses?”

  “His series seven checked out, but I’ve heard of brokers who pay people to take the test for them.”

  “He definitely has money. I know an expensive suit when I see one.” Liz closed the clamshell lid on her empty salad container and threw it in the trash. “And he drives a brand-new Range Rover.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I happened to get out of the elevator on the same parking level as he did and made an excuse to follow him.”

  “I know the building he lives in—a tony condominium tower on Wilshire in West L.A. I once had a client who lived there. Definitely high rent.” Iris downed the last of the Snapple and threw the garbage from her lunch into the trash on top of Liz’s.

  Liz pulled a small mirrored case from her jacket pocket and repaired her lipstick. “Has he made any sales?”

  Iris retrieved a tube of lipstick from her desk and smoothed on color between sentences. “Nothing to write home about. He’s on the phone a lot, but he’s not setting the place on fire. Certainly not earning enough to support his lifestyle. He was supposed to have brought a full client book with him.”

  Liz peered into the tiny mirror on her lipstick case and shoved her thick, dark curls with her hand. “What kind of signing bonus did he get, if I may ask?”

  “Five thousand dollars.”

  Liz frowned as if she hadn’t heard correctly. “That’s nothing. An average bonus is twenty-five grand.”

  “It’s not a sum that will throw up flags anywhere. Evan talked as if Sam had given him the moon.” Iris crossed her legs, dug one heel of her pump into the carpet, and swiveled her chair back and forth. “Sam said Ron Aldrich at Pierce Fenner Smith made Evan an offer. I wish I could find out if that were true.”

  “I’ll have lunch with Ron and do some detective work,” Liz offered. “He’s still hoping there’s a chance I’ll come back to work for him, so he’s been very nice to me.”

  “Ron Aldrich and Sam Eastman are as thick as thieves. It’s not a stretch to think that Ron would back up Sam’s story, whether it was true or not.” Iris’s chair squealed as she turned it.

  “What does Garland think about Sam hiring Evan almost without your approval?”

  “He says he’s never seen anything like it. There’s another thing that’s odd. Sam’s made himself scarce since Evan was hired. Usually, I can hardly turn around without stepping on the guy. It’s almost like he’s trying to disassociate himself from me.”

  Louise poked her head through Iris’s doorway. “Excuse me for interrupting, but Redwood Equities canceled for your cocktail party tonight.”

  “Not another one,” Iris said with dismay. “Venture capitalists should be flocking to invest in Pandora. Kip Cross’s a free man and back to work, and I’m seeing favorable P.R. about Pandora everywhere, thanks to the public relations firm I hired. So what’s spooking the investors?”

  She answered her own question. “T. Duke couldn’t have that much influence. We’re talking venture capitalists. We’re talking money and the potential to make money.”

  “T. Duke casts a long shadow,” Liz said.

  Iris became glum. “Venture capitalists not wanting to have anything to do with Pandora. Threatening letters from shadowy organizations. A corporate raider who’s determined to acquire a small computer-games company. Mysterious brokers showing up at my office. What’s next?”

  “Don’t let your mind go off the deep end, Iris. Sam probably hired Evan for the exact reasons he said. Evan Finn is no monster. He’s handsome, polished, and charming.”

  “That he is. That and what else?”

  At three, Iris left the office to check on preparations for her cocktail party. Just as she pushed open the suite’s glass doors, she spotted Evan getting into the elevator.

  “Hold the elevator, please,” she called as she quickly walked toward it. He either ignored her or didn’t hear her because she had to thrust her hand between the closing doors. They again flew open.

  “Hi, Evan,” she said pleasantly, despite the fact he hadn’t held the door for her.

  He smiled with his lips closed and slightly tilted his head in her direction in the obsequious gesture he’d used the day they’d met.

  She touched the heat-sensitive button for the lobby and noticed that the one for the ninth floor was illuminated. She searched her mind, trying to remember the offices that were located on the ninth floor. She recalled there were a couple of attorneys and a dentist. Maybe he had an appointment to take care of some personal business.

  When the elevator doors opened on the ninth floor, Evan moved his feet as if he were going to exit, then hesitated.

  “Isn’t this your floor?”

  “Oh, right.” His surprise seemed feigned.

  “See you tomorrow.”

  He got out. “See you.”

  The doors closed and the elevator descended. On impulse, Iris madly began patting the heat-sensitive buttons. The elevator finally stopped on the seventh floor. She got out, walked to the stairwell at the end of the corridor, and climbed back up to the ninth floor. On the landing, she carefully turned the doorknob, pulled the door open, and looked out. There was no sign of Evan.

  She stealthily entered the corridor, walked toward the elevators, and peeked around the corner. Still no sign of him. Feeling foolish, she was about to press the elevator call button when she heard his voice.

  She tiptoed over to the opposite corner of the elevator housing, flattened herself against the wall, and sneaked a quick glance down the corridor. There was Evan, speaking into his cellular telephone.

  “Zentron is a great stock and it’s a good buy right now,” he was confidently saying. “I’ve put a lot of my clients into it. Any stock is going to be r
iskier than a treasury bill or a money market account. You have to evaluate your aversion to risk.”

  It was a standard sales pitch. She knew the stock he was recommending and considered it a good pick. So why was he doing a deal in the ninth-floor hallway?

  “You’ve made the right decision,” Evan said. “Make out a check for ten thousand dollars to Canterbury Investments. No, not to McKinney Alitzer. This is my private investment company. I charge lower fees than the big firms. I can certainly set you up with an account at McKinney if you want, but you’ll pay higher fees and the service won’t be any different. Yes, that’s right—Canterbury Investments. I’ll talk to you soon. Good—”

  Iris sprinted past the elevators, down the corridor, threw open the stairwell door, and didn’t stop running until she reached the lobby.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Brianna Cross sat at a table next to the pool at the Cross mansion, not far from where her mother had died, singing to herself as she drew with crayons on a pad of paper. She was dressed in a fuzzy pink pullover sweater and blue jeans decorated with colorful appliqués of flowers and butterflies. Her long, dark hair was pulled away from her face and tied with a big pink bow.

  “Are you cold, Brianna?” Summer Fontaine asked.

  The little girl, engrossed in her work, didn’t respond.

  Summer was stretched out on a lounge chair, wearing jeans and a pullover identical to Brianna’s. She looked up at the dark clouds that were moving across the sky. “I think it’s going to rain. I hate when it’s not sunny. It gives me the blues.” She looked at Brianna. “You want to come inside and see what’s on TV?”

  “No,” Brianna flatly responded.

  “Are you glad to be home?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did you have fun at your grandma and grandpa’s?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you love me?”

  Brianna paused in her work, delicately sorted through the crayons strewn across the table, selected a new color, and continued drawing.

  “Brianna!” Summer stood and glared at the child. Summer’s full lips were painted in two shades of pink—dark rose around the rim filled in with frosted pearl. “Don’t you love me?”