Courage Stolen

by R. Scott Mackey

  COURAGE STOLEN

  A novel

  by

  R. Scott Mackey

  Big Hound Publishing

  Sacramento, CA

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, dead or alive, businesses, events or locales is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2015 by R. Scott Mackey

  Cover Design by Karen Phillips

  All rights reserved. This book, or any parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

  Get a FREE Copy of Courage Begins

  Read the first book in the Ray Courage series

  (click the book cover below for free download page)

  In this novella, Ray Courage begins his private investigation career, displaying the skills, abilities and sense of humor that have made him a fan favorite around the world.

  Also by R. Scott Mackey

  In the Ray Courage Mystery Series

  Courage Resurrected

  Courage Matters

  Courage Begins (A Novella)

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  For Carney and Dace

  Table of Contents

  Also by R. Scott Mackey

  one

  two

  three

  four

  five

  six

  seven

  eight

  nine

  ten

  eleven

  twelve

  thirteen

  fourteen

  fifteen

  sixteen

  seventeen

  eighteen

  nineteen

  twenty

  twenty-one

  twenty-two

  twenty-three

  twenty-four

  twenty-five

  twenty-six

  twenty-seven

  twenty-eight

  twenty-nine

  thirty

  thirty-one

  thirty-two

  thirty-three

  thirty-four

  thirty-five

  thirty-six

  thirty-seven

  thirty-eight

  epilogue

  Get a FREE Copy of Courage Begins

  About the Author

  More Ray Courage…

  Acknowledgements

  one

  Jerry Langford, Granderson University’s chief of security, knew his was the most difficult and important job in California, or pretty much anywhere this side of Washington, DC. That’s about all I’d gleaned during the first thirty minutes of our meeting in his basement office. I wanted to ask him the significance of the security chief being located where he would never see the light of day but refrained from doing so because Langford had yet to exhibit anything resembling a sense of humor.

  “We may be a small school, at last count about twenty-four hundred undergraduate and graduate students, but the work here is cutting edge, top notch.” He was sitting back in his chair, fingertips steepled below his chin. I thought he might hoist his feet onto his desk, but this was one affectation he avoided. The small office was lit with a single desktop halogen lamp the size of a pencil eraser pointed at the ceiling. Behind him, I counted a dozen security monitors fed by cameras positioned throughout the campus. There were video images of building exteriors, interior hallways, classrooms, and labs. He glanced every now and then to check the screens.

  “Impressive system,” I said, pointing at the monitors.

  “State of the art. Twenty-four seven, video and audio.”

  I nodded. “Why do you like it so dark in here?”

  “Is it? I hadn’t noticed.”

  “Like a cave.”

  “Well, I suppose I’ve grown used to it. Anyway, as I was saying—”

  “You mentioned last night on the phone something about a theft or a sabotaged project.” I couldn’t take another thirty minutes on the theory of university law enforcement. If he couldn’t find a point, I’d damn well lead him to it.

  “Yes, I was getting to that Mr. Courage, or is it Dr. Courage?”

  “Ray is fine. You can make the check out anyway you want. But please go on about the reason you called me.”

  He reached across his desk and picked up a small spiral notebook, flipped through a few pages, and read for several seconds before explaining the reason for our meeting. “Last night about seven, I received a near hysterical call from a PhD student over at Frankenstein’s lab. She said someone had stolen their drawings for a prototype and had destroyed all their data on some micro-something genome research.”

  “You have a Frankenstein lab?”

  “No, no, no. That’s just what everyone calls it. Everything there is secretive. No one knows what goes on in there, except for Professor Wiggin, who runs the place, and his doctoral students.”

  “Not even the chief of security?”

  If he recognized my jab, he chose to ignore it. “I’m much too busy to know the details of every research project on this campus.”

  “Of course you are.”

  “Are you messing with me, Ray?”

  “Wouldn’t think of it.”

  He gave me about five seconds of a well-practiced cop stare down. I gave him my well-practiced impish grin.

  “How did you hear about me?” I asked. He’d been vague on the phone.

  “Nick Trujillo recommended you.”

  “Lieutenant Nick Trujillo?”

  Langford nodded. Trujillo had arrested me for murder a year earlier, and as far as I could tell, hated my guts. Even after the charges were dropped, he looked at me like I’d tried to sell him dirty pictures of his kids.

  “He said you were a good investigator. Discreet. And because you used to work at a university you might know your way around here. You look surprised.”

  “Just didn’t realize Lieutenant Trujillo held me in such high regard.”

  “No matter. I think we had better move this discussion along. It’s taking far too long,” he said, as if it was my fault he’d spent the first forty minutes bloviating about himself.

  “So there’s a theft or sabotage of—”

  “Alleged theft or alleged sabotage.”

  “Okay, fine. But why are you hiring me and not investigating it yourself?”

  He laughed. Apparently, he had a sense of humor after all. “I don’t have the resources. In addition to myself, I have two sworn officers. I’m supposed to be getting four more, but that doesn’t seem to be a priority for the university president or board of trustees.”

  “Your police force is three people? I don’t mean to sound rude, but you made it sound earlier that you were academia’s version of the palace guards.”

  “You can infer whatever you want into my previous comments.” His eyes narrowed, face reddening. “But the fact is, I don’t have the time to investigate this claim. And, quite frankly, my two officers lack the training to do so.”

  “Why not call the city police?”

  “Because no matter what did or didn’t happen over in that lab, it could turn into a public relations nightmare for the university if word got out we had to call the police. We do not want any negative publicity. As you know, we are only fifteen years old. We’ve had remarkable growth, remarkable success. We are starting to be seen nationally as a top-tier university, a place—”

  “You told me that already, somewhere right after ethical responsibility and educational freedom.” It was rude. I didn’t care.

  “Are you going to keep interrupting me?” His eyes bore into me, and I thought he might fire me before I even started.

  “Go on.”

  “Fine
. As I was saying, if it gets out that this institution’s academic integrity is less than stellar, our reputation—our hard-earned reputation—will be shot down in flames.”

  “So you hired me to keep things under the radar.”

  “Yes, and I’m beginning to regret it.”

  “No need to worry about a thing. I’m all over this.”

  A few minutes later, I left Langford’s office and walked across the Granderson campus towards the Sieboldt Science Center, home to the so-called Frankenstein lab. I stopped to sit on a bench and review the file Langford had given me before sending me on my way. It was a cold February day, and rain clouds darkened the mid-morning sky. The campus occupied Rosetown’s eastern edge, which at an elevation of three thousand feet received an occasional dusting of snow.

  The campus was small, about the size of an urban high school, its building tending more towards high tech with lots of glass and steel rather than traditional red brick and archways. Scores of students strolled from one building to another, apparently making their way from one class to another. They were a comely lot, hair in place, clothes tidy, their straight teeth the marvel of modern orthodontics. Quite a contrast to the mixed bag of students I taught during my tenure as a communications professor at Sacramento State University, where students balanced minimum wage jobs, student loans, and overcrowded classrooms in pursuit of a public school degree. I wondered if the forty-two thousand dollar tuition Granderson charged got you more than a Sac State degree other than free and abundant parking and the chance to marry a fellow blueblood.

  I flipped open the folder and read the first page. It was the curriculum vitae for Professor Kenneth Wiggin printed from a webpage.

  Degrees:

  1972—Doctoral Fellow, Harvard University, Molecular and Cellular Biology

  1967—PhD, University of California, San Francisco, Genetics

  1961—BA, University of Colorado, Cellular and Developmental Biology

  Research Interests:

  My focus is on the discovery of microbial organisms for purposes of genome sequencing and gaining insight for developing energy-related biotechnologies such as photosynthetic systems and organisms that can metabolize available renewable resources and waste material. Given that less than 0.01% of all microbes have been cultivated, this research field holds significant potential for academic insight and commercial advances in energy supply.

  The vitae went on to list his publications, memberships, and other activities of interest to other academics. It was a lot of blah, blah, blah that didn’t shed much insight into what they were doing in his lab. The second paper in the folder was more of a brief bio:

  PhD candidate Candace Symington holds a bachelor’s degree in genetics from Stanford University and master’s degrees in both mathematics and biology from Cornell. She has published fifteen different papers on microbial genomics, including her full genomic characterizations of eight unique bacteria and three protozoa. Ms. Symington is working with Dr. Kenneth Wiggin on commercial applications for microbial sequencing.

  I still didn’t have much of a clue about what went on in Wiggin’s lab, but the word “commercial” popped twice. Closing the file, I stood and headed towards the science center.

  two

  According to the small sign outside the door, Candace Symington shared an office with someone named Jack Cassidy. A few seconds after I knocked on the closed door, a twenty-something woman opened it.

  “Yes?” She showed no expression as her eyes surveyed me.

  “Candace Symington?”

  “Yes. And you are?

  “Ray Courage. The head of Granderson’s security said something might have happened to a project you’re working on. He asked me to follow up with you.”

  Her chin dropped to her chest, and I thought she might cry. “Yes,” she said, just above a whisper.

  “Do you have a few minutes to talk about it?”

  “I was going to get some coffee. Okay if we talk at the student café?”

  Her hands shook as she locked the office door, and she accidentally dropped the foam keychain loaded with several keys. The Granderson University seal, printed in royal blue on one side, was beginning to rub off. I bent over and picked the keys up for her.

  “Thanks. I guess I’m a bit unnerved by this whole thing, especially since I got this note this morning.”

  “A note?”

  “I’ll show it to you when get to the café.”

  We walked down the stairs and outside. She was an attractive young woman, medium height and build, with light brown hair and the bangs that had become the style on college campuses. Her face was pretty: soft brown eyes and firm cheekbones accented with a hint of blush. She wore Top-Sider flats, expensive jeans, and a simple green top over which she had thrown a black wool coat. She led us to the café three buildings from her office.

  “Are you a policeman?”

  “No, private investigator.”

  “Really? I didn’t know there really were private investigators. I thought they were just on television.”

  “Here I am.”

  Inside, she selected a bran muffin and poured herself a tall cup of coffee. I settled for just coffee. After paying the cashier, we settled in at a corner table next to a picture window. Through the windows of the building next door, I could see several students running on treadmills while others hoisted dumbbells or battled the weight machines.

  “I’m glad to see Chief Langford took me seriously.” She peeled the paper from the base of her muffin. “Though, I was hoping he was going to call the police. No offense.”

  “None taken. He still might. He just wanted me to do a preliminary investigation, I guess you could say.”

  “You mean he wants you to see if I’m full of crap or if what I said happened actually did.”

  “There’s that.”

  “Thank you for not bullshitting me at least.”

  I took a sip of my coffee. “Do you mind telling me what happened?”

  She sighed. “I guess the short version is someone stole Project Monarch. Three long, hard years of work.”

  “What’s Professor Wiggin say about the whole thing?”

  “I haven’t heard from him yet. He’s in Germany. I e-mailed him last night.”

  “Tell me what’s missing and when you discovered it was gone.”

  “It was about six o’clock last night. Jack and I had been working in the lab pretty much all day and—”

  “Jack Cassidy?” I remembered the name from the sign by her office door.

  “Yes. He’s also a PhD candidate. In biofuels engineering. Brilliant guy. So we knocked off sometime after five o’clock. We left the lab at the same time. I was about halfway home—I live a couple miles away here in Rosetown—when something came to me about a problem I was having on the project. A little detail I hadn’t been able to work through. You know how it is, your subconscious mind solves problems when you aren’t even thinking about it.”

  I nodded and took another sip of coffee.

  “So, when I get back to the lab and fire up my laptop, I can’t find it.”

  “Can’t find what?”

  “Anything—the prototype designs, three years of lab test results, any of the related microbial genome sequences. Everything on the computer was gone. Three years’ work all gone.”

  “Did your hard drive crash or something?”

  “No, no. The hard drive was fine. All my other files were untouched. Just the project was taken or deleted or whatever.”

  “You have backup files, right?”

  “Of course. I called Jack, and he came back so we could check his laptop. Same thing. All the data was erased from his computer, too. I mean, less than an hour earlier it was all there. We were both working on it, had saved everything, and then uploaded it to our server.”

  “It’s on the server then? It’s just not on your laptops?”

  “I wish. The server was stolen. We have a dedicated server located away from the
lab for security reasons. Great security, huh?”

  “Wait a minute, when did you find out the server was missing?”

  “Not long after Jack and I realized what had happened to our laptops. We tried to connect to the server from our laptops but kept getting a ‘drive not configured’ message. That’s never happened before. I mean, we had backed everything up less than an hour earlier. It was standard protocol. We backed up to the server twice each day—before lunch and at the end of the work day.”

  She paused and picked at her muffin, tore off a piece no bigger than her thumbnail, nibbled at it, and then washed it down with a sip of coffee.

  “Did you try to reconfigure your connection to the server?”

  “Didn’t work.” She shook her head as she tore off another small piece of muffin. “We were panicked, so we went over to the administration building where the university server farm is and demanded to see—to physically see—our server. We’d never been there before, never seen the damn thing. Even the tech guy couldn’t tell us straight off which one was ours. I mean, there’s something like fifty or sixty servers over there. He checks his records and takes us to the rack where our server is supposed to be. And, of course, it’s gone. Big empty space where the fucking thing is supposed to be.”

  “Wait a second. If you had backed everything up at about five, and by now it’s about six or so, wouldn’t the tech support employee have seen someone steal the server?”

  She shook her head. “He had come here to the café for his dinner break. He said he locked the door to the server farm area, but who knows?”

  “Security camera?”

  She shook her head. “Supposedly it’s on the to-do list, but as of now, there’s no camera on the server farm or the entrance to it. At least that’s what the IT guy said.”

  “Does Jerry Langford know about the theft of the server?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. IT probably reported it. I was kind of upset when I called him last night, and he didn’t really seem in the mood to talk. Next thing I know, you’re knocking on my office door.”

  Her mood had become more somber by the second as she recounted everything. I felt bad about putting her through it but didn’t see any way to avoid it.