“None really. I don’t even know if he did it in the first place. It’s just very suspicious.”
“I think that answers your question, Chris. We have to have absolute certainty that he is going to strike again to do anything with this information.”
There it was. Chris studied his father. His dad was just out for himself. He never had a social conscience. He never cared about the little guy. For him it was all about billable hours, about accumulating wealth.
“This is bullshit. Metcalf did something. The law may say we can’t do anything about it, but the law’s wrong.” Chris turned and headed for the door. “We, I, have to do something.”
“Chris, wait.” Harry jumped up. “Maybe there is a way . . .”
Chapter 22
“Cat, I think you might find this interesting.” Ted flipped a manila file onto Catrina’s desk.
Catrina opened the file. “Airline ticket receipts. Credit card bills. What is this stuff?”
“Old Teddy has been snooping around MS again. These are Alison Clarke’s expense reports. Now look at this.” He handed her another folder. “Angie Hopper, senior VP of product development.”
Catrina took the second file. She placed the expense reports next to the first ones.
“Curious isn’t it.” Ted could hardly contain his grin. “Alison and Angie always seem to go to the same conferences and meetings. Always fly on the same flight. Do you see what’s missing?”
Catrina studied the expense reports for a minute. “Hotel rooms? Angie never has a hotel room.”
“Does that seem a little strange to you? They fly to the same cities for the same meetings. Alison’s expense reports always include meals for two. Angie doesn’t report buying any meals or paying for a hotel room.”
“They’re sharing a hotel room. They’ve got a thing going on. . .”
“Yeah.” Ted almost burst. “Alison’s married, has two kids and a loving husband. But she’s sneaking off to conferences and sharing her room with Angie. She’s got something to hide. She’s a closet lesbian.”
“And just what is wrong with being a lesbian?” Catrina got up and walked to the door. “Abeba, can we get coffee in here please.”
“There’s nothing wrong with being a lesbian,” Ted said. “But she is cheating on her husband.”
Catrina turned back to Ted. “Okay, you’re right. Even if she isn’t doing anything, this looks awfully suspicious. She has something to hide. So, why get us involved? She hired us after Donna disappeared. If she was trying to cover up her involvement in Donna’s death, she sure wouldn’t come to us.”
“Not necessarily.” Ted sat on Catrina’s desk. “She’s really smart. Maybe she wanted us to go off in another direction. Maybe she never expected us to uncover this. What if she hired us to make the police think she was trying to find the killer, when all the time, it was really her?”
“If this information was made public, it would be a scandal.” Catrina clicked her fingernails together. “It would affect stock prices, maybe force Alison out of her job. This is something worth covering up. I wonder if Donna stumbled on it.”
Abeba entered the room wearing a flowing African robe, with her silver tray and three glass coffee cups. She handed one to Catrina. “Just like you like it. Black, like me,” she said with a smile. She handed the second cup to Ted, then sat down in one of Catrina’s unmatched chairs with the third cup. Ted’s coffee was sweetened, just the way he liked it.
“OK, Mrs. Flaherty. You don’t yell for coffee unless something’s really bothering you. What’s going on?”
Ted glanced at Catrina in disbelief. Abeba had a lot of nerve. Would Catrina really let her in on an investigation?
“Abeba, Ted just found some new information on the Clarke case.” Catrina leaned back in her swivel chair, nestled her cup in her hands and put her feet up on her desk. “It seems like our client is not as lily white as she seems . . .”
****
Ted stared at Catrina, stunned. Why would she lay out their whole case for the receptionist? What was he missing here?
“No. Mrs. Clarke has something to hide, but she isn’t the one.” Abeba drained her cup. “I don’t think her messing around has anything to do with Mrs. Harrison going missing.”
Ted looked from Catrina to Abeba and back again. There was some kind of trust between the two women. What were they thinking?
“You’re probably right.” Catrina pulled her feet off of her desk and set her coffee cup back on Abeba’s tray. “Thank you. You always seem to know.”
“Oh, I just remembered. I have a package for Mr. Higurea.” Abeba jumped up and hurried out of the office.
“Cat, I don’t get it. Why did you just share our whole case with the receptionist?”
“You have a lot to learn, Ted.” Catrina drilled her gray eyes into Ted. “The first thing is that we all have something to offer. We may have different job titles, but we all have equal worth.”
Ted felt a slight flush hit his face.
“Abeba is incredibly, almost mystically, intuitive. I’ve learned to trust her. I can lay out a case for her and she can tell me if I’m on the right track or not. She’s almost never wrong.”
“Here you are, Mr. Higurea.” Abeba re-entered the office and handed Ted a large purple and orange envelope. “This came a few minutes ago.”
“Fed-Ex.” Ted took the envelope. “No return address.” He turned the package over in his hands. “The address is filled out in neat block printing. Is there any way to tell where this came from?”
“I can trace the billing address.” Abeba stood over Ted. “We can find out who paid to ship it and were it was picked up.”
Ted ripped the envelope open and pulled out half a dozen eight and a half by eleven black and white pictures. “These look like surveillance photos.” He handed them to Catrina, one by one. “They’re of a cleaning lady.”
“This is Donna Harrison.” Catrina handed the pictures to Abeba. “These must be from surveillance cameras at Millennium Systems.”
“Why would someone send pictures from MS?” Ted wiped his hand through his thick, black hair. “We already know that Donna was working there under cover.”
“Someone’s trying to help us.” Catrina leaned forward in her chair. “They don’t know what we know. They’re trying to put us on the right trail.”
“Who would want to help you, Mrs. Flaherty?” Abeba lowered herself into her chair. “How do they even know you’re working on this case?”
“Okay.” Ted wished he had Chris’ analytical mind. “We don’t know where these came from. We do know that they aren’t from Alison Clarke. She already told us that Donna was working under cover for her. If she wanted us to have these pictures, she would have just given them to us. . .”
“Right.” Catrina brushed her hair back behind her ear. “Alison probably doesn’t even know about these. That means that someone with access to MS security tapes is holding back from her.”
“But someone at Millennium Systems has the tapes.” Ted’s mind was racing. “Donna obviously found something there, something worth killing for. Somebody at MS knows about it and wants us to know about it, but they’re afraid to come forward.”
“I don’t get it.” Catrina picked up her empty coffee cup, looked in it and set it down again. “We’ve seen Delphi. It’s a really cool electronic toy, but why kill someone over it? It’ll be the flavor of the week for a few months, then someone else will come out with something even more high-tech. Next year, everyone else will have copied it and it’ll just be a commodity like a PC.”
“So, what’s happening at Millennium Systems that’s even bigger than this new computer toy?” Abeba said.
“That’s what we have to find out.” Ted stood up. “We need to start by finding out who at MS is trying to help us. We need to contact them, find out what they know.”
“Abeba, can you work on the Fed-Ex package? Can you find out who our ‘Deep Throat’ is?” Catrina asked.<
br />
“Right away, Mrs. Flaherty.”
****
Ted filled his classic Starbuck mug, the one with the topless mermaid in the logo (Ted always thought of her as a mermaid, although Chris had explained that she was actually a siren.), with heavy, dark coffee and headed to Catrina’s office. Thank goodness Catrina shared Ted’s taste for rich, hearty coffee. The stuff they served at YTS was like brown water.
The MS case had evolved. Every morning Catrina, Jonathon Jefferson and Ted met in Catrina’s office to share what they had learned in the previous twenty-four hours. This was obviously Catrina’s highest priority.
“What do you have today, Jeff?” Catrina wore a navy blue suit with a short skirt and cream-colored silk blouse. She even was wearing heels. She must be meeting Alison Clarke today. The only time Ted ever saw her in a skirt was when she had to go to the MS headquarters.
“I’ve been following up on Webber Inc.” Jeff looked as dapper as usual, dressed in a charcoal suit that complemented his chocolate skin color “There’s definitely something fishy going on here.”
Ted slid into the empty chair in front of Catrina’s desk. “What’d ya find, dude?”
“It’s what I didn’t find. The address for Webber Inc. is a PO Box. That’s not that unusual, but I couldn’t find any street address for them. The registered president is a Mr. Jacob Webber. I found his birth certificate, born August 12th, 1961. I also found his death certificate, August 18th, 1961. Funny thing is, the dead Mr. Webber applied for a Social Security card in May of 2003.”
Silence hung in the air.
“Okay,” Catrina finally broke the silence. “We have a phony ID. Who does it belong to?”
“Hard to say.”
“Leah and I have gone back through the MS accounts payable system.” Ted set his coffee cup on Catrina’s desk. “There’s payments to Webber Inc. every month going back to the beginning of the Delphi project in June of 2003. Almost six million dollars.”
“Do we know what service Webber Inc. was providing?” Catrina stretched her long legs under the desk.
“The payments just say for consulting.” Ted caught an appreciative glance of Catrina’s thighs.
“So is it Schmidt, or is it this Lombardi woman?” Catrina raised an eyebrow.
Dios mío. It’s time to come clean. “It’s not Gina Lombardi.” Ted’s voice was low. “She’s the one who put me onto Schmidt in the first place. She told me where to look.”
“What?” Catrina almost came out of her chair. “Higuera, you’ve been holding back on us?”
“I’ve kinda been seeing Gina. I found the file at her house. Schmidt has been forcing her to make these illegal entries into the company GL for him.”
“Jeff, I think you better leave us alone.” Catrina was seething. “And close the door.”
Ted suddenly felt a violent urge to urinate. He wiped his wet palms on his pants.
“I can forgive a lot of things.” Catrina’s voice was soft and ice cold. “But holding out information is not one of them. You’re part of a team. When you come to work here, you dedicate your life to our cause. If you can’t do that, Ted, you need to get out.”
Ted’s cheeks burned. He had fucked up and he knew it.
“Cat, I’m sorry. I didn’t think it mattered. I was so excited about finding out about this that I didn’t think you’d care how I got the information.”
“I don’t give a shit about the information or how you found it. You don’t get it, do you? This is about loyalty, about family. We took you in here. Made you part of our family. I don’t give my trust easily, and once you’ve lost it, you can never get it back.”
Don’t forget you invited me. Ted’s ears felt like they were on fire. After all, he had a good job, was making a ton of money. Catrina had recruited him, now he was working twice the hours for half the money. I didn’t need them, they needed me. Why am I even working here?
“You let me down.” Catrina’s voice cut through his soul. “You held out on me. Chasing a skirt was more important than your responsibility to your family. How can I ever trust you again?”
Ted looked at his hands. His mind froze. He had a thousand things he wanted to say, but he couldn’t come up with the words.
He cared about Cat and her cause. He had never thought about it in those terms before. Family. Flaherty & Associates was kinda like a family. They were a sorority of wounded souls, bound together by their pain. Everyone working here had been hurt, assaulted, denigrated and minimalized in some way. Catrina had built a safe haven for these outcasts. She had invited him to be part of it.
He hadn’t been fair to her. He had tried to compartmentalize his life, to keep work separate from his personal life. Catrina didn’t see it that way. She demanded one-hundred percent of his life.
What could he say?
“Cat, there’s something else.” He held his breath. The explosion didn’t come.
Catrina didn’t say a word. She stared through him. Finally she nodded her head slightly.
“Chris. My best friend, Chris Hardwick.”
“I know about Chris. His father is Harry Hardwick”
“Chris is working for his dad.”
Catrina pushed her swivel chair back from her desk. “As a paralegal. Why? What does that have to do with anything?”
“He’s working on a case for his dad. I shouldn’t be telling you this. He probably violated attorney-client privilege when he told me.”
Catrina just stared at him.
“”They’re working for Terry Metcalf. Metcalf is getting ready for the suit that he thinks Alison is going to file against him.”
Catrina exhaled a long breath. “Get the hell out of here. I need to think about this.”
Chapter 23
Ted hadn’t heard another word from Catrina all day. He didn’t know if he still had a job or not. It was probably best if he kept up the investigation. Suddenly, it was immensely important to him not to let his boss down.
He parked the white delivery van in front of a well landscaped two-story house in the fashionable Redmond neighborhood. He had carefully selected this house.
This time he had selected Eastside Plumber signs for the van.
Sliding out of the driver’s seat, he crouched over and made his way to the back of the van. His lap top was on a shelf along the sidewall. He pulled up a chair, took the lid off of his Starbucks cup and made himself comfortable. This might be a long night.
He booted the laptop and searched for wireless networks. As on several previous evenings, he saw “The Dragon’s Lair” on the list of available home networks. Somehow, the name seemed appropriate for Richard Freeman’s wireless network.
It suited Ted’s sense of irony to hack into Freeman’s network. The real question was, what in the hell was Freeman thinking? He, of all, people should know the vulnerabilities of a wireless network. Ted had to admit that the password had been tough to crack, he wondered why his attempts didn’t set off alarms, but eventually he got it.
By now, Ted had the drill down. He opened a VPN into the Millennium Systems network and logged in as “sysadmin.” He poked around. Something was different. The IP addresses he had used before didn’t respond.
He ran a quick survey and found that the network had been totally re-addressed. It didn’t take long to find the Finance sub-net. He quickly broke through the firewall and started scanning the file systems.
It dawned slowly on Ted. Something wasn’t quite right. This wasn’t like the last time. It was too easy. Why were MS’s defenses so weak? They were a world-class technology company. And the server count, there had to be less than two hundred. That was more like a mid-size company than one of the largest computer companies in the world. He would have expected to see thousands of servers.
Caramba! Maybe this baboso Freeman wasn’t as stupid as he looked. Ted tried pushing past the servers he could see. Where were all of the other corporate servers? He had been in HR before, but it didn’t look anything li
ke this. He couldn’t find the files he had copied from the Finance servers before.
“Shit. It’s a trap.”
Ted hit the power button on his laptop and shut it down.
“They’re on to me.” How long had he been logged in? Could they have traced him? And what would they have learned?
Only that Richard Freeman was hacking into their network. That would give the SOB something to think about in the morning.
But the important question was, why were they waiting for him? Had they discovered his previous intrusions or was this just a new security effort.
He needed to talk to someone about honey pots. Bear. He’d give Bear a call in the morning. Bear would know how to deal with this.
Ted slid back into the driver’s seat and started the van. He put it in gear and pulled away from the curb. As he turned the corner, the lights on a dark Dodge Charger came on. The Dodge turned the corner and followed Ted at a distance.
****
“Saddle up, Higurea. I need backup.” Catrina stormed across the office, hardly slowing down to shout at Ted. Did this mean he was forgiven?
She was in her Wonder Woman outfit. Black jeans, black boots. Ted loved the black turtleneck sweater that showed off her rack. What he didn’t love was the Glock nine mil strapped to her waist.
“Hold on, Cat. Where’s the fire?”
“We’re working tonight. Jessie Madison.” Catrina grabbed the emergency kit with first aid supplies, food, water and teddy bears as she headed towards the door. “Her husband beat her again. We’re doing an extraction tonight when he goes to work.”
She was gone. Ted stood and stared at the door a minute.
“You better get a move on, Mr. Higuera.” Abeba put her hand on Ted’s shoulder. “Mrs. Flaherty doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”
Hacker For Hire (Ted Higuera Series Book 2) Page 20