by Camy Tang
“Horatio was talking to Alex when you called, so I tagged along.” He nodded toward where the detective had gone to speak to Becca. “Twice in one day, huh?”
Rachel gave him a rueful look. “Poor man. He’s tired of our demanding family.”
“You need to stop having crimes at the spa,” Edward said.
“This time it wasn’t at the spa, but it did involve a Grant.”
Horatio approached Naomi. “Let’s go to your office and you can tell me what happened,” he said.
They all trooped back into Naomi’s office, and she talked about the man grabbing her laptop and hesitating.
“He looked surprised?” Edward asked. “Are you sure?”
Naomi nodded.
“Surprised at what?”
“He looked surprised at Naomi,” Devon said.
“As if he was expecting someone else?” Edward asked. “As if he were expecting to see Rachel?”
Silence for a brief moment, during which Rachel’s face paled and the pulse in her throat picked up its pace.
“Rach was carrying the laptop when it was first stolen,” Naomi said.
“And I was with you when you bought it earlier that day,” Rachel added. “They might have thought the laptop was mine…if someone were watching us.” She shivered.
“But it was new, so it didn’t have any information on it,” Naomi said. “And they returned it.”
“With that bogus note,” Becca said bitterly. “And I told you not to call the police. I’m such an old fool.”
“Aunt Becca, we all thought it was a wayward teen,” Rachel said.
“So they returned the laptop and gave you a week or so to load more information on it,” said Devon. “Then tried to take it again. But when the man saw Naomi, he was surprised because he’d thought the laptop was Rachel’s.”
Edward stared hard at the laptop case on Naomi’s desk. “But how did he know you’d be in San Francisco today? Especially if he thought the computer was Rachel’s?” He unzipped the case and removed the computer.
“You’re not going to take it apart, are you?” Becca asked.
“No, I wouldn’t dare. Although if you want Alex to do it…”
“I might,” Naomi said, ignoring Becca’s head shake.
Edward searched the case. It was a simple padded case, made of tough, cheap canvas and synthetic materials. When the laptop had been returned, he hadn’t thought to examine the case closely. After all, they’d thought it had been a kid forced to return it.
He looked to Naomi. “Do you have a utility knife?”
She nodded and rummaged in her desk drawer.
“Shouldn’t Horatio do that?” Becca asked.
“Go ahead, Edward,” the detective said.
Edward took the utility knife and gently ripped open the seams of the laptop case. He pulled out the polyester stuffing carefully, followed by the foam padding.
And then he saw it.
A small electronic device. Alex could have probably identified it easily. And it definitely did not belong in the laptop case, hidden among the stuffing.
“What is that?” Rachel peered at it as Edward laid it on Naomi’s desk.
“A GPS tracker?” Devon guessed. “That’s how they knew the laptop would be in San Francisco.”
“But not that it would be Naomi carrying it and not Rachel,” Edward finished.
Horatio looked at Devon. “Did the man have anyone else with him?”
“After I tackled him and he let go of Naomi, he took off. I chased him, but he got into the passenger side of a car waiting on the other side of the street. The car took off pretty fast, so he at least had another person driving for him.”
“Did you get a license plate?”
“No.”
“Make and model?”
Devon glanced at Rachel. “Blue Ford Taurus.”
Edward had been expecting the answer, but it still made him clench his teeth.
“We filed a complaint with the San Francisco police,” Naomi said. “We also told them about the man trying to get into the labs, and we told them to speak to you about the outside video-surveillance tapes we gave to you.”
“I looked at the tapes,” Horatio said. “They didn’t get a good picture of the man. He deliberately kept his head down. But we have a description of his height and weight.”
Rachel was still staring at the electronic device. “They wanted the laptop because they wanted my formula,” she said softly.
“You’ve taken precautions to protect your lab and computer, Dr. Grant?” asked Horatio.
She nodded. “My cousin Jane looked over my computer a few days ago, and I have a new lock on my office door.”
“But we need to fix the card-key lock to the lab,” Becca said.
Edward frowned. “The lab door lock is broken?”
“Not broken,” Rachel said. “The man who tried to get in tampered with the card-key pad and now sometimes it takes a few tries before the door unlocks.”
“I would suggest you take care of that as soon as possible,” Horatio said. “These people are getting bolder. They’ve shown their faces—this one man, at least—and they’ve escalated to attacking you in broad daylight.”
“What will they try to do next?” Becca cried. She placed her arms around Rachel, her face crumpled in fear for her niece.
“We’ll get him,” Horatio promised, his voice growling in conviction. Detective Carter typically had a mild demeanor, but his steely eyes always reminded Edward that he could be very dangerous, which made him a good cop.
But Rachel turned a sober expression to the detective. Edward couldn’t blame her—Horatio’s determination alone couldn’t protect her.
So Edward would try to take up the slack.
Their relationship was undefined at this point, and he still wasn’t sure about her faith, but he couldn’t fight the need to help her anymore than he could fight gravity. He’d sort out his feelings later, at a more quiet moment. Right now, the danger seemed to be circling closer and faster.
Rachel’s lips thinned as she stared at the shredded laptop case, the electronic device that Detective Carter was even now storing away in an evidence bag. At the same time, her hands and shoulders shook, and she clenched her arms around herself as if to keep from flying apart.
“Come on,” Becca said, tugging at her arm. “Let’s get you home.”
“No.” She said it quietly, but with a thread of steel that somehow reminded Edward of her father.
Becca tilted her head. “Rachel, you’re exhausted. We all are. Let’s go home, get some dinner—”
“No, I can’t.” She lifted her chin as she faced her aunt. “I can’t do anything about this, but I can at least devote more time and energy to figuring out exactly what information they did steal from my computer.”
Naomi shook her head. “Rach, it’s late.”
But Rachel was shaking her head, too. “I’ve been going through the archived files slowly, but after this attack on you…” Her shoulders heaved once. Twice. “I haven’t been spending enough time going through those files. I have to do a more exhaustive search—and the sooner, the better.”
Becca gave Edward a worried glance. “But Edward will have to wait, too.”
Rachel turned to him. “Why don’t you go home, and I’ll call you when I need a ride? Or if it’s late, I can ask one of the security guards to drive me.”
“No,” he insisted. “No matter what time it is, call me.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.” He would be there for her. And maybe make up for the time he had spent trying to stay aloof from her. He hadn’t understood her at all.
“I have to do this, Aunt Becca.” Rachel took her aunt’s hand. “I have to. I need to keep busy.”
Becca’s mouth opened and closed silently, but Naomi seemed to understand, and she gently steered her aunt out of the office. “Devon and I will take you home, Aunt Becca. It’s almost time for the spa to close, any
way.”
“It’s actually a good thing I’ve shut down the lab,” Rachel said to Edward as the detective followed them into the hallway.
“Aside from the question about Stephanie’s innocence?” Edward asked.
“It gives me time to search my files. I’m determined, Edward.” Her eyes were fierce. “Thirty-six hours from now, I’m determined to know exactly what Steve stole from my computer. It’s got to be more than just the defunct diamond-dust project.”
At thirty-seven hours and twelve minutes, she still hadn’t figured it out.
She’d stayed at the lab around the clock, catching a couple hours’ rest in a sleeping bag on the floor of her office. She’d read all the archived files of various project notes from the day of the computer hack and found no mention of the basil plant or the scar-reduction-cream formula.
Which she probably should consider a good thing, because it implied that Steve hadn’t gotten any information about the project when he stole the files off her computer. But there was still the niggling suspicion that she was missing something. That he had stolen something vital to do with the scar-reduction cream, or else why go through the effort to trash the greenhouse and steal three basil plants? If a rival company were starting from there, they were already too far behind. They must have had a better reason than to play catch-up.
She glanced at the clock, surprised that it was already almost ten o’clock in the morning. She hadn’t had more than a cup of coffee since she got up from a short nap around five.
She jolted when her office phone blared. “Hello?”
“Hi, Dr. Grant. It’s Stephanie.”
“Hi, Stephanie. Is everything okay?” Why would she be calling her?
“Everything’s fine. I’m sorry to bother you, but I might have left my cell phone in my desk at work—I’ve been using Mom’s cell phone since I noticed it missing.”
“Oh. Did you want me to get it for you?”
“The thing is, I’m not positive I left it there. I’ve looked everywhere for it, and it’s the only place I haven’t tried yet.”
“Have you tried calling it? I haven’t heard it ring.”
“I always put it on silent when I do experiments, because I don’t want the ringing to distract me if I’m doing some sensitive pipetting.”
That’s true, and Rachel appreciated Stephanie’s conscientiousness about her work performance. “Stephanie, I have the lab on shutdown.”
“I know, and I’m sorry to have to ask you, but would you be able to let me in to look?”
Rachel didn’t want to do it. But how to tell Stephanie without being outright mean and suspicious?
“I promise, Dr. Grant, you won’t even need to come out of your office. If you have the security guards open the card-key door for me, I’ll look through my desk and then leave.”
Rachel didn’t really like suspecting Stephanie—after all, the girl had worked for her for two years and had told her about being offered money to steal her formulation. Plus she could just have one of the guards escort Stephanie so she wouldn’t be alone in the lab with her. “Okay, I’ll tell the guards you’re coming by.”
“Thanks, Dr. Grant. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
Rachel told Martin about Stephanie’s visit and asked him to escort her. Only then could she relax a bit and continue looking through the file currently open.
She must be more tired than she realized—her eyes were wigging out as they stared at the monitor. She closed them tightly, rubbing gently, then opened them again. No, the screen was still jiggling and flipping files….
Wait. She wasn’t seeing things—it really was flipping through files.
Was she being hacked again?
Her heart squeezed painfully in her chest, and at the same time her brain seemed to expand, taking in every file, identifying it as it passed off the screen. Her fingers shook as she dialed Jane’s number. “Jane, my computer screen is going crazy.”
“Are you sure—”
“And I know it’s not because I’ve been working too hard. I can see my files popping up, one after another.”
“Rachel,” Jane barked, “remember the shutdown procedure I told you to do?”
“Uh…yes.”
“Do it now!”
She did. Striking shortcut keys, unplugging certain cords and wires Jane had labeled especially for her. Every quarter when Jane updated her security system, she had drilled the procedure into Rachel over and over again so that her hands would do things automatically if she ever had to shut down her computer this way.
Adrenaline started to kick in, shaking through her hands, drumming wildly in her heart, sizzling in her veins. How dare someone do this…how dare someone try to invade her research…how dare someone attack her here….
The computer went dead with a protesting cry. “Jane, it’s done.”
“I’m on my way.”
Rachel sagged back in her chair, breathing as heavily as if she’d biked a race. Then she pushed away from the dark monitor. She couldn’t look at it. She wanted to rage. She wanted to dissolve into tears.
The office seemed quiet without the computer softly humming in the background. Quiet and dark, since she didn’t have any windows to the outside. The sun would be shining fitfully through the late-fall chill in the air, gilding the rosebushes surrounding the spa.
She should go out to the gardens and walk around, clear her head.
No, was she stupid? Someone had broken into her bedroom. Someone had tried to hit her on her bike. She was a target, and targets didn’t go roaming around spa gardens, even if it was the middle of the morning.
Plus, she still didn’t feel she’d figured out what had been stolen. She must be missing something. But the only way to find out for sure would be to look through all the raw data files she had archived, and while she’d glanced through some of them, to go through them all would take days. Exhausting days.
But days she might have to spend. She didn’t know where else to look.
She sighed and spun around in her chair to get the computer monitor out of her field of vision, her eyes falling on the bookshelf with her lab notebooks lined up in rows.
Of course! She sat up in her chair. Why hadn’t she thought of those? She recorded her experiment notes by hand initially, and although she typically typed vital information when she wrote up the final reports on her experiments, sometimes she recorded findings in those books if she did small experiments that she wouldn’t write a formal report for or on research projects she hadn’t yet committed to pursuing as formal projects.
She fingered through them until she found the one she was working on at the time of Steve’s hack, and flipped through the pages.
At the time, she had suspected the diamond-dust cleanser project wasn’t going to work out, so she had been doing numerous last-ditch efforts to formulate a carrier lotion. But interspersed with those notes were jotted ideas for other projects she might pick up.
Including one for Reformorum. That sounded familiar. There, another notation, along with the word scars.
Then it suddenly hit her. When she’d talked with Aunt Becca’s missionary friend in Malaysia, Ellen had mentioned the basil species name Ocimum Reformorum, and Rachel had jotted it down. But it wasn’t until several weeks later when she had gotten the seeds, grown a couple plants and had them DNA-tested that she realized it had been the wrong species name—the plant species was actually Ocimum Redemptiorum.
When she searched her computer before, she had used the correct species name—Redemptiorum—and found the earliest use of that species name in her notes. But she must have been using the wrong species before that, and maybe she forgot to notate in the files when she discovered the correct one.
She paged through the notebook, paying attention to the dates, finding a few references here and there to the incorrect basil species.
No formulations. No chemical notations.
Just the wrong basil species name.
Stev
e had stolen the wrong basil species name.
So whoever hired Steve Schmidt to hack her computer perhaps had seen references to the scar-reduction cream in her files, but the references had probably had the wrong basil plant species. They could have been doing formulation experiments using the wrong strain of basil for several months—perhaps up to two years, since the day they got the illicit information. They must have finally realized that they had the wrong basil species, but instead of giving up on the project, they discovered she was still going forward with the basil plants in Edward’s greenhouse. They stole the correct plant from the greenhouse, but they had already lost months of research time with the wrong plant and it would be time-consuming starting over again to develop formulation with the new basil.
That meant they needed her formulation, which she’d perfected over the past two years, in order to launch their own scar cream. That’s why they’d been trying to get into the lab. That’s why they’d tried hacking into her computer today.
And if they sabotaged her scar-reduction-cream product launch, the market would be open for their own product. That explained the attack on the greenhouse, trying to destroy all her plants.
She sat, staring at the lab notebook, unsure how to feel. On one hand, she ought to be rejoicing because Steve obviously hadn’t stolen any formulation information. According to the notebook, she hadn’t yet started developing formulas at the time and didn’t begin those experiments until several weeks later.
But whoever paid Steve to get the information had found out about her scar-reduction cream and the properties of the basil.
But they’d also had the wrong basil species.
She glanced at the clock. Where was Jane? She wanted to look through her computer for the wrong basil species name to see what references popped up.
She heard the card-key door locks disengage.
“Hi, Dr. Grant,” Martin called to her.
“I’ll just be a second,” Stephanie said.
That’s right, Stephanie had said she was coming by. Rachel heard the sounds of Stephanie rummaging through her metal lab-desk drawers. Then soft footsteps approaching her office and a soft tap on her office door.