He said it like a Jedi would about the Force.
I pulled my PI license. Not that I needed to. But it paid to remind the locals I was actually qualified to snoop on their properties. “I’m on a job,” I said.
“Thought as much. Who you chasing?”
“No one you’d know,” I offered.
“I could help. We cover seventy-three percent of the holiday homes monitored in the region. We have eyes everywhere now.”
It sounded creepier than you’d have thought.
“Great,” I told him. “If you see something suspicious let the cops know.”
“A cop job,” he said, rubbing his hands together gleefully. Gossip was legitimate currency in Doubtless Bay. “Met the new detective, then?”
I grimaced. “Yeah. You?”
“Nah, it’s only been three days. There’s still time.”
Time for what, I didn’t know. I opened the door for Doug to get in the car and then saluted Stalker Stu.
“See ya around,” I told him.
“Not if I see you first,” he said and cackled.
Yeah, I didn’t need the Three Cees to feel creeped out. Stu could do that all on his own without even lifting a finger.
I slid into the Micra and turned up the air conditioning. It wasn’t as good as a hot shower, but I figured nothing could survive subarctic temperatures.
Doug let out a little whine and stuck his nose out the window, tasting the salty air and dreaming of warmer climes. I’d make it up to him once I was sure I was free of Stu germs.
A shiver danced down my spine.
Chapter 4
That Would Be Rude To Dogs Everywhere
The place where the electronic equipment had been stolen from last year was also now monitored by Stu’s security firm, so I decided a drive-by was the extent of any investigation I’d do for now. I popped my head out of the Micra’s open window and sniffed the air rather like Doug was doing out the other side. Nothing stuck out to me, nor did my neck offer any insight.
The crime was too long in the past or the location not relevant to what I needed to solve the current mystery. My intuition was pretty particular like that. I pulled my head back in the car and picked up speed. Next stop Mangonui.
As I drove past the Shimmering Sands Luxury Apartments, a tendril of something coarse ran across the back of my neck. My entire body went on alert, my heart beating out of my chest. It hadn’t been a fluffy white towel this time. Nothing soft and warm about it. This had been rough and hard, yet flexible. And had smelled decidedly like wet fish. Doug whimpered and licked the side of my neck. Not exactly where the sensation had left goosebumps, but close enough to make me shudder.
I wasn’t ready to face the Shimmering Sands Luxury Apartments yet. I still needed a better understanding of what I was dealing with. And if the fluffy towel from earlier was anything to go by, whoever had managed to infiltrate Mr Big Wig’s holiday rental had done so through the laundry service. Doubtless Bay had one laundry service available to the more expensive accommodation options.
I’d track down Danvers’ suspect there and worry about the coarse brush across my neck afterwards. Or not at all. I liked that idea best.
I pulled the Micra into the carpark out the front of the laundromat. There was one of those obnoxious graffiti covered rental camper vans parked in the front and about three cars and a delivery truck out the back. It was the back half of the operation I wanted to visit, but approaching through the front portion would allow my nerves to settle some.
I couldn’t take Doug inside, so I left him tied to a post out front, pouring half a bottle of water into a travel bowl I kept in the car. He started lapping away merrily as I stepped into the laundromat.
A tourist was pulling towels out of one of the driers. I didn’t get a nefarious feeling off her, so I smiled when she smiled and stepped through the door to the back. The scent of detergent and a waft of steam came toward me. The sound of heavy duty washing machines churned away in the background. I glanced around the space, trying to spot an unfamiliar face, but the chances of the perpetrator still working here were pretty slim.
They’d got what they wanted; I doubted they’d still be hanging around Doubtless Bay for the stunning scenery.
Mr Huang shuffled out of the back office, yelling something in Mandarin to his wife or sons, it was hard to tell which. Several sweat bedraggled women stood off to the side emptying wash basins or folding linen. The old man caught sight of me and offered a toothless grin.
“Summer, Summer, Summer,” he said shuffling closer. “You bring me laundry?”
“Not today, Mr Huang,” I said.
“Then you in market for new sheets,” he said, nodding his head to himself. He turned mid-stride and went to a stack of well-worn sheets, reaching into the back for the best ones. Mr Huang always placed his best used sheets at the back. He thought no one knew he did this. “I have white and green,” he told me. “You like green.”
Clearly, the white weren’t up to snuff.
I resigned myself to a purchase of used sheets. If I got a GST receipt, I could write them off as a work expense. And use them on Doug’s bed and not mine or my guests’.
“You feel,” he said, running arthritic old hands across the surface of the uppermost sheet. “Soft. Fluffy.”
I touched the sheet and felt my neck prickle. Not towels. Sheets. The perp had handled bed linen.
“These are nice,” I said. “Where are they from?”
“That place in Cable Bay. What’s it called? Something Sands.”
“Shimmering Sands,” I said, feeling cautiously optimistic for a clue in the Huang’s establishment.
“Yes. Yes. That’s the one. Changed from green to white last summer.”
My perp hadn't touched these sheets, then, but that didn’t make me feel any less hopeful.
“You do them, too, now,” I said. “You’re getting big.”
“Big, bigger, best,” he offered, grinning. A child could get lost in those gaps.
“How many people have you got working for you now?” I asked, still stroking the sheets and feeling like a linen pervert for it.
“I take on more for summer, Summer.” He cackled. “Want a job?”
I smiled at him and picked up the sheets. “Not this year, Mr Huang.” He asked me the same thing every year. He told me he thought I had good hands for laundry.
I thought perhaps he wanted to see me in a wet t-shirt.
“Who did you take on last?” I asked him. “Surely you’re covered.”
“You’d think so, eh? Unemployment high in Northland. But oh no! Too good for laundry.”
“Who’s too good for laundry?”
“That boy. You know the one. He one of many. Too many to count.”
My stomach flopped over unattractively. I knew of one family of boys in the area with too many sons to count who could act as though they were too good for anything and still have to steal for their supper.
“Which one, Mr Huang?” I said.
“Dan. Sam. No. What he called?” He rattled off a series of words in Mandarin to his wife. I couldn’t see Mrs Huang. You usually didn’t. She hid herself away out the back filing. Or so she said. She could have been doing anything out in the back office. The detergent they used in here hid a multitude of sins. Or scents.
No wonder a Rika brother had worked here.
“Mikey,” Mrs Huang shouted.
Yeah, Dan, Sam; I could see where Mr Huang got confused on that one.
“Mikey,” he translated for me with a big toothless smile.
Ah, crud. Tia’s favourite. The youngest Rika brother.
I stared down at the stooped form of Mr Huang and said. “I guess it’s hard to get good help.”
He snorted. “I no hire local again.”
I wasn’t sure that was a reliable business plan. Tourists tended to holiday here, not swing by for a job in the local laundromat.
“And Mikey was your only recent hire?” I chec
ked.
“Trial,” he said. “Not doing that again. My girls work extra hard now to cover.”
While his sons played dou dizhu out back.
“Good to know,” I told the old man and handed over a tenner for the sheets.
“You want receipt?” he asked. I could have kissed him. Even without all those teeth.
Two minutes later I was one set of used commercial grade green sheets heavier, ten bucks lighter, and a whole lot knotted up in the stomach. The Rikas were branching out, but what could a bigwig have that the local pot cultivators could want?
I needed to know who Big Wig was fast and I needed to find out without tipping Detective Douche off to Tia’s brothers. I wasn’t above dobbing a Rika in if they truly needed it. But I also didn’t want to create friction for myself with Tia’s family. Or with Tia herself.
Best bud or not, I wasn’t sure our friendship would survive a false accusation. I needed proof. I needed info. I needed a donut.
But first, I needed to visit a man about a dog. No, that wasn’t right. I needed to visit Stan the Man about absolutely nothing to do with a dog and everything to do with video surveillance equipment.
It wasn’t cowardice; I told myself as I dealt with the slobber left in Doug’s bowl. Avoiding Tia wasn’t a lack of bravery on my part but self-preservation instead. Those Rikas possessed mean right hooks and an inclination to punch first; ask questions later.
Doug safely ensconced in the Micra, the water bowl cleaned with enough verbal accompaniment to put a sailor to shame, and the graffiti-covered camper van sneered at as I walked past, I was on my way to the only tech geek within a three-hundred kilometre radius.
Doubtless Bay was no Silicon Valley, but Stan Watanabe was definitely the gold wiring in a motherboard full of tin. And thankfully he’d never had a crush on Suzy in high school.
I rolled to a stop outside of a shack. There was no other word for the paint-peeled, rust-covered tin-roofed building at the back of his parents’ property. Mrs Watanabe had tried to hide the monstrosity with a row of bird of paradise plants. I applauded her choice of camouflage but acknowledged its futility. Not even the striking orange and blue of the flowers could take the eye away from the all that lopsided, weather-worn, turn of the twentieth-century homage to garden sheds.
Doug bounded out of the back of the car and tore off across the lawn. I let him have his wayward way with the abundant bushes and strode up to Stan’s door. A sign hung to one side with a skull and crossbones on it, warning all and sundry that poison was stored within the confines of the shack.
There was nothing of the sort stored inside Stan’s hideaway, but he made a point of downplaying his electronics prowess. The door opened before I reached his stoop and a shock of black hair sticking up in all directions appeared first around the doorjamb, followed by a frantic wave of a hand to indicate I was welcome into Stan’s inner sanctum.
The door slammed shut behind me, and Stan let out a slow breath of air as if he’d been holding it the entire time he’d held the door open for me.
“That was close,” he said and returned to his command chair.
“What was?” I asked, eyeing the multitude of LCD screens across one whole wall.
The room was clearly divided. One half housed Stan’s bed, wardrobe, camping fridge, hotplate and kettle. The other was nirvana to a Microsoft salesman. I couldn’t even name most of the gear Stan had in here.
“I’m being watched,” he told me, spinning his seat around and flicking through different screen views before him. Some were of his parents’ backyard. Some were of the inside of their house. But some were clearly not of the Watanabe’s property at all.
“Who’s watching you?” I demanded.
“The Man,” he said in all seriousness.
I studied the back of Stan’s head.
“You know what to do then,” I offered.
“Yeah. On it.” He flicked a switch, and a scene appeared on his main monitor screen.
I blinked at the police issued SUV parked across the street from Stan’s.
“That’s troubling,” I said.
“Yeah,” Stan agreed. “They’re on to me.”
“Have they reason to be on to you?”
“Of course. I see things. Things The Man would rather I didn’t.”
“Like what?” How many donuts they bought at the Coffee Cube?
“If I tell you, they’ll be after you too.”
Stan had a vivid imagination.
“Play it cool, man,” I told him.
“Will do,” he replied with grim determination.
I threw myself down on the only other available seat in Stan’s lair.
“We need a codename,” I said.
“I thought The Man was a codename.”
“Nah,” I said. “Too obvious. How about…Douche Patrol.”
He flicked dark eyes across the space to me.
“Douche Dude,” he offered.
“Douche Disease,” I countered.
“Douche Dog.”
“That would be rude to dogs everywhere.”
“I think I’ll stick with The Man.”
“OK,” I said. “You do what you gotta do.”
He smiled. Not much made Stan smile. Video games. Grilled cheese sandwiches. And being allowed to be who he needed to be without judgement.
“What brings you here, Summer?“ he asked, following Detective Douche’s progress up the Watanabe’s garden path.
“No doubt the same thing that brings The Man to your front door,” I told him.
He scowled at me as if I’d drawn a map for Danvers to Stan’s shack on purpose, betraying my friend and in the process making him have to face The Man.
There was no other reason for Detective Danvers to be at Stan’s home other than the case, though. Detective Pieters had been well aware of Stan’s abilities and would have left a note about it in some police file hidden somewhere. I was sure Pieters had been frustrated that Stan didn’t jump at the chance to help the boys in blue out when they asked. Danvers was following a lead even though he’d have known being here was not going to help things.
Stan had a healthy - or unhealthy; it depended on how you looked at it - distrust of government employees. If they wore a uniform, then watch out. Thankfully, for Detective Douche’s sake, he was a plain-clothed cop. Not that I was worried about his wellbeing or anything.
“What did you do, Summer?” Stan demanded.
“Nothing!” I automatically replied. “But someone nicked some surveillance gear last summer and used it to rip-off a holiday guest at the Shimmering Sands, and my guess is Detective Danvers wants to know how far away that person would need to be to get what they took.”
“What did they take?”
“I don’t know. Corporate stuff.”
He stared at me, perplexed.
“What type of corporate stuff? Data files? Code? Video? Was it intellectual property or sabotage? Did they drop a virus or malware? Or was it simply a snatch and grab? Both?”
“No idea.”
He huffed, clearly unamused at my lack of knowledge. We both watched the Detective talk to Mrs Watanabe on her front porch.
“How close would they need to be in order to snoop on someone staying at the Shimmering Sands?” I asked.
“Depends on what gear they used. I can snoop on the Shimmering Sands from here, and I’m over five kilometres away.”
“Don’t tell him that,” I said, nodding toward the screen where Danvers was being escorted around the main house into the backyard and toward Stan’s shed. Doug bounded out to great him and proceeded to slobber all over the detective’s boots.
I sniggered. Detective Douche made a fuss of my dog and won him over in five seconds flat. Traitor. My smirk turned into a scowl instead.
“My guess,” I said, watching the Detective’s progress with narrowed eyes, “was they used normal home security equipment. You know, outdoor/indoor wireless cameras, image sensors, motion sensors.
That sort of thing.”
“In that case, they’d need to be within a five-hundred metre radius otherwise a wifi booster would be required.”
“They might have had that,” I conceded. “But I doubt it. They used what was locally available.”
“Of course,” Stan said as Mrs Watanabe, Danvers and Doug approached the row of birds of paradise plants, “the gear would need to be that close, but they could be further away using a remote access app.”
I grimaced. I could just imagine Mikey down at the pub checking his cell phone for the right time to perform some B & E.
“But they’d have to be close to download anything?” I checked.
“Yeah, five-hundred metres or depending on the firewalls set up, right on top of the mainframe computer.”
Big Wig was a bigwig if Danvers’ red ear last night was anything to go by. And for Danvers to be spending part of the New Zealand Police’s budget on outside assistance to solve the crime, then something important was stolen. My guess: Big Wig’s firewalls were the best money could buy. The perp would have had to break into the property and directly download the data or files. The surveillance equipment was merely to watch for when Big Wig vacated the holiday home, and the laundry worker could add a side trip to his delivery service and slip into the apartment.
A lot of effort for corporate info.
A knock sounded out on Stan’s door.
“What do you want me to do, Summer?” he asked. Stan would lie for me. I knew that. If I asked him to keep Danvers in the dark, he would.
But just because Detective Douche might have been withholding case information from me didn’t mean I should from him.
I spun my chair around and faced the door.
“Invite the good detective in, Stan,” I said and grinned like a lunatic.
Chapter 5
Like A Monkey Who Had Performed An Impressive Trick
Detective Danvers stared at the row of LCD screens, each one showing different things. The centre and largest one had a video game playing. Spyro was doing something to the Tasmanian Devil I thought should be illegal in several countries. Others showed gaming websites, gamer videos, and game cheat sheets.
Chasing Summer Page 4