Willow Glen Heist

by Alec Peche

  There was a silence for a few minutes, than Ariana said, “I can’t think of another solution. We’ll do that. Hermione, I’ll be back to pick you up at 4:30, don’t leave the safety of the campus unless you see me. If your practice is going to get cut short call me immediately. Okay Hermione?”

  “Ok,” said the worried teenager.

  “Look Hermione, we’ll keep you safe. You know that Damian has magical abilities in regards to defense, right?”

  “Yeah, but maybe we should call the police to catch the guy that tried to harm you, Ariana.”

  “We talked about that dear, but Damian and I love caring for you, and we don’t want to do anything that would risk our guardianship. Don’t worry, just work hard this afternoon to win a spot on the water polo team.”

  The kid nodded and jumped out of the car, returning to school. Ariana watched until she disappeared into the library. Then she looked in her rear view mirror for the car that followed her earlier, but she only saw other parents or teachers in the vicinity. She put the car in gear and headed back to her house.

  “Let’s take your boat back to my house since it’s bigger,” Damian said. “I have a bunch of gadgets and equipment that I need to bring back to rig your house up. I think we have just enough time for me to load supplies before we return to pick up Hermione. Once we pick her up, then the two of you can pack for a stay on my island while I beef up your house. This is going to delay some other things in my life, but your safety is paramount.”

  “Do you think I should hire security for the house? Get a guard?”

  “Let me put my enhancements in place first, then you can think about that decision.”

  Ariana nodded and chewed on her lip. Things had been going so well. She wanted the relaxed and carefree life of the summer that she’d had with Hermione. Now she felt she’d be looking over her shoulder all the time.

  Damian was thinking along similar lines. How to keep them secure, but not confine their movement? Was the man that followed Ariana related to the person that posted on Facebook, or the group behind the attack in Mexico at the start of the summer? He was conflicted on what to do first - find the man that accosted Ariana or set up all the protections on Ariana’s house. In the end, he decided to set up the protections on Ariana’s house first.

  Chapter 9

  Ariana and Damian were waiting for Hermione after water polo practice. She looked relieved to see both of them in the car at the curb. Her hair was wet and she was carrying her swim bag in one hand and her backpack in the other.

  “So how was practice? Was it anything like what we practiced at home?” Ariana asked.

  “It went well and I’m sure I’m going to make the team. The hints you gave me when we played served to give me more strategy then my teammates. With that many girls in the water, I got kicked a fair amount so I’m sure I’ll have bruises for this entire season. Did you get all the security set-up, Damian?”

  “No, it will take me a while. I don’t think we mentioned it earlier, but Ariana got a picture of the man that chased her and I also want to work on identifying who he is, so I’ll be alternating between the two activities over the next couple of days. You’ll stay on the island until I have everything in place at Ariana’s house. We’ll both escort you to and from school this week. At the end of it, Ariana will make the call as to whether to hire on- site security as well.”

  “There are a couple of kids in my school that get delivered by private security. Their parents are very rich but I’ve never heard of them and they’re very paranoid about their safety. They don’t get to play on any of the sports teams.”

  “Do they want to play or are they just not sports-minded, so it’s no sacrifice?” Damian asked curious about the other kids.

  “I don’t know them well enough to know. Neither of them is in my grade, so I’ll likely never know.”

  “Well kiddo, you and I and Miguel are going to pack our bags to stay at Damian’s for three to five days. We need to not discuss what we’re doing while we’re in the house because of the microphones.”

  “Did you check this car as well for spy devices,” Hermione asked.

  Ariana looked stricken and put her hand over her mouth while Damian laughed out loud and said, “She didn’t ask me to, but yes I checked for bugs and there weren’t any on the car.”

  “Whew,” Ariana said wiping her brow.

  Hermione grinned in the back seat and said to Damian, “You’ll have to give me instructions on how to care for Bailey and Bella. I think I’m supposed to get them fish fresh each day. Do you cook it for them?”

  “Yes, I don’t know why since they eat barely dead seafood all the time, but it’s a habit.”

  “Okay, I’ll fish for them every day. So we’re going to go home and pack in silence then head across to Damian’s house and we can talk again on the boat or by text, right?”

  She got nods of agreement from Ariana and Damian. Mostly, it seemed like an adventure. She didn’t know why, but she actually felt safer with these two than with her own parents. Perhaps it was Damian’s ingenuity that gave her such a sense of security. Her parents relied on secrecy and the safe rooms, while Damian deployed weapons that hurt rather than killed people, thus insuring their safety.

  They arrived in Ariana’s neighborhood and Damian scanned her house for heat sources and it was clear. They parked the car in the garage, shutting the door upon entry to the house. As planned, the two women packed while Damian wondered around the house looking at its present security system, making a list of things he planned to install to make it difficult to get into Ariana’s house. He’d probably need to leave a bug scanner at her house, so she could frequently check for surveillance.

  Within fifteen minutes they were heading across the bay to Damian’s home. He would change the sheets on his bed for Ariana and Hermione fortunately already had her room. Pulling out clothes and toiletries, he packed for a few days at her house. Since the house was already wired for security, he could put some fun enhancements on it to dissuade anyone from entering. Specifically, he planned to electrify the door knobs so that anyone touching them from the outside would get a nice electrical jolt. He wanted to get to work, so after securing their comfort on his island home, he took Ariana’s boat across the bay to her dock. As he was bouncing on the waves, he was debating putting the cover on the boat. That was the normal way to take care of the boat and fog would be rolling in later which would cover it in moisture. However if he needed a quick getaway, messing around with a boat cover would waste valuable time. He decided he needed to plan for the quick getaway and would place a beach towel over the steering wheel and pilot seat.

  He’d again checked the house before docking and there were no human heat sources around. He studied Ariana’s backyard area from the dock looking for the perfect hidey-hole for the boat key. He wanted it close to the boat, but not visible. If he had to run, the last thing he wanted to worry about was a looking for a key. Of course he could hot wire a boat, but he’d be long dead by the time he completed the circuit to start the motor.

  Next, he knew he had to work on the house security rather than searching the internet for a facial match to Ariana’s thug. Perhaps it was fortunate that he had set up a security system for Natalie several months ago when she was under attack from the Aryan Brotherhood. That experience gave him ideas on what to do to enhance Ariana’s home. Starting with her property perimeter, he developed an early detection system that would sound the alarm whenever someone more than one hundred pounds or taller than four feet crossed onto her property. That way if Miguel was outside, he wouldn’t trigger the alarm.

  Before he escorted the ladies over to his island, he had set up a recording device for all of the hidden camera locations and taped three hours of footage. He left the lights on for the recording as he didn't have time to duplicate a full twenty-four hours. He could only hope that whoever planted the devices didn't look at them in the middle of the night and wonder why the room was brightly lit
but empty. He then diverted the cameras to the recorded coverage rather than the live picture. Once he had the feed going he got to work inside the house with a few modifications. Rather than building safe rooms for Ariana and Hermione, he instead put defensive devices in the house. Ariana could disable the entire system or just parts of it when home. Starting with the doors, he electrified the outside doorknobs.

  When they vacationed in Cozumel, he had set up buckets of pepper juice inside the front door colored with red dye. It was great for stopping and staining the bad guy, but it had made a mess of the interior of their rented home. This time, he put the buckets on the outside with a failsafe to prevent anyone exiting the house from getting splashed in case Ariana forgot to disarm the system before leaving. So anyone coming in through the door would get a jolt of electricity and be trenched in pepper juice. The cool thing about that was it disabled the thug from running away as they were temporarily blinded.

  Outside Hermione and Ariana’s bedroom doors, which were on the second level of the house, he studied what to do. The hallway was tiled and the ceiling was smooth; what kind of booby trap could he build that wasn’t in the immediate peripheral vision of the thug? He decided to place a net in a quick release sling that would be triggered by anyone entering at least three feet into the hallway to the bedrooms. He also stashed pepper juice-filled water pistols in every room, so the ladies could defend themselves at any moment.

  It was approaching midnight when he felt confident that he’d done everything possible to protect the ladies and contain any thugs that dared to break in. It was time to go to bed and wait for the ladies to arrive in the morning. He went to sleep with mixed emotions, on one hand he wanted someone to try breaching his system that night as a test, and on the other he wanted a good night’s sleep in a strange bed. His latter wish won out as he had a quiet night.

  After he and Ariana took Hermione to school that morning, he proceeded to show Ariana the details of his security enhancements. Since he was fond of pepper juice as a way to keep the criminals away, she expected it would be somewhere in his protection scheme. Due to the length of her driveway, the postman was safe from Damian’s gadgets. Deliveries were another story and she’d have to make sure she picked up any deliveries for the foreseeable future. Damian planned to spend the night at Ariana’s house just to make sure they knew how to operate his system and then they could go back to their normal living situation.

  Damian went home to his island to get some work done with the plan to return to pick Hermione up from school. The top of his to-do list was finding the identity for the man who had attacked Ariana. He hadn’t found the man in his run through the facial recognition system. He decided he didn’t want to waste any more time so he tapped into the passport system. He pulled data on every active passport and anyone that entered the United States in the last two years.

  He did a facial recognition search and came up with ten matches. It looked like the ten were in reality four people that had entered the United States on different passports. To be fair their appearance was changed by hair and beards, but the bone structure remained the same. He reviewed the home country of each entrant trying to see a tie with Hermione’s parents. None of the ten passports represented Columbia or China, two countries that Hermione mentioned the family lived in. There were two Canadians, two Mexicans, and six faces of other countries. It could be coincidence the one man seemed to have entered on multiple passports, or Damian’s eyesight might be wrong; the computer said these ten faces were possible matches, but to his eye some of the ten faces were the same face. Wasn’t there a saying that everyone had a twin somewhere in the world?

  He sat back and thought some more. Maybe he could trace the car? He pulled up the picture to see if the license plate was in view and it wasn’t. All he could see was the word “California” at the bottom edge of Ariana’s picture. He focused in on the car’s windshield looking for identifying stickers or maybe the VIN, but again he found nothing. Ariana had said the man had an accent, but she’d been unable to identify what kind of accent. He dropped her an email outlining the results of his research so far, including the countries represented by the passports and asked if the man’s accent might have represented any of the countries. She replied shortly that it might have been six of the ten countries with ‘might’ being the operative word. Damian decided it was a lost cause and gave up on the idea.

  He hadn’t spoken to Natalie in nearly three days which was unusual when they were in the midst of a case. He wondered how her meeting had gone with Detective Shimoda. Sometimes she forgot to update him when she got lost in thinking of strategies for identifying the bad guys. She called him shortly after receiving his email with an apology and the exact explanation that Damian had suspected.

  “What did the detective say about the pattern of sales on eSale?”

  “He was going to obtain a subpoena to get the seller data. The judge he wanted to tap was away until today, so I expect to hear any moment that he has it.”

  “Who’s going to serve it and what’s the turnaround time?”

  “Good question. Since this is a cold case, we’ll have a hard time requesting eSale turn over the information within twenty-four hours. I expect they’ll be given at least a month to comply.”

  “I get your reasoning but that seems like a long time. With the programmers they have, they could write a program and hand over the names and addresses of the sellers within about two hours.”

  “I suppose you could get the information in that same amount of time?” Natalie asked.

  “For eSale alone, yes. If you include the other major sites it will run me an hour for each site. I could legally run you a report with the sellers and the states or countries eSale says they reside in. That information is available to the public.”

  “Even for some old sales like these? Suppose I sold stolen jewelry five years ago and I never put a second item for sale on the website. Would you still find me in a public list of sellers?”

  “I think so. Hold on a minute while I try,” Damian said and Natalie heard keyboard keys clacking in the background. “Yes, anyone of average computer skill could reach that information. It doesn’t give you any more information than name and location, but it’s a starting point. For your subpoena I would ask eSale to turn over the names, addresses, banking information, and how many items they sold.”

  “I’ll let Detective Shimoda know about your request, meanwhile my brilliant UC Berkeley students providing free computer skills will compose a list for me to go to work on. Thanks!”

  “You’re welcome. I’ll get you that list in an hour or so.”

  They ended the call and Damian thought, “I would never have made it as a cop. I lack the patience to do things legally when I can get the answers so much faster by illegally accessing computer systems.’ He also knew that the kind of power he had in regards to computers could be used in the most corrupt manner possible destroying financial systems worldwide or causing chaos in major systems like airline reservations, but that was not who he was. He felt like he had a duty to police the cyber world and use his skills to bring down criminals. Helping Natalie fulfilled some of this urge of his to use the cyber world against criminals.

  Chapter 10

  Damian provided Natalie with the list as promised and then sat back a few minutes to think about the case. The data run he provided Natalie was helpful, but he felt that given the success of this bank robber, the authorities were underestimating the robber’s technique to pull off the heist. How else could he approach the case? Then he gave himself a little slap to the side of his head.

  Angus Walsh. Why hadn’t he thought of him before now? Then he knew the answer; it was his distraction concerning Hermione and Ariana’s safety. Angus was a man who’d spent over twenty years behind bars before being released after new technology proved his innocence. He was good with computers and Damian had met the man at Pete’s Bar when he was searching for help to understand the Aryan Brotherhood’s b
ehavior on a previous case. Angus belonged to the gang in prison, but through some of the finest acting ever, had managed never to participate in their violent schemes. His photographic memory ensured that he remained untouched once he was released. Damian had hired him for his new company which he now admitted he hadn’t paid any attention to since his return due to his focus on Hermione.

  Checking his watch, he decided it was a good time to cross the bay and visit his company which was located in a warehouse in Richmond. When he’d taken time off for the vacation to Australia, he added the additional day for Hermione’s first day of school. Now he was overdue at the office. He could be forgiven for this slipping his mind as this was the first time he owned a company. Prior to this, he was his own inventor with his own timeline. Now he was funding his small company with his own personal wealth and he had engineers working on ideas that had languished under his sole attention.

  Thirty minutes later he was walking in the door of the warehouse that Ariana had found for him. It was far larger than they needed for the start of the company, but he did not want the technologies his company was pursuing to be limited by the lack of space for experimentation. He had installed high security fearing the theft of his technology and to keep any neighborhood kids from getting into trouble if they broke into the building and unknowingly touched any of the equipment that was dangerous in ignorant hands.

  After passing a series of locked doors with card keys, fingerprint and retina scans, he entered the large room to find Angus, Haley and Chris at work at their respective work counters. Haley had taken over Damian's wave energy generator since he’d been stuck on the storage aspect of the energy. She was also working with Angus on the drone guidance. At the moment he could see that it was crashing into fake buildings. Yes, that needed a little more work. He looked over to where Chris was working on his line of self-defense items. Damian designed a polymer that he used to coat a water gun. Once the polymer was in the water gun, then the user could fill it with water or in Damian’s case with pepper juice. He planned to sell the items as self-defense weapons and he was looking at other devices that could contain his patented pepper juice. His current pepper juice guns were made by a common toy water gun company. If he wanted to sell them worldwide, he needed to engineer his own mold for the polymer, design machinery to make lots of plastic guns, and have a quality control process. As yet he hadn’t decided whether to also sell his patented pepper juice. There would be significant shipping restrictions on such a product. He might just grow the peppers and sell them along with a recipe. There was plenty of time to decide some of these issues.