Cassie McGraw Box Set: Books 1-3

by David Archer

  Pennington looked at me. “It may be,” he said. “We finally got his military records yesterday afternoon, and this guy tested out as a bona fide genius. IQ over a hundred and fifty, and it turns out he’s highly skilled with computers, electronics, all kinds of technology. He’s an expert in demolitions, including improvised explosive devices, and with just about every kind of weapon they could train him for. In one of his evaluations, his commanding officer said that he viewed the world differently from everybody else. At the time, it made him a valuable member of his team. Later, they used the same comment against him when they kicked him out.”

  I shook my head. I don’t care how smart he was supposed to be, the things he was doing still didn’t add up to anything remotely logical. There was nothing at all that connected all of the different bombings and attempts that I could see.

  “You said you were going to have the crime scene people look at everything,” I said. “Did they come up with any ideas? See any clues?”

  “Not yet, but they haven’t given up. They’re pretty smart, themselves, so they might come up with something.”

  “Well, something more is going to happen. Danny says the next round starts within an hour or so, but I haven’t gotten any hints about passwords or anything. I guess the only thing we can do is wait and see.”

  Pennington nodded, and he left a few minutes later. Dex and I went into his office and sat there for a moment, and then I happened to glance at the clock. It was a little after ten, and I suddenly realized that I had an appointment coming in my office at eleven. I told Dex, gave him a kiss, and started walking around the block.

  I unlocked the door and walked inside, turned on the lights in the reception area, and went into my own office for a few minutes, getting the computer online and making sure it wasn’t too warm or cool. Everything seemed okay, so I went back out front and sat down at the reception desk.

  My client that day was Annette Anderson. I had only seen her a couple of times before the bombing of the Outreach, but she was one that I was particularly concerned about. Her husband Randy was a micromanager, a man who makes every decision in the marriage, even down to telling her what she can wear, how her hair must be arranged, and who she’s allowed to speak to. On those occasions when she had failed to do things exactly the way he wanted, he had beaten her severely. He had even broken a couple of her fingers and refused to allow her to have them seen by a doctor. As a result, they had grown crooked and caused her a lot of pain.

  In our first meeting, she had responded to Freda quite well. Hearing my story, she said, made her even more determined to escape her situation, but when she returned for the second meeting—when we were supposed to arrange for her to go to a shelter—her own fears had overcome that determination. She had begged me to simply let her come and talk to me from time to time, until she could get up the courage to try again, and I had agreed.

  To be honest, I had been surprised that she wanted to come to my new office at all. I had worried that the bombing might have made her afraid to even consider trying to escape again, but when I had called to tell her I was open for business, she had begged for an appointment right away. It had to be during the time when she knew her husband would be tied up on his job, and he was scheduled to be in Oklahoma City at ten thirty. That meant she had at least a couple of hours free, because he couldn’t even take or make calls when he was in one of his corporate meetings.

  A car stopped out front, and I looked through the window to see Annette step out of it. She stood beside the car for a moment, then turned and walked up to my door and pulled it open. I got to my feet and smiled as she stepped inside, and then I saw the tears streaming down her cheeks.

  “Annette,” I said, “what’s the matter?”

  She held out a hand to tell me to stay back, and the back of my neck started crawling again. I stopped where I was, and then she opened the light jacket she was wearing to show me the bomb vest that was underneath it. I stared at it for a second, then looked at the earpiece I knew I would see on her ear.

  “He says if you call anyone,” she said through her tears, “or if you try to leave the building, it goes off.”

  I nodded. “Come over here and sit down,” I said. I pulled one of the chairs closer to the desk, and waited until she sat down on it, then knelt down in front of her. “Give me the earpiece.”

  She reached up slowly and took it off, then passed it over to me. I put it on my ear and said, “Hello, Danny.”

  “Cassie,” he said, sounding as if he were delighted to speak to me again. “Are you ready? You’re on your own with this one, no hints, no clues. If you’ve been paying any attention at all, you should be able to figure out what I’m trying to tell you. If you do, then you’ll know what to do about this bomb.”

  “You are such an ass,” I said. I looked closely at the bomb, which appeared to be identical to the last two. The phone with the keyboard was there, and the timer started at fifteen minutes while I watched. “So there’s a password, right? Just like the others?”

  “Of course there’s a password,” Danny replied. “All you got to do is think about the clues I’ve given you with almost everything I’ve done. Come on, Cassie, I’ve literally put it right in front of your eyes more than once. Turn on your brain, use it.”

  THIRTY-ONE

  He said no hints, but he had just given me a big one. Something I had seen each time I had to deal with his insanity was supposed to tell me what I needed to know to save Annette, but also to stop Danny Kendall. The trouble was that I had been over and over those moments, and nothing was jumping out at me.

  I looked into Annette’s eyes. Danny had said that if I tried to leave the building, he would detonate the bomb. That might mean he was somewhere close by, watching to see if I left, but it was also possible that he was sitting all the way across the city watching through some sort of closed circuit cameras.

  Of course, I had no intention of leaving Annette. I just wasn’t sure how much he could see, and I was trying to think. I took hold of her hand and squeezed it, held up a finger to tell her to wait quietly, and then I closed my eye and tried to concentrate.

  Back when I was still in the hospital after the fire, one of the nurses taught me some tricks that are supposed to help you pull yourself away from pain. The idea is to focus on a pleasant event from the past and explore every possible aspect of the memory. The idea is to occupy the mind to the point that pain can be ignored, but it also tends to develop the ability to recall details that you only noticed subconsciously. It’s absolutely amazing how much you really see, but don’t even realize that you see.

  It was time to put that ability to use, and I went through the mental exercises I had learned back then to help me tune out the world around me. I took a deep breath through my nose and slowly let it out through my mouth, telling myself silently to remember the morning when St. Mary’s had been destroyed.

  I started with getting dressed that morning, when I thought of spring colors. I watched myself choosing the yellow skirt, the pink top and eyepatch, and then I was in the Kia, frustrated at all the red lights. I concentrated harder, trying to remember every inch of the journey from my house to the office. I saw not only the road ahead of me, but a number of cars that were on the road with me. There was a police car a couple of vehicles ahead of me, and it slowed me down when it stopped to make a left turn. I saw an older Corvette, and realized that I only knew what it was because Dex had shown me one.

  None of this had registered on my conscious mind that day, but it was all there in my memories. I focused on the last couple of blocks before the office, and how I got stopped at each intersection. I remembered getting ready to turn to go to the alley, and having to stop so that van could pass in front of me. I noticed the big cloud design on the side of it, and realized that it was a service vehicle from Hamilton Pro-Cloud.

  I saw the billowing smoke and heard the explosion again, and watched myself cut off the Lincoln SUV that was beside me as I
aborted my turn and shot forward. I saw myself get out of the car and stand staring at what was left of the building. I remembered the police officer that arrived, the one that recognized me and asked if anyone was in the building. In a matter of seconds, I replayed the entire event in my mind.

  What was next? It was the following morning, when I found Marsha at the dumpster. I went over every excruciating detail, looking for anything that connected to the events of the day before, but there was nothing.

  Next was the bombing of my Kia. I played it over in my mind from the point where I emerged into the garage from the elevator. I remember standing there trying to think of where I had parked the car, and the blast that made me fall onto my rump. I remember the people who came rushing to check on me, and all the noise that I could barely hear because of the ringing in my ears. I remembered being surprised at the blue van that drove sedately down the spiral, and the way the driver glanced at me. And in that moment, even though I hadn’t noticed it at the time, I saw the big cloud logo on the side of the van.

  Cloud. Something about a cloud. The logo that Marsha drew, the one that Danny apparently was wearing when he abducted her, also had a cloud.

  Was I on to something? I thought about New Beginnings, and suddenly remembered that Danny drove away in a blue van with a cloud on the side.

  At the hospital, Danny had told Toni Denham to sit in the children’s area of the waiting room, where the wall was done in a mural of clouds. The password that time had been my own password to my cloud storage account.

  I thought about Beverly Walker and the Mayo Hotel; Danny had sent me on a treasure hunt for a clue to the password, and I found it on a weird sculpture called The Artificial Cloud.

  Almost everything he had done had somehow involved a cloud, and the van he kept driving was actually from the cloud service that I used.

  Maggie, the Hamilton Pro-Cloud sales rep, had told me that the company had recently been sold. And Alfie had told me that Danny Kendall had made a lot of money from some tech investment in Silicon Valley.

  He’d said that I would know where to find him when I figured out the clues. I didn’t know the address of Hamilton’s office at that moment, but it wouldn’t be hard to find. The question was what to do about this bomb.

  I opened my eye and looked at the timer. Six minutes and twenty-one seconds, that’s all I had left. The clue, I knew, was the clouds that I kept seeing, but what would he use for the password?

  I typed in the word “cloud,” and the timer didn’t even hesitate. Apparently that wasn’t it, but it looked like he was telling the truth will he said I had three tries.

  What other word might be associated with clouds? I thought of Cumulus, Nimbus, thundercloud, rain cloud, and I don’t know how many others, but none of them jumped out at me. There was something I was supposed to be seeing, and…

  I looked at the password field on the phone. There were eight spaces this time, but I remembered that when I entered the other passwords, they each took all the available spaces. My cloud password, 4Abby43v3r, had ten characters. Vexatious had nine characters. This password had eight, then, but none of the things I had considered would fit.

  Only eight letters, and connected somehow to the clouds I kept seeing. I racked my brain, watching the countdown timer go lower and lower. It was down to two minutes and seven seconds, but nothing was coming to mind.

  Annette was crying, trembling. I needed to do something, even if it was wrong.

  Eight freaking letters, and this would be over. Well, at least for the moment. The only problem was where to find them.

  I close my eye again and tried to visualize the various clouds. Mostly, I had seen the one on the side of the van, so I focused on it…

  I typed in ‘Hamilton’, and the countdown timer went blank.

  “Bingo!” Danny said in my ear. “I knew you could do it. Now, are you ready for the final round? This one is for the prize, bitch, for all the marbles. Are you ready?”

  I was reaching for the buckles, ready to let Annette out of that thing. “Soon as I let her go,” I said. “That is just you and…”

  “Don’t touch the buckles! This one is a little different, Cassie. This one stays right where it is.”

  “Oh, come on, Danny,” I said. “Are you changing the rules?”

  “Oh, yes,” he said. “I sure am. See, this lady is my insurance policy. I know you want to stop me, and I want us to come face-to-face. The trouble is, you’re so tight with the police that the chance of getting you all alone was pretty slim. I had to set up a situation that would give you a clear understanding of what’s at stake, while motivating you to do things my way. You understand that, don’t you?”

  I sat back on my haunches, one hand stretched out to hold Annette’s. “Fine,” I said. “You want to be just you and me, that’s what I want, too. I take it you’re where I expect you to be?”

  “I think you know where I am. Did you know that this company is housed in what used to be a hotel building? Old man Hamilton bought it for back taxes, but all he ever used was the ground floor. He put a bunch of servers in what used to be the ballroom, with all the fancy equipment to keep them running nice and cool. He just didn’t have the savvy to turn it into a serious cloud storage business. He was content to work locally, but it really has a lot of potential.”

  “Yeah? Too bad you won’t get to realize any of it. Now, tell me how we’re going to play this out.”

  “Easy enough,” he replied. “She’s going to sit in your office, your own office, so nobody can look through the window and see her. I’ve already turned off your phones and Internet, so she can’t contact anybody. You’re going to lock her in, and explain to her that as long as you show up here, all alone, I won’t punch in the code that will detonate the bomb. Now, what happens after that is still up in the air. That will all depend on whether or not you can finally put me down. If you do, you’ll be able to turn off the device and let her go.”

  “And if not?” I asked. “What happens then?”

  “Well, I guess that’ll depend on how good a mood I’m in when it’s over. You’ve got twenty minutes to be here.”

  The line went dead. I grabbed my phone and googled the address of Hamilton Pro-Cloud, and saw that it was seventeen minutes away according to Google Maps.

  I grabbed Annette by the hand again. “You’ve got to do something for me,” I said. I pulled her out of the chair and led her to my office, putting her in my chair. “You have to sit right here, and not move. He wants me to come to where he is, and I’m going to do my best to put a stop to him. When it’s over, I’ll come back and get you out of that thing, but if you try to take it off before then, it will explode. Do you understand?”

  “Cassie, I can’t…” The tears were flowing freely again.

  “Annette, I am so sorry you got dragged into this, but I’m doing everything I possibly can to save your life. This is one time when you absolutely have to be strong. You have to sit here, do not leave this room. Do you understand me?”

  She stared at me for a moment, her lips and jaw trembling, and then she nodded her head. “I’ll stay right here,” she said, sobbing.

  I wrapped my arms around her neck and hugged her. “And I’ll be back as fast as I possibly can.”

  I turned and hurried out the door, locking it behind me. I was sure he was genuinely watching, somehow, although now I was almost certain he was doing it through the Internet. I ran around the corner to the shop and hurried inside.

  Dex looked up at me, and my face must have given it away. “Cassie? What’s going on?”

  “I can’t tell you, and you can’t help me.” I pointed at the Cuda. “Does that run?”

  He stared at me for three seconds, then nodded his head. He hurried to his little office and snatched up a set of keys, then tossed them to me as he ran and opened the overhead door in front of the car.

  I got in and fumbled for a moment trying to get the key into the ignition, then shoved the clutch dow
n and cranked it over. The engine sputtered once and then caught, and I grabbed the pistol grip shifter and pushed it into first gear, then gave it gas and let the clutch out.

  The rear tires squealed as I left the garage, turning to the right and fishtailing. I got the car back under control and shot forward, and was impressed at how smoothly it shifted into second, then third. The light at the intersection ahead of me was red, but having to run to the shop had wasted a minute I couldn’t afford.

  I dropped it back to second gear and slowed the car down, but I could see a gap in the cross traffic. I pushed my foot to the floor and shot through it, right past the red lights and a half dozen drivers that were suddenly leaning on their horns.

  The last thing I wanted to do was attract the attention of the police, however. I laid my phone in my lap and glanced down at it, and saw that I had just over fifteen minutes on my time limit, and sixteen minutes to go to my destination. No matter how I sliced it, I was going to have to break some speed limits to get there in time.

  I made it through the next two intersections on green, but that told me that the next one would be red by the time I got there. I was running in third gear, not even up to fourth-gear speeds, but I decided it was time to change that. I pressed the accelerator until the speedometer hit fifty, then shifted into high gear and started weaving through the traffic.

  When I got to the next intersection, I slowed quickly down to forty and made it through on the green. A glance at my phone showed me that I had twelve minutes left on both the deadline and the trip.

  I hit the gas again, this time making it up to sixty for half of the next mile. That would buy me an extra thirty seconds or so, I figured, but when I got to the intersection I shot through it on yellow. I had several more to go through before I got to my destination, so I kept the accelerator down almost all the way to the next one.

  One by one I made it through them on either green or yellow, but I was sure somebody was probably calling the police to report that crazy lady in the hot rod car. For the last mile, I slowed down to the speed limit and tried to be as inconspicuous as possible.