ONCE TRAPPED

by Blake Pierce

  She said, “I can pretty much prove I was right here last night when it happened.”

  She pointed to security cameras in the corners of the recreation room and added, “Just check the security tapes. You’ll see.”

  Chief O’Neill was just sitting there taking in all the comments. He’d had nothing to say, but suddenly Jared Ruhl spoke up.

  “Do you have any idea who might want to kill your husband?”

  Riley bristled a little, hoping Ruhl wouldn’t say something tactless, but decided not to shush him.

  The woman smirked and said to Jared, “Aside from me, you mean? Because I’m not going to lie to you, I really didn’t like the bastard.”

  Riley could see Ruhl’s eyes sparkle with interest.

  He asked, “Are you going to benefit from his death?”

  Tisha let out a sharp, short laugh.

  “Oh, you bet I am. I’m going to inherit every last thing he owned. I’m not stupid, I knew how to handle him the minute I met him. And I always come out on top.”

  Tisha kept on talking, bragging to Ruhl about her resourcefulness. As Riley half-listened, those words echoed in her mind …

  “I always come out on top.”

  With a slight shudder, Riley realized who Tisha reminded her of.

  It was her own adopted daughter, Jilly.

  The resemblance wasn’t physical—Jilly was dark, while this woman was a pale blonde.

  The likeness ran much deeper than mere appearance.

  Again Riley flashed back to that shocking night when she’d discovered Jilly in the cab of a truck, ready and willing to sell her body rather than go back to her abusive father.

  If Riley hadn’t shown up, what would have become of Jilly?

  She’d have survived, Riley thought. She’s too tough not to survive.

  But what kind of life would she have gone on to live? Riley had tried not to think about it, but sometimes she couldn’t help it.

  If Jilly really had become a prostitute, Riley knew that drugs, violence, and disease would have taken their inevitable toll—as would the psychic scarring that came with such a life.

  Jilly might have survived in the short run, but she would have lived a short and ugly life.

  But now, as Riley watched and listened to this young woman, a different scenario began to unfold in her mind—one that really hadn’t occurred to her before.

  It was easy to guess at least some of the details of Tisha’s life story.

  Like Jilly, Tisha had surely suffered an abusive childhood, perhaps at the hands of her father. Maybe, as a young teenager, she had even tried her hand at prostitution. She’d also probably gotten caught up in other criminal activities of one kind or another.

  But one day something had changed. Perhaps she’d looked in the mirror and realized how pretty she was—or at least how pretty she could be if she made some changes.

  Also like Jilly, Tisha had always been smart, a quick learner. She’d given herself a crash course in making herself attractive to rich men. Although she’d surely dropped out of school and couldn’t dream of going to college, she must have read lots of books to acquire knowledge and sophistication, and she’d found it easy to learn different languages. And she’d observed people carefully.

  She’d found it easy to move in affluent circles and finally to catch the attention of a rich, elderly man like Edwin Gray Harter. As soon as she’d married him, she’d laid claim to his fortune, probably to the horror of his closest family members, especially his offspring.

  Once Tisha had done that, Edwin Gray Harter couldn’t die soon enough for her purposes.

  Riley felt a deep chill at the thought that Jilly could well have wound up just like this tough, smart, but deeply bitter young woman who no longer could even imagine what it might be like to be happy or loved.

  While Riley was thinking all this, Tisha had kept chattering boastfully about her hopes for her future now that she was a rich widow. Jared was listening with obvious distaste, but perhaps a touch of fascination too.

  Then Riley noticed someone else entering the room. It was a tall, imposing woman wearing an expensive black pantsuit and a bowtie.

  Riley asked Chief O’Neill, “Who is that?”

  “I’ll introduce you,” O’Neill said.

  Riley, Jared, and the chief got up and walked over to the woman, who stood firmly in the doorway with crossed arms and a haughty expression. She appeared to be in her thirties, and she projected an air of infallible authority.

  O’Neill introduced Riley and then said, “This is Vivian Bettridge, and she’s the chief, uh, butler here.”

  Bettridge stared at him and snapped disdainfully, “I believe I told you—my proper title is majordomo.”

  Riley was not at all surprised to hear the woman speak in an English accent. She’d struck Riley as British from the very first glance.

  She continued speaking to Riley in a cold, efficient tone. “I am—or rather was—Mr. Harter’s most trusted servant. I am completely in charge of the household—the staff, the finances, the day-to-day affairs.”

  Jared said, “Then perhaps you can explain what happened last night.”

  Bettridge’s eyebrows rose sharply as she glared at Jared.

  “I’m sure that I cannot,” she said. “I believe that’s the police’s job.”

  Turning to Riley she added, “And the FBI’s job too.”

  Riley detected a note of defensiveness in her voice. Riley guessed that Bettridge cared little about Harter’s actual murder. All that mattered to her was that she not be blamed for letting it happen. Her professional reputation was at stake—and she didn’t value anything in the world more than that.

  Unless …

  Riley couldn’t discount the possibility that Bettridge was the one person who really knew what had happened.

  Riley turned to Chief O’Neill and asked, “What about the rest of the live-in staff?”

  Chief O’Neill said, “I’ve had my people interviewing them since we got here.”

  Bettridge said, “And as I told you earlier, I hardly think that’s necessary. I can assure you that nobody under my authority would ever have dreamed of doing such a thing.”

  Riley tilted her head with interest.

  She said, “Then I take it nobody on the staff disliked Mr. Harter?”

  Bettridge’s lips curled into a supercilious smirk.

  “What an odd sort of word to use, Agent Paige. To like or dislike—they’re entirely irrelevant to the work we’re all here to do. Every single one of my people is of impeccable integrity. I handpicked them all myself. We do our work and do it perfectly—nothing more and nothing less. The household functions like a well-oiled machine.”

  With a disdainful grunt, Jared said, “Well, something didn’t seem to be functioning quite so perfectly last night.”

  Bettridge’s expression darkened.

  She said, “As I said—I believe it’s your job to determine whatever that was.”

  Riley studied her face silently for a moment. The woman was so emotionally closed off, it was hard for even Riley to read her. She was also exercising textbook passive-aggressive behavior by shunting away all responsibility onto the police and the FBI.

  Then she asked, “What about the security system?”

  “It’s the very best, completely state of the art.”

  “Unhackable?” Riley asked.

  “I should think so,” Bettridge said. “I researched it thoroughly, compared it with everything else on the market. It’s called SafetyLinks. Perhaps you’ve heard of it.”

  Riley hadn’t heard of it, but she didn’t say so.

  “And now, if you don’t mind,” Bettridge said, “I’d like to go see my staff. This has been rather an ordeal for them, as you can imagine.”

  Without waiting for permission, Bettridge headed toward the elevator.

  Jared grunted again and said, “Well, isn’t she a charmer?”

  Riley turned to Chief O’Neill and sa
id, “I want to meet with your whole team downstairs in five minutes.”

  O’Neill nodded and headed back into the bathroom.

  “So what do we do now?” Jared asked.

  “Give me a moment alone to think,” Riley said.

  Jared followed after Chief O’Neill.

  Riley’s head buzzed with ideas and suspicions.

  She was especially curious about this supposedly unhackable, state-of-the-art security system.

  And she knew just who to call for information about it.

  She took out her cell phone and punched in a number.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  After a couple of rings Riley heard Van Roff’s gruff voice answer the phone.

  “Hey, Agent Paige. What’s up? I take it you’re in a sunny little golf-obsessed town in Georgia. Or more precisely, at the mansion of one late Edwin Gray Harter.”

  Riley was startled.

  “How did you know?” she asked.

  “Oh, I never give away the secrets of my trade.”

  Riley thought for a moment, then smiled as she remembered how Jared had found out about Harter’s murder.

  She asked, “Might it have something to do with a certain online service called CrimeWidth?”

  She heard Van Roff gasp a little.

  He said, “Uh … how did you guess?”

  Riley laughed and said, “I never give away the secrets of my trade. Now don’t tell me … you listen to CrimeWidth when you have trouble sleeping.”

  “OK, now you’re just doing some spooky mind-reading number on me.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m known for that kind of thing.”

  Roff laughed and said, “When I heard on the alert feed about some rich dude getting knifed to death in Monarch, Georgia, of course I thought, ‘Hmmm … same MO, probably the same killer. I’ll bet Agent Paige is on her way to the crime scene right now.’”

  “You’d have won that bet,” Riley said.

  In a husky growl Roff said, “I don’t guess you called me directly from a crime scene because you adore the sound of my voice.”

  “Well, of course you do have such a lovely voice, but …”

  Riley paused and thought for a moment.

  “Our killer seems to have a pretty nimble way of getting around security. This time he got into the mansion despite a supposedly unhackable system called SafetyLinks. I wondered what you might be able to tell me about it.”

  Roff was silent for a moment.

  Then he said, “I’ll tell you what, let me get back to you about that.”

  He ended the call without saying another word.

  Riley stood staring at her phone for a moment, feeling a little mystified. This didn’t seem like Van Roff at all. She figured his knowledge of high-tech devices of all kinds was pretty much encyclopedic. Hadn’t he ever heard of SafetyLinks?

  She realized there was no point in just standing here waiting for the Seattle geek to get back to her. She hoped he’d come up with something useful soon.

  Meanwhile, she had asked Chief O’Neill and his team to meet downstairs. It was time for her to join them.

  Riley took the elevator down to the ground floor and found O’Neill and his people gathered together in the huge, pristine formal living room. Jared was there too. She wished they’d chosen some smaller sitting area elsewhere in the house, but everybody was already here, waiting for her. She couldn’t help but feel a little amused to see uniformed officers trying to make themselves at home on snow-white furniture that looked like it had never been used.

  Everybody looked distinctly uncomfortable.

  Riley herself stayed on her feet. She said to Chief O’Neill and the group, “Does anybody here have any new observations or theories?”

  O’Neill got to his feet. “Three of my people talked to the whole live-in staff, and I met with them all briefly. The place has got servants, cooks, maintenance people, and even medical personnel. They all had alibis, and most claimed to have been in their rooms when the murder happened. But they’re edgy, and some of them are acting kind of odd.”

  Riley didn’t say so, but the fact that they were “acting kind of odd” didn’t especially surprise her. They were surely scared—partly from being close by when a murder took place, partly from being under suspicion themselves.

  O’Neill hesitated for a moment, then said, “We’re going to need some technicians to look at the security tapes, check on everybody’s comings and goings. But I’ve got a weird feeling about everyone in this place—including the wife, and also that Bettridge woman—the butler or major-general or whatever she calls herself.”

  “Majordomo,” Jared said.

  “Right. This might sound weird but … nobody here strikes me as exactly innocent. I think this must have been some kind of inside job. Someone in this house is a killer, or at least someone inside let somebody from the outside get in unseen.”

  Riley was interested but skeptical.

  “Explain,” Riley said.

  O’Neill paused again, then said, “This house seems to have ironclad security—at least everywhere except the third floor. I don’t see how anyone could have broken through it from the outside. It would take someone who knew the system—and that would almost have to be someone who lived and worked here.”

  Riley’s doubts were only increasing. But she’d learned from experience how to deal with local cops who weren’t enamored of the FBI. It was best to hear them out as fully as possible.

  O’Neill continued, “My theory is that more than one member of the staff was involved. Maybe it was some kind of team or conspiracy or something. Edwin Gray Harter sure didn’t have any friends in this house.”

  Then Riley said, “You might be forgetting that two other men were killed in two other locations, apparently by the same killer.”

  “Or maybe killers,” O’Neill said, starting to sound a bit defensive now.

  One of O’Neill’s cops nodded in agreement and said, “We haven’t had a chance to run down where everyone in the staff was when the other men were killed. We’ve got some work to do there.”

  While O’Neill and the cop talked this over, Riley wondered …

  Does any of this make sense?

  It was partly a question of security systems. She still didn’t know anything about the system in this house. She did know that security hadn’t been a problem for whoever had killed Julian Morse. Just cutting the wires was all it took to disconnect the cameras around his swimming pool—it hadn’t taken any hacking skills to accomplish that. And the truth was, she had no idea how difficult it might or might not have been to crack through Andrew Farrell’s system.

  She did have some personal experience with this kind of thing. Just last winter, the security system in her own townhouse had been disengaged by a man who then attacked April, Gabriela, and Blaine. She had put in a new system after that, but was still wary that it might not be impossible to breach.

  She wished Van Roff would get back to her about SafetyLinks, and just how sophisticated it was. It still seemed strange to her that he’d ended their call so abruptly.

  Meanwhile, she had to admit it wasn’t impossible that one or more of the people in this house were involved in all three of the murders, but even so …

  It seems like a stretch.

  So far, no connections of any kind had turned up between the victims, their families, their employees, or their businesses.

  Finally Chief O’Neill spoke to Riley directly …

  “Look, Agent Paige, as far as I’m concerned, every single person who was in the house last night—including the wife—is a plausible suspect. We can check them all out, but that’s going to take some time. Meanwhile every single one of them is a flight risk. I think we need to take all of them into custody.”

  Riley could hardly believe her ears.

  She didn’t yet know how large the household staff was, but rounding them all up and arresting them struck her as absurd. She could see by Jared’s expression that he felt t
he same way.

  She was on the verge of saying so when a synthesized female voice filled the room.

  “Nobody move. The place is surrounded.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  At the sound of the voice, Riley felt a sharp jolt of shock. Like everyone around her, she froze in place.

  Then Vivian Bettridge charged into the room, her British composure completely gone.

  “Could somebody tell me just what the hell is happening?” she yelled.

  Everybody else broke into a clamor of explanations.

  “What?”

  “Who?”

  Riley smiled as she began to realize what had happened.

  When her phone buzzed and she took the call, she wasn’t the least bit surprised to hear Van Roff’s gravelly voice.

  “SafetyLinks is hackable.”

  “And you just proved it,” Riley replied.

  “I did.”

  Riley said, “Could I put you on speakerphone so you can reassure my law enforcement colleagues? They’re a little bit shaken up.”

  Van Roff laughed heartily.

  “Sure, let me talk to them.”

  It took a moment for Riley to get the attention of the rest of the people in the room. When she finally overrode their exchanges of indignation and questions, she explained just who she had on the phone—an FBI technical wizard based in Seattle.

  Then Van Roff spoke to all of them. “Folks, there’s no cause for alarm. I just hacked the house’s SafetyLinks security system. Of course I’m a genius, but believe me, it didn’t take any brilliance to do it. In fact, as I poked around the system I found out something interesting in its records. Someone else hacked in last night and disabled it for a short time—someone outside the house, like me.”

  Riley couldn’t help but grin at Bettridge.

  She said, “So much for your thoroughly researched, state-of-the-art security system.”

  Bettridge’s face reddened and she glared down at the floor.

  Riley said to Roff, “Can you give me an estimate of what time the system was hacked?”

  Roff let out a rumbling chuckle.

  “An estimate? No, but I can tell you exactly, if that’s OK. It was shut down at eleven fifteen p.m., then started again at eleven forty-five.”