The CEO Came DOA (The Alvarez Family Murder Mysteries Book 5)

by Heather Haven

  “I’ll send the directions to your phone. Easier that way.”

  “Thanks. Before I forget, I uploaded files from two flash drives I found in Collier’s office last night.”

  “To the cloud?”

  “Yeah. Proof that Collier was the one sabotaging the company.”

  “Nasty.”

  “Frank wants us to forward on the files to the Sunnyvale Police, Chief Broas. Copy Frank, too.”

  “They might not have much legal validity, obtained without a search warrant.”

  “I was hired by the company to find the culprit. As a licensed private investigator, I am bound to pass on any wrongdoings to the proper authorities.”

  “I love it when you go all legal on me, sis.”

  “Oh, shut up. I’ve got to go now; I’m almost at the garage where the chips were stolen from. Or should I say, from where the chips were stolen?”

  “You’ve been hanging around Our Lady too long.” He referenced what he called our mother on the sly other than She Who Must Be Obeyed.

  “Noted. Give my love to Vicki.”

  I could feel him smile into the phone. “I’ll tell her when she wakes up. What’s it like outside? Still raining?”

  “Rain clouds gone. Sunshine aplenty. It looks like it’ll be the mid-sixties today. Not bad for December nineteenth.”

  “Noted.” Richard’s voice carried an impish quality. We both laughed before hanging up.

  I stood in front of a small, unassuming, one-story 1960s starter home with an attached garage, badly in need of a fresh coat of paint. If it were in any other place in the world, it would cost around fifty thousand dollars. Here in the Bay Area, it was probably valued at half a mil. That’s paradise for you.

  The garage door was open, revealing several tall, two-inch thick Plexiglas sheets leaning against a wall. Next to them was a table saw. It looked like someone was in the middle of a project. Other than that, there were a few stacks of old newspapers, built-in cabinets, and dust bunnies. Nothing else.

  On either side of the roof two motion-activated video cameras were angled toward the driveway and entrance to the garage. A tall pine tree several feet away held a third camera.

  A car was in the drive, wearing the Allied Security logo proudly. A uniformed woman in her thirties sat in the driver’s seat doing a Sudoku puzzle. Strolling down the cracked driveway, I glanced at my watch. Almost straight up eight o’clock.

  I knocked on the car window, startling the guard. I smiled and waved. Blonde, with a sunburned complexion, she gave me a hard stare, but rolled down the window.

  “You must be the PI Mr. Patel told me to expect.”

  “Yes. My name in Lee Alvarez. I’m here to look around and ask a few questions.” I flashed my license. She looked at it, looked at me, and flung the car door open. I backed out of the way just in time.

  “I’ll show you around, Ms. Alvarez, but there’s nothing much to see. It’s all gone.”

  “What’s your name?” I continued to smile, but it was fading.

  “Wendy Lewis. You can call me Miss Lewis. You’re from Discretionary Inquiries.”

  “Right.”

  “I applied for a job there. Didn’t get it.”

  “Oh, ah.” Not an intelligent reply, but the best I could do at that hour of the morning. And it did explain her almost combative attitude. “So what happened, Miss Lewis? Why didn’t the video cams work?”

  The woman shrugged. “Taken over by remote control. We figured out it was a ten-minute video loop fed into the cameras that the main office was seeing and not actually what was going on.”

  “Sounds pretty sophisticated.”

  “It was.”

  “Tell me about your schedule.”

  “I started work at four forty-five, like I always do. My first round was at five am. Everything looked normal to me and to the office. I got out of the car, walked the perimeter, and checked on the locks. Same thing at six. Then when I came back at seven, I found it like this, garage door open, everything gone. The office didn’t know a thing; the loop was still going.”

  “Anything else besides the chips and tester taken?”

  “If that’s what they were. I only saw boxes and some weird looking cabinet.” She thought for a minute.

  “Wait a minute. There was a stack of Mr. Collier’s old Superman comic books in an open cardboard box. They’re gone, too.”

  “Thanks. I’m going to look around for a moment by myself. Is the house open, as well as the garage?”

  “Yes.”

  I nodded. “Thanks. You can stay here.”

  Wendy Lewis nodded, got back into the car, and returned to her Sudoku.

  A quick tour inside the house revealed high end rental furniture, each labeled on the underside. Elaborate electronic equipment was scattered around, but no laptop. The kitchen was devoid of cooking utensils and the fridge held a small variety of cheeses, crackers, and white wines. I couldn’t find any personal effects in any of the rooms, other than one small suitcase filled with Collier’s clothes and toiletries.

  I turned to the garage and scrutinized the lock system, which was top of the line. The garage door was open, pulled up by a handle at the bottom then slid into a frame at the top. It lay flat against the ceiling of the garage, and appeared to be made of steel or something else just as impenetrable.

  I checked the sides and floor of the garage opening. Welded framing at least two inches thick lined three sides. When the solid door was down, it set flush against this framing. Left and right, the sides wore three heavy-duty locks. They were the latest in fingerprint and keypad locks, large and of galvanized steel. Unless you knew the combination, each of the six locks needed at least fifteen minutes’ worth of blowtorching to get into. I should know. I once had to do it.

  I walked inside and crossed the fifteen feet or so to the one window on the side of the garage, which it no longer was. The glass window had been replaced by thick steel. The whole thing was locked in much the same way as the door. This wasn’t damaged, either. All locks were pristine.

  I returned to Ms. Lewis and her Sudoku, and tapped on the car window once again. With a sigh, she rolled down the window.

  “What?”

  “How big was the shipment that was stolen, roughly?”

  She thought for a moment. “I only saw it the once, when it was being loaded in last week on pallets. Maybe five by fifteen feet. Something like that. And the cabinet thing was about five by three feet. Weighed a lot though, even with him using the forklift.”

  “Him? Do you know who he was?”

  “Couldn’t tell; some guy in a grey sweat suit with a hoodie. It was hard to see his face. He asked me to keep my distance, so I did.”

  “Okay, thanks for your help.”

  So the load in was around six, seven hundred cubic feet, just like Richard and I thought. I mused as I moved back down the driveway, suddenly stopped by the woman’s voice.

  “You know, I spent four years in the Marines. I’ll bet I could take you.”

  I turned around to face the security guard getting out of her car again. She slammed the door shut and glared at me. I strode back and looked down at her. I’m five foot eight; she was probably around five-five. Wisps of her fine blonde hair blew in her face from the soft breeze of the morning. She spread her feet apart and took on an aggressive stance. I approached her with a slight smile.

  “Now, Miss Lewis, you don’t want to do that. First of all, I have a black belt in Karate. And second, if you want a job at D. I., picking a fight with one of the owners of the business is not the way to get it.”

  She seemed to deflate before me, doubt and insecurity showing on her face. Licking her lips, she couldn’t seem to find any words. I went on.

  “Do you have a private investigators license?”

  She shook her head.

  “How about a degree in computer science, you got that?”

  She shook her head again.

  “That’s probably why you
got turned down. Our employees consist solely of investigators and IT people. That’s all we hire, besides two clericals for filing papers.”

  “You don’t do security?” Her voice was small, sounding about eight-years old.

  I shook my head. “We job it out. I’m not sure where you got the information we did, but it’s not true. “

  “My boyfriend said you did. That’s why I applied.”

  “Well, shame on him, because we don’t. Suggestion: next time, check out the qualifying criteria for yourself before you get a mad on.”

  She digested this in silence. I turned to leave and was near the curb when her voice shot out at me again.

  “What if I got a PI license, Ms. Alvarez? What if I knew karate?”

  A smile on my lips, I said over my shoulders, “Well, that and being in the Marines should take you to the front of the line.” I looked at my watch again, continued back to the parking lot of Read-Out, and to my car.

  Something new will always be the source of growth in Silicon Valley.

  Steve Jurvetson

  Chapter Five

  It was pushing nine AM and I was pushing the last of the rush hour traffic on the Dumbarton Bridge on most likely a wild goose chase. But I had a feeling, and as I didn’t have much else, I went with it. Maybe with a little luck, I could pick up the trail of the chips and tester. Hope springs eternal.

  Supposedly, I was driving in the opposite direction of where the bulk of the traffic was heading. But when there are so many cars tootling around the Bay Area all the time, it’s often hard to tell when rush hour begins and ends or where it’s heading.

  The Dumbarton Bridge is the southernmost of the highway bridges crossing the San Francisco Bay. It’s also the shortest at 1.63 miles. I was crossing it in style in a turquoise 1957 Chevy, a car given to me by my father shortly before he died.

  While it has all the latest gewgaws and is the gift that kept on giving, it also costs a fortune to maintain. If the distributor isn’t going, the hoses need to be replaced or all the trim seals on the windows. He’s an old man trying to keep up in a modern world, but I love him.

  At the moment, I had the top down and the radio blasting an NPR interview with Mick Jagger. If I hadn’t found a dead man dangling from a rope a few hours before, I would have called it a lovely day.

  Once over the bridge, I followed Thornton Avenue through Newark until I reached Fremont, an incorporated city made up of five smaller towns. Richard’s directions brought me to a modest, white Fremont house, probably from the early 70’s. A narrow driveway went past the right side of the house and ended at a one-car garage in the back. The house didn’t look lived in, but overall the property was in pretty good shape.

  I drove to the end of the block and parked. Walking the tree-lined, residential street back to the address, I found it charming, but a fairly ordinary start to a billionaire’s life.

  Carrying a Bible, my hope was that any neighbors with too much time on their hands and staring out a window for want of nothing better to do, might peg me for a Jehovah’s Witness canvassing the street. It’s worked before.

  I went to the front door, but instead of ringing the bell, I scooted to the side of the house and tried to look in the windows. Heavy curtains covered each one of them. However, when I got to the French doors, I had better luck. Instead of curtains, off-white blinds hid the inside from outside viewing.

  But one slat was broken near the middle revealing a small gap. I squatted down to look inside, and saw two familiar young nerdy-looking guys sitting on folding chairs in an otherwise empty room. One had short, dark curly hair, the other blonde, long and stringy. Impossibly thin, they wore the standard geek uniform of ripped jeans and faded T-shirts.

  I’d seen them at Read-Out from time to time, doing exactly what I wasn’t sure. What I had noted was they were always together, coming and going on similar motorcycles. I took a quick picture of them with my phone then studied the scene.

  The longhaired guy was reading a Superman comic book; a carton filled with them sitting next to him on the floor. The other kid was strumming a guitar and badly, I might add. Richard plays a beautiful guitar, so I’m sensitive to these things.

  Radiating from the crack in between the French doors was the heavy scent of pot. Just to prove the point, the comic book guy took a toke from a skinny, rolled-up cigarette and passed it on to his buddy.

  I straightened up and assessed the situation. Being a detective and all, I’d say this must be the place. Superman might agree.

  Assessing the situation further, I liked the fact the two were probably high on pot. Not an aggressive-making drug, that meant they might be slow on the uptake, maybe not even know what was happening until after it took place. I sucked in a deep breath and regretted it instantly. All I needed was a contact high.

  At the rear of the house, tall trees surrounded the backyard providing a certain amount of privacy. Two Honda motorcycles, one red and one blue, stood on their kickstands near the garbage pails.

  I passed them and looked inside the lone window on the side of the free-standing garage. Frosted over, I could still see a blobby, large yellow shape, like a rental from Penske Trucks. I went around to the front. It had an automatic garage door opener. Goody.

  So as not to arouse the neighbors, I strolled back to my car for the stuff I keep in the trunk for such an emergency. I opened the passenger’s car door, returned the bible to the glove compartment, and popped the trunk.

  I am not neat about much, but the trunk of my car is the exception. Held within it is a plethora of supplies that would warm the heart of any Campfire Girl or con man, including extra clothing, food, and a weapon or two. I grabbed the tote bag already filled with among other things, a compass, water, and flashlight.

  Into it I further crammed a tapered wedge of wood or shim, wire coat hanger, my purse, phone, and a Milky Way Bar, even though the tote already contained two granola raisin bars. When a girl needs chocolate, she needs chocolate. Granola is not going to do it.

  I slammed the trunk shut and relocked the car. It would be safe there for a time. This was a nice neighborhood. At least, until I got through with it.

  Carrying the necessary tools, I went back to the white house. After checking to see if my pot-smoking friends were still doing their thing in the living room – they were - I returned to the garage.

  I pushed the shim into the center at the top of the garage door, and past the rubber stripping to create a space for my wire. Straightening out the hanger but leaving the hook at one end, I inserted it into the space next to the shim. I shoved the wire inside about eighteen inches, and felt the resistance of the mechanism at the top of the opener.

  The emergency pull lever was right below, so I snagged it and yanked the wire back toward me. The garage door opened, folding into the top of the garage. All in all, it took about six seconds. I have to say, it was a morning of garages, but life can be like that.

  I looked around before entering the now open garage. All quiet on the western front. The yellow truck sat headfirst inside, and I examined the paltry lock on the backend that kept me from knowing what was in the hold. This was another lock made for the same dog or cat trying to get into Rameen Patel’s desk. I opened that sucker in about three seconds flat with my handy-dandy picklock.

  Once opened, pallets holding sealed cardboard boxes greeted me. Beside them was a small but powerful forklift. Behind the forklift was the silliest looking kitchen cabinet I’ve ever seen, so I took it to be the tester.

  An electric platform at the end of the truck made it possible to move the heavy stuff in and out of the truck bed. I climbed up, went straight to the cartons, and ripped at one with eager fingers. Iridescent computer chips sparkled up at me. Bingo.

  I gave a quick search for a black ring box, but such a small thing could have been anywhere in the truck, if here at all. Time was a-wasting and I had to get out of there.

  I replaced the box of chips, jumped out, pulled the cargo door
down, and locked the hold again. I charged around to the front of the truck. Both driver and passenger windows were wide open. I looked inside and saw the keys still in the ignition. Some days it pays to get up in the morning, dead bodies notwithstanding.

  I climbed in, started the motor, backed the truck out of the driveway, and pulled away. Easy, peezy.

  The amounts of money in Silicon Valley are staggering.

  Alec Berg

  Chapter Six

  Retrieving my Bluetooth from the tote, I phoned Richard. There are pretty strict laws in California about talking on a phone without a Bluetooth while driving. All I needed was to be stopped in a hijacked truck containing millions of dollars worth of stolen stash taken from the property of a famous guy who killed himself in the early hours of the morning. They’d chuck me in a cell and throw away the key.

  After a brief chitchat with my brother, we made arrangements for him to drive me back to Fremont to retrieve the Chevy in the early afternoon. Meanwhile, I would hide the little yellow truck in the four-car garage of the Alvarez home, where big renovations were taking place adding on Gurn’s new office. My garage slash apartment was perfect. The truck would blend in with the rest of the chaos and I could take my time searching it for the prototype.

  I instructed the phone to call Rameen Patel and marshaled my thoughts. It wouldn’t do to be blathering like an idiot to a CFO who was on the brink of hysteria; I needed to be clear and concise, especially if I wasn’t going to play this quite the way he wanted. As the number rang, I hit the Dumbarton, used my FasTrak®, and started my journey across the Bay and back to Palo Alto.

  The CFO’s eager voice came through on the second ring. “Lee! What news? Did you find them?”

  “I have the chips and tester.” I was proud. Even I couldn’t believe my good fortune. “I don’t know yet if the prototype is among them. We’ll have to tear this truck apart to know for sure.”

  “We need that prototype, Lee.” His voice was chastising and abrupt.