“No, it really happened.” The moment I said it out loud, I was more sure than ever. “It was big, like a Wonder Woman bracelet. Maybe it was just the detonator, I don’t know. It had a yellow blinking light on it. Blalock freaked out, tried to jump out the window, and then told me to run just as the light on the bracelet turned red. That’s all I remember.”
I was nearly jumping up and down I was so excited by these recovered memories, but Ruby was frowning.
“What is it?
“Well, this means we’ve been all wrong.”
I stopped bouncing.
“About what?”
“Well, motive of course. We assumed that Carter Blalock was trying to plant a bomb in the Farnham Building when the police showed up. But…”
“He was the bomb!!” I interrupted. “Somebody was using him as a bomb!”
Twelve
The next day, Aldo Frances exited the elevator on the executive floor of the Illcom building. He looked around the clerical pool, looked right at me without noticing me. He did seem a bit nervous, and a bit suspicious, but his eyes passed right over me without pausing or showing any sign of alarm. My disguise seemed to be succeeding.
My cubicle was on the main aisle, so he walked very close to me on the way to his office, which was at the far end of the building, adjacent to what had, until recently, been Carter Blalock’s office. Frances was the head of new product development, so his real office was on one of the lower floors where the engineers were hard at work on the next big thing in fiber optics or whatever. He probably was uncomfortable to find himself the CEO. Arthur Vincente had become interim CEO after the first explosion killed Blalock, but then the second explosion sent him to the ICU, leaving Frances, as the senior officer, suddenly in charge. He was the Gerald Ford of the telecom industry. No, I wasn’t alive when that happened. But I’ve read some history books, I’ll have you know.
The report had been that Frances had also been critically injured in the second blast, but this turned out not to be true. He seemed perfectly fine. Sometimes the news gets it wrong.
I had been in this cubicle for about an hour. According to the unprotected gmail account on this desktop computer, the desk belonged to Angie Delacroix, who ordered a lot of clothes from Land’s End and had 452 Facebook friends.
Only one person had said a word to me the entire time: a cheerful woman with spiky blonde hair asked how long I was temping for, and wasn’t it a shame about Angie.
It was, it was a terrible shame, I agreed, though I had no idea what had happened to Angie.
I gave Frances enough time to get settled in to his office before I got up and made my way over to visit. I was wearing an embroidered Louis Vuitton shirt and matching skirt that was several levels above my office temp pay grade, but it seemed unlikely Aldo Frances would know much about fashion, and I had been dying to try it on. Strappy black shoes with a very low heel (so sensible!) completed my businesswoman attire. I was wearing purple framed reading glasses with zero magnification. I picked them up at Jewel Osco. They went great with my intense red hair. I wore a bright, dangly earring on the ear that was showing, and nothing on the ear that was obscured by my swoop of hair. It was a case of hiding in plain sight. Clearly my temp job was a hold over until my acting career took off, or my ultra-modern paintings took off, or whatever hip thing I did when I wasn’t at Angie’s desk.
I held a sheaf of blank copy paper in one hand as I rapped lightly on Frances’s door and let myself in. Aldo Frances looked up as I entered, pulling off his reading glasses so that he could see across the room.
He was about 65 years old, with a big head of salt and pepper hair, a strong face and a closely shaven chin. When he walked past me I was struck by how short he was, maybe five foot five. He didn’t look much like a scientist. In his blue suit, well-made but not very stylish, he looked like an insurance executive from the nineteen fifties. To him, I must have looked like some sort of punk rock alien, because his eyes widened as I crossed the floor to stand right in front of his desk.
“Yes, what is it?” he asked briskly.
I set the sheaf of papers on his desk, and then reached over to the back of his telephone console and unplugged the cord.
“Hey! What on Earth…” He stood quickly. “Who are you?”
I put my finger to my lips and motioned him back into his seat. Amazingly, he was captivated by the strange move and actually sat back down. I sat in one of the two chairs on my side of his large desk.
“Mr. Frances,” I began, removing my glasses. “I don’t actually work here, but I have some important questions to ask you. I’m afraid they it’s quite urgent.”
He sat up alertly in his chair. “I thought you looked new—I would have noticed the hair—but the girls out there change all the time. Are you a reporter?”
The girls. Lovely, old man, lovely.
“No, I’m not a reporter. I’m guessing you’ve had enough of them. I’m an investigator.”
“I’ve already talked to the police, at great length. If you’re with an insurance company you need to talk with Arthur or Carter’s lawyers. Honestly, I’m having a hard time just keeping the company going day to day. This is not my world—I’m usually down in the lab. I don’t really see how I can help you.” He ran himself out and sat looking at me, probably wondering how to get me out of his office. He looked to the closed door, but made no move.
“I can’t reveal my employer, I’m afraid,” I said conspiratorially, leaning toward him and talking in a hushed tone, “but needless to say there, is a lot at stake here, and we can’t be completely sure that you are not still in danger.”
He didn’t like my secrecy shtick, apparently, because he rose from his seat, looked at his disabled phone, and then started to come around the end of the desk. Damn, well, here we go…
“Mr. Frances, wait. My name is Kay Riley, I’m a—”
“Police officer!” he broke in, the name registering with him, because of course it would. He’d been told I tried to kill him. I stepped between him and the door.
“Wait, please,” I said in a pleading voice, but I braced my stance as best as I good in my well-tailored skirt, ready to stop him if he made a run for it. My aim was to look formidable but not threatening.
I had come here because Aldo Frances, like me, had survived a bombing, presumably perpetrated by the same individual. Had he seen something, anything that would give me a clue to go on?
“I am not involved in this,” I pressed on. “I know it sounds ridiculous, but someone is setting me up. I didn’t know why until just recently.”
He tried to sidle slowly to one side, but I adjusted to keep myself between him and the door. I was about an inch taller than him, even in the low shoes. He eyed the door, but he hadn’t started shouting his head off yet, so there was still hope. I could see that behind his eyes there was some serious thinking going on. Option weighing. I had to connect quickly.
“The bracelet,” I blurted, and I saw his eyes widen. “They are framing me because I know about the bracelet. I saw it on Carter Blalock. You know what I’m talking about don’t you. I can tell.”
He took a step back, slipping his hand in his pocket, and drawing out a cell phone. Of course he has a cell phone! What was I thinking? Still, he hadn’t tried to make a call yet. Maybe he was worried I would jump him if he did.
“You could know about the bracelets because you could be the one who put them on us.”
“Alright, that’s true. But I didn’t! I’m just a Chicago cop. I just answered a call about a break-in.” I was getting frustrated. “I was just standing there doing my job when that bracelet flashed yellow. Blalock looked at me with such fear, like I’ve never seen. And then he tried to jump out the window.”
I may have sobbed a little at this point, because Frances lowered his phone and looked at me with an odd expression on his face.
“He tried to save me,” I said, looking directly in his eyes. “And now somebody’s trying to kill m
e, and I need to know what the hell is going on…” I looked at him helplessly.
He sighed and moved back behind his desk, sitting down and motioning me back to the chair I had been in.
“How much do you know?”
“Not much,” I admitted. “Everyone thinks this is about a Farnham/Illcom rivalry, but if Carter Blalock was forced somehow, maybe with threats to his family, to be in that building, wearing that weird detonator, then it seems likely that some third party is trying to pit you against each other.” I sighed. “And because I saw the evidence, I’ve been made a scapegoat. Which tells me that someone in the police department is in on it. I don’t know how else they would be able to accuse me with such authority.”
Aldo, leaned forward. We were compatriots now, both survivors, so I had decided to call him Aldo. It’s a great name; I’d never met an Aldo before.
“Well, I can fill in some of the holes for you, but not all, I’m afraid.” He got up and paced the room, a man used to working and thinking on his feet. “On that terrible night, I got a call from Carter. He sounded crazed, insane. He was saying something about Belinda and Gracie, when suddenly there was the sound of a struggle and then Greg Ralston came on the line.”
“Wait, the security guy? How did you know it was him?”
“I’ve known Greg a long time. He’s been with Ferris forever, and I worked for Farnham when he first started.”
I must have looked startled, because he continued. “I know, it’s all a bit intertwined, which is part of why I agree with your assessment. It must be an outside party. Ferris and Carter were much, much closer friends than anyone in the public knew. They wanted it kept quiet, for many reasons.
“Anyway, Greg told me that a secretary working late had heard noises, and seen someone sneaking through the building. She called 911, they called Greg and sent you, I suppose. Greg got there first. He found Carter nearly delirious with panic, saying over and over again to get away from him, because he was a bomb. Greg pulled the phone away from him and, when he realized it was me on the other end, he asked me what was going on. Of course, I had no idea, but when he described the bracelet Carter was wearing, I told him that yes, it was completely possible that a high-powered bomb could be that small. When Greg hung up, he told Carter what I had said, and Carter turned and fled. Greg ran after him, but went downstairs figuring Carter was trying to get to the street. Evidently Carter had gone upstairs instead.”
Wow! That all seemed to fit. Carter was a bomb, and somebody had tried to blow up both Carter and Farnham at the same time. Killing two birds with one of the birds.
“There’s more,” Aldo said, moving to the computer and tapping a few keys. “I don’t think it’s the police that have set you up. Look.”
He rotated the monitor until it faced me.
“This is from our security footage.” He tapped a button.
The video showed somebody walking down a long hallway, then walking through the cubicle garden just outside the office we were now in. It was a woman, in a police uniform. She had reddish brown hair hanging down from a cap that covered most of her face. She was carrying a black doctor’s bag in one hand. She entered the door to the office next door to this one and disappeared inside. Aldo stopped the video.
“That’s you,” he said, “the same night that Arthur and I were nearly killed.”
“It is not!” I protested.
At that moment, there was a knock on the door. I jumped half out of my skin, but Aldo sat quickly in his chair, tossed me a pen, and pointed at the papers I had left on his desk.
“Come in,” he called as I scrambled to grab the pen, and take on the appearance of somebody who noting the instructions their boss was dictating to them.
It was Perky Spiky Hair.
“Mr. Frances, you wanted me to remind you about your 10:40 appointment with Accounting. It’s on the fifth floor, so you want to give yourself some time to get down there.”
“Thank you, Tina—“
“Tracey.”
“Sorry, Tracey. I’ll be done with…”
“Carlotta,” I offered.
“…Carlotta in about five minutes, and I’ll head down.”
Tracey left.
“Ugh,” Aldo moaned. “Accountants. Maybe it would have been better to be blown up.” He instantly caught himself. “I don’t mean that, of course. A terrible thing to say. Carter gone, Arthur in the hospital.”
“What happened to you and Arthur?”
“I’ll try to give you the short version, but it was the most terrifying fifteen minutes of my entire life. I still relive it when I close my eyes.” He stood up again, and moved to look out the windows. “It was after business hours. Arthur and I were in his office—which had recently been Carter’s office. Arthur is retired, but as the president of the board we all thought it best if he became the interim CEO. Anyway, for the last several evenings we had met to discuss issues and have a drink together. On this night, shortly after our first drink, we both passed out. There must have been something in the scotch. An hour later, according to the security cameras, someone dressed as you came in and put one of those exploding bracelets on each of us.”
“Did you see who might have entered the office to spike your drink?”
“No, I’m afraid the security cameras aren’t on during business hours, only at night, so it could have been anybody.”
“But that anybody must have been familiar enough with Illcom to know that about the video cameras.”
“Or they got lucky.”
“No,” I persisted. “They knew about the video cameras, because they took the precaution of wearing a disguise when they entered in the evening. They knew I had been at the earlier explosion, and people would think it was me when they saw the hair and the uniform.”
“Hmm. You may be right. But how does that help us? You being her now proves that it’s incredibly easy for anyone to act like they work here. There are so many employees, always coming and going.”
“You probably want to beef up your security.”
“Of course, you are absolutely right about that.”
“What happened next?”
“Right,” he said. “We woke up and it was morning. We both had a bracelet locked on our wrist. Each had a solid green light embedded in it. From my conversation with Greg, I knew we were in great danger. Arthur ran for the stairs; the main reception area is one floor down. I had noticed a small data jack on the bracelet, and I ran to my office to get a cable and plug it into my computer.
“It was a fairly simple mechanism, once you were connected to the software. I heard Arthur’s voice on the intercom, telling everyone to evacuate the building—he had run to reception to try and save lives.
“With a little more fiddling on the computer my bracelet popped open, but just then the light started blinking yellow. I found the command to disarm the bracelet, and the light went off completely.”
“Oh my god!” I gasped. I was breathless and on the edge of my seat.
“I grabbed my laptop and the cable and sprinted down to reception where Arthur was still trying to clear the building. His bracelet was blinking yellow. I plugged it in and had just gotten it off his wrist when the light turned red. Arthur grabbed it in his right hand and threw it across the room, but it only flew about 10 feet before it exploded. Arthur was directly between it and me, and the force blew him back into me and knocked us both to the ground.”
“Wow.”
“He shielded me, inadvertently. He must also have called 911 when he first reached reception because suddenly there were firemen everywhere. They pulled Arthur off me and I didn’t see him again until the hospital. I didn’t have a scratch on me, but Arthur has some severe burns and seems to be in a coma. I think he hit his head pretty hard against the desk or the floor. He hasn’t woken up.”
We sat there in silence for a minute, until Aldo shook himself back to the present.
“I’ve got to go downstairs, and you’ve got to get out o
f here.”
“What do we do?” I asked, helplessly. I was overwhelmed.
Aldo reached into his pocket and gave me a business card.
“Officer Riley, I believe you. Logic tells me you should go to the police, but my instinct, like yours, says to wait. I, like the rest of the board and senior staff at Illcom, have been fully interrogated by the police. I’m pretty sure I’m not a suspect, so I think it’s safe to call me if you need help. In exchange, I expect you to tell me whatever you find out.”
“I can do that.”
“Good, because my business is at stake, and so is my life. And yours. I don’t think we can wait for the police to sort this all out.”
We stood there staring at each other, both surprised to find ourselves in these roles.
“You should leave first,” Aldo said, motioning toward the door. “I’ll follow in a few minutes.”
Thirteen
I left Aldo and took a bus to my apartment building. I slid the key into my apartment door, and let myself in. It had been two weeks since I had last been inside, and the entry hall felt oddly alien. The air was stale and the quiet seemed otherworldly. As I moved into the kitchen, the feeling continued. Dressed in dark clothes, with a black knit cap covering my bright hair, I felt like a thief in my own home. Nothing seemed quite right, and I realized it was more than likely that my apartment had been thoroughly searched by at least the Chicago police and perhaps other interested parties as well. It gave me a shiver as I passed through the living room and into the bedroom, noticing small items that didn’t seem to be quite where I had left them.
So far, I had played it pretty smart, if I do say so myself. My investigation hadn’t produced any strong leads, but I now had a much better idea of what was going on and whom I was dealing with. Really, it’s whom. Unfortunately, my days of smart were over, because going to my apartment was both stupid and dangerous, as I was about to find out.
My gun safe seemed, well, safe. And untampered with. I opened it and sighed with relief at the sight of my Baretta M. I grabbed it and loaded it, took a box of rounds and put them in my backpack. My Glock was still in an evidence locker somewhere at police headquarters. I would not be going there any time soon.
Chicago Blue: A Red Riley Adventure Page 5