Executive Dirt: A Sedona O'Hala Mystery

by Maria Schneider

  Leave it to Huntington to decide my sleep was unimportant. “No. This gardening thing was your idea, you know.”

  He snorted. “Fine. I’ll install some equipment. But we are not even.”

  I agreed heartily. “Damn straight. You owe me way more than this.”

  His eyes narrowed, but I didn’t drop my gaze. He finally asked, “Do you know the names of the blueberry plants?”

  “I’ll text them to you. The detectives took all four plants. Two of them were Sunshine Blue, but I don’t know the other two. I’ll ask Dad.”

  Huntington snagged two cookies when he stepped back into the kitchen.

  “Were smartwatches part of the contraband you think Joe was stealing?” I asked.

  “What makes you ask that?”

  I was just about to tell him about the watch when the doorbell rang. It was Radar and Mark. Their timely appearance meant I only had to tell my story once.

  “This is an odd looking watch,” Radar declared after a quick inspection. “Yet it runs high-end code. It has Pig Latin on it?”

  “Just like the Borgot phones, but Borgot isn’t producing a smartwatch to run with its phones.”

  “Joe couldn’t have loaded all the Borgot code on here, but if the Pig Latin is on here, that means at least part of the phone code runs on this without the phone being nearby. And I don’t recognize this watch model.” He held up his own very snazzy unit.

  “By ‘not recognize,’ I assume that means you have considered purchasing every smartwatch available, memorized the list of specifications, and know the price of all of them?”

  He grinned. “The price is the least useful because they are all expensive. The good ones start at around three-fifty and run to well over a thousand dollars. I got in on the first Kickstarter for my Pebble so I actually only paid a hundred and fifty, but it is barely a prototype compared to what the newer models can do.”

  “Joe’s watch doesn’t look high-end,” I said slowly.

  “No. And it will be very interesting to see what this watch can actually do when it’s running with his phone nearby. Was he smart enough to integrate the Borgot phone with a smartwatch?”

  “He didn’t code. Ever.” I shrugged, nodded and then shook my head. “I suppose it’s possible he kept his talent hidden. I avoided him for the most part.”

  “I’ll check it out and get back to you. Meanwhile, can you get me the raw code you’re testing now and a Borgot phone?”

  “Why?”

  “If Joe’s phone worked with this watch, I can check the raw code to see if it has any kind of support for a watch. If it doesn’t, that means someone added it to whatever was running on his phone.”

  “Okay, sure.” I grabbed my backpack and took out one of the Borgot test phones and the SD chip Cary had given me. “This isn’t the absolute latest code drop, but it’s close.”

  Radar blinked. He looked from the card to me. “You transfer test code on an SD card?”

  “We can download code easily at work over wifi just like any kind of phone update, but the early phones locked up sometimes. We often transferred the code the old fashioned way using the SD card to transfer it. Cary handed out the SD cards when he gave us phones to test on the weekend, but I never loaded this drop because Joe’s phone started talking, and we realized it was probably his personal phone. But the code on this card is pretty current for all our other test units.”

  Radar took the phone and stared at the slot on the side where the SD card would fit. “You transfer valuable code on a card.” He nodded. “That would make it very easy to hand off the latest version of Borgot code by slipping someone this little card. Give them the phone as well, and they have everything they need to code another device, including a competitor phone or a smartwatch.”

  “But he didn’t code!”

  “He could have given it to someone who knew how to code a smartwatch, all without any kind of email or download that could be traced.” He smiled. “No trace. They have the code if they want to make it work with a watch and sell the watch without Borgot ever being the wiser.”

  “But who would he give it to?”

  Radar wasn’t listening. He was already halfway to the door.

  Mark and Steve followed him. “I need to make some calls,” Huntington said, already frowning over his phone.

  “Don’t forget you promised to add cameras to my yard!” I yelled after him.

  He ignored me, of course. Mark gave me a quick kiss. “I need to follow up with Steve on a couple of things and make sure I stay in the loop. The heists he was working on don’t look like the real problem here.”

  I sighed and watched him go.

  Chapter 16

  Having taken most of the previous day off, I was behind on my testing. So, of course, there was a mandatory meeting taking up the entire morning. Monique came by to remind me and to hand me a copy of the new product launch schedule.

  “This schedule is also attached to the email with the meeting plan. I want to make sure when we leave that room everyone has agreed to this more aggressive product ship date.”

  I didn’t even need to look at the schedule to know it was a disaster. “Uh, Monique, did you run this by Roscoe and Kovid?”

  “What for?”

  “They are the ones who have to code the phone features. They know how long it takes. I can’t test until they are done coding. The schedule Cary was touting was overly optimistic. We haven’t hit a single date on it yet.”

  She blinked and stared down at the paper in her hand. “That’s one reason I did it over. I want to make sure we meet my schedule.”

  “But if you didn’t ask Kovid or Roscoe how long it would take them to add the features, how do you expect us to stay on schedule?”

  “Wait.” She put one hand on her hip. “Are you saying I should come to you and ask how long these tasks take and then come up with a schedule?”

  I nodded. “Well, yeah.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. We’ll never get stuff done if we just let you decide on the schedule!”

  She flounced off.

  At least her management style wasn’t any different than Cary’s. There would be no adjustment curve.

  The meeting did not start off with donuts or other goodies. Monique dug right into the schedule without even mentioning that she had taken over Cary’s position. Of course, several emails had informed us of the change so there really wasn’t a need to dwell on it. We could move straight to the arguing.

  “There is no way we can code all this by next month.” Kovid didn’t even glance at the display at the front of the room. “To meet the first ship date, we already had to take out all the foreign language support except Spanish.”

  “What?!?” Monique shook her head so emphatically, her hairspray was in danger of flinging off onto the walls. “The languages are what sets our product apart! We can’t not have them. We need every single one.”

  “Nothing patentable without at least one foreign language,” Howard, the lawyer assistant, intoned. “A patent would give us a stronger case with the venture capitalists for more funding, and if we have a patent, the company would always have that asset to sell, whether the company survives or not.”

  Roscoe pounded his fist on the table. “Last meeting Cary insisted we put Pig Latin back in. That was doable. Some of the Spanish is functioning, but that was assuming the old date.” He pointed at the PowerPoint slides on the display. “If you move those dates in where you want them, you won’t even get the Spanish finished.”

  “Do not ask me to consider writing a patent for the Pig Latin,” Howard said. “I already told Cary no dice, and it’s still a no go, I don’t care who asks me to do it.”

  “None of the Spanish language has even been loaded on the phones for testing,” I added.

  The good news was that since neither of the programmers would agree to the ship dates, Monique didn’t care about the test dates. I sat through most of the meeting wondering who had killed Cary. Had he di
ed because the programmers were sick of his bad schedules? Kovid never showed anger, but he wasn’t backing down from Monique’s demands. Roscoe’s face turned beet red, and he had no problem shouting Monique down, yelling about his expertise not being properly appreciated. Had either of them hated Joe because Joe never did a lick of work? In fact, with his Pig Latin claims, he only added to the workload.

  Monique tried pulling rank. She even offered bonuses. That did quiet the room, at least temporarily. Since Lawrence had sent his assistant and not shown up himself, I had to wonder if anyone in this room even had the authority to offer a bonus.

  “What kind of bonus are you offering?” Roscoe demanded. “Cary once suggested he’d throw in a thousand dollars per language, like we were dogs that would snap at stale and rotting bones.”

  “If you take out all language support other than English, we can get a phone out close to that date,” Kovid said. “We can add in languages one at a time after that.”

  “That would be a nice marketing move,” I inserted. “Just think. More announcements, more press releases about our fabulous phone.”

  “No language, no patent,” Howard snapped. “Why not just shut the company doors now and save the venture capitalists the trouble?”

  “We must have at least Spanish!” Monique wailed.

  Roscoe’s neck was still a dangerous purple, but the rest of his face had toned down. “It’s not ready. Testing hasn’t even started on it.”

  Oh sure, throw the ball at me. “I haven’t seen any code with language support other than Pig Latin. Cary hadn’t even finished the test plan for the other languages.” I lobbed the ball back at Monique.

  She was in marketing. She didn’t even duck. “You’ll need to create the test plan now that he’s gone. Hopefully he left you some notes.”

  How had his job become mine? I hadn’t been promoted, she had! Rather than point out her manipulation I merely said, “If the code isn’t in the phones, I can’t test.”

  The meeting went on for another hour, but the code didn’t exist. Monique lost her cool babe look long before we adjourned.

  She stomped off to report to upper management that we were refusing to do our jobs. She was new at this though. Upper management would just blame her for not being able to get our “buy-in.” No matter how beautiful or how she dressed, no way would upper management take the blame for a late product. That left her as the responsible party now that Cary was dead.

  I frowned. Had upper management killed him because we weren’t making the schedule? Nah. That implied they knew and had lifted a finger. Killing him hadn’t improved Borgot’s chances of producing the product on time. Of course, him being dead probably didn’t hurt our chances either.

  I worked late to make it look as though the meeting had given me some incentive, but I was actually pleased that we might ship the phone without all the language support. Of course, I now had to come up with a test plan, but if we shipped English first, there was time to figure out the other languages later. No doubt Roscoe and Kovid felt the same way.

  Monique, unlike Cary, didn’t stay late to make sure the rest of us did. At seven, I headed for the stairs.

  I’ve never been a big fan of hearing about endless executive perks while the worker bees toil and hope for raises. That said, I’m also not into employees who believe a company is a benevolent parent. Obviously, there were others who did not share my view. I stood and stared into the break room where Roscoe stuffed pizzas, quiche, frozen ice cream bars and a pack of Starbucks cold coffee into a cooler. I seriously doubted he was taking all this food back to his desk to thaw and eat while he worked.

  Management bought these things to keep us here longer, not as take-home for our kids and the kids in the entire neighborhood.

  Roscoe finally noticed me staring. He froze for a second and then recovered. “Big work weekend at home.”

  “Uh-huh.” I folded my arms and my foot started tapping.

  He shrugged and closed the cooler. “I’ll have the work done to prove it. What can they say? Besides, who will notice?”

  “Gosh, you’re right,” I agreed, slapping my forehead. “No one will notice that the freezer has been emptied out overnight.” A corner of the break room was suspiciously empty. “They’ll probably think that those few people who stayed all night managed to suck down two or three cases of soda, too.”

  He snickered as he edged me out of the way with his cooler. “The delivery to replace this stuff is early every Monday morning. And this month there’s a big meeting with the venture capitalists who fund Borgot. They always restock heavily before those meetings so the next delivery will be huge.”

  I waited until he was a good ways down the hallway before yelling, “Should be a fantastic weekend coming up with all that food, Roscoe! Have fun at the lake!”

  Some detective I was. I hadn’t even known when the food and sodas were restocked.

  Chapter 17

  I had promised to attend sewing meetings and gardening meetings, and here it was, Saturday, the regularly scheduled day for the garden meeting at Dave’s Garden. The internet said we’d be talking about spring planting. I was on my way out the door when Turbo and Radar showed up, followed by the truckful of dirt that Huntington had ordered.

  “We brought a few things for your garden,” Turbo said.

  “The replacement dirt is here too.” I gestured at the guys in the truck to go ahead and take the dirt around back. “I’m on my way out to a meeting.”

  Radar’s head tilted with curiosity.

  “It’s at Dave’s Garden. I have to replace the plants that the police confiscated for no good reason, and there’s a meeting there to discuss what to plant and when.” That was a reasonable enough explanation that it didn’t require mentioning Huntington had asked me to spy on someone.

  His head leveled again. “I bet they don’t have any advice for when to plant dead bodies.”

  “Anytime the ground isn’t frozen,” Turbo said. “Be too hard to bury them then.”

  I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Why did you stop by again?”

  Radar said, “To tell you that Joe’s watch locks onto the phone code and the two work together. But the latest code drop you gave me from Borgot on the SD card doesn’t have any watch support. Not even a hint of any watch support.”

  I thought about that. “Can you tell if the code that ran on Joe’s phone is Borgot code?”

  “Whenever you turned the phone on, a Borgot screen appeared, so there was definitely Borgot code on his phone in addition to smartwatch support.”

  “There’s no mention of Borgot doing a smartwatch in our schedule or product description. And yet he has a version that supports his watch.”

  “You sure the guy wasn’t a genius programmer? Maybe he added the code to work with the watch.”

  “He wasn’t playing idiot, he was an idiot,” I said.

  Turbo held up a phone and another smartwatch, one I hadn’t seen before. “We’re also here to beef up security. This is one of Radar’s old watches. The phone app will control the security we’re adding to your garden. You can then monitor the garden from this phone or the watch!”

  I tilted my head. “The phone will run my security?”

  He nodded. “But you can keep the watch in your bedroom and from there, you’ll get alerts.”

  “Couldn’t I just keep the phone in my bedroom?”

  Radar nodded. “Sure, but it’s cooler to check the smartwatch. The phone app is your control unit for the system. We’ll let the dirt guys do their thing, and then we’ll install a couple of things to monitor the garden for you. You won’t have to worry about anyone burying dead bodies back there without you knowing about it.” He started babbling about alerts and scans and a passcode for on and off.

  It was nothing short of a miracle that Huntington had responded to my request for security this speedily. He usually pontificated, argued and waited until he was tired of me nagging. Maybe Mark had lit a fire under him.
I held up a hand. “Tell me about it later. Do not break anything while I am gone.”

  Turbo pouted, which is not a good look for a geek with hair that hangs low over the tops of his eyebrows and a shirt ratty enough to have come out of the rag bin. “Have I ever broken anything?”

  I used logic against him. “Statistically, it would be impossible for you to have reached this age and not broken a single thing.” I headed for the garage, keys in hand.

  “We’ll leave the phone and smartwatch on the kitchen table,” Turbo called after me. “You can wear the smartwatch and use our phone instead of that simple Borgot phone. It doesn’t have a smartwatch.”

  “Uh-huh. Unless you’re Joe and you found a watch that works with Borgot phones.” I went back and took a spare key from the kitchen drawer. “Here. Lock up when you leave.” I glanced at Radar. “And don’t give Radar the key. He’ll make a copy because he can’t help himself.”

  “Heh-heh,” was Radar’s response.

  Turbo frowned. “He wouldn’t steal anything.”

  “Of course not.” I don’t know why I bothered. Radar probably already had a key. As a hacker he prided himself on getting in anywhere, anytime. His skills might very well have spilled over into houses, libraries, and Fort Knox for all I knew.

  * * *

  Technically, I’d met Dave of Dave’s Garden a few weeks ago. Huntington had sent me on a quick mission to obtain a guest list from one of the garden meetings. The assignment had turned into a bit of a fiasco, but I’d gotten the list and assumed my job was done. Apparently that hadn’t been enough because here I was, headed to Dave’s establishment, this time with instructions to spy on Joe’s mother. She wasn’t likely to admit to any funny business Joe might have been involved in, and now that he was dead, striking up a conversation about her son was impossible.

  Dave’s Garden was on the outskirts of Denton, a flat, somewhat barren tract that had been zoned for businesses. Dave’s Garden took up a good four or five acres on one side of Old Ranch Road, but the land across the rural route was built out with a brand new office building complex. The front of the office complex had a beautiful blue granite clock with the time, the temperature and a list of the buildings’ occupants below it. There was also a concrete garage that was not very cleverly hidden by a few large pines and a tiny strip of land for flowers. I felt lucky to be headed to Dave’s Garden rather than the office-type garden.