Executive Dirt: A Sedona O'Hala Mystery

by Maria Schneider

  A bawking beast rushed us. Saunders dodged, causing those that had settled to fly again. He took a direct hit in the chest, a lone feather sticking solidly on his jacket. It looked to be smeared with a smelly offering from the chicken.

  LeAnn handed her bird to one of the troopers. “I’ll get it.”

  She was off, chasing chickens. She clapped, a mistake if you wanted to catch a bird, but it worked well for making several more take flight, including at least three landing on the front seat of Saunders’ car. She seemed determined to bury the detective’s car in chickens.

  I grinned.

  The next vehicle to pull up was the one I wanted to see. Huntington could barely inch the Viper forward, forcing Sean to pop out several yards away.

  My dear lawyer brother didn’t appear much calmer than Mark. His face was an unhealthy red. “Sedona!” He shot me a glare dark enough to kill the chicken I was holding, but if there is one thing we O’Halas understand, it’s loyalty and family.

  “I’m fine,” I told him.

  “Were you speeding?”

  I shook my head. “Um, there was a Silverado chasing us and they shot at us!”

  Sean was already in lawyer mode. Saunders didn’t have a chance, and he knew it. Within a minute, Sean had the troopers admitting they had nothing conclusive on radar. How could they? All of us had been speeding, including the Ducati. But by the time they aimed radar at us, I was probably traveling the slowest of the lot.

  “I’m impounding this car,” Saunders announced.

  Sean switched gears. “We’ll allow you to inspect the contents, but the car is legally registered and up-to-date. No reason to impound it.”

  Huntington added his two cents, but he was fighting off a chicken as he tried to extract the talking phones from the back. “This isn’t my stuff. You can have it.” The phones hadn’t gone silent either. As Huntington yanked the box from the back, the voice of the phone assistant clearly read out a location and time.

  Wanda froze and so did I. I knew that voice. I’d recognized it right away. It was the Borgot assistant voice, which meant these were not phones that had ever been sold. They had to be test phones that should have remained at the company. Untraceable, unowned, unregistered phones would be very valuable to a criminal.

  “That’s supposed to be a box of pillowcases,” I said.

  “Your fingerprints anywhere on those talking pillowcases?” Sean demanded.

  I shook my head and pointed at Wanda. “She brought them. She’s the only one who touched that box. LeAnn, Barb, and I put the other pillowcases in the back.”

  “I had to do it. They killed Joe! If I didn’t deliver the phones Joe stole, they woulda come after me.” She pointed back down the road. “You saw them! They had a gun! I promised I’d bring them, but they didn’t wait at the charity where Joe usually delivered them. I thought maybe they’d leave me alone if I came with you and delivered the last batch of phones he had taken from his work!”

  Saunders started reading her her rights. She’d already confessed to having the phones, but she hadn’t been the one to steal them. Joe had. He’d taken the phones from Borgot and sold them to the bikers—or whoever wanted to buy them.

  Even though the phones had been stolen and probably used to commit crimes, Joe’s mom couldn’t have been the one who had murdered Joe. Although, having known how annoying Joe could be, anything was possible.

  LeAnn handed her chicken over to the farmer. I gave mine up too, and since I had already been pooped on, decided to help catch the rest.

  Sean and Detective Saunders argued over who would keep the car. Huntington tried to get in a word edgewise while still holding the box of talking phones.

  I was almost relieved when Radar and Turbo drove up in a white van. “Need a ride?”

  Neither of them owned a van. This one looked as though they had borrowed it from an airport shuttle service. The old lettering had peeled away, but it was still possible to read the “Ride’n Fly” logo.

  “How’d you guess we needed wheels?” I stuffed a last chicken into one of the cages and inspected my pants. There was only one or two poop smears, but no way would Huntington let me drive any of his cars back. I wasn’t even fit to ride on the back of a nice Ducati motorcycle, not that I had a helmet.

  Turbo turned to Radar. “Good call on the vehicle.”

  LeAnn strolled up behind me. “Is this our ride? Oh, how low we’ve fallen already.”

  “Heard on the radio there were phones in the box,” Radar said.

  “They announced that?”

  He shrugged. “Not exactly.”

  I nodded. “Yes, phones. From Borgot. Free minutes because they are test phones, I’d bet.”

  “Did you snatch one for me to examine?”

  I shook my head. “I was never near the box, but Huntington pulled it from the back seat. Maybe he’ll be smart enough to confiscate one.”

  “And we thought maybe information was sewn into the pillowcases.” LeAnn shook her head.

  “Those phones are unmarked, unowned, and Borgot is paying for the air time.” Turbo waggled his eyebrows. “Untraceable and if used in a crime and dumped later, it’s a test phone assigned to nobody.”

  Radar nodded. “Even if conversations are recorded or locations tracked, that wouldn’t prove who was using the phones unless they were caught in the act because no one ever bought them. Perfect for heists, kidnappings, bank robberies, whatever.”

  “Probably drug drops,” Turbo declared.

  “If Huntington can get us even one of the phones, we’ll know more,” Radar said.

  I shook my head. “I don’t know if he can pull it off. There are enough cops over there to open six donut shops. They’re planning to impound the car.”

  “Yup.” Radar held up his smartwatch even though I couldn’t possibly read any of the text from so far away. “Someone called in for a wrecker so we figured you might need us to bring transportation.”

  Most of the chickens had been captured. The ones that hadn’t were probably going to run wild and free until a coyote or hawk spotted them. I slid the back door of the van open and let Mark’s mom in ahead of me.

  I waved at Mark and climbed in. The van smelled of stale smoke and failing air fresheners. LeAnn was right. We’d been driving in the seat of luxury only moments ago, but things had taken a downhill turn, fast.

  Chapter 25

  Radar dropped LeAnn off at her house so she could get cleaned up. At my own house, I rushed my shower because Radar and Turbo went out back to reset and “improve” the garden security. The danger was in their definition of “improve.”

  “Leave precise and detailed instructions for shutting things off,” I yelled as I raced into the bedroom. “Precise and detailed!”

  “Arming it is easy,” Radar said.

  “For shutting it off!” I slammed the bedroom door.

  Even showering at warp speed, Mark and Steve had arrived by the time I finished. I grabbed clothes and dressed fast, not wanting to miss any details. My newly sewn bra was half on before I realized it was the one I’d made.

  I nearly tossed it back in the drawer, but it would hold well enough. In fact, the hooks were so snug I could barely force them through with all the sewing I had done around the area. Well, no one was going to see it anyway.

  By the time I staggered into the living room, Radar was hard at work examining a phone. Huntington had, indeed, pilfered one of the Borgot phones from Wanda’s box. “The investigative team is working on extracting every possible clue from these things, but Joe’s mother spilled her guts,” Huntington said. “Joe was selling the phones to a gang who used them for heists, at least one blackmail and one kidnapping for ransom.”

  “Was this gang a bunch of her biker friends?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “She claims they were Joe’s friends that he met through a single biker her group used to know. The criminals not only used the phones to coordinate crimes, they had branched out and were sell
ing the untraceable phones to other entities for criminal use. That’s why the pattern of crimes wasn’t always the same. Several of the crimes were happening in other states. We knew some of the perps belonged to a local bike gang here that included the two in the Silverado.”

  “Good thing you managed to snag one of the phones,” I said.

  “The gang hadn’t taken control of these phones yet, so there probably isn’t any incriminating evidence on any of them. This particular one spouts Spanish phrases, and I didn’t know how to switch it to English.”

  That got my attention. “What?”

  “It’s doubtful any of the foreign phrases are a special code for the gang, because they hadn’t taken possession of the phones.”

  “Are you sure it was Spanish? It wasn’t Pig Latin?”

  He scowled at me. “Spanish.”

  I turned to Radar. “Joe’s phone—or his watch, did it have foreign languages on there?”

  “Yes and no. There were apps for Pig Latin, Spanish and Italian on the watch. But the phone only had Pig Latin on it so the watch couldn’t utilize the functions. Those watches don’t have the juice to run alone. There was no foreign language support on the Borgot code drop you gave me on the SD card either.”

  “Let me see that phone.”

  Huntington reluctantly handed it over.

  I hadn’t done any of the foreign language testing, but I knew how to activate the translation service, at least in theory. I said the words and typed in the proper letters. “Borgot, Spanish.”

  “Si, estamos para servirle,” the phone replied.

  My hand shook slightly. “Where is the bathroom?”

  ¿Dónde está el baño?

  I shook my head in amazement. “This is weird. Very weird.”

  Radar tilted his head. “That sounds like the proper translation.”

  I nodded. “It is. But the translation code hasn’t been loaded on any of the test phones at Borgot.”

  Mark raised his eyebrows.

  “It isn’t even supposed to exist yet.” I explained about the arguments and scheduling. “Roscoe said some of the Spanish had been coded, but not enough to test. Howard said if we don’t have language support, we have nothing patentable. None of the languages other than Pig Latin has been loaded on our official test phones, or I’d have known about it. Just how much Spanish was on Joe’s smartwatch?” I asked.

  Radar retrieved his jacket from the couch and dug around in the pockets. He finally extracted Joe’s smartwatch. After a bit of tapping, he verified his earlier claim. “There’s no actual way to start the apps on the watch, not without phone support, but there are two icons, one for Spanish and one for Italian. There was Pig Latin and a British voice versus an American one on his phone, but no Spanish, no Italian.”

  “None of the Borgot plans have a British voice. The actor we hired to do some of the voice impression is all-American phrasing. Borgot’s translation plans call for everyday phrases and travel guide phrases, along with a kind of artificial intelligence to offer answers to oddball questions, but supposedly none of that code is ready to be tested except in English.”

  Radar tapped the watch face with one finger. “Smartwatches are all the rage. A watch that works with a phone to offer translations would be very useful. For a business traveler, it could save time and make him look smarter. A guy could just ask his question without even taking his phone out. The watch spits out the translation, and he’s in business.”

  “But Borgot is only producing a phone that will someday offer translations. It doesn’t work yet!”

  “Looks to me like someone is leapfrogging over Borgot,” Radar said. “They got their hands on the basic Borgot code and are adding languages and watch support.”

  I picked up the prototype smartwatch. “A gang of bikers is coding a watch to work with Borgot’s phone? But how are they planning to get the watch to market?”

  Huntington narrowed his eyes. “They caught the two in the Silverado. I’ll find out if they had watches on them.” He made a phone call.

  “Cary had access to the code and so did Joe. But neither one of them was writing code, so who added the ability for Spanish? And then who coded the watch Joe was wearing to work with the phones? Anyone could steal the code once Kovid or Roscoe checked it into the main build machine. The problem is, there isn’t finished code there. The code is barely started for most of the languages.”

  Huntington hung up. “No smartwatches on the Silverado crew or Joe’s mother. This looks like it could be a separate crime. The bikers just wanted untraceable free minutes and disposable phones that weren’t tied to them.”

  “Joe was stealing the phones for the gang, but he must have known about the translation code as well because he owned a watch that had some of the translations working,” I said.

  Mark agreed. “Looks to me like Joe was delivering code and phones, but not necessarily to the same people. Cary had to be involved also or he wouldn’t have ended up dead in your garden.”

  I nodded. “Cary wasn’t the type to get his hands dirty. He probably hired Joe as the delivery person. After Joe died, I heard Cary talking to someone on his phone. I think he was looking for Joe’s watch. It must have fallen off, and Cary was supposed to recover it.”

  Mark grunted. “The more important question is what got Joe and Cary killed? Selling code to work with a watch or selling the phones to a biker gang so they could commit crimes?”

  “The gang wouldn’t kill Joe,” I guessed. “He was their ticket to the phones. Joe’s mom even said she’d tried to explain she couldn’t obtain more phones. And since at least some of these phones have code meant to work with a smartwatch, they were probably not even headed to the gang. Joe must have intended to deliver them somewhere else.”

  Huntington nodded. “If the gang had killed Joe, they would already have known that Joe was dead and couldn’t get more phones.”

  “And if Cary was a secondary source for the phones, killing him wouldn’t help the bikers either,” Mark said.

  We stared at the watch. “It had to be the watch,” I muttered. “Something to do with the language translations and making it work with a watch got them both murdered.”

  Mark picked up the phone from Wanda’s stash. “The watch is a step above what Borgot intended to sell. But who is writing the language translations and making it work with this watch? And how are they planning to continue the operation without Cary or Joe?”

  I looked at Radar hopefully.

  He shrugged. “The bits we have seen are not that close to completion, but we’re only getting pieces here and there. The code on the phones that Joe’s mom had is obviously further along than any of the code you’ve seen at Borgot. My guess is that if they can get a few more tweaks, they are probably in business.”

  Huntington paced and grumbled. “Anyone could be stealing that code.”

  “Not just anyone,” I disagreed. “Whoever is doing this has to be coding the languages ahead of schedule and getting it to work with the smartwatches. All the code goes through Roscoe and Kovid. There are a few junior engineers and a couple of real language experts, but their modules are integrated with everything Roscoe or Kovid do.”

  “You think one of them killed off Cary and Joe?”

  “I can’t imagine either Roscoe or Kovid willingly cooperating with Joe in the first place! Kovid did admit he put the Pig Latin in there, but he did that as a joke. Maybe he’s been secretly working on the other languages too. But how do we prove it?”

  Useful suggestions were in short supply. Even if Radar hacked into Borgot or I let him use my account, whoever was stealing code wasn’t stupid enough to do it under their own account. They had to be delivering code via the SD cards —and that meant there was no tracing it back to an email account or work account. The phones were stolen, so there was no tracing the units back to whoever was doing the code.

  Most worrisome of all was that whoever was behind all this was a murderer who had already buried
one body in my backyard. I really didn’t want to be the next victim.

  Chapter 26

  It was late by the time everyone departed. Thankfully Mark stayed. He called his mother to give her an update and then turned to me with a brooding expression. “I didn’t find it amusing when someone took shots at you in the Panamera.”

  Was he blaming me or complaining in general? “I wasn’t thrilled either. Nor was I very happy when you drove between me and the bullets on a motorcycle. You were in more danger than me!”

  “Huntington should never have involved you.”

  “Or you, for that matter.”

  His eyes narrowed. “There’s no arguing with you, is there?”

  Since we were arguing, even though I wasn’t certain why, he was obviously wrong.

  He ended the argument by striding over and kissing me.

  If he didn’t want to discuss my involvement anymore, who was I to argue? I could redirect my worry every bit as much as he could. I squeezed his broad shoulders, knowing he hadn’t been hit, but needing the reassurance of touching him.

  His hand traveled under my shirt across my back to my bra clasp.

  It didn’t take me long to remember I was wearing the bra I’d sewn myself. The clasp was wedged on there crooked and triple sewed around the little hooks. Instead of melting from the sheer bliss of being with Mark, I was getting downright hot from the embarrassed blush that crept up my face, starting in the vicinity of the damn bra.

  His lips were still on mine, but his concentration was obviously elsewhere. He had both hands involved now, trying to discern the nature of the bra clasp. At this rate, I’d be out of that bra by the time he was sixty.

  Finally he pulled back, panting either with passion or from the effort of twisting the bra, the clasp and me underneath it all. “Do you have a lock on this thing or what?”

  “Well, no, but I sewed it myself,” I gasped out.

  He closed his eyes.

  “Except for the part your mother helped me with.”