A Motor for Murder (Veronica Margreve Mysteries Book 1)

by Valerie Murmel

  She reached for a tissue and dabbled her eyes. “Involving you in this entire thing was my fault. You must have learned so much unpleasant stuff about my social circle.” I thought about some of the people I met over the last two weeks – the greed, the false facades, the obsession with status, the showing-off. “And about George. But he wasn’t all bad, really. He wanted to show off so much. He… he liked being able to do whatever he wanted. He liked buying people, you know?”

  I nodded. “It sounds bad, but I can understand.”

  “And he could be genuinely kind and helpful, and expect nothing in return. Like he was to Roger, giving him the chance to pursue his ideas. And he did help out Paul and Claire, even if he – we – did get something in return.” Her eyes welled up, and I put my arms around her. I felt tears burning my eyes.

  After a couple of quiet sobs, she continued.

  “And I’m disappointed in myself. I had become too passive, I was just going with the flow, swimming in my newly-found lack of financial worries. I sat back, and let him deal with the money. With all the obstacles, in fact. I had worked so hard earlier in my life to support myself and Roger, that it felt good to... just coast for a while. On the money, and the comfort, and the fancy gifts. And ignore the person that he was becoming. And I was becoming, I guess. And the people surrounding us wanted a piece of that money.”

  She swallowed.

  “When I met you at the farmers’ market that day, I wanted to show off my new life, my fancy house, my having everything. But of course I knew not everything in my life was perfect... And look, I did it again, tried to go along for a ride on someone else’s coat-tails: after George’s death, I asked you to investigate, sort of passed the responsibility to you on that. Got you involved into this whole mess, nearly got you killed. I’m so sorry.”

  “No, you were in shock. You were a suspect, I was glad to help.”

  After the food delivery came, I said over some roti canai:

  “There is something I still need to ask. It is about the affair.”

  Rita put down her fork.

  “You probably figured it out. I suspected that George was having an affair, but didn’t know who with. I overheard them talk at the party, as Caitlin was screaming at him. I was almost angry enough to kill George at that moment. That’s why I made up the story of the therapy and the divorce lawyer – to create an illusion of some time passing between my discovery and George’s death. Because it wasn’t that far-fetched for anyone, even myself, to believe that I could kill him on the spur of the moment over the affair. I apologize for not telling you the truth from the beginning.”

  “What are you going to do now, Rita?”

  “I don’t know. But I don’t want to be here during the trial any more than I have to. The house seems so empty and enormous to me now. And sad. I don’t need this... Maybe I’ll move back to California.”

  Around midnight, I finally headed home. On the drive back, sitting at a stop light, I burst into tears, that felt hot running down my face. Tears for George – an ambitious and driven (if not always moral) guy, done in by another’s greed; for Rita, betrayed and suspected of killing him; for all the victims of violence; for their loved ones; for Claire and Paul, and others, caught on the treadmill of trying to make enough money; and even John, caught on the same treadmill, running after some prize, coldly writing everything else off to collateral damage.

  It was about money all the way through, after all.

  I came into my doorway, and a little black cat ran excitedly towards me, saying “Meow, meow”. It meant: “Finally, you’re here to feed me dinner!” I scooped her up into my arms and gave her a kiss, burying my nose in her warm black fur. She squirmed, wanting to get to the food.

  After she ate (first things first) and then jumped up on my lap, I told her the story of my day, explaining about going to work, and then stopping by the Ellis house, and there running into the real killer and being rescued by Rita. Bitty looked at me with her enormous serious eyes, as if she understood. I gave her another kiss on the top of her head. She sat on my lap and purred. It felt so good to be home.

  Epilogue

  Rita sold Mayfair Motors and moved back to LA.

  She leased her house in Bellevue to a women’s and children’s shelter, at a symbolic rate $1/year for 20 years; and also paid for the renovations needed for them to use it. She had Paul’s help on the HOA rules, and his daughter Claire’s on the zoning and legalities to make it happen. There are now over 40 people staying there, formerly homeless women with children, fleeing abusive relationships. The kids especially love splashing in the pool – with the lifeguard present, of course. Rita has submitted her dissertation and will be defending her PhD in a couple of months.

  Roger came back. He since stayed in the area and is continuing to work on his idea. Rita, as George’s beneficiary, has annulled the original idea-sharing agreement, giving him full control of his invention.

  Stan Greenwich’s divorce from his wife went through. After the very public and very splashy division of assets, it seems he is not anywhere near being loaded. Pretty soon he will have to work for a living, like most of the rest of us.

  The news media covered the situation in great detail. John’s arrest for the murder of George Ellis was in all the papers (including the weekly alternatives) for a couple of weeks. The police went through his office papers, and based on his conversations and e-mails with Roger, found a compelling motive and plenty of evidence that he wanted to control Ba-Ele Tech Inc. They analyzed the last check written to Ba-Ele Tech Inc and determined that John was the one who forged it. He also didn’t have an alibi for the time of the murder. He is currently awaiting trial. (Teresa has refused to represent him.)

  Caitlin is now apparently involved with a senior partner at John Sargent’s (former) law firm, who she met through all the brouhaha surrounding the investigation. He is senior in also the literal sense, and rumor has it that he is very cheap in his personal life.

  The 2 much-coveted cars that George had went to Alluring Exotics – they were auctioned off to the club members at a charity event, raising over $2M for the Red Cross.

  Rita had asked me how she could express her gratitude to me for helping to find George’s killer, and we came to a nice agreement – she gave a tidy sum of money to the Humane Society, to help them care for abandoned animals like my little cat had been once upon a time.

  Speaking of which – my little Bitty is seriously working on becoming a big cat. The vet said that she shouldn't gain more than 0.5 lbs, and she promptly gained 0.6 lbs. She is looking quite conical and furry. I don’t have the heart to put the chubby darling on a diet.

  Acknowledgements

  Thank you to Anna G for her stories, that inspired some of the adventures in the book.

  Thank you to Krista S, John W, Brian G and Jonathan S for listening to me talk about the book, sometimes incessantly, and moral support!

  Thank you to my editor John W.

  Thank you to Mark for being involved in and helping with every step of the process: from ideas and characters, to cover and title brainstorming, to editing every line.

  About the author

  Valerie Murmel has been working in the software industry for over 16 years. She lives in the Seattle area with her cat, Bitty. This is her first novel.

  If you enjoyed the book, please leave a review of it on Amazon.

  Please turn the page for an excerpt from the next book in the series!

  An Excerpt from “Art and Arsenic”, Book 2 in the series

  1

  He was desperately hoping that I could fix his most pressing problem.

  He had told me that, in so many words, as soon as I walked in. His pleading eyes confirmed that it was true.

  I smiled benevolently. I was used to hearing it from people in his position.

  “I think some quiet place would be better for debugging.” I said, looking around.

  “Oh, no problem. Please come into my office.
This way.” The large man led me across the spacious white-walled room to the office in the back. “Please, take a seat. Would you like some coffee?”

  I refused the suggestion of coffee, requested tea instead, and thanked him.

  He brought me a cup of steaming tea from a small kitchen further down the hall and left, closing the office door behind him.

  I made myself comfortable in his office, putting my laptop on the solid wood desk and connecting it to the giant monitor, and settling into the big brown leather chair. The furniture in the room was all large, to match the size of the man. The office, besides the big desk and the chair, had a desktop tower computer on the floor, and book shelves along the back wall with art-related books on them. There were no windows. The room was at the back of a building that fronted one of the streets in downtown Kirkland. In the spacious white-walled area out front, a couple of guys in overalls were moving big bubble-wrapped rectangles of stuff and putting them against the walls.

  Fred Nordqvist himself was a rotund man of above-average height in his late fifties, with graying hair, bulbous nose and blue eyes behind his glasses. His forehead seemed immobile and a bit shiny (Botox? I wondered), and when he handed me my cup of tea, I noticed that his nails were bitten down to the quick.

  Fred had called my computer security firm’s office earlier in the day in panic. His art gallery’s website was not loading. He was babbling that he suspected the site’d been hacked, insisted that it needed to be fixed immediately, and agreed to pay our rates for a minimum 5-business day engagement, with the consulting fee upfront. So when I arrived at Nordqvist Fine Art, located close to the waterfront in Kirkland, I was prepared to trace a huge data breach like Target’s, but not really expecting to find one.

  I was already annoyed by the time I got to the gallery. I had been in a bad mood from the time I woke up that Thursday morning, hearing the persistent drumming of rain on my roof and pulling more blankets over me in an attempt to keep from freezing. The late-March weather, which had flirted with spring and sunshine the day before, had turned bone-chillingly cold overnight. Bitty, my cat, was also discombobulated because she couldn’t sleep on her favorite sunny spot in the guest room (which she considered her room by all rights), for lack of sun, and had been expressing her displeasure at the fact with loud meows since dawn.

  Then, when brushing my hair in front of the bathroom mirror, I found several gray hairs among my normally-brown shoulder-length coiffure. On one hand – what did I expect, after getting to my mid-thirties? On the other hand – I had thought that the face looking back at me in the mirror each day hadn’t changed since my teens – and now that my hair had obviously changed, maybe I was wrong about my face too? But I got carded in the grocery store just last week!

  Twisting and turning in front of the mirror, I tried to imagine ways of dealing with the gray. I could get highlights – but that would mean going to the salon and spending at least an hour there. (Would it be an hour? I didn’t even know how long such a process would take. And I always felt like a fish out of water in a beauty salon.) And highlights would require regular upkeep – I frowned at the thought of going to the salon every (what? 3 weeks? I didn’t know that either). That was a world in which I simply didn’t belong, in spite of reading Vogue magazine occasionally. I liked seeing beautiful models on its pages, and admired how inventively-dressed they were, but was at total loss about how to apply that to my own appearance. The person I saw in the mirror didn’t look like a model – just over 5’6” in height, with long slim legs and neck, but short arms and a torso that books on “dressing for your shape” called an inverted triangle. I was an engineer living in the drizzly Pacific Northwest – which meant I wore rain gear, jeans and hiking boots almost everywhere I went, put up my hair in a ponytail and didn’t have much chance to wear dresses, skirts, heels or elaborate hairdos.

  The other option was to dye my hair some strong color that would have no intention of looking natural. I had dyed my hair at different times before, as a teenager in high school, college or starting out in the software industry. I had purple, or black, or bright orange, or flame-red hair before, and I pondered which color would suit me best. I preferred the darker colors (I thought they made my blue eyes pop), but the problem was that my eyebrows were light, almost blonde. With dark hair and pale skin, my face would look washed-out. Hmmm, it looked like I had to re-commit to having my brows and lashes regularly tinted by a professional. So it seemed I couldn’t really avoid the hassle and time expenditure of going to some beauty salon. Having resigned myself to that, I decided enough time had been spent contemplating my looks, the beauty industry, and the expectations for women’s appearance in the twenty-first century, and headed to work.

  At work, I had been tracking a new hacker collective that claimed to have shut down a couple of Bitcoin exchanges recently, and pulling myself away from that to go restore some art gallery’s website didn’t appeal much. A small unknown site just didn’t warrant the same level of excitement as anything involving a distributed cyber-attack, potential money laundering and a crypto-currency with an unknown creator referred to only by a pseudonym. But my boss pointed out that this client was local, more than willing to pay our rates, that getting out of the office might do me some good, “And besides, you might like some of that art stuff in the gallery.” Fighting my annoyance at the interruption of my normal work, I got my laptop and bag and drove to downtown Kirkland, a community of expensive houses hugging the Lake Washington waterfront, great views, fancy boutiques and tech start-ups. There were plenty of hair salons in the vicinity, I thought. Maybe I’d be brave enough to do something with my hair while I’m there, if the assignment itself turned out to be quick.

  To be totally honest, I was mildly curious about who would want to hack an art gallery’s web site and why: from my short conversation with Mr. Nordqvist on the phone, I knew that they were not selling anything through their website (so no processing of credit cards or other payments that the hackers would be interested in), had no customer log-in screen (so no possibility for harvesting of passwords to try to use on other sites), and only gave visitors an opportunity to sign up for a newsletter. So I supposed that an attacker could get a list of e-mails and mailing addresses of local art lovers – but that by itself hardly justified such an attack, I thought.

  “Thank goodness you’re here! We are preparing for a big opening tomorrow. Seven works of David Cox!” These were the words that Fred Nordqvist greeted me with on the doorstep of his gallery. When he saw that the name didn’t elicit any signs of recognition from me, he explained: “The 19th-century painter. Works from a private collection. It’s a big deal. We want people to be able to find us, and attend! So the website has to be up! It’d look very bad on us if it’s inaccessible.”

  It turned out that the gallery’s website was made using a simple template. I logged in with the password provided by Fred and checked the traffic coming to the site, still a bit miffed at the turn of events. To think that I was missing out on keeping close tabs on hacker forums, or trying to figure out what North Korea might be up to, for this, a two-page cookie-cutter website?! Oh well, the sooner I got through with this, the sooner I could get back to more interesting stuff.

  I got the “signature” of the incoming traffic, and found that over 99% of it matched that of a well-known hacker tool available for a free download on the Internet, if you knew where to look – D3stroyZ (pronounced “destroys”). That meant that, most likely, whoever was running it was an amateur who just downloaded the tool and pointed it at the target, without any further tweaks, or any other signs of computer expertise.

  I put in place a defense: a block for the bad traffic by configuring one of the web server modules to drop all incoming requests matching the signature, before any page rendering or any expensive server side processing had to happen. Then I watched the effect – immediately, I saw the number of requests actually reaching the web site, drop to normal and stabilize there. I clicked refr
esh on the website in my browser – it came up. The Nordqvist Fine Art web page was accessible again.

  Having stopped the attack, I went looking for who the perpetrator might have been. A little more digging showed me that all the traffic originated from the same IP address. Geo location showed that it was a local address. This meant that whoever was running this didn’t even bother to disguise the IP, or run the attack from a different place – or didn’t know how to.

  As I was contemplating that fact, I heard some noise – a door closing, perhaps? – out in the large main space. Footsteps crossed the entire gallery floor and were nearing the office door.