Mortal Crimes 1

by Various Authors

  “Okay, but I don’t drink.”

  “You do tonight,” Rosie said, and her mouth curved into a grin.

  Aroostine rolled her eyes and headed into the bathroom. She shoved her worries about the trial, Joe, and the ridiculous notion of a romance with Mitchell to the back of her head.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Sunday morning

  Aroostine held her identification badge up to the reader and waited for the soft click that signified the door had opened. She pushed it open and held it for Rosie.

  Rosie was still grumbling about the early hour. She shook her head and dug her own badge out of her purse. “I don’t think so, sister. If you’re going to drag my butt in here before sunrise on a Sunday, you better believe Sid and all the bean counters are gonna know I was here. I want full credit.”

  She turned and waved at the security camera. “Hi, Sid!”

  Aroostine couldn’t suppress the laugh that rose in her throat. “You’re insane.”

  She rolled her neck and stretched her back while she waited for Rosie to finish mugging for whoever had the bad luck to be monitoring the cameras at five thirty in the morning. To her infinite surprise, didn’t even have a headache. She’d fully expected to wake up hung over and sick after not one, but two, bottles of Syrah.

  Instead, she felt rested and ready to tackle the mountain of work that awaited them. Maybe, she reasoned, every once in a while, a person just really needed a night of egg rolls, girl talk, and bad Lifetime movies.

  The night had gotten a little fuzzy toward the end, though. She could only hope that she hadn’t blurted out anything about Joe. Or, worse, Mitchell. She reddened at the thought.

  Rosie followed her through the door, and Aroostine told herself to forget about her disastrous personal life and focus on the trial. It was time to get serious.

  “Grab your laptop and meet me in the big conference room so we can spread out,” she said to Rosie’s back, as the younger attorney made a beeline for the kitchen.

  “Caffeine first, you demon woman.”

  “Do what you need to do. I’ll get the files.”

  “Do want a mug of tea, at least?” Rosie called over her shoulder as Aroostine headed for her office.

  “Sure, that’d be great.”

  She ducked into her dark office and scooped up several of the redwelds that formed an unsteady tower on her desk. She eyed the trio of fat three-ring binders stacked alongside the desk and considered whether she could possibly manage to carry everything.

  Deciding it wasn’t worth it to try, she took the redwelds and dumped them on the conference room table. She detoured to the supply closet to sign out a loaner laptop and dropped it off in the conference room then headed back to retrieve the binders.

  On her way through her office, she bumped the corner of her desk, knocking the heart-shaped paperweight to the floor.

  She dropped the binders on the desk and bent to retrieve it, turning the cool, gray rock over in her hand. The memory of the day Joe gave it to her washed over her like a wave.

  Joe and Rufus had spent a lazy August morning fishing in the stream out back. They came tromping into the kitchen just before lunchtime, both of them dripping water on the floor.

  She’d looked up from her reading.

  “Any luck?”

  Joe grinned and hefted his cooler.

  “Four trout.”

  “Nice.”

  She marked her placed and walked over to take the cooler from him, wrinkling her nose. “One or both of you smells like wet dog. Why don’t you take a shower while I clean these?”

  He’d bent and planted a sweaty kiss near her ear. At the same time, he slipped something smooth and heavy into her hand and closed her fist around. “We found this, too. Made me think off you.”

  And then he disappeared up the stairs, whistling, with Rufus trotting along behind him.

  She’d opened her hand to find the perfectly heart-shaped stone, still wet from resting in the bed of the stream.

  She lost track of time as she stood there turning the rock in her hands, with her mind hundreds of miles away in her sunny kitchen.

  Rosie appeared in the doorway.

  “Hey, you okay?”

  “What? Yeah—sorry.” She forced herself back into the present, set the paperweight on the desk, and gestured to the binders. “Can you give me a hand with these?”

  “Sure.” She grabbed the top binder and eyed Aroostine closely. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

  Aroostine swallowed around the lump in her throat and searched her mind for a suitable lie. “Just trying to recreate my opening from memory, that’s all. Let’s go. We can divvy up the witnesses.”

  “Divvy them up? You mean … you’re going to let me take a witness?”

  Judging by the shock that glazed Rosie’s face, her distraction effort had succeeded.

  She smiled. “Maybe two,” she tossed over her shoulder, as she walked out the office with Rosie tripping on her heels.

  First, though, they’d have to draft a motion to file their opposition nunc pro tunc, just in case Rosie’s contact at the Clerk’s Office couldn’t figure out what happened and get the opposition reinstated. They wouldn’t spend too much time on it—a motion nunc pro tunc was, at its core, a formality, a technicality. It was simply a way to correct a clerical error after the time for doing so had passed. No judge in the world, not even one harboring a grudge against a government lawyer, would refuse to grant it.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “What is it?”

  Franklin pushed away his irritation at the greeting. He couldn’t afford to get into a snit with the man on the other end of the phone—the man who literally held his mother’s life in his hands.

  “I wanted to give you an update.”

  “Please do.”

  “At exactly five-thirty this morning, Aroostine Higgins’ card registered on the log. Less than a minute later Rosalinda Montoya’s card registered.”

  “And she is?”

  “Montoya? Another lawyer at Justice. Junior to Higgins. Her name isn’t on the signature block of the complaint, but she has signed some motions and certifications.”

  “So she is assigned to the trial?”

  “I don’t know. Possibly?”

  “Is that all?”

  Franklin checked the pocket-sized notebook he’d picked up at the dollar store near his home. If there was one thing he knew beyond a doubt, it was that every electronic file left some trace, no matter how crafty and careful its author believed himself to be. He’d decided any notes he took in the course of one of his so-called assignments would exist only in physical form. There would be no digital footprints leading back to him; more accurately, there would be no digital footprints that would make sense to anyone who hadn’t invented the RemoteControl system.

  “No. Higgins used her card to open the locked file room, while the other woman used hers to access the kitchen. The lights in Conference Room C were turned on, and both women signed on to their laptops from that space. They’ve been camped out in the conference room ever since.”

  “Have you been tracking all their activity?”

  “To the extent possible, yes.”

  The man huffed in his ear, and Franklin heard a slapping sound, as if he’d struck his thigh or, God forbid, another person, in exasperation.

  “And what extent would that be?” the man asked, his voice sarcastic and mocking.

  “I can tell if one of them opens, modifies, or prints an existing file. And I can tell if one of them creates a new file. But, I can’t tell the exact letters or numbers they’re typing,” he answered carefully.

  “Why not?”

  “Um, that would require the installation of a keystroke logger. That could be done remotely, but it’s probably a serious felony, like high treason or espionage or something, seeing as how they work for the Criminal Division of the federal government. Do you … is that something you want?”

  Franklin sent up a si
lent prayer that the man would say no.

  There was a pause. Then the man said slowly, “No. Not yet, at least. What about emails?”

  “Neither one has opened her email yet.”

  “What information can you gather about the emails?”

  “Oh, I can see everything on the emails. Envelope information—recipient, sender, subject, time, and date—as well as the content.”

  “You can read her emails but not her files?”

  Franklin heard the disbelief in his voice and hurried to answer. “Yes. Look, I know it seems counterintuitive, but it’s just a function of the different program. I can explain it, but it’s highly technical. How much detail do you want?”

  “None. Just make sure you capture all the information you can, whether or not it seems important to you.”

  “I will. In that case, you may also want to know that the Higgins woman has a dental appointment tomorrow morning.”

  Franklin tossed out the piece of information as an afterthought and mainly because the man’s insistence that he not use his judgment rankled him. Fine, let him sift through all the useless crap himself.

  To his surprise, the man’s voice registered excitement.

  “She does? Where? What time?”

  “Uh—,” he checked his notes, “According to her Outlook calendar, she has a wisdom tooth extraction scheduled at Suburban Dental Surgery Associates with a Dr. Davis at eight o’clock tomorrow morning.”

  “Suburban? This office is associated with Suburban Hospital, yes?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Find out. SystemSource has contracts with the hospital. See if your company provided a monitoring system to the dental surgery suite and call me back.”

  “But—”

  “Do it.”

  The line went dead.

  He stared down at the phone in his head. How did the man know so much about SystemSource’s business? Again, the worry that the man was someone from work nipped at him like a yappy little dog. He shook his head, there was no one with an accent like that at the company—at least no one he’d ever met. And, in the end, what difference did it make who he was? The man owned him, and that was all that really mattered now.

  He opened the contracts database to perform the search the man wanted and ignored the fact that his fingers were shaking. He scanned the list of clients. His mother’s kidnapper would be pleased to know that, as an affiliate of Suburban Hospital, Aroostine Higgins’ oral surgeon did, in fact, use SystemSource’s medical equipment monitoring suite.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Monday morning

  Franklin took a steadying breath to fight the nausea that had been coming over him in waves all morning.

  When he’d called the man back to tell him that Suburban Dental Surgery Associates did use RemoteControl both to run its office network and to monitor the medical equipment in the surgical suites, the man had been elated. He ordered Franklin to interrupt the supplemental oxygen supply being delivered nasally and to cut power to the vital signs monitoring equipment once the lawyer’s procedure was well underway. Then, he’d disconnected the call again.

  And Franklin had passed a sleepless night trying to rationalize what he’d be doing the next day. He’d argued with himself as he tossed, turned, and twisted in his bed:

  It’s just dental surgery—she won’t be under general anesthesia. It’s not like she’s going to die.

  Is it?

  He thought he’d stared at the ceiling for hours, but he must have fallen asleep at some point, because he awoke to the sun streaming through his window with his face wet from tears he’d shed during one of his dreams.

  He called into the office to report that he was feeling ill (true enough) and planned to work from home for the next day or two. Then he brewed a pot of coffee and sat with a mug and stared at the clock on the kitchen wall.

  At seven fifty, he imagined the lawyer arriving, dressed in a suit and eager to get her appointment out of the way and get on with her full day at the office. Although the dental office’s notes indicated the recommended recovery time after a wisdom tooth extraction was at least twenty-four to thirty-six hours at home, Aroostine’s Outlook calendar was packed with meetings on both Monday afternoon and all day Tuesday: All of them listed under the caption of her upcoming trial. He would have bet that that she insisted on the first appointment of the day to accommodate her pretrial schedule. She probably thought there was no way she could spare the entire day—which was probably especially true now that her home computer had been destroyed in the fire.

  At eight o’clock, he imagined her settling into the vinyl dental chair, possibly a touch nervous, to await the arrival of Dr. Davis. Franklin tried to distract himself by checking his email, but he was too antsy to focus on the messages, so he closed the program and just sat, staring blankly at the screen until it went black, and waited.

  At ten minutes after eight, his computer screen blinked to life: the program tracking the use of the medical equipment was active.

  This is it. He stared at the information scrolling across the screen. Her vital signs were being monitored. And the cocktail of sedatives and painkillers was being delivered into her veins. He watched the display show that her heart rate and breathing had settled into a slow, steady rhythm, and the supplemental oxygen had begun to flow.

  The procedure was underway. He’d give the oral surgeon time to make his first cuts.

  He lifted his mug to his mouth and took a swig of coffee. Cold. Disgusting.

  He stood to spit it into the sink. When he raised his head from the basin, his heart stopped. A black and white patrol car was parked in the alley directly at the end of his small yard.

  His stomach seized. He grasped the edge of the counter to steady himself.

  It was over. The police were coming for him. There was probably another car stationed out front. They were going to crash through his door and throw him to the floor.

  He focused on breathing, which suddenly seemed like an almost impossibly difficult task.

  A knock sounded on the kitchen door.

  He swallowed but couldn’t seem to convince his legs to move to the door.

  His mother was going to die because, somehow, somewhere, he’d slipped up.

  Another knock, more insistent this time.

  He craned his neck to look through the window and see how many of them were out there.

  What he saw was Tyrone Johnson, in his patrolman’s uniform, raising a hand to knock on his kitchen door a third time, a deep frown of irritation creasing his mouth.

  What had Tyrone learned? Did he know?

  Tyrone rapped loudly against the door.

  Franklin forced his numb legs to move in the direction of the sound.

  He stood in front of the door and worked up some saliva to wet his throat. Then he pulled it open.

  Tyrone was pulling his radio from his belt.

  “Oh, good. You’re alive.”

  “Why wouldn’t I be?” Franklin croaked.

  “I dunno, man. It’s been quiet over here. No one’s seen your ma in days. And your lights have been on twenty-four, seven. I thought maybe you bought it. Didn’t want her to come back from her trip to visit your great-aunt and find your decomposing corpse, you know?”

  Tyrone flashed him a smile, but Franklin got the distinct feeling that his neighbor didn’t completely buy the great-aunt story.

  “Heh,” he chuckled weakly. “I’ve been working from home. I caught some kind of bug. Flu maybe? Anyway, that’s the benefit of working in IT. I can do it in my pajamas from my kitchen table.”

  Tyrone’s eyes flitted from Franklin’s face and swept through the visible portion of the house.

  Franklin moved into the doorway to block the cop’s ingress and continued, “So, uh, not to be rude, but I don’t want to give you whatever I’ve got. It’s nasty.”

  “You working ‘round the clock?”

  “What?”

  “The lights? Your ligh
ts are on all night long.”

  “Oh. Uh, actually, it’s this stomach flu. I’ve running back and forth to the bathroom all night. It’s bad, man. Sorry if the lights are bothering you and Gloria. I can turn them off tonight.”

  “No, don’t sweat it.” Tyrone’s mouth curled into a sneer of disgust at the thought of his neighbor’s stomach problems. “Just glad to know you didn’t kick the bucket.”

  “Ha, yeah. Well, thanks for checking on me,” Franklin said.

  He was already backing away, like he was worried Franklin might projectile vomit on him or crap his pants right there in the doorway.

  Franklin half thought he might, too. But Tyrone left, and he swung the door shut and bolted it. Then he leaned against it and caught his breath.

  It had been stupid to leave the lights on. It was an empty security gesture, anyway—a lame attempt to make himself feel better. But it had been reckless. He couldn’t afford to draw that kind of attention to himself. The man had said if he talked to the police, his mother was as good as dead. He had to assume that he was being watched.

  God, you’re an idiot, he berated himself.

  He stayed there, leaning against the door, until his pulse rate returned to normal. Then he remembered his assignment, and his pulse spiked again.

  He whipped his head around and looked at the clock. It was almost eight-thirty.

  He had no idea how long the surgery would take, but the dental practice’s schedule had the surgeon’s next patient booked for nine o’clock.

  He had to interrupt the oxygen flow and disrupt the vital signs monitoring before the dentist finished up. He didn’t want to imagine what might happen to his mother if he didn’t.

  He ran across the kitchen to the table, sliding across the slick tile in his socks, and clicked his computer mouse frantically until the screen came to life. His eyes scanned the information as to which pieces of equipment were in use. With shaking fingers, he typed a line of code and hit “Enter.”

  Then he slumped into his chair, drained, and prayed he’d been quick enough.

  ________