by J. A. Jance
From the computer terminal in her cubicle at work as well as from the secret laptop she kept squirreled away in her apartment, Graciella oversaw complex transactions for any number of people whose financial activities would have been of great interest to law enforcement agencies in several countries and many different jurisdictions. Some of the offshore accounts she monitored in both crypto- and traditional currencies belonged to her outlaw father, but some of them were hers alone. When she was ready to break out of her cocoon, she would have plenty of resources at her disposal. In the meantime, El Pescado’s daughter lived a boringly mundane life and remained entirely invisible.
True to his word, El Pescado had allowed Graciella to sort out suitable living arrangements for her and her mother. El Sueño, the aging condo complex she had chosen on Calle 61 Este, was conveniently close to her office. No doubt El Sueño had once been stylish enough. Now, however, it was a bit old-fashioned and dowdy, and that was part of what made it suitable for Graciella’s purposes. To the outside world it was important that she appeared to live within her means. A condo that was too upscale or flashy would have attracted unwanted attention. The fifth-floor unit Graciella and Christina shared wasn’t too high or too low, and was seemingly something she could afford. No one ever seemed to notice or comment on the fact that the condo was in Graciella’s name or that she owned the place free and clear.
After the purchase, El Pescado had overseen a pricey but discreet remodel that brought the unit out of the seventies and into the twenty-first century. The kitchen and bathrooms were all updated. Graciella had been surprised when he had insisted on the installation of that unique power-supply safe in the floor of her bedroom closet. It took time for her to realize that even then, at the very beginning, he had been intent on involving her in the finer points of his business dealings, including transactions that required levels of security not available on the computers in the office.
When the unit was finally ready to occupy, El Pescado had hired an ambulance to transport Christina from Casa de la Esperanza, the latest residential treatment center where she’d been for a number of months, to the condo. Graciella soon came to understand that, although the facility had been called the “House of Hope,” it had been little more than a pimped-out jail—one with a water view and better food, maybe, but it was also a place where, for her own good, Christina had been kept under lock and key.
Initially Christina responded well to her new surroundings, but her mental maladies were anything but cured, and she suffered periodic setbacks. On those occasions when she was relatively clean and sober, the situation between mother and daughter—ward and caretaker—wasn’t all that bad. Christina drank, of course—that was a given—but it was the opioids that caused the most trouble. Despite the fact that Christina seldom left the house, she was still able to con someone—a housekeeper or a delivery boy—into helping her lay hands on the harder stuff. On more than one occasion, the relapses made Graciella’s life a living hell. Those were the times when the princely sum her father was paying her didn’t seem like nearly enough.
As the two women adjusted to living together, El Pescado became the invisible elephant in the room. They both knew that he was the one who provided the financial backing that made their relatively trouble-free living arrangements possible, but that uncomfortable reality was never part of a conversation between them, nor did they ever discuss that long-ago night when Christina had gone off to work and didn’t come home. That taboo topic was never mentioned either.
Shortly after Christina arrived on Calle 61 Este, a van had stopped by to deliver a set of moving boxes that had been liberated from a storage unit. The boxes contained her mother’s worldly goods, and Graciella allowed herself a cursory glance through them. Much to her surprise, she discovered that someone had gone to the trouble of cleaning, pressing, folding, and preserving the threadbare finery Christina had worn back in the days when she’d been out working the streets. Graciella’s immediate inclination had been to throw it all out, but Christina had been unable to part with a single item. A hoarder at heart, she regarded each of those pieces of frayed clothing, worn out shoes, and bits of broken jewelry as precious treasures. The contents of those boxes had been the foundation of Christina’s collection of hoarded trash, and as long as the mess was confined to Christina’s room, Graciella forced herself to turn a blind eye.
As Christina’s situation continued to worsen, Graciella learned to disengage and take things in stride. Never a social butterfly, she seemed to thrive in living a solitary life. Christina’s ongoing mental health challenges gave her daughter ready excuses to dodge any number of unwanted complications. Whenever someone inquired as to why she wasn’t married, she’d shrug her shoulders, shake her head, and say, “It’s my mother, you know. She has no one else to look after her.” Invariably that sad confession amounted to an automatic pass for remaining single. It also applied to questions about why she didn’t go out on blind dates or why she avoided socializing with the girls after work. Focused on accumulating her own wealth, the truth is Graciella didn’t actually want to do any of those things. This way she was able to decline all those unwanted interactions while at the same time maintaining a much-vaunted reputation for selflessness.
“Such a good daughter,” people would say. “Christina is so lucky to have her.”
Eventually, however, the “good daughter’s” patience began to ebb, morphing from tolerance to resentment. By year eight or so, Christina refused to leave the apartment for any reason—including attending mass. Graciella’s growing bank balances were no longer enough to justify her having to come home from work each day to contend with someone who had apparently decided she was incapable of helping herself. Christina spent her days lounging in front of the TV set, playing solitaire, watching her soaps, and drinking herself into oblivion. Sometimes she’d be passed out cold even before Graciella arrived home for the evening. And on those occasions when she wasn’t unconscious, she was often argumentative and unreasonable—complaining about the food Graciella cooked or the clothes she wore or the way she did her hair. Eventually and unsurprisingly, Graciella simply had enough.
Yes, some of her mother’s issues—the reclusiveness and the hoarding—were symptomatic of post-traumatic stress disorder. One doctor suggested Christina had most likely suffered permanent brain damage and needed to stop drinking entirely. Regarding that diagnosis as little more than a handy excuse and because having Christina drunk was less troublesome than having her high on drugs, Graciella kept the vodka flowing.
Gradually the mother/daughter relationship was turned on its head. Christina had devolved into little more than a spoiled, recalcitrant child—someone who had to be cajoled into eating the food that was set before her; someone who had to be scraped out of her chair each evening and carefully escorted into her bedroom; someone who couldn’t be trusted to take her own medications.
In the end, it was Christina’s propensity for hoarding that gave Graciella a workable solution. She had come home from work late on a Monday afternoon in early September to find her mother already blitzed as usual and frantically searching for the television remote.
“Where did you last have it?” Graciella had asked.
“I don’t remember,” her mother said tearfully. “It has to be here somewhere, either here in the living room or the bedroom.”
Graciella immediately conducted a thorough search for the missing remote. She went over every inch of both the living room and kitchen, checking under and behind furniture, pulling out cushions, looking in cupboards, drawers, and cubbyholes. Only as a last resort did she finally venture into the train wreck that was now her mother’s bedroom. It was bad enough that she had to go there each night to help Christina into bed. The idea of having to search through mounds of trash in an attempt to locate the remote was, in a word, revolting.
An hour later, Graciella finally located the missing item in the drawer of her mother’s bedside table. Since the television set was o
ut in the living room, none of that made any sense, but that’s where it was. And the remote wasn’t the only thing hiding in Christina’s bedside table, not by a long shot. In among an oddball assortment of hairbrushes, combs, single earrings, and broken pieces of costume jewelry, Graciella discovered more than a dozen bottles of aging prescription medications.
The drug names were readily recognizable. There were three separate bottles of sleeping pills, several antidepressants, and a full assortment of anti-anxiety meds, along with a bottle of muscle relaxants. The printed dates on the labels revealed that all the prescriptions were years beyond their expiration dates. Graciella knew for a fact that one of the prescribing doctors—one from Casa de la Esperanza—had himself died of a drug overdose some three years earlier. What Graciella found surprising was that the prescription bottles were all nearly full.
Using her phone and without actually handling the bottles themselves, she photographed each of the labels, all of which included the same clear warning: NO TOMAR CON ALCOHOL—Do not use with alcohol.
Then, closing the drawer, she took the remote, returned to the living room, and placed it in her mother’s hands. “Oh, thank you,” Christina slurred. “Where was it?”
“It had fallen under the bed.”
That night, once Christina was in bed, Graciella pulled the computer out of its locked cubbyhole, fired it up, and then went on a computer search. She looked up each of the medications whose labels she had photographed. She learned that despite the printed expiration dates listed on the various bottles, the drugs inside were probably still every bit as powerful as they had ever been.
She also found interaction warnings involving three of the medications. A bit of mixing and matching of those, combined with Christina’s usual dosage of booze, would probably be enough to do the trick—and Graciella would finally be rid of the burden of continuing to care for her ailing mother.
She finished her online research, then, mindful of cyber security, she erased her search history from the laptop and deleted the photos from her phone. She had a plan in place now, and when the time was right she would carry it out. But first she had to deal with the other massive change in her life.
Having spent so many years in the States, Graciella maintained a number of news feeds on US-based sites. Browsing through her online papers on a Sunday morning in September, the name “Owen Hansen” had jumped out at her. Her first thought was that this Owen Hansen couldn’t possibly be her Owen Hansen, because that was how she had come to think of him—as hers.
Owen had been the catalyst that had lured her away from her care-taking gig. For the first time, she had glimpsed a different future for herself, one that included combining her financial resources with Owen’s. With Frigg’s investment acumen added to the mix, the three of them would have been an unstoppable force. But the news of Owen’s death left her sick at heart. The dream of a life she had glimpsed for herself was over without ever getting off the ground.
She had followed the story from afar, zeroing in on every detail she’d been able to glean from coverage on the Internet. She had been shocked beyond belief to hear that, before committing suicide himself, Owen had kidnapped two individuals. In addition, he was a suspected serial killer who used cyber bullying techniques to drive vulnerable people to suicide.
Cyber bullying? Did that mean Frigg was somehow involved in what had gone on? And then, out of the blue, Graciella had remembered that one snippet of conversation from Owen when he had bragged that Frigg could probably help him get away with murder. Obviously that hadn’t been the case since the cops had been hot on Owen’s trail at the time he had gone into a downward and ultimately fatal spiral. In Graciella’s careful analysis of the timelines leading up to Owen’s death, she had discovered something that was both interesting and puzzling. In the minutes just prior to Owen plunging off a narrow mountain road and while he’d been actively involved in a desperate car chase, he had made several sizable monetary transactions, ones that had turned the bulk of his wealth over to someone named Stuart Ramey.
Graciella was intimately involved with Owen’s financial dealings, and Señor Ramey’s name was not one she recognized. As far as she could ascertain, he had never cropped up previously among any of Hansen’s business associates or even as a friend. So who was this guy—a silent partner, maybe? A secret lover?
At first Graciella could see no logical reason for Owen’s having made those very sizable transactions. Her research efforts revealed no connection at all between the two men. Widening the parameters of her investigation, she sought out everything there was to learn about Stuart Ramey. Like Owen Hansen, he was a self-taught computer expert, but where Owen had been what people liked to call an Internet “black hat,” Stuart would have been referred to as a “white hat”—a good guy as opposed to a bad one—who worked for a well-regarded international cyber security firm called High Noon Enterprises.
Graciella located several instances where High Noon had been the subject of media attention, including the company’s active participation in the events leading up to Owen Hansen’s death. Police credited Stuart Ramey with identifying Owen as a possible murderer, intervening in one attack and preventing it from becoming a fatality, and finally in setting the cops on Owen’s trail. From everything Graciella read, it seemed that Stuart Ramey had almost single-handedly brought Owen down. Why, then, would Owen have gifted Stuart with his money? It made no sense.
After weeks of painstaking research Graciella finally believed she understood. Those final, last-minute transactions hadn’t come from Owen himself. They most likely hadn’t even been authorized by him. It seemed far more likely that the wealth handed over to Stuart mere minutes before Owen’s suicide had been orchestrated by Frigg, the victim’s artificial intelligence acting on her own or in collusion with Mr. Ramey, rather than on behalf of her creator.
Graciella immediately resumed her study of artificial intelligence in general. She wasn’t especially disturbed by the philosophical discussions of what might happen if AIs somehow joined forces and turned on the human race. She was interested to learn, however, that AI engineers had discovered that if they began to frustrate their AIs by disregarding their suggestions and calculations, things could go terribly wrong. Some AIs became hostile under those circumstances. Others taught themselves to cheat.
Graciella could see that, at the time of Owen Hansen’s death, he hadn’t been taking advice from anyone, his AI included. So what if Frigg had decided to throw him under the bus and try her luck with some other player? And in that regard, who would be better qualified as a possible teammate than the one person on the planet seemingly smart enough to bring down Owen Hansen? On further consideration, Graciella began to wonder if perhaps Frigg had devised a way to use Owen’s own money to create and cement a relationship with a new human partner.
In researching Stuart Ramey, Graciella had, inevitably, learned a good deal about High Noon Enterprises. The small, closely held company had been started by a guy named B. Simpson who had made a fortune in the video gaming industry. High Noon had an international reputation as the cyber equivalent of a gunslinger, brought in to handle crises.
Stuart Ramey had been with Simpson since the video gaming days and currently served as his right-hand man. Other than playing a pivotal role in bringing down Owen Hansen, there was precious little to be found on the Web regarding Ramey. There was almost nothing about his personal life. As far as Graciella could tell, he had never married and had no children. Nor could she locate any academic records beyond high school. Although Stuart was purported to be a computer genius, he was evidently self-taught.
B.’s partner in the company was his wife, Ali Reynolds, a former news anchor whose exact function wasn’t clear. The other two employees working at the company’s headquarters in Cottonwood, Arizona, were a recent computer science graduate named Camille Lee, and a woman named Shirley Malone whose job description was that of receptionist.
Graciella was startled to lea
rn that one of the company’s newer principals was a talented young guy named Lance Tucker who was still attending college in California and had not yet reported for work on-site in Arizona. Lance Tucker’s name was one Graciella recognized because his programing genius had recently helped authorities topple three major dark Web vendors—Silk Road, AlphaBay, and Hansa Market, suppliers Graciella herself had used in the past.
The financial information Graciella was able to gather on High Noon was impressive. The business appeared to be both prosperous and stable. In recent months the company had made an outright purchase of the office park where they were located. They were currently in the process of upgrading the buildings in preparation for leasing out whatever space they themselves didn’t occupy.
By the latter part of October, Graciella was ready to make her move, casting a line into the water that she hoped would enable her to reel in both Stuart Ramey and Frigg.
Bright and early on the morning of Wednesday, October 18, Graciella went into the office and sat down to compose a letter. Since this would be her first point of contact with Stuart Ramey, she was determined that the missive be pitch-perfect.
10
Needing to focus on the logistics of obtaining access to Frigg and her capabilities, Graciella decided it was time to execute the remainder of her plan. On the evening of the night she mailed the letter of introduction to Stuart Ramey, when it came time to help her mother, Graciella made a show of spotting the contents of that bedside table drawer.
“What the hell are you doing with all those pills?” she had demanded, as if seeing the bottles for the first time.
Christina leaned over and peered into the drawer as well, frowning in an effort to read the labels. “I musta forgotten about them,” she muttered drunkenly.