by J. A. Jance
Stu was well aware of the working conditions for Bitcoin miners toiling away in what had once been abandoned industrial parks in China’s Sichuan province, where the presence of cheap electricity and cheap labor had made blockchain technology the only growth industry around. People there worked under terrible conditions in tumbledown buildings that looked like little more than grimy, metal-sided chicken coops. Cooling was provided by walls of exhaust fans and lighting came from bare bulbs on wires that dangled from the ceiling. As for the blades? They were usually perched on metal shelving that looked as though it was strung together with baling wire.
But that was there—in China. In Santa Barbara, California, Stu could only stand and stare at what he was seeing. He had felt the same way two years earlier when he had first set foot inside Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral. That incredible achievement had been due to the efforts of countless laborers, toiling over hundreds of years. What he saw now, in all its simple elegance, was the product of a single brilliant mind. The racks were open to the air, but not a speck of dust was visible anywhere. Everything was pristinely clean, but then, almost as an afterthought, Stu realized something else—the room was eerily silent. There may have been eight hundred high-end GPUs in the room, but not a single one of them was running.
“I turned them all off,” Irene Hansen said, noiselessly materializing in the open doorway behind Stu and answering a question he had not yet asked. “My son always paid his own electric bill,” she continued. “After he died, when that first power bill showed up, it was so high that I almost had a heart attack. I had my yard man come down and unplug everything.”
Stu winced at that. He would have preferred to have each blade powered down individually to keep from corrupting the data. Then again, if Frigg had already disbursed all the files, maybe powering down properly wasn’t that big a deal.
“Owen never liked me much,” Irene added as an afterthought, entering the soundless room and running her finger along the dust-free surface of one the racks. “He liked his machines better.”
Still unable to speak, Stuart Ramey nodded in reply.
“He always blamed me for his father’s death,” Irene continued. “Owen was convinced that it was my fault that his father committed suicide.”
And then, without any warning, she flung herself at Stuart and fell weeping against his chest. Irene Hansen needed someone to lean on right then. It didn’t matter to her that the person she chose for her leaning happened to be the one who had contributed the most to bringing her son’s murderous crime spree to an end. No, that didn’t bother her in the least.
All his life, Stuart Ramey had recoiled from any kind of human contact. For a long time, he stood frozen with both hands raised in the air, as if they were strange appendages belonging to someone else, and he was uncertain about how to use them. At last he lowered his arms. He wrapped them around Irene’s tiny heaving shoulders and held her close.
That was the first thing an astonished Cami Lee saw when she entered the computer lab through the open slider—Stuart standing there holding a grieving Irene Hansen against his massive chest and gently rocking her back and forth.
“It was the most amazing thing,” Cami would tell Ali much later. “You just had to be there.”
22
Ali awakened thinking about that damned building inspector. She had been battling the building department off and on for weeks. Abby Henderson was a bureaucrat’s bureaucrat whose best trick was putting people on hold and forgetting about them.
What Ali still couldn’t wrap her head around was the idea that less than two hours after Abby had insisted that the inspection couldn’t be done until the middle of the following week, it had already been completed—by a county employee, working overtime, on a Friday afternoon—none of which made any sense.
In Ali’s experience, the Yavapai County Building Department was an entity that not only under-promised, it also under-delivered. Something was out of sync here, and Ali couldn’t quite put her finger on what it was. Still, if the inspection was out of the way, a little gratitude was probably in order. That was one of her mother’s enduring lessons.
“It never hurts to say thank you,” Edie Larson had always insisted, “even when you’re dealing with annoying people—sometimes especially when you’re dealing with annoying people.”
Abby Henderson certainly qualified on that score. Leaving Bella asleep in the bed, Ali padded over to the love seat, opened her computer, and sent Abby Henderson a brief note:
Thanks for expediting our final inspection. I’m so happy to have that out of the way earlier than expected. We have equipment coming soon, and it’ll be great to be able to get it installed and working.
With her self-assigned thank you note completed, Ali scanned through her mail, dumping the spam and checking for messages from B. She was relieved when there wasn’t one. At the moment he was probably in the air over the Atlantic, somewhere between England and Maine. Considering no news good news, Ali took her laptop with her and, with Bella scampering at her heels, headed to the kitchen in search of coffee.
Before returning to the UK, Leland had given Alonso a crash course in the running of the Reynolds/Simpson household, including a computer file filled with extensive directions and suggestions as well as a compendium of recipes. As a consequence, it was no surprise for her to find Alonso at the kitchen counter, putting the finishing touches on B.’s somewhat delayed welcome-home meatloaf. As she made her way to the coffeepot, he looked up and nodded good morning.
“Your Saturday-morning special for breakfast?” he asked. “Herbed scrambled eggs?”
“Yes, please,” she said. “I’d like that.”
While Alonso set about making breakfast, Ali sat in the nook, reading her online newspapers. When an e-mail announcement arrived, she switched over immediately, expecting it to be from B. It wasn’t. The terse message came from Abby Henderson, who clearly wasn’t overjoyed at receiving Ali’s thank-you note.
Dear Ms. Reynolds,
I do not appreciate being contacted during my off-hours except in cases of dire emergency.
As I specified in our phone conversation yesterday afternoon, we are unable to complete the final inspection of your project until sometime next week, most likely not before Thursday or Friday at the earliest. Once again, let me remind you that no equipment of any kind may be moved into the remodeled space until the open permits are cleared for occupancy.
If you have any further questions in this regard, please feel free to contact me during regularly scheduled working hours, Monday through Friday.
“That’s weird,” Ali said aloud, feeling a slight glitch in her stomach. Something that had seemed mildly strange before now was even more so.
“What’s weird?” Alonso asked.
“Shirley Malone told me that the building inspector came by last night and cleared our permits, but I just now heard from the scheduler who says the inspection is still pending.”
Reaching for her phone, Ali dialed Shirley’s home number. “Sorry to bother you on a Saturday,” Ali said when Shirley answered, “but tell me again about that building inspector.”
“He stopped by about four and left right around five. Why?”
“Because I just heard from Abby Henderson at the building department. She claims the inspection is still on the schedule for late next week.”
“But he was there yesterday for sure,” Shirley said. “I walked him back to the lab and he got right down to it.”
“Did you stay with him while he was working?” Ali asked.
“No,” Shirley answered. “I had to leave him alone and so I could go back up to reception.”
“What was his name again?”
“Barris,” Shirley said at once. “Steve Barris, but he said most people called him Sonny. He was sort of flirty but sort of smarmy, too, if you know what I mean. He was wearing a name badge with photo ID. As he was leaving, he told me straight-out that his inspection was complete, and that we’d p
assed. I hope I didn’t do anything wrong by letting him in.”
“Did he bring anything into the building with him?” Ali asked.
“A toolbox and some tools, which he was none too careful with, by the way,” Shirley told her. “Do you want me to drive over to the office and make sure things are okay? It’s no trouble.”
Ali was thinking about what else might have been in that toolbox besides tools. What if this was some kind of sabotage plot? What if one of High Noon’s competitors had decided to take their corporate headquarters off the map with a toolbox full of C-4? Or worse yet, with Stu and Cami out of town, what if someone had infected their computer systems with some kind of self-replicating worm that could quickly spread to the computers of all their corporate clients? That would put them out of business every bit as quickly as detonating explosives.
“No,” Ali said quickly. “If anyone needs to go check, I will. And don’t worry about any of this. It’s not your fault. It’s probably some kind of misunderstanding.”
That’s what she said, but Ali wasn’t at all sure it was true. Next she found Dave Holman’s number and called. Dave was the chief homicide investigator for Yavapai County. He and Ali had been an item once, but the relationship had ended amicably. At the time they had been at different stages in their lives. She had been done raising her son, while Dave was still dealing with parenting issues and relatively young children. Afterward, they had both married other people, but the friendship between them had endured.
“Morning,” Dave said when he answered. “Long time no hear. What’s up?”
Ali knew that, as a member of the sheriff’s department, Dave would have access to a comprehensive personnel directory containing the names of all county employees. “Are you at home or at work?”
“What do you think?” Dave replied. “It’s the weekend. Working a domestic from last night. Right now it’s only attempted murder. With any kind of luck the victim will live and that won’t change, but we have to do the whole investigation just in case. What can I do for you?”
“I’m curious about a county employee—a guy named Steve Barris who works for the building department.”
“How do you spell that?” Dave asked.
“B-A-R-R-I-S.”
A clatter of keyboard keys clicked in the background. “What’s he done?”
“He came out to do an inspection for our remodel.”
“He may have done your inspection,” Dave said, “but there’s nobody here on the county employee rolls by that name, although he could be a new hire who came on board after the directory was last updated or maybe even a temp of some kind. Why, is there a problem?”
Ali felt another clutch in her gut. If Barris wasn’t a county employee, who the hell was he?
“I wanted to know if he was on the up and up,” Ali said. “We were told the inspection wouldn’t be done until next week, but he showed up and did it yesterday afternoon.”
Dave laughed aloud at that. “Right,” he said, “when bureaucracy works too fast, it’s easy to be suspicious.”
Dave’s offhand dismissal didn’t leave Ali feeling any better. “Probably just a misunderstanding on my part,” Ali said, repeating the same line she had used earlier with Shirley. “Thanks for the help.”
She ended the call just as Alonso set a plate of chef-worthy scrambled eggs and buttered Dave’s Killer Bread whole-grain toast on the table in front of her. “Is there a problem?” he asked. Obviously he’d been privy to her part of the conversation.
“The guy who did the inspection may be a phony,” she said. “Shirley left him alone in the lab with all that equipment at a time when both Cami and Stu were out of town, and that bothers me a lot. As soon as I finish breakfast and before I go pick up B., I’m going to run over to Cottonwood and take a look around, although I don’t know how much good that will do. I’m the last person at High Noon who would be able to tell if someone had been messing around with our computers.”
Alonso gave her a quick look. “I’d be glad to ride along,” he suggested. “I was already planning on going over there this morning anyway to do some shopping.”
Ali appreciated his concern and knew it was not unfounded. Alonso’s first day on the job hadn’t exactly been uneventful. Alonso had been headed toward Cottonwood in order to complete the hiring process paperwork when he’d been pulled into an emergency situation that placed him behind the wheel of Ali’s Cayenne during a hair-raising car chase up Mingus Mountain. That shared firefight experience had cemented their new employee/employer relationship in a way nothing else could have, and a supposedly temporary job offer had been amended to permanent on the spot.
A younger Ali Reynolds might have rebuffed Alonso’s offer of backup, but an older and wiser Ali did not. If something was amiss at the office, having a retired but still very able-bodied seaman along for the ride would be a good idea.
“Okay,” she said, “if you’re sure you wouldn’t mind.”
“Not at all.”
“Okay, then,” Ali told him. “I’ll go get dressed.”
She was in the bedroom pulling on a sweatshirt when B. called.
“Hey,” he said. “Hope I didn’t wake you.”
“No, I’m up and getting dressed. Where are you?”
“On the ground in Bangor, refueling. They’re slow as dial-up Internet around here. I guess they’re having way more traffic today than usual. By the time we get off the ground Dan says we should be in Flagstaff by four or so. What are your plans for the morning?”
Did she want to lay any of this building inspector mess on B. when he was about to be stuck in a plane for five hours with no way to do anything about it but worry? But not telling him was wrong.
“Alonso and I are about to make a quick trip to Cottonwood. He needs to pick up a few things, and I want to stop by the office. Yesterday afternoon a somewhat shady individual bluffed his way past Shirley by claiming to be a building inspector.”
“Don’t tell me she let him inside!”
“She did. With both Stu and Cami out of town, I want to give High Noon a once-over to make sure everything is A-OK. Do you have any advice about what I should look for?”
“Have you heard anything from our traveling road crew?” B. asked.
“Not so far this morning,” she answered. “They were supposed to pick up the truck in Burbank first thing. They’re probably already in Santa Barbara by now. If not, they’re bound to be close.”
“Call Stuart and ask him to run a scan. He can do that remotely. And don’t worry. We’re pretty bulletproof.”
Ali felt the weight lift from her shoulders. “Thank you,” she said.
“Okay,” B. added after a moment. “Dan is saying it’s time to load up. See you in a few.”
Half an hour later, Ali and Alonso headed for Cottonwood with him behind the wheel and her seated in the passenger seat with Bella, who had begged to go along, curled up in her lap.
On the thirty-minute drive, Ali brought Alonso up to speed on why Stu and Cami had gone racing off to California. After all, since Alonso had been in on all the action the day of Owen Hansen’s suicide, it was only fair that he know what was really going on. Once they reached the office, they left Bella in the car while Ali used keypads to raise the security shutters, unlock the front entrance, and turn off the alarm.
Inside the building, she went straight to the visitor’s log on the reception counter and checked the entry for the building inspector. Steve Barris, whoever he was, had clocked in at 4:10 and out at 5:03. With Alonso on her heels Ali did a quick walk-through of the building. Nothing was apparently out of place, and everything seemed to be in good order. Equipment that was supposed to be on was on, and equipment that was supposed to be off, including the collection of darkened monitors over Stu’s and Cami’s workstations, was clearly off.
Finished with her cursory inspection, Ali had turned and started out of the room when her phone rang.
“Is something wrong?” Stu demanded
when Ali came on the line. “What are you doing in the office on a Saturday?”
Ali pulled the phone away from her ear and looked at the screen. This was definitely not a FaceTime call. “How do you know I’m at the office?”
“Motion-activated cameras,” Stu answered. “The one stationed behind Shirley’s desk is the one that sent me the first alert. When I’m there, I don’t keep the notification function turned on, but since Cami and I were both going to be out of town, I switched it on while we were on our way to the airport.”
“Wait,” Ali said, “we have surveillance cameras in here? Really?” She paused long enough to glance around the room and saw no sign of a camera setup. For a moment she was angered by the idea of being under surveillance, but then curiosity got the better of her. “I never noticed them. Where are they?”
“That’s the whole point with surveillance cameras,” Stu said, “you aren’t supposed to notice them. They’re supposed to be subtle and invisible, but wherever there’s a bookshelf in the office, you can count on there being at least one working camera. Most of the books really are books, but some of them aren’t. For instance, the camera that’s filming you right now is on the bookshelf next to my wall of monitors.”
Ali stepped closer to examine the shelf. As far as she could see, the shelf contained nothing but a row of thick equipment manuals. “I don’t see any camera,” she said.
“Exactly,” Stu said. “You’re seeing books, and that’s what most of them are, but the one in the middle of the top shelf isn’t what it seems. If you look closely, you’ll see that the inside pages have been removed to leave space for the camera.”
On closer examination, Ali spotted a camera lens peering out through the lettering on the spine. She was so relieved that she almost burst out laughing. “I’ll be damned,” she exclaimed. “I never would have noticed that in a million years.”
“That’s the idea,” Stu explained, sounding more than a little proud of himself. “I bought the cameras and figured out how to place them inside the book covers. Cami was responsible for the artwork. The camera over Shirley’s desk is situated in what looks like an office supply catalogue.”