01-A View to Die For (2012)

by Richard Houston

  The overweight man finally got back in his truck and pulled over with the other customers, who were trying to separate the metals in their trucks into piles the yardman would accept.

  Our load was no exception. When we finally got our turn to unload, the yardman refused our refrigerator. “Sorry, Boys,” he said. “Read the sign. I can’t take those. But if you want to come back with just the coils, we’d be happy to buy the copper from you.”

  Then it hit me. I remembered seeing on television how the theft of copper coils from air conditioners had reached such epidemic proportions that some counties had started tracking their sale. “You keep a record of those, don’t you?” I asked.

  “Yeah. We give that to the cops whenever they get a hair up their ass to crack down on copper theft,” he answered.

  “Anyway I can get the list for last month? My mother had her outside unit stolen. It might help track down the culprits.”

  “Axe ‘em in the office. Maybe they can help ya.”

  It took us twenty minutes to sort through the junk in the truck before we were able to go back through the scales and determine how much scrap metal we actually had to sell. The boys waited in the truck while I went in to collect our reward. I was surprised to see a thick glass plate separating me from the clerk. I had seen a setup like this at a few convenience stores in some of the less desirable neighborhoods back in Denver, but it was a shock to see it here.

  The girl behind the counter was a female replica of my nephew. It must have hurt for her to speak with the rings in her lips. “Looks like twenty-three dollars and sixty cents,” she said through the speaking disk built into the glass. “I just need a driver’s license and a signature.” She slipped an invoice in the tray on her side of the window then pushed it toward me.

  I signed the invoice, returned it to the tray along with my Colorado driver’s license, and pushed the tray back to her. “They told me in the yard that you might be able to get me a copy of copper sellers for the last few weeks. My mother had her air conditioner ripped off, and I was hoping the thief might have tried to sell the coils to you.”

  “You’ll have to get that from the police. We only give that information to law enforcement,” she answered, then after looking at my license, “Do you have a Missouri ID? I can’t accept an out-of-state license.”

  “No. I’m just visiting.”

  She pushed the license back to me through her tray and nodded toward Taylor’s truck. “How about one of them?”

  “Sure. They both live here. Hold on, and I’ll go get my nephew.”

  I returned a minute later with Kevin. “Phat lookin snake bites, Sharene,” he said when he saw her.

  “You guys know each other?” I asked, looking at her lip more closely. Then I saw the connection. The holes from the rings looked like a snake had bitten her.

  “Yeah, Uncle Martin. Me and Sharene used to hang together.” Then turning to his old girlfriend, he said “What you doin workin here? Who’s watchin the kid?”

  “My mom. Hey, hold on, and I’ll see if I can get your uncle what he needs.”

  The twenty-three dollars and change didn’t even pay the dump fees when we eventually made it to the landfill. The place seemed even hotter than the recycle yard. And the smell was a lot worse. They wouldn’t take the refrigerator either. It was looking like we would be stuck with a white elephant until the gal in the office gave me a number of someone who would take appliances for a price. I saw a McDonald’s soon after leaving the dump and offered to buy the boys lunch.

  The cool air of the restaurant was a welcome relief. I ordered six McDoubles, three fries and three large cokes. It was cheap, but it nearly broke me. “I’m sorry, Uncle Martin. I really thought we could make some money doing this.” Kevin said when we sat down at a table by an older couple with their grandkids.

  “It’s okay. I still have a little put aside. We’ll stop off at an ATM before we get home. Just don’t tell your mom. Let her think we got it selling junk.” Then the couple and their grandkids got up and moved to the far table. Either we smelled worse than I thought, or they thought the boys were vampires seeking new recruits.

  “Do you think the disk will help catch the guy who trashed your mother’s house?” Taylor asked after scarfing down his two burgers faster than Fred ever did.

  “With a little luck, I might be able to find him. But it might take a while. Kevin’s girlfriend copied the last two months of copper sellers to a floppy disk. My computer doesn’t have a floppy drive.”

  “Don’t look at me,” Kevin said with his mouth full of fries. “I ain’t seen one of them in years.”

  “You could buy an old computer at the Goodwill,” Taylor said. “It’s right on our way home.”

  “Great idea. But first we need to hit that ATM and then get rid of the refrigerator,” I answered as I reached for my cell. “Finish up while I get the address of the appliance store. We need to get home before it gets dark.”

  The boys had to use the restroom before we left, so I amused myself by people watching. Only the old couple with grandkids seemed to be interested in us. They were probably wondering about the hygiene of vampires and wondering why the boys didn’t use the restroom before eating. Once the boys joined me to leave, I waved to the grandparents on the way out. I swear I saw the grandmother grab the nearest grandkid.

  After dropping off the refrigerator at the appliance store, we stopped at the nearest ATM. I withdrew a couple hundred, and we headed for the Goodwill Taylor had mentioned. I struck out again. They didn’t have any computers – new or old. They no longer accepted electronic donations because there was no market for the stuff, and it cost them money to get rid of it. They suggested I could try one of the many so-called flea markets that lined Highway sixty-five on the way home, but I didn’t want to waste my time. I would order a floppy drive online and wait to read the disk until it came. I had more urgent tasks at hand. There was still the matter of getting my hands on Hal’s computer.

  It was nearly dark by the time we left the SuperMart in Truman. I had stopped to get some groceries. The bill would have cleaned out my wallet, so I paid with my debit card. A quick mental calculation said I better get some money in the bank soon. “Think your father has left town yet, Taylor?” I asked as we left the parking lot and headed toward Highway Sixty-Five.

  Taylor took out his cell phone and touched a single icon. “I’ll check with my mom. She’s probably wondering where I am anyway.”

  I pretended not to listen while he got his mother on the line and answered her questions on how he was and if he had eaten lately. I couldn’t actually hear her, but it was obvious from his responses what she had asked. Then he completely surprised me and handed me the phone. “She wants to talk to you, Jake.”

  “Hi, Amy,” I said, hoping the boys didn’t notice my red face. “What’s up?”

  “Hal wanted to call you. But he has to be in San Diego tomorrow, so he didn’t have time. He was wondering if you could come over and take a look at his computer. He says it has slowed down to a crawl since you fixed it for him.”

  “Really? That’s odd. Maybe he got a virus somewhere. I was just telling Taylor I needed to update his virus program, so I’d be happy to come over.”

  “Oh, thank you, Jake. I know it wasn’t anything you did. It’s more likely the fool downloaded it himself from some porn site.”

  I didn’t know how to respond. Should I agree or try to defend him? “Jake? Are you still there, Jake?” she asked.

  “Must have passed a dead zone,” I answered. “What time should I come over?”

  “Oh any time. I have to work, but Taylor can let you in. He knows how to turn off the alarm, so come on over whenever he gets out of bed.”

  We continued to chat for a few more minutes about how my sister and mother were doing before I returned the phone to Taylor. He held the phone to his ear and rolled his eyes while she talked. It wasn’t lost on Kevin. He made a motion with his hand that imitates someone wh
o won’t stop talking. I wanted to say something in Amy’s behalf, but I thought better of it.

  Taylor finally spoke: “Love you too, Mom,” he said and hung up.

  Chapter 16

  When I finally got into Hal’s house, it was well past noon the next day. It wasn’t Taylor’s fault. He was up and ready to go before ten. We had waited for Kevin to get out of bed and finally gave up and went on without him.

  Once in the house, Taylor hurried over to a very expensively framed mirror in the foyer, and to my amazement, he opened it like a medicine cabinet. Then he punched in a code on a keypad that was hidden behind the mirror to disarm the alarm. I tried to act uninterested by looking past the foyer into the great-room.

  The house made my sister’s look like a shanty. There must have been at least six thousand square feet, and it had been designed without regard for cost. The foyer was larger than my cabin back home. It had a marble floor with a mosaic medallion I would expect to see in a Roman palace. The foyer led into a great room with a window three stories tall that had been situated to catch the view of the lake. This was no tract house; it was designed as a one-of-a-kind work of art. The entire house smelled of money, and it made me wonder if I’d gone into the wrong profession. Then I noticed a small camera with a blinking light pointing at us.

  “Is that thing on?” I asked, pointing toward the camera.

  “Yeah. Dad had them all over the house until Mom made him take them out,” he answered while leading me toward a set of ten-foot tall French doors off the foyer. “She said only a pervert would want to watch our every move.”

  I didn’t comment. I was awestruck by the rich mahogany doors and trim. It must have cost more than I could make in six months.

  “Here’s where they installed the main system and DVR,” Taylor said once we were in Hal’s office.

  “Where are all the wires, Taylor? You must have at least six different cameras outside, but I don’t see any wires.” I said, pointing to the large LCD monitor on the wall with six different camera angles, including the dock.

  Taylor opened a hidden door in the massive wall unit surrounding the monitor. The door led to what must have been a large walk-in closet at one time, but it had been converted to house the electronic equipment and, I assumed, a hidden safe for Hal’s coveted coin collection.

  “This box here is for the burglar system,” he said, pointing out a small unit on top of a file cabinet. “It’s hooked to the security company by satellite. It also has a backup power supply over here, so if we lose power, it still works.” I was impressed with Taylor’s knowledge of the system.

  “And I take it this is the video surveillance system in this rack.” The box said Surveillance Net 1000.

  “Yeah. Cost more than he paid for my truck.” He said with a note of sarcasm. “Nothing is too good for my father. It has a terabyte hard drive and can record up to sixteen cameras. The damn thing is set to record only when the cameras detect motion, so it can store a couple months of data on the hard drive before overwriting it. It even has a DVD recorder to backup data.”

  I did a quick mental calculation. “That would take a truck load of DVDs. Even with double sided recording, it would take at least a hundred disks to back up a terabyte.”

  “It only backs up what you want. You know if Dad wants a permanent record of something, he can put it on a DVD or copy it to a flash drive with the USB port. He never even bothered until a few weeks ago.”

  In less than a second, I knew how to find Born2fish. I tried my best not to show Taylor my revelation by making small-talk. “So there’s that bad boy,” I said, tilting my head in the direction of the computer. I had brought my laptop along as part of the charade and placed it on Hal’s desk, and then sat in his leather office chair. “Guess I better get to work and see what’s slowing it down.”

  Taylor stood behind me, watching over my shoulder when I started to work. It was exactly what I thought he might do which is why Megan and I had cooked up a plan the night before to distract him. I looked at the time in the lower corner of the screen, and I wondered why she hadn’t called. It was already fifteen after one. She was supposed to call fifteen minutes ago. I pressed the CTL, ALT, and Delete buttons at the same time to start the Task Manager.

  “Won’t that reboot the computer?” Taylor asked.

  “It can, but it is also a shortcut to show me which processes are running and the resources they are using.”

  Taylor started to say something else when his cell finally rang. “Hello… Hi, Meg… Sure, I’ll be right back.”

  I waited until I heard the truck leave the drive before I started going through Hal’s desk. I didn’t know how long Megan would be able to keep Taylor away with her plea to help Kevin move Mike’s old beer refrigerator to my mother’s. Hal’s computer could wait. I had just been given the chance to solve the murders in one fell swoop. He never bothered to backup data until a few weeks ago? Now why would he decide all of a sudden to start backing up at the same time everyone started to die? There must be something on that DVD he thought was mighty important. My guess was that it was a record of Born2fish meeting him at the house. All I needed to do was find where he kept the DVD backups and make a copy of that meeting.

  I tried the large file-folder drawer first, thinking he may store them there instead of files. No such luck. He actually used the drawer for files and a few porn magazines. I was tempted to look through the other drawers – not for DVDs but just to snoop – when I remembered the file cabinet in the hidden closet. I left the desk and opened the concealed door of his security system.

  Surveillance systems were something new to me. They would have been a complete waste of money for my little cabin - most of them cost more than anything I owned. It would be like renting a safe deposit box to safeguard my rejection letters. Besides, I already had the best security alarm money could buy. I had Fred. But even though I had never programmed a system like the Surveillance Net 1000, it didn’t look any more difficult than a TV remote. I would have to play with it if I had time before Taylor came back.

  The file cabinet was locked, so I went back to the desk to search for a key. It wasn’t in the top-center draw, so I did a Kinsey Millhone trick and felt under the bottom of it. I had read enough Grafton novels to know where to look for hidden keys. Kinsey, Grafton’s infamous PI, would have been proud. The key was taped right where she would have found it.

  All I found for my clever impersonation of the alphabet sleuth was more girlie magazines and some old VCR tapes. How he managed to watch those was another mystery. Did he have a hidden tape player somewhere? Next, I checked out a box of computer paper in the corner. I’ve used empty boxes for storage. Maybe Hal did, too. Bingo. There were five DVDs in the box. They were labeled 6-1, 6-2, etc. I took the disk that read 6-1, as it must be the first week of June, and Mike died on the fourth.

  Once back at Hal’s desk, I inserted my pilfered DVD into the computer. Then I thought better of it and pushed the eject button. There would never be time to copy the disk. I removed it and returned it to its jewel case. Then I slipped the case in a pocket of my laptop carrying case. I would have to find a way to return it later – hopefully before Hal returned from his trip. Now all I had to do was delete any record of my spyware program, and I could once more sleep at nights.

  My little spy was still running. It hadn’t been deleted after all. Then I saw why it wasn’t sending me any data. Hal’s internet connection wasn’t working. My program had not been able to connect to me and had been using most of the system resources trying. No wonder the computer was so slow. I immediately stopped my Trojan and copied its log files to a flash drive I had inserted into a USB port. I deleted the program and every trace of its existence. I started to check what had happened to the internet connection when I heard a car outside.

  Just as I finished, I heard the front door open and smelled the scent of expensive perfume. “Hi, Amy. I didn’t expect you. I thought you were chained to that hospital,” I sai
d in a voice that did nothing to hide my surprise.

  “Only when Hal’s home,” she said without a hint of catching me off-guard. “Where’s Taylor? I didn’t see his truck.”

  “He went to help move a refrigerator for my mother. I would have gone too, but I thought I’d better fix this computer and get Hal off my back.”

  Amy came up behind me and looked over my head at the computer. Then she put both hands on my shoulders and started giving me a massage. “Did you find what the bastard did to slow it down?”

  Her little massage was starting to get me aroused. I just sat there like a golden retriever and couldn’t say a word. I half expected to see my leg start to shake the way Fred does when I rub his back. Words finally found their way out of my mouth. “Looks like some kind of spyware he must have picked up from a download. I killed it and am running a malware check as we speak. This could take a while, but please don’t stop. That feels so good.”

  She stopped with her massage, so I turned around in the swivel chair to face her. It was the first I’d looked at her since she came in. She looked so sad, yet at the same time, she was trying to smile. “Are you okay, Amy?”

  “It’s been a rough day, but thank you for asking, Jake.” She was looking at me in a way I’ve only seen in movies: the kind of scene where the girl has fallen for her lover. “I’ll get changed and meet you on the deck. I hope you don’t mind Budweiser; I don’t have any Colorado beer.”

  “Taylor won’t be back for a while,” I rose to my feet and softly took her head in my hands. Then, without another word, I bent down and kissed her. She didn’t resist or act surprised.

  When we finally stopped for a breath, she took me by the hand, led me out of the office, and to the curved staircase leading to her bedroom.

  * * *

  Fred woke me late the next morning, wanting to go outside and do his thing. “Okay, Fred, alright already.” I got up just when Amy was about to kiss me again in my dream. “Couldn’t you hold it for a few more minutes?”