A Panicked Premonition

by Victoria Laurie

  Greg pushed up his glasses with his index finger and came forward to collect the flash drive. He snuck a wide-eyed look at me and Candice before ducking back out again.

  After Greg left, Eldridge sat back in his chair with a heavy sigh and stared at his central computer monitor. Tears formed in his eyes and threatened to spill down his cheeks, but he sniffled loudly and rubbed his eyes to wipe them away. His cheeks reddened and he seemed embarrassed to be so upset, but I thought there was no way he couldn’t be, given what’d happened over the weekend.

  Meanwhile, Candice had already lowered the water bottle back to the desk and put the lid back on too. “You okay?” she asked Eldridge.

  A sound escaped him, almost like a strangled laugh. “No,” he said. “Far from it. In fact, today is looking like it’ll be the second worst day of my life.

  “Yesterday, two detectives came here to inform me that my best friend and business partner had been murdered along with his wife—another of my closest friends—and the fix to the code that Andy promised me was on his computer . . . isn’t. So, a two-hundred-million-dollar deal that was supposed to go through on Friday is dead on arrival today because only Andy could’ve repaired it. InvoTech now has grounds to sue us, which will put us out of business and everyone here will lose their jobs. Including me.”

  Candice frowned, and I could tell she was feeling bad about torturing Eldridge with the water bottle. “We’re very sorry to hear about your troubles,” she said gently. “But I’m sure InvoTech will understand, given what’s happened to Mr. Roswell.”

  Eldridge looked up at her as if she’d just given him something to hold on to. “God, I hope so,” he said.

  And then Eldridge lost the battle to hold his emotions in check, and tears slid down his cheeks. He turned away from us for a moment, to collect himself, and Candice and I exchanged uncomfortable looks.

  After a few more sniffles and lots of wiping at his cheeks, Eldridge swiveled back to us and apologized again. “Sorry,” he said. “This is all hitting me at once.”

  Candice took a seat in the chair across from Eldridge and motioned me to do the same. “We know this is very hard,” she began. “And we’re very sorry for your loss and the worry over your company. We have only a few questions for you, though, and normally we would never press, but time is of the essence here. If we’re going to catch Andy’s killer, we need as much relevant information as possible.”

  “I understand,” he said, closing the lid to his laptop and focusing on us. “What did you want to know?”

  “How about we start with the basics—what can you tell us about Andy and Robin?” Candice said.

  Eldridge sighed and his shoulders sagged. It seemed like he aged ten years in that moment. “They were great people. Everybody loved them.”

  My intuitive lie detector went off, but it didn’t really tell me anything other than Eldridge was naturally trying to put the best face on a young couple murdered in their prime.

  “How long had you known Andy?” Candice asked.

  Stanton blew out a breath. “I’ve known Andy since my freshman year of college.” He used the present tense, as if his mind hadn’t fully accepted that Andy was gone. “We were roommates at Boston College. He was there on a scholarship. Brilliant guy. Seriously brilliant. One of the best coders I’ve ever known. He triple-majored in marketing, computer science, and behavioral science. On the surface, those things might not seem related, but Andy put them together in such a remarkable way. He used everything he learned about human behavioral patterns and marketing to create predictive product algorithms.”

  “Predictive product algorithms?” Candice repeated. “What’re those exactly?”

  “They’re computer code for predicting how people will respond to a given product or design based on a whole host of variables like color, shape, size, ease of use, expected PFT—”

  “What’s PFT?” I interrupted.

  “The positive feeling trend of a product.” Pointing to the Apple Watch I wore on my right wrist, he said, “How often do you check the activity app on that watch? Or track your workouts?”

  I smiled. I checked my watch a lot throughout the day. “Often,” I said.

  “And you feel good reaching the goals your watch sets, right?”

  “I do,” I admitted.

  “Yeah, the Apple Watch’s activity app has a PFT of, like, six point eight. Anything over five would be considered by us to have enormous market potential.

  “Identifying the PFT was key to Andy’s success. He’d use it to make investments in the market, and either short a company making a product, or buy lots of shares, then sell it as soon as the PFT had leveled off. He could assign the PFT to whole groups of users, and he was also able to generate algorithms to predict market saturation for any demographic.”

  My eyes widened. “Whoa,” I said. “So, Andy basically invented the holy grail for market research.”

  “He did,” Stanton agreed. “An algorithm like that is what every single consumer-based company lives for. The kind of insight he created could save millions in lost revenue from poorly conceived or flawed products.”

  “I’m assuming everyone wanted the algorithms?” Candice said.

  “They did,” Stanton said. “And for a price, they could have an analysis of their product that would evaluate its PFT and saturation points. Our clients could also bundle several products together if they wanted to for a larger fee, and if one of their products scored a low PFT, if they made improvements to it, then we would reevaluate it for a lesser fee than if we were simply analyzing a new product.”

  “Why’d you decide to sell off the holy grail?” Candice asked next.

  Stanton shrugged. “I could tell you that it was for the money, but that’s not really the reason why. Like I said, Andy and I had pretty spectacular success operating with limited staff and not a lot of overhead for years. Our employees became very good at assessing the most important identifiers to plug into the algorithm and obtain a score that we could be confident about. We likened the process to what the credit bureaus do to create a FICO score for potential borrowers.

  “Our algorithms couldn’t guarantee the success of a product with a high PFT, but our math came very, very close. The system worked well; companies who got an analysis from us had valuable information and they made better products to offer to the marketplace. Over the course of the last decade, we’ve had an outstanding reputation, and we’ve made a lot of money for both ourselves and our employees. I thought Andy was happy. I know I was. But about a year ago, he came to me and said that he’d reached his own happiness saturation point. He wanted out.”

  “Out meaning he wanted to sell his company? Or do you think he was depressed?” I asked.

  “Out meaning he wanted to sell the company,” Stanton clarified. “He said he wasn’t finding any joy in it anymore, and he wanted to spend more quality time with Robin. He wanted to travel with her. See the world. And he was tired of Austin’s traffic.”

  Candice asked the next question, which was one I was also curious about. “It took you a year to find a buyer?”

  Eldridge shook his head. “It took us a year to find the right buyer. We didn’t want to sell Market Vision to someone who was going to dismantle it. And it was fine that Andy wanted out, but our staff was going to suffer for it. Most of these guys have been with us for nearly a decade, and they’re highly specialized. Finding a job after us in such a competitive tech industry would prove challenging. So we decided to find a company that would agree to let Andy leave and allow me to stay on as president.

  “So, we investigated various companies, and entertained a host of generous offers, but InvoTech came out as the clear winner. They met our terms and offered us quite a bit more money than any of the other firms.”

  “How much is quite a bit?” Candice asked.

  “Just over two hundre
d million.”

  I whistled in appreciation. “That’s a nice chunk of change.”

  Eldridge gave a one-shoulder shrug. “It was pretty close to our true valuation, all things considered.”

  “What happened with the deal?” Candice asked.

  Stanton sighed. “InvoTech discovered something they didn’t like about the code, and after learning about it, I can’t say that I blame them.”

  “What does that mean?” Candice asked.

  Eldridge sighed again. By way of explanation he said, “As much as Andy wanted to let go of the company, it was still hard for him. He built it from nothing, after all, and he just couldn’t let it go without leaving a little bit of himself behind. So, without telling me, shortly after signing our portion of the paperwork, he tunneled his way into the code.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “Along with being one of the very best coders in the world, Andy was also one of the best hackers,” Eldridge said. “He used to brag that there wasn’t an encrypted system around that he couldn’t figure out a way into.”

  “That kind of thing could get you arrested,” Candice said.

  “It could, and I have no doubt that Andy stopped just short of abusing it—that is, until we were closing on our deal with InvoTech. I doubt that they would have been the wiser had not someone on their side actually been inspecting the code just as Andy opened up a back door. He left it open too, just so that he could look at it or manipulate it at a later date.”

  “Is that even legal, contractually speaking?” Candice asked.

  “No,” Eldridge said, and he looked irritated about it. “Like I said, Andy did this without telling me. If he had told me, I would’ve called bullshit and stopped him, which is why he did it in secret.”

  “But why?” I asked. “Why would Andy want to sneak back in to mess around with the code he sold for hundreds of millions and claimed that he wanted to leave behind?”

  Stanton smiled and traced a circle on his desk with his index finger. “I don’t know for sure, but I suspect it’s because Market Vision was his baby—his virtual house. And he wanted a set of keys to that virtual house for those times when he was traveling far from home and feeling nostalgic. I think he also wanted to make sure that the code was being used properly, and not for counter-competitive reasons.”

  “Counter-competitive?” I said. “What’s that?”

  Stanton leaned back in his chair and laced his fingers together. “We’ve always likened our company to Switzerland during World War Two. We’re neutral. If Coke and Pepsi both came to us at the same time with similar-tasting sodas they wanted to launch, we’d generate PFTs for them without ever divulging that we’d run algorithms for both companies, and we’d do that without slanting the results one over the other, because we have to be neutral to be true to the marketplace. That’s our real customer. We want to avoid the Edsels, Betamaxes, and Google Glasses of the world. But as you yourselves pinpointed, we hold the holy grail of information for product developers. Our algorithms could be used to either offer confidence or force companies to abandon a product they believed would be a market failure. That kind of information is incredibly valuable and in the wrong hands could be quite destructive.”

  “In other words,” I said, “if Coke came to you guys and said something like, ‘We’ll pay you ten million dollars to rig the PFT results for Pepsi’s new cola product,’ and you took the money and did that, you could keep a potentially great product out of the hands of consumers, and give Coke a leg up in the competition.”

  “That’s exactly it,” Stanton said. “And that’s what Andy was most worried about. Corporate espionage is a very real thing and obtaining a competitor’s PFT or even manipulating that score is something we’re constantly having to fight against. Over the years we’ve had to fend off attacks on our systems from both foreign and domestic aggressors.”

  I remembered what Dutch had said about the FBI speaking with Andy a few years earlier about an espionage threat from China. Apparently it was true.

  “Andy was nervous that InvoTech hadn’t taken the threat seriously enough,” Stanton continued. “He told me after I confronted him on Friday about the back door that he wanted a way to police the code from the back end to make sure no SEC rules were broken and that the technology wasn’t being used for corrupt purposes.”

  “How were you first alerted to the fact that Andy had tunneled his way in?” Candice asked.

  “I got a call from Chevy Zeller, the CTO at InvoTech. He told me about the tech on his staff who saw it open up in front of his eyes, and was able to quickly put a trace on it back to a familiar IP address, which routed back to us. I knew there was only one person here who could’ve been responsible.

  “Anyway the whole deal almost blew up then and there, but I was able to talk Zeller down off the ceiling and got him to agree to let us fix it. He put a lock on the wire of funds for the sale of our company until we could remove the back door and hand over all of the source codes that had been contracted originally to stay here.”

  “What did that mean?” I asked. My head was swimming with all this tech-speak.

  “It meant changing the terms of the sale,” Eldridge said with a heavy sigh. “InvoTech would get to store the source code—the original code that Andy created when he invented the PFT rating system—which would prevent it from being duplicated or tinkered with by anyone here, including Andy. Once they took possession, all InvoTech had to do was to change a small part of the source code on their end, and we’d be locked out indefinitely.

  “It also probably meant that I’d lose my job as president of the company and that InvoTech could easily lock out all the employees too. Holding on to the source code would’ve prevented InvoTech from dismantling us.”

  “Were you mad about the compromise?” Candice asked carefully.

  Eldridge rolled his eyes. “Of course I was mad,” he said. “But as long as the deal goes through, I’ll be fine, financially speaking. It’s the staff that I’m worried about. These guys have been very loyal to us, and if we close on this thing with InvoTech, they could be out of a job by the end of the summer.”

  “Why not just let the sale blow up, then?” I asked. “I mean, you said earlier that Andy promised you’d shut the back door, but I’m guessing by your conversation with that other man who came in here that he didn’t?”

  “No,” Eldridge said with a hint of anger in his voice. “He didn’t. And letting it blow up exposes us to litigation from InvoTech. They’ll sue us and collect damages. Probably heavy damages.”

  “Yikes,” Candice said. “What’re you going to do?”

  Eldridge shrugged. “Work through it,” he said. “But with Andy’s sudden death, this is all going to be an uphill battle.”

  “Who gets the shares of the company now that Andy’s passed away?” Candice asked.

  “Most of the shares revert to me,” Stanton said. “With ten percent assigned to Robin or her next of kin. But with this back door still open and our flanks exposed to litigation from InvoTech, it won’t matter how many shares come my way if I don’t find a way to close it.”

  “In other words, you’re basically screwed,” Candice said bluntly.

  “Beyond screwed,” Stanton agreed. The stress of what he’d already been through and what he was facing was etched clearly in the lines of worry on his forehead and the dark circles under his eyes. No wonder he’d snapped at us.

  “Getting back to Andy and Robin,” Candice said. “What can you tell us about their enemies?”

  “Enemies?” Stanton repeated. “What do you want to know that for? Aren’t you guys looking for that construction worker?”

  “We are,” she assured him. “But we have reason to believe there’s more to the story.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means we’re convinced that there
were more people involved, and that the motive wasn’t simple robbery,” I said.

  Stanton gulped and seemed to take that in. “You think Andy and Robin were targeted for some reason besides money?”

  I looked at Candice, who answered, “Possibly. We’re not sure yet. If the deal with InvoTech never went through, and the money wasn’t transferred, then how much money could Andy have had in his panic room for thieves to steal?”

  “Millions,” Stanton said bluntly. “Andy kept a personal stash of two million on hand at his house at all times.”

  My eyes bugged. “Two million in cash?”

  “Yes.” Eldridge affirmed it casually, like it was an everyday thing to have two million dollars just lying around the house.

  “Did you tell the police this?” Candice asked.

  “I did. I spoke with Detective Grayson this morning. Haven’t you guys talked to them?”

  “We have,” I said. “This morning, just like you, but Detective Grayson never mentioned that the Roswells had that kind of cash on them.” (What? It wasn’t a lie. Grayson never mentioned it when she was asking us about Dave.)

  “That’s a lot of money to keep in a house,” Candice said. “Why would Andy and Robin want that kind of stash anywhere other than a bank?”

  “There was a hell of a lot more in the bank,” he said. “Andy was worth about fifty million even before the sale of Market Vision. But, to answer your question, I think it made him feel safe. He grew up in the foster care system, and as a young man there were times when he literally survived on pennies a day. He told me the first time he’d had more than fifty dollars in his wallet was when he was a senior in high school and earned his first paycheck at a grocery store. Having cash on hand made him feel safe in a way, and I know that Robin liked to have it around too.”

  “How’d you get along with Robin?” I asked, curious about his feelings for his partner’s wife.

  Eldridge smiled, and it was sweet and sad. His eyes misted again and he ducked his chin to wipe the moisture away. “She was one of my best friends.”