“Did he?” Flora gave Jane her full attention.
“Yes. At first I thought he was threatening me. But I kind of think he was scared. He told me to stay away from the Fish family.”
Brenna scratched her head. “That can’t be right.”
“Why not?” Flora swung her laser eyed stare back to Brenna.
“Because Kyle is a victim, not a perp.” She reached into the crate on the left and scrabbled around in it until she found a velvet ring box. “See?” She handed the box to Flora.
Flora popped it open, slipped her glasses down on her nose, and drew her eyebrows together. “Explain.”
“That’s Maggie’s wedding band. It was in his tux jacket pocket, hanging in the living room of my house. Right before we left for the rehearsal, he checked to make sure the ring was still there. He wouldn’t have done that if he had been planning on ditching.” She clenched her fists. “He didn’t know anyone saw him do it.”
Jane tilted her head. “Sure. But it’s not evidence of anything, really.”
Flora popped out the lining that held the ring in the box. Carefully, with the tips of her fingers, she pulled out a yellow sticky note that had been folded in half. “Hmmm…” She unfolded it, looked at it for a moment, and then turned to Jane. “When, exactly, did the online harassment of Maggie Frances start?”
Brenna answered instead, “It started Wednesday, the day before the rehearsal dinner.”
“It ended in a missing groom and a murder in two days? That escalated really fast,” Jane said it more to herself than her company.
Brenna shot Jane the evil eye. “These guys weren’t messing around.”
“We can’t be sure that that was what led to the murder of Devon Grosse.” Flora’s businesslike voice shut off Brenna’s words. “But with the right evidence, we could be. Jane, in your report you said you found sticky notes with some numbers written on them in Devon’s apartment. Do you remember what I am talking about?”
“Of course!” Jane fumbled in her purse for her phone, glad the cracked in her screen was the only damage. She pulled up the pictures as fast as she could, and passed the phone to Flora.
Flora dragged her finger across the screen, enlarging the image. “They’re the same.”
Jane sat on the edge of her seat. “But what are they?”
Brenna held out her hand for the paper, impatiently flicking her fingers.
Flora narrowed her eyes, but handed the phone over. Not the paper.
“IP address.” She passed the phone back.
“Okay.” Jane sat back, deflated. What she knew about the internet and IP addresses could dance on the head of a pin with any number of angels. She wasn’t completely ignorant on all things computer, but this wasn’t her area at all.
Brenna also slumped into her seat. “Exactly. About as useful as a drug dealer’s cell phone number.”
“Not likely,” Flora said. “Not if Kyle thought it was important enough to double check that it hadn’t been lost, the day before his wedding.”
“Or if a geek like Devon thought it was important enough to write down on paper. I mean, the guy didn’t have any paper in his home office. None. So why write this down?” She liked the idea that was brewing. “Ayla was quickly dismissive of the note to her, which was also written down, which was about a donor. What if this was the IP address of that donor? It would certainly narrow things down.”
“But he had hundreds of donors.” Brenna shoved her hands in her hoodie pocket again. Her whole body seeming to disappear into the oversized sweatshirt.
“Sure, and that’s a lot of people, but there are thousands of people harassing Maggie.”
Flora turned to her computer and started typing. “It’s local.”
“You know how to look that stuff up?” Brenna sounded surprised.
Flora rolled her eyes. “I’d be a sorry detective if I didn’t.”
“So we have a local IP address that was important enough to hide with the wedding ring, and a note about donors. We should narrow the donor list down to locals, and then see if we can link it up to one of the people making threats.”
“It’s even simpler than that,” Flora said. “It’s the IP Address for Cascadia Surety.”
“Excuse me?” Jane’s heart leapt to her throat.
“Our client.” Flora sat back and folded her hands on her desk. “It looks like you are right. Fraud case and the murder seem to be connected.”
Brenna jumped from her seat and dug into her box again. “Then you might want this.” She held a bunch of papers with a shaking hand.”
Flora accepted them, and looked over them in silence.
“I found those in Kyle’s car. In his jockey box.”
Jane drummed her fingers on her knee, not wanting to interrupt Flora’s concentration, but dying to know what the papers were.
Flora passed them to her, with a smile. “What do you think, Jane?”
Jane turned the stapled pages over, one at a time.
Scribbled notes.
Coffee stains.
Computer print outs.
Phone numbers.
Dollar signs.
She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and looked them over again, concentrating.
They were estimates for wedding stuff. Including insurance.
She focused on that page. Three companies, three quotes. Cascadia was circled, but their cost for insurance was not the cheapest, their total covered was not the highest, and they were also not the highest coverage for the cheapest price.
“So why did the two of them choose Cascadia?”
“Maggie doesn’t know. I’ve asked her and asked her.”
“Jane, I want you to get together with Ayla and compare the list of donors to the employee list at Cascadia. Brenna, I want you to go through your evidence and pull out anything that has even the remotest link to insurance.” She stood up. “Things keep popping up with my other case, but I should be done with it soon.” She waved her hand at the boxes. “Rocky called this morning. He is sorry to have missed you both, but it couldn’t be helped.”
Jane stood up, the papers gripped in her fist. Brenna followed suit. She stacked her boxes and hefted them onto her hip.
“I will call you just as soon as Rocky and I have reported to our other client. Expect it sometime this evening.”
“Yes.” Jane bit off the ‘sir’ she had been about to say. “I will.”
Flora looked from Jane to the door.
Jane took the hint and led Brenna out.
Chapter 12
Ayla didn’t answer Jane’s calls at all that afternoon, so Jane had to do the best she could with the info available online.
She was pleased to see that Cascadia Surety had names and work-based emails listed for their employees, but she was even more pleased that Brenna had overestimated the number of donors for the gaming device. There were merely dozens instead of hundreds. Unfortunately, she couldn’t see the identities of every funder. Just the couple of dozen who had commented, and of those, only the ones who commented with what at least appeared to be a real identity.
And none of those were employees of Cascadia Surety.
Jane shut her laptop harder than was wise.
The trick about the messages on the funding site was that the interesting ones were the anonymous ones. The insinuations, the threats, basically anything that mentioned MotherofBridezilla/Maggie and her game had been written by people with names like MENZRITES and killtrollz. Jane considered cross referencing the user names with user names on the forum, but she dismissed it as the pointless time waste it was sure to be. Especially because the note found with the IP address talked about donors, and it didn’t at all look like KILLJOYNOW or BOOMSTICK had ever been donors.
She reconsidered. Who would be the angriest about the perceived injustice of the game test article? A donor. Someone who had ponied up money.
But would they have been angry enough to kill?
She read the comments
again. All eight hundred of them. She was looking for the one commenter who wrote like they were personally invested in the game, and for whom the negative publicity had done actual damage.
But all of the comments sounded like that. Everyone was acting like their own grandmother had been personally assaulted. It made Jane’s stomach sick.
No sense of proportion. Not in eight hundred comments.
She didn’t read them a third time. Another thought had occurred to her.
If someone from Cascadia Surety had paid into the development of the game device, and had then used that donation to pressure Kyle to buy insurance from him, then that person would be easy to contact.
It would be the client. The one who had hired SCoRI to investigate fraud.
Jane picked up her phone and called Flora.
“The thought had also occurred to me,” Flora said, after Jane had explained her theory. “However, the person who sold them their wedding insurance policy is a sixty year old woman named Hester Paige.”
Jane paused. Was Flora suggesting a sixty year old woman was too old to be interested in gaming? Could a retired person be age-ist? “I think you might be dismissing her too fast.”
“It’s a good theory, and I won’t scratch it off the list until we have a final answer. However, the likelihood of a woman my age having an interest in video games, much less an interest that led to murder, is highly unlikely.”
“Unlikely, but…”
“I have seen surprising things. However, we are still looking. Before we convict Hester Paige of murder, we need to find out what Brad Carter saw.”
“Right. Okay.” Jane huffed a sigh, and then hoped that Flora hadn’t heard her. “I’m still trying to get ahold of Ayla. She must know more about the IP address.”
“Yes. Do that. See what she knows about Hester Paige.” Her tone indicated she thought Ayla would be able to put Jane’s theory to rest.
“Thanks, Flora. I’ll do everything I can.”
“Good.”
As soon as the call ended, her phone rang. It was Jake.
“Hey, Janey. How’s the spy business?”
“I’m workin’,” Jane said. She drummed her pencil on her desk. Was she working? Did she get paid for this? She hadn’t sorted all of that out yet. As soon as she had this murder resolved, she could worry about that. She hoped Miranda wasn’t in charge of payroll.
“I thought you were supposed to be underground right now.”
“Untraceable cell phone. Plus, you wouldn’t try and trace me.” Jake sounded bored.
“Are you sure?”
Jake chuckled. “Maybe I want you to find me.”
His teasing put a smile on Jane’s face. She knew whatever he was doing was intense, and that was likely why he had called her. “What can I pray for you about?”
“Wisdom.”
“Me, too.”
“Will do. Listen, I just had time for a hello. I’ll let you go.”
“Love you,” Jane said.
“Thanks. Love you, too.”
Jane got a hold of Ayla right after she finished praying for Jake. She convinced Ayla to meet her by getting her to talk about how amazing Devon had been, and leaving her with the assumption that the only thing Jane wanted to do in this world was listen to Ayla talk about him over coffee. Ayla was free that evening, but not before.
They met at Nonessential Trivia, for the food, and for the chance to run into Maggie again. Maggie might know more about her insurance policy than they were giving her credit for.
“There are just so few real geniuses in the world.” Ayla sipped her micro-brewed beer.
“Very true.” Jane sipped her Coke. “Devon sounds like he was truly a rare mind.”
“He wasn’t just smart about games and stuff, either.” Ayla rested her chin on her hand, her eyes far away and dreamy. “Sometimes he’d draw beautiful tattoo art for me. I didn’t sell a lot of them, but a few. Tessellations and stuff like that.”
“Techy and artsy.” Jane tried to sound like she totally understood.
“And a real environmentalist. He hated waste so much. Wasted time, wasted energy, wasted resources.”
“He must have loved the natural beauty and power of Alaska.”
Ayla sighed. “He did. Sometimes we’d talk about moving back there.”
“Oh yeah?” Jane imitated the sigh out of sympathy. “I thought you and he weren’t that close.”
“No…but talking about Alaska was a good way to draw him out. He had plans for an off the grid life.”
“Do you think he would have followed through with it?”
“No, but it was a lovely dream.” She dipped a French fry into organic locally made ketchup.
“But you guys…I mean…” Jane stumbled over the best way to say it. “He wasn’t still upset about the crowd funding thing, was he? You all had worked that out?”
“Yeah. Pretty much.”
“He got the money and developed his device.” Jane nodded as she said it, trying to keep Ayla talking.
“We made enough for the prototype, anyway. But I guess now it won’t go anywhere further. He just…I don’t know. It could have been a real break-out thing for him.”
“Financially he was okay though, right? He had that office out by Johnson Creek?”
“He was doing fine. He always had contracts on and projects he was doing. Plenty came in from his apps and games, too. But to be able to only do your own thing—that was his dream.”
“I was looking at the fundraising site earlier.”
Ayla shuddered.
“Yeah. It was pretty bad. Really harsh stuff.” Jane sipped her Coke, and shivered. This time it wasn’t false sympathy. Those online bullies really freaked her out.
“I can’t believe people were so mad at Maggie. Her game was fun,” Ayla said.
“But they wanted to see the device be…just for boy games?”
“They want the whole world to be just for boy games.”
“There is more money in boy games, I guess.” Jane lifted an eyebrow.
“Whatever. There’s more money in boy tattoos, and boy detectives. So what? We don’t let that stop us.” Ayla’s cheeks flushed red. “Why should it stop Maggie?”
“It shouldn’t.”
“Exactly.”
“Were any of those comments from real donors?”
“A few.”
“Yikes.”
“Yup.” Ayla swirled another fry in her ketchup but didn’t eat it.
“Did they ask for their money back?”
“Yeah, that’s how I knew. Most of the comments were new sock puppet accounts, so it’s not like I could be sure who was who, but Brenna probably could.”
“Really? With some like, computer analyzing or something?”
“No, but she was a tutor at PSU for a while and was trained to spot plagiarism. She’s really good at reading troll posts and figuring out which different characters are the same people.”
“Really?” Jane perked up. “Have you had her look at these yet? Maybe compare them to other posts—the earlier, positive comments?”
“What good would it do?”
“Well…what if one of the donors got really mad at Devon and killed him?”
Ayla’s face got redder. “If I knew who had done it…”
“Shall we call Brenna?”
Ayla’s face fell. “Brenna hates me.”
As if on cue Maggie came through the front door. She stopped at the register and said good evening to her coworker.
“But Maggie could ask her, right?”
Ayla shrugged. “Maggie doesn’t hate me.”
“What happened between you and Brenna?”
“Devon happened.”
“Ah.” Jane still hadn’t seen a picture of the programming Lothario, but he must have been something else to inspire two girls to such heated passion. Not many computer types could do that.
“So…Brenna was jealous that Devon liked you more?”
; “I wish.”
“Brenna and Devon?”
“I don’t really want to talk about it.”
Jane hadn’t learned how to push past that yet in an interview, and she really liked what she had gotten out of Ayla so far, so she stopped that line of questioning, making a mental note to ask Brenna about it later.
“Of all of the donors, who do you think would have been the most upset about the review?”
“I didn’t know them all personally.”
“So no guesses?”
“There were a couple of donors who gave over five hundred dollars each. They had a lot invested.”
Jane rocked her head from side to side. Five hundred dollars didn’t seem like enough to kill for. “Were they really anti-women developers?”
“One of them was. He posted a lot last year, over that other issue…the Gamergate thing.”
“So he might have had a real axe to grind this time.”
“If he was sincere in his claims that all he wanted was journalistic integrity, he might have. But I still don’t see how testing Bridezilla on the device was an issue of integrity. How could it matter at all what game they played on it? They just wanted to try out how well it worked. Anything would have done.”
Jane had asked herself the same question more than once. How could the choice of game matter at all? They were testing the play of the device. And the device wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. She had a feeling none of them—Devon, Kyle, or Maggie—were served by that fact. Which brought another question to mind. “So Devon was going to be Kyle’s best man?”
“Yes.”
“Even after Kyle wrote the less than stellar review?”
“Devon was above that kind of thing.”
“But surely he needed good reviews to get his dream off the ground.”
“The design needed work. He knew that. Kyle had the review scheduled. He had to run with it. What could they do? There were no hard feelings.”
Weren’t there? Jane wondered. Ayla would be torn between her brother and his work interests and the boy she loved. But perhaps Devon was more than a little mad about the review, and his anger led to a pre-wedding fight, that ended in his death, and Kyle needing to run for it.
The Plain Jane Mystery Box Set 2 Page 28