Murder Goes to Market

by Daisy Bateman

  And why, with no apparent history with California, fabric crafts, or false advertising, had she decided to drop everything for a new life that combined all three?

  She wasn’t going to find that in a credit report, so for the moment Claudia set aside the unknowable and did her best with what she had. The additional information was useful for constructing more precise search terms, with which Claudia was able to unearth a few more tidbits.

  There were a couple of restaurant reviews heavy on complaints about waitstaff, a mention in Lori’s alumni newsletter that she had run a 5k, her name on the list of attendees at a networking luncheon. None of that held Claudia’s attention for long, though she did take a moment to entertain the idea that the killer had been a hitman sent by the Food Service Employees of America on behalf of their members.

  Frustrated, Claudia was tempted to give up, but she pushed through and tried the next series of combinations. She was starting to reach with some of them, which was why she was surprised when the name of one of Lori’s former employers and “fraud” came up with a cluster of hits.

  It was a series of old news stories about a member of a D-list boy band who had found a postfame career running a medium-sized cult. They had been doing a fine business in drug running and some light brainwashing in California, but then they had decided to expand their practice to Northern Virginia, to the office building where Lori’s employer was located. There were some confrontations, and it turned out that the International Concordance of Love and Light wasn’t afraid to fight dirty.

  Things escalated quickly, to the point that the CEO of the company came home one day to find a rattlesnake in his mailbox. (Fortunately, November temperatures in Virginia do not make for lively reptiles, and the man got nothing more than a scare and an interesting conversation with animal control.) Eventually, the FBI were able to put together a case, the cult was disbanded, and the TV movie got only average ratings. Lori’s name didn’t appear anywhere in the coverage. But, if the dates on her resume were to be believed, there was no question she had been present for the events in question.

  With further digging, Claudia was able to determine that the cult leader (Serenity Icono Bartok, nee Jason), had been released from prison and was currently living in Humboldt County, about two hundred miles north of San Elmo. It wasn’t exactly next door, but a person could probably make the trip in the afternoon, make a short stop to commit murder, and be back home before sunrise.

  It was the baldest sort of speculation, of course. With no evidence that Lori had ever interacted with Bartok, it certainly wouldn’t be enough for Claudia to take to the police. She could just imagine Lennox’s face as she explained that this person who was in the same general area as Lori over a decade ago was definitely a better suspect than herself. Claudia didn’t know Lennox very well, but she felt like his response would be less than productive.

  She found some pictures of Bartok/Jason and studied them, hoping to tease out some sense of familiarity, but came up empty. In his boy band days he had been a vacuous looking young man with a toothy grin and a hairstyle that answered the as-yet-unasked question of “What if a sea urchin had frosted tips?” In later photos he had acquired most of a beard and an expression that combined divine inspiration with at least two major concussion symptoms.

  His booking photo was the most recent she was able to find, and the most telling. Here she found a man, still young, but stripped of the publicist’s artifice and beatific styling, so that only the angry boy remained. The round cheeks of his youth had turned hollow, crowned by dark eyes that sat deep in their sockets, like two burnt holes in a blanket. His dark brown hair, long since having abandoned the indignities of bleaching, hung in lank tendrils that framed an expression of sullen superiority.

  She couldn’t find any photos that dated since his release, and Claudia wasn’t very good with faces, but if Jas-tok had made any appearances in the area, she didn’t think she had seen him. Still, she printed out the picture to show around. She wasn’t sure how she was going to explain her interest, but it seemed like the least she could do.

  Claudia finished the chili and let Teddy earn her keep by prerinsing the bowl. (She was aware that there were people who would be horrified, but Claudia considered being able to do what she wanted without fear of judgement one of the primary benefits of living alone. And, frankly, the dishwasher needed all the help it could get.) While her new roommate was hard at work, Claudia wandered back to the computer and stared at it, wondering what her next step should be.

  What she needed was more information, something to give her investigation direction, rather than wandering in the figurative darkness. And she had the feeling that the only person who could provide it was Lori, and she wasn’t talking.

  Or was she? Thinking over the interactions she had had with Lori, one anecdote floated to the top. It had been a slow Sunday afternoon in the marketplace, and Claudia had been helping Helen out in her shop while she was shorthanded. The conversation had somehow worked its way around to computer security and passwords, with Claudia passionately advocating for the value of length over complexity. Lori had been listening in without saying anything, until she interrupted to point out that Claudia, with her years of background in software development, was completely wrong, and it was a stupid thing to worry about. As proof of her position, she offered the fact that she had been using the same password for years, and no one had ever hacked her.

  At the time, Claudia had been too annoyed to explain how stupid that was, and now she was glad she hadn’t. Because if no one had hacked one of Lori’s accounts before, it was high time it happened now.

  One of the first things Claudia had done when she decided to take on the marketplace, was to set up a website. It had started out as a bare-bones affair, with a couple of pictures, hours of operation, contact information, and directions, but leaving it at that was not in her nature, and it had evolved into a comprehensive web portal for all tenants, with individual calendars and updatable pages to list their current offerings. Adoption had been inconsistent, but the important thing was that every tenant had their own account, with their own password.

  The good news was that Claudia had handled all of the setup of the website herself, and she had control of the system on her own server. The bad news was that Claudia had handled all of the setup of the website herself, and as a result it was built with a level of security more frequently associated with banks or dark web drug sales. Which didn’t mean she couldn’t get at Lori’s password, it just meant that she was going to have to work for it.

  She had set up the system to store the passwords with a salted hash, which meant both that a brute force attack was out of the question and now she was hungry again. Setting aside thoughts of browned potatoes, Claudia got to the more pressing issue of how she was going to crack her own security. She knew there were tools available for that sort of thing, and in the end it only took a few more minutes of hunting and an encrypted text to a college friend who had a history of not asking too many questions, and Claudia was the not-very-proud owner of a precomputed rainbow table, suited for cracking the hashed password of her choice. She tried not to think too much about where her money was going—murderers were worse than hackers, after all—but found herself hard to convince.

  Claudia had bought a couple of terabyte drives during a Black Friday sale a few years back, with no specific plans for what to do with them but unable to resist the price, and now she pressed them into hosting the attack. Figuring it all out took some time, and employed parts of her brain that hadn’t gotten much of a workout in a while, and she found herself chewing gently on her pinkie finger, an old habit from her programming days that turned up whenever she had a problem to solve.

  Eventually, she had the program running in a way she was pretty sure was right, and Claudia was able to drag her eyes off the screen and work out the crick that had developed in her shoulder. It all felt so familiar, she had an impulse to IM Sanjay in the next cubicle and see if
he wanted take a break to raid the snack room. But there was no Sanjay, and no cubicles, and, sadly, no snack room, so Claudia had to make do with some ranch-flavored chickpea crisps that a distributor had sent as a promotional sample.

  Cracking the password could take anywhere from hours to days, so once she had gotten it running Claudia left the tool to do its work. Teddy was whining, so she went to let her out, and stood in the doorway while the dog did her business.

  The fog had rolled in too thick to see the ocean, but Claudia could hear the thump of the waves on the rocks and the eternal insistence of the foghorn. Her little cottage felt like an island in the clouds, where even the lights from Mr. Rodgers’ house up the hill were like beacons on a distant ship. She tried to center herself in the peace of it, but her heart was racing and she couldn’t stop thinking about the investigation, and what she was going to do next.

  It was terrible, but Claudia had to admit part of her was enjoying this. It reminded her of what had drawn her to programming in the first place, the feeling that there was a problem to be solved, that could be solved, if only she had the right information and was able to use it in the right way. Claudia loved the marketplace, and she wouldn’t give it up for anything, but until now she hadn’t realized that there were things she missed from her old job and life.

  Some people had normal hobbies, Claudia reminded herself. Treating a woman’s murder as an opportunity for self-actualization was skating pretty close to sociopath territory, even for her. But this was something she had to do, and if she was going to do it, then she should take advantage of every bit of enthusiasm she could manage. She had a feeling she was going to need it.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Claudia woke up the next morning ready to dive back into the investigation, but feeling a little guilty about not spending her time trying to help her tenants. She salved her conscience by calling Julie to talk about the creamery as a possible alternate stop for the two tour groups that were supposed to visit the marketplace in the next week, and listened with sympathy to her account of Elias’s meeting with a member of the city council the previous evening on the subject of the closure. It had been apparently going fairly well until he threw the chair.

  “It wasn’t a heavy chair,” Julie said, apologetically. “But you know Father. He does get carried away sometimes.”

  Claudia said she understood, and told Julie to thank him for getting carried away on her behalf. Privately, she wasn’t sure if he had done more to help her case or hurt it, but at this point there probably wasn’t much difference.

  Her next call was to Iryna and Carmen, ostensibly to make up for not visiting them the previous day, and offer some feedback on the new empanada flavors. (She was able to say they had been well appreciated, without mentioning how much of the appreciation had been done by Teddy.) They went back and forth for a few minutes, with Iryna chiming in over the speakerphone to advocate for herring and Carmen firmly rejecting the idea, before Claudia got to what she was really interested in.

  “I was just wondering, Carmen, I know you talked to Lori some—did she ever mention anything about her life? I’ve been thinking about what happened and I realized I hardly got to know her at all. I can’t imagine why she would have been pulling the trick with the fake stuff, let alone what would lead someone to kill her. Do you think she was afraid of anyone?”

  Even over the background noise on the speakerphone, Claudia could hear Iryna sigh.

  “No, and I don’t understand it,” Carmen said. “Any of it. She wasn’t the nicest person, or the smartest, but that’s no crime. I think she had a good job where she was before, but she was hardly making anything with the new business. I thought, well, she must really love to create, but now I don’t know what to think.”

  “Maybe she thought cheating people would be easier and more profitable than it was.” Where Carmen tended to be restrained in her judgement, Iryna was prone to flights of fancy, much to her wife’s annoyance.

  “I bet she moved here thinking it would be an easy life, living on the beach in the sunshine and fleecing the rubes,” she went on. (Iryna’s tastes in entertainment ran toward the sort of high-end cable dramas that specialized in tough-guy talk.) “And then she gets here, and it’s cold and she’s not making money like she thought, so she looks around for another way. I think probably the mob.”

  “You think the mafia is in San Elmo?” Claudia liked the idea of a simple solution, but it seemed far-fetched.

  “Well, maybe she went to Santa Rosa,” Iryna allowed, referring to the nearest city of any size. It was not, to Claudia’s knowledge, a hotbed of organized crime, but she supposed anything was possible. “And when she tried to cheat them too, they killed her. It’s the sort of thing they would do. Who would commit a murder like that, except for a criminal?”

  Claudia considered explaining the concept of a tautology, but decided this wasn’t the moment.

  “That’s stupid,” Carmen said, putting it more succinctly. “Lori wasn’t like that at all, and why would she be? If her money was running out here, she could just go back to her old work and forget all about it.”

  She made the statement with the finality of someone stating the obvious, and Claudia could imagine the two of them glaring at each other across the ancient speakerphone on their kitchen table.

  “If that’s not what happened, then what did?” Iryna countered. “You think she killed herself for not being a good enough artist to make little bags and stuff?”

  The suggestion was sarcastic, but something in her own words set Iryna off on a new theory. Her voice got louder, and Claudia thought she must be leaning in closer to the phone to make her point.

  “Or drugs! She put the drugs in the bags, and then people came and bought them from her with a secret code word. She makes the profits go through the business so no one finds out. Maybe the drugs even come in with the bags when they are shipped from China. It explains everything.”

  “It’s certainly something to think about,” Claudia agreed. “The police took all the boxes of hers that I had in my storage, so if there’s anything in there I’m sure they’ll find it.”

  “I think it’s completely wrong.” Carmen’s voice sounded like she was speaking from a distance, like she had walked away from the conversation, but couldn’t keep herself from joining in. “Lori was no criminal mastermind. I don’t know what she was doing, but it wasn’t that.”

  This wasn’t a disagreement that was going to be settled soon, or possibly ever, so Claudia made some noises about not wanting to take up too much of their time and apologized again for the disruption to their business. Before saying goodbye, she mentioned the possibility of working with the other farmer’s markets she had contacted, and resisted the temptation to bring up the possibility of the cult. Iryna would be delighted, but Carmen might never forgive her.

  Claudia’s next plan was to call Robbie and Emmanuelle, and she was starting to dial their number when there was the sound of tires on gravel and the now-familiar sight of a police car in her driveway.

  Her heart bounced up when she saw Derek in the driver’s seat, then took a corresponding dive when Lennox got out on the passenger side. She knew they had seen her watching them arrive, but she waited for the knock. Whatever conversation they were going to have, Claudia suspected she wasn’t going to like it, and there was no reason to be in a hurry.

  “Good morning, Miss Simcoe,” Lennox said in response to her greeting. “I suppose you’re wondering what brings us back so soon.”

  He strode into the cottage as smug as a cat with a dead lizard. Derek trailed in behind him, looking apologetic and saying nothing. Teddy immediately trotted over to demand ear-scratches.

  “You’re done with the marketplace and I can reopen it today?” Claudia said.

  Lennox’s smirk was almost audible.

  “No, not that. We just have some more questions for you. Well, actually, just one question, and it should be a pretty simple one.”

  He reac
hed into his pocket and took out a clear zip-top bag containing a blue plastic object, about the size of a large beetle, shaped like a focus group’s idea of a pebble. There was a clip on one side and a small, scratched LED screen on the other.

  “Is this yours?” Lennox asked.

  “It could be,” Claudia said, cautiously. In truth, she recognized it immediately. It was a fitness tracker, one of those little devices that were supposed to monitor your steps, your sleep, and your general physical activities, making you a healthier person by shaming you with your laziness. She knew it was hers because it was a less-popular brand, which she had chosen because the software it came with was open-sourced, the better for her to play with, and there was a scratch on the screen from when it had fallen behind one of the deli fridges and gotten stuck there. But she didn’t see how it would be to her benefit to share that information, especially since she didn’t know how Lennox had come to be holding it.

  Naturally, Lennox didn’t care for her prevarication.

  “What do you mean it could be? Either it’s yours or it isn’t. Which is it?” Lennox waggled the bag in front of her, like he expected her to try to grab it out of his hand so he could snatch it away. It was bizarre, this constant need he seemed to have to prove his power over her, when there was no question he had plenty. Claudia wondered if he was like this all the time, or only when he was faced with a murder he had no chance of solving.

  “I do own a tracker like that, but I can’t be sure that’s it. There must be thousands like it, and I haven’t been using mine for a while. Where did you find it?” she said.

  “It was found under Lori Roth’s body. Does that help jog your memory?”

  He obviously expected the revelation to have some sort of devastating effect, but Claudia declined to oblige. It took some effort, considering that her internal dialogue was composed entirely of screaming, but she was able to meet his triumphant gaze with a blank, mildly curious look.