Broken Build (3 page)

She turned toward the building. A scattering of dried leaf fragments blew around her feet. Something moved to the right, and a large body pushed her into the wall. Jen screamed, but a gloved hand covered her mouth and yanked her head to the side. She kicked at his shins, but the man was too massive to dislodge.

“Baby doll, hand over the memory stick.” The gruff voice didn’t belong to Rey, and the cinnamon breath mints provided scant cover for the reek of cigarette smoke, stale cologne and road tar. He pried it from her fingers and shoved her headfirst into the juniper bushes along the side of the building.

A car’s engine idled nearby, and the door slammed.

Jen brushed hair and twigs from her face. The taillights of a white sedan disappeared around the corner. She stumbled to the lobby door and ran into the building. Her heart racing, she pounced through the double doors of the lab and hid in the last row of servers and storage arrays.

She bent her head between her knees, unable to catch her breath—the fluttering of her ribcage fanned like the dry, omen-laden Santa Ana winds. She had fucked up big time.

By tomorrow, the code could be posted on the internet, and her fingerprints were all over the memory stick.

* * *

Jen turned on top of a coil of extension cords. She blinked the sleep out of her eyes and stretched on the hard floorboards. The build servers were still flashing green lights and their humming fans blew warm air over her face. Her neck ached and her shoulders were tight. The screensaver on the lab monitor blinked 5:54 am. Sunday morning.

The panic of the night before rose like a plume of acid. Jen went to the women’s room and peered into the mirror. Angry bruises encircled her neck, and her throat was raw and dry. She washed her face and walked to her desk. A flashlight lay next to the toothbrush in the corner of the bottom drawer.

Praveena had a scarf on her coat rack. It was a flouncy polka-dotted knit with pink pom-poms, but it would have to do. After wrapping it around her neck, she left a note, bought a yogurt from the vending machine, and went back to the server room.

She’d retrieve Rey’s memory stick and give it back to him without the code. Whoever took the stick from her last night would hopefully not tell where they got it. But Rey? He’d have another thing to hold over her. If it came down to it, she’d turn herself in. She wasn’t a criminal. Okay, withholding evidence, lying to the police and possible accessory to a kidnapping. Her eyeballs ached.
Not going to think about it, nor the man whose life she ruined.

Jen pried the floorboard up and shined the flashlight into the mass of wires. The red stick lay halfway between an outlet and a jumble of cables. She fished it out and shoved it into her pocket.

The heavy double doors thumped and footsteps lumbered over the hollow floor. Jen’s hairs prickled. She lowered the panel slowly and hid behind the row of storage arrays. Their fans hummed quieter than the higher-pitched whine of the server farms. She peered around the cooling unit.

Bruce’s broad frame stopped near the burned out power supplies. “Who left the fire extinguisher out?”

The nerve of him! Where was he last night while she did his job?

She stepped behind him, her hands on her hips. “I did. The data center could have burned down if I hadn’t come by to check on my servers.”

He jerked around, his multiple rubber-banded ponytail swung like a baby rattlesnake. “You’re overreacting. They all had safety fuses.”

“Well, you still have to thank me. I re-cabled my servers to the old supplies. You overloaded them and I couldn’t reload all of them, so I only have half my cluster working.”

“Sure, thanks.” He tugged on his nose ring and answered his cell. “Hi, Greta. I got everything fixed already. Okay, no prob.”

Liar.

He ended the call. “Hey, thanks for covering. You were here all night?”

Jen yawned. “Looks that way. You owe me one. Could you give me a ride back to my apartment?”

“Sure.” Bruce pulled out a packing box and rolled the ‘uninterruptible’ power supply into the Styrofoam forms. “Hey, did you hear the sirens?”

“No. What happened?”

Bruce’s deep-set eyes brightened while he taped up the box. “A jogger found a body in the parking lot.”

A chill scratched down Jen’s back, and she clutched at Praveena’s long knit scarf. “A body?”

“Some gangbanger guy. Wanna look?” He grabbed his keys and shoved them into his pocket. “I’ll pull the rest of your servers back online later.”

Jen followed him out of the lab to the edge of the parking lot, marked off by yellow crime-scene tape. A shrouded form lay on a gurney in front of an ambulance, and an outline was spray-painted onto the asphalt. Jen averted her face. There could be blood, bits of bone and hair. She never looked at smashed squirrels and skunks while jogging, but crossed the streets to avoid them.

A small crowd of onlookers gawked from the sidewalk.

“There’s the jogger who found the body.” Bruce pointed to a silver-haired man in shorts, his legs pink from windburn. The old man jogged in place and shook his arms as if impatient to be on his way. A tall black man wearing a suit handed the jogger a card.

The man in the suit strode fluidly in their direction. His gaze swept over Jen once, twice, and stopped at her neck. He grinned, showing perfect teeth. “Any tighter and that scarf would be a leash.”

Jen tugged at the pom-poms, feeling like a ninth grader walking past the senior jock table.

“She was here all night,” Bruce said, looking at Jen.

The man extended his hand. “Detective John Mathews, San José Police Department. Do you work here?”

“Yes, and so does he.” Jen shook the detective’s thin, firm hand and glanced at Bruce. If the officers weren’t around, she would have kicked him.

“Miss, may I ask you a few questions?” Mathews gestured for them to step away from the crowd.

“Sure. What happened?”

Detective Mathews took out a notepad. “What time did you arrive?”

“Nine, nine-thirty.”

“See or hear anything?”

Jen shook her head. “I was in the server room.”

“All night? Doing what?”

“Re-cabling the power cords and monitoring my build servers.”

“That’s dedication.” The detective raised an eyebrow. “No car?”

Jen grimaced. “A friend dropped me off.”

“I suppose he or she can corroborate the time of your arrival?”

“No need,” she replied evenly. “The badge reader would give you the exact time.”

No way was Jen going to admit to being friends with Rey Custodio.

Mathews scratched his goatee. “Do you make it a practice of spending the night here?”

Tiny pinpricks of sweat wet Jen’s forehead, but she didn’t dare wipe it. What if Rey killed someone? He had that rage problem. She almost looked around to see if he were in the crowd, but the detective’s predatory glare fixed her gaze on the knot of his jade colored silk tie.

“Sometimes,” she said. “I’m the build engineer, and Bruce is the lab manager. We have to make sure the systems are functioning, so the rest of the team can work from home.”

“What do these jobs entail?”

“I take care of the servers and storage arrays.” She noted the detective’s puzzled expression. “Servers are high performance computers used for backend processes and software builds. And storage arrays are giant enclosures full of disks.”

Detective Mathews didn’t comment, so Jen continued. “Last night, some of our servers were not available from the network, and I had to manually bring them back online.”

The detective tapped his pen on his chin. “And lab manager? You take care of physical premises?”

Bruce shrugged. “More or less. I install the hardware, make sure they’re wired and cabled, configure the network, and maintain the power and air conditioning systems.”

“Any other engineers around last night?”

Bruce shrugged at Jen’s direction. “Ask her.”

“I didn’t see anyone.”

“Hard to believe how things change.” Mathews rubbed his goatee. “Back in the go-go nineties, cars were piled up in these startup parking lots day and night. Nowadays, these lots are empty except for illegal street racers. Did you hear any tires squealing or see any kids out here?”

“No,” Jen said. “I wasn’t looking.”

“No windows from the lab?”

“Nope.”

The detective fished cards from his pocket. “If you two remember anything, give me a call. Your name, miss?”

“Jen Jones.” She took a card. “Do you know who died?”

Detective Mathews glanced at the broken beer bottles strewn in the corner. “A young man. No ID. Muscular guy, it would have taken someone pretty large to overpower him.”

Jen swallowed heavily and hoped the detective missed it. He leveled his eyes at Bruce.

Bruce swept his palms up. “Like I said, I didn’t recognize him.”

Mathews made a noncommittal hum.

Rey hung around with muscle heads. What if he met up with them and things got ugly? Jen noticed the detective staring at her. She shrugged. “Sorry.”

The detective snapped his notebook and scanned the other onlookers. “I’ll be in touch with your company to verify your statements. Thank you for your time.”

He moved toward a knot of Asian women. They restrained a distraught one who cried, “Is it my brother? He didn’t come home last night. Someone left his GPS on the doorstep, but his car’s gone.”

Jen clasped her hand over her neck. Vera Custodio, Rey’s sister, handed the detective a GPS unit. “His last destination was this cross street.”

Rey? Oh, my God. Rey’s dead!
Jen’s knees weakened, and a wave of pressure slammed her gut.

Bruce touched Jen’s elbow. “Ready to go? My pickup’s on the street. They cordoned off the lot.”

“Sure, let me get my iPad.” Jen backed into the building, her gaze trained on Vera who was being led to the body. Cold sweat swept her with dizziness, and she bumped into a telephone table.

“Whoa, there, are you all right?” Bruce grabbed her arm.

“Sure… fine.” The room circled and Jen could barely catch her breath.

Bruce stood in front of the floor-to-ceiling window. “I saw him before they covered him. He was smashed across the middle, guts spilling out. Dude had some serious muscle and an awesome tribal tattoo from his shoulders down to the fingertips.”

Nausea folded Jen like a jackknife. She slumped onto the lobby sofa, tucking her head between her knees.

Oh, Rey. What the hell happened? She shuddered from the spear of fear in her gut. They could have killed her too. And the code? Had they killed Rey so they could grab the code from her?

“Cute sister,” Bruce said, peering at the distraught woman through the window. “Jen? You’re not going to get sick in my truck are you?”

“I’m fine. Give me a few minutes.” She almost pulled off the hot, stifling scarf, but loosened it instead.

“I’ll bring you a bottle of water.” Bruce pulled out his badge and accessed the double doors leading to the workplaces.

Outside, the ambulance departed silently. A female police officer comforted Vera. Jen blinked through tears. Rodrigo’s death was no accident, and now Rey had been murdered. And other than the murderer, Jen had been the last person to see him alive. The sinking feeling started from the top of her head and slithered to the soles of her feet.

The killers knew Rey, and now they knew her too.

Chapter 3

Dave pushed away from the monitor. “Lisa,” he called his assistant. “I thought you filtered my email.”

She stepped through the door. “I installed a spam filter and set all the rules. You mean she got through?”

“She set up another Gmail account. Go through my inbox and flag only those messages I need to see. Who’s my next appointment?”

Lisa adjusted her glasses over her high-bridged nose while smacking bubblegum. “San José Police Detective Mathews.”

“Wait, wait. Why didn’t you get rid of him? I told you I know nothing about the guy who was run over.”

She rolled her eyes. “He wants to talk to you about the surveillance tapes.”

“Send him to Eddie, he’s Chief of Security. I have a VC pitch this afternoon.”

“He’s right outside.” Lisa lowered her voice. “He only wants a few words.”

Dave switched off his monitor. The day’s irritation kept mounting. The venture capitalists had been skeptical, and he needed cash or he’d have to close the doors.

“Send him in.”

A tall African-American man strode through the door, flipped his badge, and offered his hand. “Detective Mathews.”

The handshake was firm and solid. Dave motioned to a leather-backed chair.

Mathews remained standing. “This won’t take long. Did you know your security camera lens was cracked and had condensation inside?”

Dave shrugged. “I lease this building. The company before the dot com bust put it in. So what did you find?”

The detective leaned forward. “Know anyone with a white Camry or Lexus?”

“Sure,” Dave replied. “Very common car. Did you get the plates?”

“Your camera is suboptimal. Didn’t capture the actual incident, just a car speeding out of the lot. Might want to give your security guys a call about upgrading.”

Dave glanced at his wrist, wishing he still wore a watch. “I’d say it was a drug deal gone bad. My insurance company informs me we’re not liable. The lights were working, and there were no hazards in the lot.”

Mathews opened a folder and pulled out a picture. “Know this guy?”

It was the studio portrait of a soldier in front of the American flag. Dave studied it. Filipino or Malaysian, a cropped haircut and a thick neck, dark-skinned. Cold black eyes. He shrugged. “Tough dude. Don’t think he works here.”

Detective Mathews paced across the room and stopped in front of the desk. “We’ve found a connection between one of your employees and the victim. There was a text message from him to her.”

“Who?”

“Jennifer Jones. Know anything about her?” He poised his pen over his notepad.

Dave shook his head slowly. “Nope. Must be one of the recent hires. Check with HR.”

Mathews walked toward the door. “Will do. What would ‘break the build’ mean to you?”