Lynn Osterkamp - Cleo Sims 03 - Too Many Secrets (11 page)

Gayle breezed in, snowy and energetic, cheeks red from the
cold. “I called Diana and Hana right after I talked to you.” Gayle
spoke rapidly as she pulled off her boots, hat, and jacket. “I told them
I’m going to tell you everything, and if they want to be here for it, they
should show up.”

No sooner had the words left her mouth than Hana and Diana
burst in, trailing snow all around my waiting room. “Gayle, you have no
right,” Diana said, grabbing her shoulders.

Gayle shook herself free, brushing off the snow Diana had
dripped onto her arms. “I have every right,” she snapped. “This
is about Sabrina. We’ve wasted way too much time already.” She pushed past
Diana toward the counseling room.

Hana stepped in front of Gayle, impeding her path. “This
is not about Sabrina and you know it,” she said. “Think about what you’re
doing.”

I elbowed past them all and stood in the doorway to the
counseling room. “Enough,” I said. “If we’re going to have this
conversation, you need to take off your snowy boots and jackets, come into this
room, and sit down. If not, you can all leave, and it will be up to you to find
Sabrina on your own.”

They stopped squabbling long enough to get their stuff off
and get seated in the counseling room—Hana and Diana on the couch and
Gayle in the armchair catty-cornered from them. I turned on my electric
teakettle, then sat in the wingchair across from the couch. They started right
up again.

“You may be right that what’s going on in Moxie has
nothing to do with Sabrina’s disappearance,” Gayle said, glaring at Hana.
“But we don’t know that. One of those men may have made the connection and
taken her.”

“One of what men?” I asked.

They ignored me. “Gayle, that makes no sense,” Hana
said. “If someone took her to get back at us, they would have sent us a
message. Otherwise what’s the point?” She leaned forward, staring at
Gayle.

“Let’s start at the beginning,” I said firmly.
“Gayle, you said you’re going to tell me everything. What is
everything?”

Gayle took a deep breath and straightened in her chair.
“Hana and Diana have a website that makes men suffer,” she said.

Hana sat still, stonyfaced. Diana clenched and unclenched her
fists. “Only some men, she said, scowling, “and those men have
brought suffering on themselves.”

Gayle lifted her palms to stop Diana. “Be quiet until I
finish,” she said. “Then you can make your case.”

Diana pushed back. “You don’t get it.” Her
expression hardened, as she dropped her voice down low. “We don’t want you
to finish. This is Moxie’s confidential business. Why would you expect us to
sit here quietly and let you talk about it?”

The teakettle whistled, jolting me out of the intense
conversation. “The water’s ready. I’m going to get myself some tea. Please
help yourselves if you’d like some,” I said, standing up and moving to the
counter at the back of the room. I got mugs and boxes of tea bags out of the
cabinet.

To my surprise, they all stopped talking, walked back to the
counter, and quietly fixed themselves mugs of tea. Gayle’s phone rang while she
was pouring boiling water into her cup. She put down the kettle to pull her
phone out of her pocket, but I stopped her before she could answer it. “If
you can, let the call go, Gayle,” I said. “We need to get on with
this talk.”

She glanced down at the phone, but let it go to voicemail.
“Sorry,” she said. “I keep it on pretty much all the time to be
responsive to my customers.” Her preoccupied look as she finished making
her tea suggested the call had been one she hated to miss. Too bad. I’d been
waiting long enough for some straight talk about Moxie.

After everyone was settled back in their seats, I put my
cards on the table. “Look,” I said. “Gayle is going to tell me
what’s going on. She invited you both here as a courtesy to hear what she says.
If you don’t want to hear it, you can leave. But if you stay, you need to let
her talk.”

Hana and Diana sat rigidly, but silently, on the couch. Hana
stared down at her hands, while Diana looked off out the window across the
room.

I turned to Gayle. “Can you give a brief summary, so we
can go on from there?”

Gayle shifted in her chair leaning toward me, away from them.
“Right,” she said. “Hana and Diana’s website is set up to punish
abusive men. Here’s how it works. Women report men on the site and provide
details of the abuse. Diana checks out the story through a confidential network
of investigators. If the story is true, Hana teaches the woman how to infect
the abusive man’s computer with a malicious software program called Zeus. Once
Zeus is installed on the man’s PC, it collects credit card information, online
banking account passwords, and other financial documents and sends them to
Hana’s server.” She stopped, leaned back, and looked over at them, as if
waiting for a response.

Hana stared down at the low coffee table between us. Diana
squirmed in her seat, looking like she’d rather be anywhere but here. But
neither of them said anything. No denials.

I let the silence hang for a minute. Forced myself to breathe
in and out before speaking. Their retribution website was way more complicated
and sophisticated than I was expecting. I was shocked. Of course I knew Hana
was a computer programmer, but it was hard for me to believe she could or would
get people’s information this way. I needed to hear more. “How does Zeus
work?” I asked. “Just give me the simple overview.”

Hana looked up, her face impassive. “Zeus is a
data-stealing Trojan horse,” she said, her tone and lack of affect fitting
a lecturer addressing a Computer 101 class. “Once Zeus is on the man’s
computer, it installs modules that make his computer part of a botnet—a
network of compromised computers under our control. Just think of it like an
alien takeover. We turn the infected computers into zombies—called
bots—that do whatever we want them to do. And what we want them to do is
give us the man’s financial information like account numbers and
passwords.” She stopped.

But clearly that wasn’t the whole story. “What do you do
with the financial information you get?” I asked.

Diana glared at Gayle, then at me. “We even the
score,” she said challengingly. “We use the stolen passwords to transfer
money from the men’s accounts into phony accounts, and we use the credit card
information to make electronic withdrawals from their accounts. We send the
abused women the money they deserve and need to live their lives and take care
of their children. The rest of the money goes to charity.”

I was stunned that these women were so far over the line. So
Lark was right. They are making themselves the judges. And what they are doing
is risky and illegal. No wonder Sabrina was upset. “This sounds like
identity theft,” I said quietly. “I can’t believe no one has reported
it. Why haven’t the police shut your site down?”

Hana rolled her eyes. “You may have heard that identity
theft is almost impossible to catch,” she said. “And we know how to
cover our tracks. The website is secret, passed along by women only to other
women they know well. No one will stumble on it, and even if they did, all
they’d see is an innocuous women’s discussion forum. The real underlying site
is protected by an elaborate system of passwords and logins.”

“So this is what Sabrina wanted you to stop doing?”
I asked. “Why didn’t she report you to the police?”

Diana faced me, nostrils flaring. “Because it was Moxie,
not just the two of us,” she said in a carefully controlled tone. “We
all signed on to this. It erupted out of mutual frustration and resentment.
Individually we had once felt impotent, but together we became powerful. We
couldn’t just talk. It wasn’t sufficient. We knew we were right to be angry. We
wanted to stand up and help other women. We wanted to act, we had to act. We
acted.” She sat back, arms crossed.

Hana nodded and leaned forward eagerly. “After we give
the abused women the money the men owe them, we give all the rest anonymously
to shelters for abused women and to groups working for women’s rights in
societies where women are seriously repressed,” she said. “So we
truly are helping all women.”

Apparently Diana and Hana don’t have doubts. The end
justifies the means for them. But how could the others go along? From the way they’d
been talking, I had the feeling they had second thoughts about Moxie’s
activities. I looked at Gayle. “Maybe I’m missing something,” I said
carefully. “But to me it doesn’t sound like all of Moxie did sign on to
this. From what I’ve heard, Sabrina and Lark and Paige and you, Gayle, weren’t
in total agreement with what was going on.”

Gayle grimaced. “No, Diana’s right,” she said,
reluctantly. “We did sign on. It wasn’t just Hana and Diana who wanted to
help women who were suffering. We all had our reasons. Horrible exes, abused
women we’ve known.”

“Even Sabrina?” I asked.

“Definitely,” Gayle said. “Sabrina’s ex was an
addict who couldn’t hold a job. When Ian was a baby, Sabrina was working
full-time as a hospital nurse, and he spent all the money he could get on
drugs. She couldn’t even leave Ian with him, so she had to pay for daycare. He
kept telling her how much he needed her, how he would change if she stayed with
him, but he never did. She finally left him. He disappeared into some druggie
world, never paid any child support, never saw Ian again.”

Gayle took a deep breath. “Then there’s me,” she
said. “My ex had a child with another woman while he and I were still
married. And he was convicted of tax evasion, which messed up our financial
situation forever. I didn’t hang on as long as Sabrina did. I had no trouble
leaving Frank when I found out what he’d done. Never wanted to give him a
second chance. Never looked back. Got a divorce and moved on with my life. But
I had to take money from my brother to get a new start, and I hated Frank for
putting me in that position. And I’ve hated him even more for how he’s treated
Nicole.”

I could understand their anger and feelings of betrayal. Even
their desire to get revenge. But to spread that outrage to men they’d never
met? To set up their own kangaroo court that allowed the accused no defense or
appeal? To punish them harshly and illegally? To put themselves and their
friends in danger of prosecution and jail time? Is this where the strength of
Moxie took them? To this dark side? What were they thinking?

“Diana, I hear your anger when you talk about the
frustration the Moxie members felt as individuals. Can you tell me more about
the power you felt?” I asked.

Diana nodded, her dark eyes cold and hard. “Feeling
powerful is fairly new in my life,” she said flatly. “My ex was
physically abusive and I took it for years because deep down I thought I
deserved it. My grandparents, who were very strict and religious, raised me.
Hard work was expected. Laziness was a sin, and everything fun was laziness.
They taught me I didn’t deserve anything, that we’re all sinners in God’s eyes,
that I could never be good enough. I rebelled by marrying a guy who was
good-looking, charming, self-centered and spoiled. When he had affairs, took my
money, hit me, and accused me of having sex with other men, I felt like it was
my fault—that I deserved it. I was so powerless that all I could do was
keep trying harder to please him.”

Her face softened briefly. “I wanted us to be a family
for our babies. I wanted Amy and Hugh to have the real family I never
had,” she said. Her eyes narrowed. “But the shitbag got worse and
worse,” she said bitterly. “He found every excuse he could to have a
tantrum and leave the house. He’d yell that everything was a mess and he
couldn’t find his things. Then he’d empty drawers on the floor and storm out.
Sometimes he’d stay away for two or three days. Finally a friend helped me see
my codependency and my fears of leaving. I got in touch with my personal power and
left him. I did it for my kids. I didn’t want them growing up in that
toxic environment thinking men can push women around any time they
want.”

Diana stopped and turned to Hana. “Your turn,” she
said.

Hana shook her head. “No. I’m not going to bore Cleo
with the story of my ex,” she said. She turned to me. “But you have
to understand why we do this,” she said. “We’re not stealing, we’re
righting wrongs. Not just wrongs against us, wrongs against all women. Have you
followed the sexual assault suits against the university football players and
recruits? Those guys use women like sex toys, and get away with it. One woman
was gang-raped at a recruiting party, but football boosters used their power to
whitewash the whole thing. The police, the district attorney and the grand jury
investigated her claims, but the prosecutors decided not to file sexual-assault
charges.”

Diana was nodding vigorously. “Exactly,” she said.
“My ex is long gone but he messed me up in a lot of ways. After all I went
through with him, I’m not interested in a relationship with any man. My
physical therapy and massage practice is doing well. And my feelings about
abuse have become stronger over the years. Intimate partner abuse is the number
one cause of injury to women—more common than muggings, stranger rapes
and car accidents combined. I see victims in my practice. Even though they
don’t admit they’re being abused, I recognize those bruises. So yes, I’m on a
crusade to stop this.”

Miserable stories. I felt myself joining their anger. But I
couldn’t go there. I looked off at one of Gramma’s paintings on the opposite
wall for a minute to restore my sanity. It was time to take a principled stand.
“I sympathize with your anger and frustration,” I said. “I also
hate domestic violence. But I can’t endorse your tactics. You can’t simply take
the law into your own hands like this.”

Then I turned to Gayle. “How did you all agree to this
extreme solution?” I asked.