Sex and Murder.com: A Paul Turner Mystery (7 page)

“Where were you early this morning?”

“With my husband, having breakfast and getting ready for work, as we always do.”

Justin Franki looked like he had just parked his surfboard on the nearest beach and come in off the waves. His blond hair was wet and slicked back. He wore khaki pants molded to his hips and a light brown T-shirt that clung to broad shoulder muscles and stretched taut across beer-can abs. He looked tan, healthy, and energetic. Turner realized most of the others they’d seen looked like they spent every minute of every day indoors. This guy had either just been vacationing somewhere much warmer than Chicago in winter, or he was the best customer a tanning salon ever had.

Justin might have been over thirty, but if he was it was just barely. “Yeah,” he said in answer to their inquiries, “Craig and Brooks saved my ass. I was way in debt. I tried to take my company public. I did take it public. The stock soared. Then it plummeted. They don’t talk much about the tech stocks that drop out of sight.”

“What happened?”

“Most of these dot-com companies are a lot more promise than product. Eventually people are going to demand to see a profit. I never even got off the ground floor. The software I was developing had nothing but glitches, and I could never get it to work right. Everybody in the industry knew I was about to lose everything. Craig and Brooks offered to have me come work here, where I could continue to work on my product while doing other things for them. It got me out of a deep hole.” Franki paused. “These guys were great.”

“What about this Eddie Homan guy?” Turner asked.

“You always get malcontents. Security and crackers are a problem with almost every computer company. I never got big enough to have any problems. I wish I had been.”

“Did you know Eddie personally?”

“Sure. We worked in offices next to each other for a year or two.”

“Was he angry enough to kill Mr. Lenzati?”

“Eddie wasn’t the confrontational type. He fit the wimpy nerd stereotype pretty well. If he was angry, he’d just go back to his machine and try and think of elaborate schemes to get even with people.”

“What were those?”

“He never told me much. I don’t think he ever gave up hacking into other people’s stuff, but I think the time in prison made him so careful that he really couldn’t be effective.”

“Do you know of anything specific Eddie might have been working on when he quit?”

“No, either Craig or Brooks would be the ones to ask, maybe Warren Fortesque.”

In response to their questions about his whereabouts that morning he said, “I went to the gym for an hour at five, like I do every weekday. I had breakfast at Healthy Mornings restaurant like I do every day. Frederico, my regular waiter, would recognize me. Then I went to work.”

The head engineer was Warren Fortesque. He was young like all the others. He wore a brown sweater vest over a white shirt and faded blue jeans. He was maybe five-foot-six, and might have weighed one hundred and twenty-five pounds.

“This is a great place to work,” he said. “A fabulous place. No computer company anywhere is working on so many different aspects of the future. You hear about the big egos and huge fights at other companies—here we work together. If you have an idea, you go with it. You don’t have to worry about getting start up money. Lots of these companies have engineers who dream fantastic dreams, but those people have no sense of what something is going to cost or if anyone really wants the stuff they make. Here, it doesn’t matter. The goal is to create, to always be on the next cutting edge of technology.”

“Any problems?” Turner asked.

“Never. This place is paradise.”

“What about Eddie Homan?”

“A complete twit. I wish he’d stayed around long enough to get fired.”

“What was he working on before he left?” Turner asked.

“Lots of security programs. Many programs computer users buy contain bugs that affect security. He was an expert at finding hidden viruses and eliminating them.”

Turner asked, “If he was good at getting rid of them, wouldn’t he also be good at inserting them?”

“Sure, but not here. We took too much care. Craig and Brooks were way too smart to trust him with anything vital to the company. Craig and Brooks might be young, but they knew to be careful.”

For the next fifteen minutes, they got nothing further from him but cheery pabulum.

Finally, Turner asked where he’d been this morning. Fortesque claimed to have had an ordinary morning, as he and his wife got ready to go to their respective jobs. She was a school teacher in the north suburbs.

They interviewed six of the other top employees of the firm. Not one was over thirty-five. All said basically the same thing. Lenzati was a very nice man with an awkward way of handling people. But he had a gift for unleashing genius and getting the best out of an employee. Each worked in their creative niche and either knew of no one with whom Lenzati fought, or were unwilling to point to a coworker as a possible killer.

When Turner and Fenwick finished with the interviews, they compared notes.

“What I’ve got,” Fenwick said, “is that this guy was a reasonably nice dweeb and a decent employer who paid well, and who had a pornographic collection which he supplemented with a topping of late night visitors that nobody knew anything about. Can anybody be that ordinary?”

“Besides you?”

“Just remember, when you get your ballot for saint of the millennium, I’ll be on it.”

“You’re going to have a tough campaign.”

“I’m not campaigning. The selection is obvious. Mother Theresa had nothing on me.”

“I always wondered who had something on Mother Theresa,” Turner said, “but if we could leave celestial politics aside for a moment. These people liked the boss, which is not a crime. There’s got to be a few places on the planet where that happens. We just happened to run into the only one on this continent.”

“We need to find an enemy. We need to find someone who knew these people in their personal lives. If we track down this Eddie Homan, I may kiss him. I feel like I’m drowning in a vat of candy with all this saccharine sweetness and light. No one is as good as they all claim Lenzati was.”

6

I like watching people and thinking about what their last moment alive is going to be like. I want to be the one in charge of that moment. I want power over them. I want the cops to be the ones without the power for the first time. I like to watch their eyes as they realize they are going to die.

Back at Lenzati’s home in his electronics room, they met with the computer tech from the department. To Turner the guy looked younger than his son Brian. He had brush-cut hair, which was slicked down and pulled forward. He kept a tuft of hair growing under his lower lip. He was as pale as someone just getting the flu. He wore baggy pants, a white T-shirt, and a leather jacket that looked several sizes too big for him.

“You’re the computer guy?” Fenwick asked, his voice soaked with an ocean of doubt.

The kid glared at him. Without speaking he held out his ID. “You want my driver’s license for proof of age of admittance?” Turner saw the guy’s name was Dylan Micetic, aged twenty-four. Micetic said, “What is it you guys want?”

“We didn’t mean to give offense,” Turner said, “but you do look awfully young.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve been that way all my life.”

Turner said, “We need to inventory everything in here with someone who has knowledge of what we’re looking at. We also need to find any evidence of computer hackers and/or sabotage.”

“You mean crackers. Don’t they train you guys in any of this stuff? The big thing here with the monitor on top is a computer.” He pointed and began naming objects. “That’s a printer, a chair, a desk—”

Fenwick interrupted, “Listen, you snot-nosed twerp—”

The kid held up a hand. “Abuse someone else on my time. I have knowledge you need. I’m paid to give it to you, but not to put up with you.” He pointed at Fenwick. “And I’ve heard all about you.”

Fenwick grinned. “I hope you heard nothing but the worst.”

Turner said, “I’m willing to call a truce. We’ll promise not to disparage you for your age if you’ll promise not to look down on us for our lack of computer sophistication.”

Everybody nodded, although if it was possible to give a surly nod, Fenwick did so.

Turner continued, “What we’re looking for is something that might give a hint as to who killed Lenzati. What we want to concentrate on is any kind of fraud or double dealing.”

“You think he’d have that out in the open?” the kid asked.

Turner said, “I’m not sure what he’d have, how he’d have it protected, or what its value might be. I suspect we’ll find nothing. I’m not an expert on this stuff. I’d settle for an anomaly that will lead to who killed him.”

In fact, Turner had taken several computer classes and seminars through the department. All of the detectives had taken at least a word processing class. But he wasn’t about to claim vast knowledge, especially in the face of the department’s supposed expert.

While Micetic worked, Turner and Fenwick checked with the neighbors who hadn’t been home on the first canvass. They also interviewed the members of the cleaning service. None of them knew anything that was helpful.

Back in the electronics room, the work was tedious. The room had been photographed already. They had to take each piece of electronics equipment, software, and disk, note where they found it, what was next to it, what they did with it, and where they placed it when they were done. The trail of evidence had to be clear, and they couldn’t know at this point what might be important in their search.

It was nearly four o’clock and they’d been searching for half an hour, when Fenwick said, “Screw it. We’ve got a million other things to do. We’re not going to find anything here. I’ve got to get home.”

“Big case,” Turner said. “We’re not going to be able to leave it like this. At the least, we’ve got to get back, report, and write up what we’ve got.”

“They’re all big cases,” Fenwick said. “They’re also all dead bodies. They aren’t going anywhere.”

“We should stay a while longer,” Turner said.

“I’ve got something,” Micetic said. “I think I found out what the main project was that they were working on in their business. The latest cutting edge technology is artificial intelligence. They’ve done a lot of work with it. No one is close to creating what I consider real intelligence. Essentially computers are still just a series of on and off switches. Today they just go faster than anybody ever dreamed of. An infinitely fast calculator does not add up to intelligence.”

“You a Luddite?” Fenwick asked.

“Skeptical is all,” Micetic responded. “It’s easy to oversell what computers are going to be able to do. Instead of looking through a catalogue that comes in the mail or running to the mall, you make some clicks and buy stuff. You may have convenience, but I’m not sure you’ve got a revolution. You can talk about vast technology, but if you’ve got machines that wear out in less time than an average car lasts, I’m not sure you’ve got much.”

Turner thought he might like the guy. He peered over Micetic’s shoulder at the screen. It was filled with calculations that made no sense to him.

“What is all that?” Turner asked.

“Formulas. I recognized some of the basic ones. These guys were far ahead of me. I don’t pretend to understand all this stuff, and I’ve got three different computer degrees. I’ve got an IBM AS400 at home, which I think is the best computer on the market. This stuff makes that look like an abacus.”

“What’s so important about working on artificial intelligence?” Fenwick asked.

“It’s cutting edge. They would have rivals. That kind of project would be ripe for industrial sabotage, international intrigue, double dealing, anything. The closer computers get to what they call artificial intelligence, the more efficient they would be. Build the better mouse trap, etcetera.”

“Which companies would be interested?” Turner asked.

“All of them.”

“That’s not helpful,” Fenwick said.

“It’s the truth.”

“We’ll have to talk to their business rivals,” Fenwick said.

“Many of them will be out of state,” Micetic said.

“I think I knew that,” Turner said. He assayed their work so far. “Are you almost done with what’s on the computer?”

“I have to get into its innards to try and discover any hidden programs.”

“If he hid them, how will you find them?” Turner asked.

“I’ve had a lot of training. I’ll look very carefully. The guy was a computer genius. So far I’ve beaten all his codes and tricks, but they were fairly simple. There are more, I don’t know how many. I cannot guarantee omniscience. I can guarantee I’ll do a better job than anybody else you could possibly hire.”

“I like confidence,” Fenwick said.

Micetic said, “You’re going to have to get Werberg in here with me to go over some of these.”

“Probably tomorrow,” Turner said.

“Whenever,” the kid replied. He pointed to the screen. “This next bit is the only thing I haven’t been able to crack yet.”

Turner and Fenwick gazed at the monitor. “It’s gibberish,” Fenwick said.

“Precisely,” Micetic said. “It is also very organized gibberish.”

“It’s a code,” Turner said.

“Encryption, yep,” Micetic said.

“I’m old fashioned,” Fenwick said, “to me it’s a secret code.”

“Can you break it?” Turner asked.

“I’ve tried a few simple things, but I’d need an encryption breaking program from my office. I should be able to.”

“Print us a copy of that,” Turner said. “We can add it to the inventory.”

Fenwick asked, “Why isn’t there an address book anywhere?”

Micetic said, “They don’t have address books anymore. They have Palm Pilots.”

Fenwick gave him a quizzical look.

Micetic said, “Those hand held computers that you write on?”

“Whatever the hell you call it, where is it?”

“I have no idea. It’s a physical object that you would need to look for, not me.”