The Fortune Teller (Tropical Breeze Cozy Mystery Book 5) (14 page)

“No,” Frane said, his strange eyes glowing eerily. “He was talking about the bank. Eden wanted Kendra to crack her own bank, and she didn’t want to do it.”

I gasped in admiration. They don’t make detective because they drag their knuckles around and say Duh. “You’re right!” I exclaimed, as if he’d done a magic trick. He was very pleased with himself.

“Now,” he said in his creepy-silky voice, “Where is Mr. Smith?”

“I don’t know!” I said. “Can’t you track him down somehow on the Internet?”

“It’s much more likely,” Michael said, “that he’ll be tracking all of us on the Internet from now on.”

I’d already realized that myself, of course, but somehow hearing somebody else say it made it even worse. Still, I never do anything on my computer that I wouldn’t do in front of a roomful of grannies, so I didn’t think I cared.

The cyberstalking began that night.

After the meeting, we ran around and got some things done, and had an early dinner at Tropical Breeze’s only real date-worthy restaurant. It’s called Thirty-Nine. It’s across the street from Girlfriend’s, at 39 Locust Street. Get it? Thirty-nine? Everything seems to be acronyms and digits these days, like we’re all walking around speaking code. No self-respecting restaurant calls itself a supper club any more, or even refers to the fact that you can eat there. It would be uncool.

I guess having a leisurely dinner in a candle-lit room, with two glasses of wine and the man I love had lulled me into a false sense of security. It was the day before Halloween, after all, and I had a lot to do.

When we got home and unloaded the SUV, I told Michael I just wanted to check my e-mail, and I’d only be a minute. I was beat, and I wanted to go to bed. When I got on-line, his messages began.

He had been out there somewhere, waiting for me. Waiting for my computer to come to life. Somewhere as he sat in the center of his own web, he had a feeler out that would send him a signal when I signed on, and he began to speak to me immediately, in the language he spoke best. My normal desktop screen faded to black, and I saw the words,
“Hello, Taylor.”

I stared at the screen as if my computer had just come to life. His message dissolved within a few seconds, leaving a blank screen with a cursor blinking, waiting for me.

It took me a good thirty seconds to believe what I was seeing, and another thirty to decide what to do. As I sat blinking at the eye of the monster, another message in a smaller font said,
“Taylor?”

I set my fingers on the keys and typed, “I’m here.”

“I’m sorry I had to leave. Please believe that I don’t blame you. I am not angry.”

I suddenly understood people who grab shotguns and blow away their television sets when something on the screen enrages them. I kept just enough presence of mind not to attack my computer, though. Computers are expensive.

I reset my fingers on the keys and typed, “How dare you, you SOB?”

“Are the cops being a nuisance?”

“OF COURSE THEY ARE! Where are you?”

“I’m sorry.”
The message melted away, as each line in the thread did within a few seconds.

“Where are you, damn it!”

“I’m safe; thank you for asking.”

“You need to come back. They need the evidence from Eden’s computer. It’s encrypted, and they can’t break your code.”

Within a few seconds, a smiley-face devil appeared, then dissolved.

“Cute,” I said. Then I began typing again. “Now, would you please grow up and realize how serious this is? Unless you’re the killer, and in that case . . . .” I’ll leave out the details of what I suggested he could go do to himself.

“Taylor! And I thought you were a lady. Meh heh heh.”

I didn’t bother to answer that. While I fumed, and tried to figure out my next play, he sent:
“Don’t be angry. I’ve already given you the passcode. Don’t you remember?”

I sat back and stared at the computer monitor as if it were a human face. I actually started to talk to it, then shook my head and hit the keyboard again, typing, “What the heck are you talking about?”

But before I could hit the Enter key, I stopped myself. Then I slowly pressed the Backspace key until all I had left was a blinking cursor. I murmured, “You little devil,” and then simply typed, “Got it.”

“Excellent. You’re welcome. Good-bye.”

I could only hope he meant, “Good-bye forever,” but that’s not what he said.

Instantly, my wallpaper came back up on my monitor and all my icons popped up. I had the odd sensation of a tentacle being retracted into cyberspace and disappearing with a little snap. Real time began again.

I picked up my phone and called Bernie.

“Tell Kyle’s I.T. guys to try this as a passcode for Eden’s computer. Write this down verbatim, okay? Here it is: ‘A good puppy never wets its own bed.’”

I heard a sharp intake of breath. “Good girl, Taylor!” she exclaimed. “I thought it was odd, the way he was looking at you when he said that. It seemed like a complete non sequitur. So you figured it out – or did Victor just call you?”

I didn’t exactly lie, but I didn’t exactly tell the truth either. I’m not really sure why I did it, except that I knew they’d come and take my computer away if I told her what had happened, and I knew that if Victor didn’t want any trace of our chat to remain on my hard drive, it wouldn’t be there. It would be an exercise in futility, and in the meantime, I’d be without my computer.

“No, he didn’t call me. I – I’ve just been thinking about it. You’re right. It was odd, the way he made eye contact with me when he said it, like he was trying to communicate something. He already knew he’d have to leave Tropical Breeze by then. Maybe he thought that if the cops could unlock Eden’s computer, they’d stop looking for him, but he didn’t want them to get the hint too soon, before he could disappear. Maybe this means he didn’t have anything to do with the murders after all. If he
wants
them to see what was on her hard drive, there must have been nothing there to incriminate him.”

“Sounds like wishful thinking, my dear. I wouldn’t count on it. And why would he hint around to you, instead of making an anonymous call to the police?”

“Who knows how that man thinks? He told me we have a special connection, because we were both left with no family when we were fairly young. Something like that. Anyway, have the boys in the lab mess around with that. It’s worth a shot.”

“Will do. And sometime you’re going to have to tell me the truth . . . off the record, if you prefer, but you know you can trust me. I always protect my sources.” She chuckled and hung up.

I sat back, staring at my familiar computer desktop and wondering if I could really be right, but somehow I already knew that I was.

I got up slowly and went upstairs. I needed to tell Michael what had just happened.

I got up early on Halloween morning, excited about the day and ready to rock and roll.

I called Bernie first thing, and she confirmed that the passcode had worked. I was free. The cops were decrypting the files in Eden’s computer now, and would be poring over them very soon. By the next time I saw Kyle, hopefully he wouldn’t be mad at me anymore.

I could go ahead and have a fun day. The cops would figure out what to do, and maybe they’d even find Eden’s killer today, or at least figure out who they were looking for. I had things to do; I wasn’t going to even think about Victor and his computer games.

And I decided it was time to talk to Michael about our strange cat. What better day than Halloween?

He was in the kitchen, pouring coffee, and when he saw me coming, he poured a second cup and handed it to me. As if she knew she was going to be the topic of conversation, Bastet came out of nowhere and leapt onto the high-boy chair I pulled out before I could sit on it myself. “Well, all rightie, then,” I said. “You take that chair and I’ll take this one.” I sat down beside her and she settled herself neatly on the padded chair and wrapped her tail around her feet.

“You know, having a black cat around on Halloween can be either good luck or bad luck.” I was talking to Michael, but continued to gaze at Bastet. She gazed back at me intelligently, as if academically interested.

I started gradually. I talked about animal familiars, and Ed’s theories about the Egyptian goddess Bastet, and the dispersal of Vesta Cadbury Huntington’s Egyptian collection among the people of Tropical Breeze. Then I laughed, just to show I wasn’t completely insane. “And then this cat appeared,” I said, sort of trailing off. Bastet still stared at me, unblinking, and I was still looking at her. “There’s something odd about this cat,” I mused, dropping my voice.

“Seriously, Taylor? You just noticed?”

Startled, I turned and looked at Michael. “Um, you mean you agree with me?”

He came around the breakfast bar and began to scratch behind Bastet’s ears. “I’ve known from the very beginning. I’m surprised it took you so long to figure it out.”

“You’re laughing at me,” I said warily.

“Not at all.”

Bastet suddenly lost interest, jumped down from the chair and sashayed across the great room. She gave me one more lingering glance and then went into my office.

“Think she wants you to follow her?” Michael asked, only half-joking. “She doesn’t usually go in there.”

“I’m not working today. At least not in there. A quick check of my e-mail, and I’m outta there.”

Except . . . .

When I booted my computer up that morning, I noticed something funny on my computer’s desktop. There was a new folder. It was labeled “Recipes.”

I don’t cook.

I forced myself to check my e-mail and take a look at the Orphans website to make sure the details of our organized watch were right. While I was doing that, I deliberately ignored the new folder
and
the steady green-eyed stare I was getting from my cat. Then I shut the computer down and left Bastet sitting on my desk.

I fought the urge for about thirty minutes. When Michael asked me what the heck I was doing, and I realized that I was putting a large container of yogurt into the pantry instead of back into the fridge, I stood in the middle of the kitchen floor and muttered something foul. I scowled at the yogurt as I shoved it into the fridge, told Michael, “I’ll be right back,” and went into my office and closed the door. She was still sitting next to the computer, patiently waiting for me.

I glared at her. “Okay, you win. Let’s see what that maniac has done to my computer.”

She went from a sitting position to the classic “curled up cat” pose, all neat and tidy, watching me through half-closed eyes.

I booted the damn computer up and stared at the Recipes folder.

The hand I cupped over my computer’s mouse was trembling.

Over and over, I muttered, “Why am I doing this?”

I clicked on the Recipes folder and found . . . a list of recipes. Vegetarian recipes. Black Beans and Rice, Four-Cheese Grilled Sandwiches, Caprese Salad, Veggie Patties, you name it.

At the bottom, the very last recipe was called, “Pesky-tarian Grill.” Very funny. I’m pescetarian – a vegetarian who eats fish. I rolled my eyes, thought about it a minute, faced the inevitable and clicked into the recipe.

It had the usual list of ingredients, but where the instructions should have been, it read, “The techniques involved in executing this complex and delicious masterpiece are far beyond your skill level, Taylor. For expert help,
click here
.” It was underlined in blue. A link.

I positioned the cursor over the link and it obligingly turned into a little hand. I closed my eyes, I shook my head, and I clicked on the mouse. Immediately the computer began to play cheesy music.

When I opened my eyes, my desktop icons were gone. Across the screen were a few lines of elegant script reading, “Please Be Patient. Your Business is Important to Us. We’ll Be With You Shortly.” I muted the music.

Within thirty seconds, he was there.

“How did the passcode work?”

“Fine. They’re in.”

“Excellent. What’s up now? More trouble?”

“No. And I’m not grilling fish today. Just curious about the new folder. Have a Happy Halloween. Good-bye.”

“Wait!”

“OK what?”

“
I want you to see something.”

He sent me what was apparently a still-shot from Eden’s teenage enterprise, and I grunted in disgust. But before I could force a shut-down of my computer, I did a double-take and brought my face almost up to the screen.

“Oh, no,” I breathed. Without taking my eyes away from the screen, I scrambled my hand around the desk for my cell phone. If I could be quick enough, I could take a picture of it. Heart thumping, I touched the camera icon on my phone, but before it was ready, the picture on the computer screen dissolved.

“Damn!” I muttered. Right away I knew it was no loss; I could never have taken the screenshot to the police without explaining where it had come from. But I could have taken my time and studied it, convinced myself I was right, and discussed it with Michael.

“Well?”

I set my fingers on the keys, hesitated, then typed, “She was selling that?”

“Smart girl.”

“The cops will figure it out,” I typed.

“Will they?”

I closed my eyes again and sagged in my chair. When I opened them again, the screen read, “
What are you going to do, Taylor?”

“Why don’t you tell them???” I typed. “Make some brownie points. You need them.”

“That would only make them curious, and I don’t want to have to move again. And in case you’re thinking of sharing your Recipes folder with them, kiss your computer good-bye first. Not that they’d be able to trace me, of course.”

“Of course,” I muttered bitterly. I typed: “I already thought of that.”

“What are you going to do, Taylor?”
he repeated. The question disappeared, all except for the question mark, which sat there blinking at me relentlessly until I began to type.

“I’m going to the Sheriff, damn you. SOMEBODY has to tell him.”

“Excellent. You wear the white hat.”

I nearly spit. Before I could type out something scathing, my desktop screen came back up and Victor ascended into the cyber-clouds.

Bastet jumped down from the desk and strolled to the office door, looking back at me to open it for her.

“Because I can’t just call,” I told Michael when I told him where I was going in such a hurry. “I have to
show
them. And then there’s the thing about the cars. I could kick myself for not figuring it out sooner. Kyle needs to know right away. I gotta go.”

“The volunteers are reporting to Rita’s house at 4:30. Are you going to be able to be there?”

I checked my watch. It was already 9:00.
Damn it!
I thought.
I don’t have time for this
. Then a little perspective worked its way back into my mind. Halloween was going to happen, with or without me, and it would come again next year, but this was a matter of murder. And even if the cops couldn’t instantly make an arrest, they’d know who the killer was and do surveillance, or whatever. We’d all be safe, and Tropical Breeze could have a peaceful Halloween.

But I was bringing my lioness costume, darn it, stick-on whiskers and all. If I made it in time, I could change into it at Rita’s house.

“I’ll come home first, if I can.”

But of course, I didn’t.

The cops had already gotten a lot of evidence from Eden’s computer, but as soon as Kyle heard what I had to say about the cars, he left for Tropical Breeze. There I was, alone in a cubicle at the back of the Sheriff’s office (the big one, in Bunnell), with a computer geek in a Flagler County Sheriff’s Office shirt.

His name was Howie, and he was awed by Victor’s work. When I mentioned that Victor claimed to have written the encryption code as a teenager, he just shook his head in wonderment. I got the feeling that it had ruined his day and also made his day at the same time. While he talked, I nodded, glassy-eyed.

“She was in on it all the time,” he said. “You already figured that out, right? Chrissie Brown was the ringleader, and the credit card fraud had started a long time ago. Kendra didn’t just stumble into a way to rip people off; Chrissie taught her. She’s been a hacker since the Internet began – since there was almost nothing out there to hack.”

“So we had a Fagin in our midst after all,” I mused.

“Fagin? Oh, right. Dickens. Well, you might just have given us the key to the whole criminal enterprise. Eden O’Sullivan had been hacking her sister for years – since they were both teenagers, as far as I can tell. At first she was just doing it because she could. Some hackers are like mountain climbers that way. They breach Internet security just because it’s there. But this had turned into something else in the last few months. Eden had enough evidence on her to unravel Chrissie’s whole operation, and she was blackmailing her. At least, that’s what I’m getting from what I’ve seen so far. We’ll see how things look after the Chief interviews the kid.”

“What kid?”

“The daughter. Asia.”

“Oh, does he have to?” I blurted. I realized immediately how silly I sounded, but Asia was such a sweet girl.

“Well, she did give her mother an alibi for Saturday. She said they were together in St. Augustine all day.”

“They couldn’t have been. That’s what I was just talking to Kyle about, just before he went running out of here. The car thing. Chrissie couldn’t have been in St. Augustine all day Saturday.”

“Why not?”

“Because if Chrissie drove to St. Augustine on Saturday to spend the day with Asia, they would’ve traded cars right then and there. Chrissie had Asia’s Jeep, so Rusty could do some cut-rate body work on it. In the meantime, Asia was using Chrissie’s car in St. Augustine. When Asia heard about her aunt being missing, she drove Chrissie’s car back and they exchanged cars on
Sunday
.” I told him about meeting Asia in Perks, and how she’d bragged about how wonderful her mother was, using the car repair as an example. “At that point, Chrissie had already told me she’d been in St. Augustine all day Saturday. Why wouldn’t they just have traded cars then? It should have hit me right away, but so much else was going on, I didn’t catch it.”

“I get it,” Howie said. “The Chief needs to get that Jeep before Chrissie can get rid of any more forensic evidence,” Howie said. “With her daughter showing up out of the blue, and everything that’s been going on since, she probably hasn’t had a chance to really clean up. She must have used it to move the bodies. She never mentioned the car switch to us. She was probably planning to get it back to St. Augustine as fast as she could, and her daughter surprised her by showing up at home instead. She was hoping we’d never find out they’d exchanged cars, and would never think to check the Jeep.”

“But Asia wasn’t a part of all
this
, was she?” I said, gesturing at the computer. “Did her mother have her involved in crime?”

He was shaking his head. “Not at all. In fact, we’ve found plenty to indicate that she was carefully protecting her daughter from all this. She made threats about what would happen if anybody tried to involve her, or told her anything about it. You were right about that debit card Eden gave to Asia; it was fraudulent. The Chief thinks it might have been the tipping point. If the kid had been caught using a bogus debit card, it would have been hard for her to prove she wasn’t in on the carding operation. She might have ended up with a record. The Chief is still skeptical, but based on what I’m seeing here,” he said, gesturing at the computer, “she was completely in the dark, and her mom wanted it to stay that way. Eden must have been using what she knew about the identity theft to blackmail Chrissie into supporting her, and the debit card gift was a way of showing her how vulnerable her daughter was. That must be why she killed her.”

“It was definitely a wake-up call, but there was more to it than that. I think Chrissie had decided it was time to clean up her act. She’s been living in a dump and making a lot of money with her carding scheme all these years, so she must have had enough saved to live on for a good long time. But while Eden was around making threats, with an encrypted computer full of evidence, she would never be safe. And of all her partners in crime, Kendra was the most dangerous. She’d been supplying the credit card information. What about Rusty and Kady? Were they in on it too?”

“Yes. But they were just worker bees, using the phony cards to buy expensive merchandise they could turn around and sell for cash.”

“I was afraid of that.”

“They were runners – part-timers, as the operation as a whole went.”

I nodded. “But Kendra was a working partner. She was smart. She must have had proof.”

“Right. As long as nobody got caught, they were all safe. But if anybody did get caught, everybody else was in jeopardy, and Kendra was the only one who could have put Chrissie in jail. Chrissie got rid of both her problems on the same day, and counted on the other two kids keeping quiet to save their own skins. They might have become liabilities later on, so I’m not saying they would have been safe, but first and foremost, Chrissie had to get rid of her own sister. Pretty cold. And all over money.”

“I think it had more to do with protecting her daughter. But there was something else, almost as bad. I’m thinking when she found out about it, it was the last straw.”

“What was that?”

“Did you also find a kind of a peep show on the hard drive? You know what I mean. The girl in the bedroom, doing a live feed, from about twenty years ago.”

He looked at me sideways. “A little birdie told you?” he said.

“Victor. And I passed it on to Kyle, so don’t look at me like that. You were looking for it, and you found it. So let’s see it.”

He gave me a quirky smile, but he did as I asked.

“There!”
I said, touching his computer screen. “Stop it. Can you freeze it?”

“Okay. What?”

“There. Do you see that mark on her arm?”

“Like a bruise or something?” he asked, looking hard.

“No. It’s a strawberry mark. I wasn’t absolutely sure before, but I am now. That’s not Eden O’Sullivan. It’s Chrissie O’Sullivan. Chrissie Brown. Both sisters had strawberry marks, but in different places: Eden’s was on her thigh, and she covered it with a rose tattoo. Chrissie’s is on her arm, right where you see it in this still shot. What’s the original date on that recording? Can you tell?”

He swooped and clicked the mouse around and then said, “June 1, 1996.”

“Eden would have only been about twelve at the time, and that girl’s not twelve.”

“No, she sure isn’t,” Howie said, staring at the screen. I glared, and he snapped out of it.

I wondered why Victor hadn’t figured it out for himself. And then it hit me that he had. He’d just been holding out on us long enough to get out of town. Then he came creeping into my office by way of the Internet and said, in essence, “Oh, by the way . . . .”

“Yeah, I get it,” Howie was saying. “The two kids probably had to use the same computer. Kids caught onto computers very fast. She must have been digging around in her sister’s files and found this. She filed it off, or if she was computer-savvy enough, she could have made a mirror of it – another website that’s an exact copy. If she set it up under a different name and deleted it from the computer’s history, it’s unlikely Chrissie would have known about it. Websites were fairly simple back then, and easier to copy.”

“So somehow she pirated her sister’s files, and all these years she’s kept them. And rumor has it she packaged them somehow and was selling them.”

“She was. Available for immediate download, at a surprisingly affordable price,” he said like a telemarketer.