Delete all suspects, page 23
part #4 of Turing Hopper Series
"So we can't see a thing," Tim said.
"No," Turing said. "I can see through the camera attached to Maude's computer, but only because it's connected to the Universal Power Supply."
"That's the thing that's beeping, right?"
"Yes," Turing said. "Reminding us that it won't last indefinitely."
"How long?" Tim asked.
"It's supposed to give you up to half an hour to save data and shut things down safely. But the more things you have plugged into it, the faster it runs out, so you're supposed to finish shutting down a lot sooner than that."
Just then they heard breaking glass.
"Did that come from the front door?" Tirr*asked.
"I don't know," Turing said. "Possibly. Without my security cameras—"
"Inconvenient time for more company," Tim said. "Or if
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it's something Casey and Danforth are doing, I bet it's
something they shouldn't be." He crawled out from behind
the desk.
"Tim!" Turing said. "Stay here where it's safe!"
"How do you know it's so safe?" Tim said. "And anyway,
what if something happens to Casey?"
He stood up and walked out into the corridor.
I can't see what's going on- Tim left Maude's office and I haven't seen him since. Casey and Matt Danforth are probably in Casey's office, but he doesn't currently have a working camera hooked up to his computer, only the security cam that went dark when the power went out.
for once, everyone else followed procedures and logged out before leaving on Friday. So did Maude, of course; but I've set up her camera so I can use it even when she's not logged in. With the security cameras out, I no longer have a set of eyes in the building.
Eyes that would fail in less than half an hour, as the recurring beeps of the UPS kept reminding me.
Down in the main computer room, the emergency generator had kicked in, and the network was fine. Which reassured me. In a few weeks, I'm*planning to move into that network. I need to know that the first minor thunderstorm won't do me in.
By now, Alan Grace's on-call computer technician would have received a page, and before long, he'd show up to see what was wrong. Of course, long before that, the FBI would arrive, wouldn't they?
Just then Claudia called.
"You've got a reprieve," she said. "For some reason, Norris and company showed up at the Universal Library building instead of Alan Grace."
"Damn," I said. "They traced KingFischer instead of Casey. "
"I thought this would be good news. What's going on over there?"
"Danforth showed up, and Tim had Casey let him in, so we could turn him over to the FBI, and then the power went out and
222 Donna Andrews
someone broke in, and Tim went out to see what's going on, and I can't see a thing; all my cameras are down; anything could have happened to Tim or Casey or — "
"Calm down!" Claudia said. "Don't hyperventilate. Tim can take care of himself. You want me to break cover and talk to Nor-ris? Send them over?"
"I just put in a call to 911 and one to his cell phone," I said. "But by the time they get here —"
"They're only five minutes away," Claudia said. "I'm on my way right now, and — whoa! A car just passed me at light speed, and I think it was Norris. Hang on a few minutes longer."
"Roger," I said.
But before anyone arrived, and before I could see anything in the office, the UPS ran out of power and my last view of the office disappeared, and I had a feeling something awful was happening back there.
Mrs- Stallman's house was nearly dark- As she approached the front door, Maude could see only a faint light through the glass panels on either side of the front door. Coming from the kitchen, she decided.
Nearly dark, and very quiet. No wonder Mrs. Stallman had changed her mind about staying there alone. The noise and bustle from the FBI technicians would have been difficult, but the sudden complete silence after they left must have been unbearable.
She rang the doorbell, and only seconds later, Mrs. Stall-man opened the door.
"Come in," she said. Then she said something else—or perhaps only moved her lips without creating a sound. Maude frowned, puzzled.
"Are you all right?" she asked, stepping into the hallway.
Mrs. Stallman stepped back again and into more light. Now Maude could see that her mouth was saying, silently, "Run! Help!"
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Maude started to turn, but the door slammed behind her.
"You won't fool me this time," a voice said.
The fake Mrs. Stallman. She stood behind the real Mrs. Stallman, one hand gripping her shoulder. The other was invisible, and Maude guessed, from the stiff way Mrs. Stallman held her back, that the imposter was holding a gun to it.
"You again," Maude said.
"You know what I'm here for," the imposter said.
"No," Maude said. "I haven't a clue why you're here. Or why you hired us in the first place."
"She thinks Eddie stole some money from her," Mrs. Stallman said. "I've told her Eddie would never—"
"Shut up," the imposter said. From the way Mrs. Stall-man jerked forward slightly, Maude guessed that the imposter had prodded her with the gun. But the imposter's voice was curiously flat. Almost expressionless.
"Stole money?" Maude echoed. "Ah—the phishing scheme."
"You see?" the imposter said. "You knew all about it."
"I only know about it because you hired us to pry into Eddie's business," Maude said. "If you were paying attention, you'd have heard us say that we thought one of Eddie's friends was taking advantage of him. Doing something illegal with his servers."
"You're lying," the imposter said. "I should have known better than to trust you. I thought that friend of Eddie's recommended you to her. I didn't know you were all in on it."
"We're not," Maude said. "If you'd—"
"I want my money back."
Still in that strangely flat, expressionless voice. A tone that you might mistake for calm if you missed the look in her eyes. Maude had opened her mouth to explain, protest, reason with the woman. But something about the look in the imposter's eyes stopped her. The pupils were slightly dilated, and they seemed to tremble, almost twitch. Was
she on something? Or just insane? It didn't really matter which.
She'd done a good job of pretending to be the anxious grandmother, hovering over them ineffectually, wringing her hands and plying them with cups of badly brewed tea. But now she'd thrown off all traces of that disguise, and Maude couldn't imagine that she'd ever mistaken her for someone sane. Reasoning wouldn't work. She had to try something else.
"I know you have the money," the imposter said. "That other crook told me."
"Other crook?"
"The one with the fancy car."
"Danforth," Maude said.
"That's the one. I fixed his wagon. His car, at least."
"He's the one who has the money."
"Liar."
"We didn't take any—"
"You took everything I had. My life savings, and what I got from my husband's life insurance. I want it back."
"I can show you proof that Danforth was the one who took the money," Maude suggested.
"Show me, then."
"It's on the computer," Maude said. "Down in the basement. I can go print out—"
"We'll all go," the imposter said. "You first."
Maude led the way down the basement stairs, hoping she'd just made a strategic move rather than a fatal blunder. She didn't know for sure what the FBI technicians had left behind. Please, let the computers be there, she thought. And turned on. At least the computer that I hope still has Turing's spare camera attached.
Someone was shining a light in Tim^s right eye. He blinked, and tried to turn his head away.
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"Don't move," a voice said.
The light jumped over to his left eye, and that was much worse. It was only glare to the right eye, but when it hit the left, the light sent a sharp, knifelike pain stabbing through his head.
"You want to tell me how many fingers I'm holding up?" the voice said.
Tim squinted against the light and saw someone's index finger in front of his face.
He swallowed. His throat was dry, and he didn't feel like talking.
"How many fingers?" the voice insisted.
Tim held up his middle finger at the voice and closed his eyes again.
"Okay, he'll live," the voice said, sounding slightly amused.
Tim took in the sounds around him for a few more minutes before opening his eyes again.
"I don't know what happened," Casey was saying, from somewhere nearby. "One minute, he was talking to me, and the next thing I knew, I was on the floor with my hands taped behind me."
Okay, Casey was all right.
After a few moments, Tim sat up and looked around.
"Take it easy," someone said. Tim glanced up to see a cop leaning against the wall, arms folded, baby-sitting him.
He was in the hall. People were milling around everywhere. Uniformed cops, and men and women in suits. He spotted Dan Norris.
"Norris," he said, and lurched to his feet.
"He okay?" Norris asked the cop.
"What happened?" Tim asked.
"I was hoping you could tell me," Norris said. "You know anything about that?"
He pointed down the hall toward an office. Casey's office. Matt Danforth was slumped over Casey's computer.
and from the amount of blood running down the keyboard and splattered on the wall, Tim guessed that Danforth was dead. Tim stared for a long second, and then a crime scene technician stepped between him and Danforth, blocking the view.
"He was alive when the lights went out," Tim said. "Then someone hit me."
"Did you see who?" another voice said.
"From behind," Tim said, glancing up to see a familiar frowning face. Detective Powell, the Arlington homicide detective.
"I'll want to talk to him later," Powell said. "You want to take him somewhere out of the way for now?"
Norris picked Maude's office as his out-of-the-way spot. Tim found himself wondering why. Because he knew it best and felt comfortable there? Or did it have something to do with Turing? Maude's office was the easiest place for Turing to listen in. Did Norris know that?
"I don't suppose it's any use interrogating you about how you fingered Casey as the vigilante," Norris said, as he seated himself in Maude's chair.
"We did? Wow, that's out of character," Tim said. "For Casey, I mean. But yeah, no use interrogating me about it, because all I know is that we had to race over here to stop Casey from doing something that really ticked Maude off."
"Then, once you got here, she took off again to pick up Mrs. Stallman."
Tim started to nod, and then regretted it.
"Any idea why Danforth showed up here?" Norris asked.
"Not really," Tim said, consciously refraining from shaking his head. "I get the idea Casey wasn't really doing what Maude thought he was doing. That he was only a pawn. Maybe Danforth was the real player."
Norris didn't say anything; just raised one eyebrow. Tim sighed. He should have been paying more attention when they went over the official cover story.
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"But I'm the technological idiot," he said. "You should ask Maude."
"Or her boss, the elusive Alaina Grace," Norris said. Something about the way he sat there, with his back turned squarely to Turing's camera, made Tim wonder how much he knew about Turing.
"She wasn't here," Tim said.
"She never is," Norris said. "But do you really expect me to believe she wasn't watching through those cameras of hers?"
"After the power went out?" Tim said.
"Before then, at least," Norris said.
"So who knocked the power out, anyway, and what happened to Danforth?"
"We're working on that," Norris said.
Just then the monitor behind Norris's head suddenly came to life. Tim could see a slightly grainy picture, like the video feed from the security cameras. The sound was loud. Too loud.
"Don't try anything," a woman's voice said, while the screen showed a woman using a roll of duct tape to tie another woman to a chair. Amateur-quality video, Tim thought. Not coming from a porn site, he hoped, though that seemed unlikely, given the fact that both women were gray-haired and fully dressed. Maybe a web cam. Only who would be crazy enough to webcast a hostage situation?
He wanted to ask Turing what was going on, but with Norris in the room, he didn't dare.
"I won't," a voice said. Just then the figure using the duct tape turned around. It was Maude. He recognized the scene now: Mrs. Stallman's basement. The duct-taped captive was Mrs. Stallman—the real one.
"What the hell's that?"
Tim glanced over at Norris, who had looked up at Maude's voice and was staring at the picture.
"Damned if I know," Tim said.
The picture panned slowly to the right until it showed
another elderly woman. The imposter—and she was holding a gun.
"Get the cops over there, fast," Tim said. "That's the fake grandmother."
"It's also the woman who emptied Eddie Stallman's bank account," Norris said, on his way to the door.
"Rick!" he shouted, when he was in the corridor. Rick, apparently, was Detective Powell. He and Norris exchanged a few hurried words, and then both began issuing orders— Powell from just outside the door to Maude's office, on a police radio, and Norris from inside the office, on his cell phone. From the sound of it, before too long Mrs. Stallman's quiet residential neighborhood would have more cops than residents.
"Hey, I know her," a voice said. Casey, accompanied by a cop, was peering in the doorway. "It's that crazy woman who was bothering Eddie."
"Crazy woman?" Tim asked.
"Stand by," Norris said. "More information coming."
"Yeah," Casey said. "I remember it now. It was the last time we had lunch, at some Vietnamese place in Clarendon. She came up to the table and began yelling at him, claiming he'd stolen money from her. Eddie said she was crazy. I figured he was right—Eddie would never do something like that. That was what made him finally ask me to send him the name of the PI I knew. I e-mailed it to him when I got home. Sorry," he said, seeing the look on Tim's face. "I should have remembered this when you talked to me, but I was pretty out of it."
On screen, the camera had pulled back until you could see all three women. Maude was finishing up with the duct tape.
"Now show me," the woman said.
Something happened on the screen. The *video picture shrunk in size, until it only occupied the lower left two thirds of the screen. Another window popped up in the up-
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per left corner—a Maryland driver's license for a woman named Gladys Phelps. The picture showed the fake Mrs. Stallman. Though she was visibly younger and a lot more, well, normal looking. Turing must be getting better at visual identifications.
"Suspect tentatively identified as Mrs. Gladys Phelps, sixty-seven," Norris said into the phone. He continued rattling off the rest of the information about Mrs. Phelps. Powell was doing much the same thing out in the corridor.
Something else appeared on the screen. A small window showing a computer file directory, with one file name highlighted. Then a third small screen, this one showing a list of names and social security numbers. One record was highlighted: Gladys Phelps.
"I think that's the list we found, the one we told you about," Tim said. "The social security numbers Matt Dan-forth stole on his first phishing expedition."
As if to agree with him, the highlighting on the two new screens flashed on and off rapidly.
"Don't try anything," Gladys Phelps said, on-screen. "I'll use this if I have to."
"I have no doubt of it," Maude said. "You killed Eddie Stallman, didn't you?"
"I only wanted to scare him," Phelps said. "I just miscalculated and hit him too hard."
"And when you couldn't find a trace of the money yourself, you hired us to help you." Maude said. "The fact that we led you to Mr. Meekins was a bonus. You didn't kill him accidentally."
"He probably didn't even see enough to be a problem,'' Mrs. Phelps said, with a slight shrug. "But I couldn't take the chance. So you know I'm not kidding; I'll kill her if you don't cooperate. Show me where it is."
"I'll need to use the computer," Maude said.
"What is she looking for?" Norris asked.
Tim shrugged.
"You're recording this, right?" Norris said.
Tim glanced over at him. Norris's face looked pale and rigid. In fact, his whole body was rigid, except for his left foot, which tapped the floor in what looked more like a nervous twitch than a voluntary motion.
Tim glanced back at the screen. The word RECORDING appeared at the top left, in red, with a small check mark beside it.
"Yes," he said.
Norris nodded.
"Give me an ETA," he said into the phone.
He didn't look as if he liked the answer.
"You're not going over there?" Tim asked.
"It's twenty minutes away," Norris said, not taking his eyes from the screen. "Maybe if things stabilize . , ."
Tim looked back at the screen. He had the sinking feeling that what Norris really meant was that there was no time to get over there before something happened, and at least here he could watch. He wondered, if he were in Nor-ris's shoes, if he'd have the nerve to stand there and watch what might be about to happen.
On screen, Maude was typing something on the computer. What was she doing? Or was she only pretending to do something to buy time?
I'd already sent in a 111 calli reporting
an armed intruder. With Dan Norris and Detective Powell sending out their calls, I was sure the police would arrive soon. But even after they arrived, they had to make their way into the house and down into the basement to disarm the imposter^and rescue Maude and Mrs. Stallman. I didn't feel optimistic.
