A Day in Court

It was supposed to be a preliminary hearing, but Silas was hoping to push the defendant to an early confession, thereby getting an automatic conviction on the embezzlement in exchange for not bringing up the kiddie porn that I’d discovered.

I dropped Maizie off with Mrs. Prior who was excited to take her to Pioneer Park where for some unknown reason they were holding a doggie day camp that according to Mrs. Prior, “Maizie told me she wants to go.” Maizie apparently speaks the same language as Mrs. Prior. I was listening to a pretty intense lecture on how worried Maizie is about how I’m taking care of myself when Silas drove up. I scratched Maizie’s ears and turned to leave. I have to say, she didn’t seem disappointed to see me go.

Damn.

Silas and I headed for the U.S. District Court on Stewart. It’s the kind of building that you’d think would be corporate headquarters for the next generation dotcom company. It sits on close to three acres and rises 23 stories of glass and concrete into the sky with a naturalistic monolith in its central courtyard and a roof that looks like something off the flying nun.

It was just nine o’clock when we entered the building and I was already getting antsy—not for the 10:00 opening arguments, but for what I’d put Riley up to while I’m sitting here listening and waiting. We’d set up a new laptop with the data from the old one that Mr. Oksamma had brought in. It turned out to have an early wireless card in it and must have been used to test the system when they were installing it. I was betting that of the dozen or so passwords we’d found on the device at least one was still valid on the network.

I’d warned Riley about not being seen or recognized at BKL. Bradley had gotten a good look at her after she’d kicked him in the gut and I didn’t think he’d hesitate to call in reinforcements if he spotted her around his offices. With his current edginess around the idea of police, I had the image of the hulking Oksamma in the back of my mind.

I sat in the back of the courtroom as the hearing opened and waited for Riley’s message. It wasn’t long before a flash on my screen indicated I had an incoming message from her. She said she was in position and ready to start scanning for the network. She had managed to get into a bathroom right outside the doors of the penthouse offices of Barnett, Keane, and Lamb. We were ready to start hacking. This first part was going to be all up to her.

We’d set the laptop to mimic the old device that Oksamma had brought us, including a user name and passwords. They were old, but I was betting that the small firm never thought about old equipment as a liability, especially an abandoned laptop back in a storage closet. The passwords collected on the device had shown a pattern. If the current password we had was expired (as was likely) my extrapolating software was likely to be able to suggest the right password for this month. Very careless.

As expected, the password was rejected, but the fifth try after she had access to the network.

Now it was my turn. I linked into Riley’s laptop through our VPN and began rifling through BKL’s network searching for vulnerabilities and backdoors. There were plenty there. We set up our own user account, backed up all BKL’s accounting data for the past three years, and closed up shop. If I needed back in later, I could now get in through remote access. Before I closed down my computer in the back of the courtroom, however, I gave Riley a key and had her download all Simon Barnett’s and Bradley Keane’s e-mail and transfer it to our servers. We were going to have a fun afternoon.

By 2:00, it was obvious that the case was not going to trial. The attorney’s had agreed to a plea bargain when presented with the evidence of child pornography on the defendant’s computer. He pled guilty to the embezzlement charges and was remanded over to custody to await sentencing. The defendant was employed by a local franchise organization where he oversaw the financial operations of the company. He systematically wrote checks to himself and made personal charges on a number of company credit cards, then covered his tracks by falsifying the records of the corporation, and hiding records of many transactions. It was an elaborate and complicated scheme which was only discovered after representatives from a local bank called the President of the Board of Directors to discuss some irregularities in the franchise’s accounts. Ultimately, he got tripped up like most white collar criminals—by his own greed. He pushed too far and took too much. The losses were tremendous, and even though part of the plea bargain is to make restitution, he’ll probably face two to three years in prison.

Personally, I’d have preferred to nail him on the child porn, but some days you take what you can get.

Silas dropped me back at my office about 3:30 and I found Riley at her desk looking prim and smug as she scanned through e-mail messages. I called her into the office to talk about what she’d found. We sat in the comfy chairs facing the window where the rain had resumed pelting down with a fury.

“So how did you manage to get in without being seen?” I asked.

“Oh, it wasn’t a matter of not being seen,” she said. “It was just being seen in the right place. I went up to the office, started to say I had an appointment, but before I said with whom, I suddenly remember that I’d forgotten my organizer and would have to run back down to my car. By the way, I asked, is there a men’s room near? The receptionist was happy to point down the hall, out of sight of both the elevators and the reception desk. Once I was in, I went into a stall and camped out. It was very convenient.”

“Wait a minute. You asked for a men’s room?” I asked.

“Of course. John Page wouldn’t ask for a ladies’ room.” She was enjoying this entirely too much. I had to say that it was creasing my own face with a smile. She showed me a picture she’d snapped of herself in disguise on her cell phone. Without knowing for a fact that it was a woman dressed like a man, I would never have been able to tell.

“So you spent the whole day in the men’s room,” I said. “Educational?”

“Disgusting is more like it,” she said. “I hung an out of order sign on the door of the stall and kept my feet out of sight whenever anyone came in. You can learn a lot in a men’s room, you know? Bradley Keane even walked in once with some other guy. I couldn’t see who, but I could hear everything they said. They should really not continue business conversations in the men’s room. You really don’t know who else might be there.”

I was interested. I knew for a fact that men in restrooms and locker rooms tend to forget that they aren’t in their own secure board rooms. I’d heard a number of explicit conversations under those circumstances myself.

“What did you learn?”

“Bradley is rallying a significant force to track down a shipment that was supposed to arrive on a container ship sometime last week. They seem to have lost track of exactly where the ship was supposed to dock. Bradley thought it was supposed to come into Seattle, but the other guy said he was sure it was coming into San Francisco because of the problems they had last time,” Riley said. “There was considerable concern that the cargo not be investigated. I don’t know what the cargo is, exactly, but it seems that it is not what is printed on the manifest.”

“Do you think it is being shipped to BKL?” I asked.

“No. They mentioned FEE as the company. I’m betting that if we start digging into their finances, we’ll find that is a subsidiary of a shell company that is owned by a subsidiary of BKL.”

We sat there looking at the rain for a few minutes. I was sure we had something to work with now. Somewhere Simon and Bradley were smuggling something. That in itself could account for a lot of their revenues and growth.

“Got any plans for tonight?” I asked.

“Hmmm… I’m hungry. Nothing particular on Thursday nights on TV. I’m single and don’t drink. So I guess I’m yours. What do you want to do with me?” Sometimes she just had a way of phrasing things so that I had to stop and think for a minute before I could answer.

“Feed you first, I think,” I answered. “Then I think we should plan on a late night digging through the records of Barnett, Keane, and Lamb Ltd. We’ll set up a search routine on the e-mail first and look for key words. I’ve started a list already, but I think we should add to it based on your bathroom liaison. Then we can start tearing apart the company financials. If we divvy up the work, we should be able to find some of these shell companies that we know exist. Maybe we’ll even find FEE.”

“Food first?” she looked pleadingly at me as I moved behind my desk. I paused, then returned and held out my hand to help her out of her chair. She took it and I pulled her to her feet.

“Food first and then we dig in to this.”

We started out the front of the office and toward the entrance to the pier.

“Dag?” Riley asked as if she were puzzled about something. “Are they always like that?”

“Who like what?”

“Men in bathrooms.”

“You mean talking business?”

“No, I mean talking all the other stuff. They were so disgusting.”

“There’s a reason it’s called toilet talk, Riley. It’s only good for flushing.” She took my arm as we walked down toward Elliot’s and gave it a little squeeze.

“Thanks.”