I've got a secret

Six o’clock gets earlier every morning, and if it weren’t for the wet nose stuck in my face and the demands of having a pet that needs to be walked, I’d have rolled over and stayed warm and comfy in my bed. But Maizie was insistent.

I hauled my body out of the sack and headed for the john. Let me tell you right now, aging sucks. I don’t mind getting older. It’s aging. A back injury from when I was in Viet Nam keeps acting up on me, especially when the weather changes from dry to wet like it did this morning. I count it a good day if I can stand up straight by the time I get to the bathroom from the bed. This morning I was all the way to the kitchen before the last spasm subsided.

After I’d had my oatmeal, Maizie and I got ready for the office. The clouds hung heavy around Queen Anne giving the Space Needle that strange other-worldly appearance that makes you think aliens have landed and are taking over downtown. Thank god I’m too low on the hill to have to look down on “Metronatural” painted across its noble brow.

With Maizie in her raincoat and an umbrella over my head we set off through the cold mist for the office. Lower Queen Anne is a great place to live and I can walk to the waterfront with only a couple stops to rest. Thankfully, Riley gets me home at night. I’d never make it back up the hill. My first stop is at an independent coffee shop on Broad. It’s one of the few independents that are left in the city that spawned coffee love throughout the world. But the big brands are now the “standard” of coffee. That means it’s the lowest common denominator that anything that wants to be called coffee has to meet. The little independents are where you get a cup that opens your eyes and puts a smile on your face. Tavoni’s is just that kind of shop.

Maizie and I stepped through the front door at 7:30 and both shook the water off. At that hour, when they open, there is never a question of standing in line, or even ordering. Jackie came out from around the counter and brought me my espresso and Maizie’s biscuit.

Yeah. Espresso with my heart. There are a few pleasures in life that are worth dying for.

Jackie brings me a 50/50 in a small earthenware cup. Two shots of espresso pulled on top of two shots of hot water. I’d drink the espresso straight, but it cools off too quickly.

First, you hold the cup in both hands and absorb the warmth through your fingers as the aroma tickles at the edges of your nose. Don’t go too fast. Don’t dive in and take a drink and burn your tongue. Just hold it there and breathe. Then slowly bring it closer—about four inches from your face—and inhale deeply. A properly made espresso will pick you up from that distance and jumpstart your heart. I can feel it working before the cup actually touches my lips. The first sip should be mostly crème. That’s the oily foam that rests on top of a freshly pulled shot of espresso. Just beneath the silky foam comes your first sip of heaven. The coffee is strong enough to dry your mouth out. The flavor washes across the sides of your tongue first then sweeps up to meet in the middle. As soon as the black liquid hits your throat, you are compelled to inhale again, sucking air down with the coffee until your lungs feel like they will explode, then lowering the cup so you don’t cool it, expelling the air out through your mouth in a long sigh.

The cup at Tavoni’s is the only cup in the day that I get any more, and I savor every last drop without thinking of anything else. I don’t read. I don’t talk. I don’t listen. I coffee.

After my coffee is finished, I check the headlines of the newspaper and look through the business section. Then Maizie and I take our refreshed selves on to the office.

I didn’t expect Riley in at the office this morning. After our dinner at the Ninety-nine she tried to get me up and dancing and did quite a lot of it herself. Of course there wasn’t a man in the club who didn’t want to wrap his arms around her dressed the way she was. She danced, but I saw how reserved she was with them. She doesn’t really like people to be that close to her. She is a real contradiction in terms. This morning, though, her assignment was to head for the library first and then to the courthouse to look up all relevant records on Barnett, Keane, and Lamb. I didn’t expect her in the office before two at the earliest. In the meantime, I unlocked the vault and checked the status of my drive set-up.

The vault is a special room I had built in this office when I first moved here years ago. I don’t show it to anyone who doesn’t need to know. Even when Silas was here last week to film the examination of a laptop that was tagged as evidence, I made sure that he filmed the set-up inside the vault, but not where the vault was located. It is behind a wall next to the bathroom. I have a remote control for my wide-screen television that sits on my desk and while it operates the device on the opposite wall, if you know the codes it also unlocks the vault. The wall slides open and a small room is revealed. This room is temperature controlled to keep the heat from my servers at bay. I operate my own network and web servers that don’t have to use a server farm for connection to the internet. The room is fairly small, if only because one wall is lined with servers. A lot of power is used here, but I’m independent of any third parties when I’m doing disk analysis. I wired Simon’s laptop into the system behind a firewall and a write-blocker. Then I spun the disk up and did a full spectrum analysis of the hard drive, including making two copies of the disk on new drives. My mission now was simply to disconnect the laptop from the system and leave it locked in the safe in the vault. As much as I can, I never touch the subject hardware unless I discover that there is a hardware key needed for security override. Let me tell you that there is no more than one computer in a million that requires a hardware key. Now that I had two mirror images of the suspect computer, I wired one of them into my network and put the other as a backup in the safe. Once that was done, I closed and locked the vault.

I don’t work on computers in the vault, I keep them safe there.

I work on an ultra-portable laptop. It weighs less than three pounds and has four means of connecting to the network. I can plug a wire in, of course, or use my in-office narrow-range WiFi router. But I can also connect from pretty much anywhere in the country through a cellular modem built into the laptop. Finally, the method that I use in the office is a narrow-area wireless connection that can’t be received from more than thirty feet away, whose signal is not strong enough to go through the structurally re-inforced walls and floor of my office, and that gives me an alert if anyone so much as walks within range of it with a compatible terminal.

This little laptop I call Simone after a character in a movie I once saw. Simone is my companion and my workhorse. I use a virtual private network to connect to the real power that is safely locked up in the vault. I’m paranoid about security, which is why I’m so good at getting around other people’s.

I was confident of one thing. Whatever was useful on this computer in finding Simon, he would not have made too hard for me to find. The tenor of his note was that he wanted to be found and that he had left the clues on the computer that I would need to find him.

But something told me that Simon was hiding something on this computer that he didn’t want me to find as well. He was using his obvious clues to obfuscate what he didn’t want me to know. And what I wanted to know was why. Why after over thirty years did Simon send Brenda to me. Why did he want to play Simon says.

For the rest of the day, I examined the results of my various searches of the hard drive. I stopped only twice. The first time was when Maizie insisted that it was time to go out again, which was a good reminder to take my pills and eat some lunch. The second time was when Riley came bursting through the door about 3:00 (hoping to find me in a compromising position with Brenda?) and proceeded to give her report.

Riley was in quite the mood, pacing her five foot eight inches, enhanced by low heels, up and down in front of the window of my office. The setting sun lit her blonde hair and visually set it on fire. She’s thin, especially for her height, but she moves like a cat. She tells me she’s a brown belt in Akido, but I’ve never seen or asked for evidence. She is sharp and understands computers as well as she does the finer points of criminal justice. I’m figuring to bring her into full partnership some day soon. Her apprenticeship days are about over.

“BKL is a kind of holding company. That’s why there are so few people who work there. All the actual work is done in the companies that they hold. It’s hard to tell exactly how many of those there are as they only have to file if they own more than 20% of publically held company. But if they own 100%, it’s not publically traded and they don’t have to file SEC papers at all. It does seem that the original business was as a consulting firm, mostly accounting and high finance. They were significant in restructuring Allied Materials about nine years ago. Seems that was just before Allied went private. Turns out BKL bought it out for pennies on the dollar. Allied had it rough for a while but made a killing in the aftermath of Katrina. They pulled down mega-contracts for supplying building materials and rumor has it that BKL is ready to take them public again.”

She barely paused for breath before she was off on the next of BKL’s acquisitions. It appeared they were known to be into import/export, financial consulting, travel planning, and even owned a small brokerage. Two local car dealerships listed other known subsidiaries of BKL as owners. Simon had spread a wide net and was raking in cash hand over proverbial fist.

“And then there’s the muffin-top,” Riley continued relishing the phrase. “Seattle Arts Council, Board of Directors of the Art Institute, Mayor’s Council for the Homeless, Governor’s Task Force on Public Transportation, Board of Directors of Cornerstone Bank, Board of Directors of Livemore Mortgage, Symphony Patrons Club, Seattle Athletic Club, President of the Homeowners Association of Madrona Heights, the list goes on and on. Her picture has shown up in the newspaper with governors back to Booth Gardner and nearly everyone who is anyone in the Financial 500. And no place does anything ever say anything about what she’s done. She’s just there.”

“I suspected as much,” I said, causing Riley to pause. “Tell me Watson, what does it all spell out? What do all these interests of Simon and Brenda Barnett say?”

“They are all over the map,” she answered. “There doesn’t seem to be any sense to any of it. One minute she’s glad handing a Republican, the next she’s donated $5000 to a Democrat. There’s no common thread among the businesses that BKL invests in. You’d think they were all different businesses entirely. I don’t see anything.”

“Money,” I answered. “Money and influence. And if you have money and influence, you have power.”

“And if you have power,” Riley continued, “you have enemies.”

“You think?” I said. “Don’t you think Simon and Brenda Barnett are beloved by everyone they do business with?” She looked at me with a blank look as though I’d just spoken to her in Swedish. “I’m being sarcastic, Riley,” I said. “Don’t make me explain.”

She laughed and plopped down on my sofa in a very unladylike pose.

“Do all Swedes have such a dry sense of humor?” she asked. “After six months, I still can’t tell when you are joking. I thought you were defending them.”

“Not likely, Miss,” I snapped. “But it never hurts to look past the obvious. Are they beloved benefactors or feared powers? Or does it make no difference at all? Get your shoes off the furniture.” She kicked her shoes off onto the floor and continued to lay draped over the sofa like a knitted Afghan. Maizie came over and licked her fingers, then finding no resistance, jumped up on the sofa with her. She absently scratched the dogs ears and I could all but hear the wheels turning in her head.

“Dag, how do you get your fingers into so many pies? It’s one thing to be in the right place at the right time to make a good investment, but so many? How do they get their leads? How do they know what to buy?” She was staring out the window at the evening fog rolling in and I crossed the room to stand by the window and look out across Puget Sound myself. The lights of the ferries were oddly fuzzed in the fog and seemed more like disconnected fairy lights than one of Seattle’s major modes of transportation.

When I took this office thirteen years ago, they were in the middle of a pier renovation project to try to bring new life to the waterfront. They thought they would try to encourage businesses to take space and thus drive more traffic to the waterfront. But Chameleon Textiles Importers had taken up one entire end of the facility three floors high and had it filled with bolts of fabric. Nearly all their business was shipping and receiving with very little retail or foot traffic. The rest of us who rented space on Pier 61 had few walk-in clients as well. Fortunately we all knew each other and it made it seem more like one big company with several departments. There were restaurants enough on the waterfront to make an occasional lunch out with co-workers possible while we still did our jobs in relative isolation.

It was full dark when I turned around and saw that Maizie had fallen asleep next to Riley and Riley was struggling to keep her eyes open. I grinned at the two of them.

“Think you can get me home before you start snoring?” I asked.

“I don’t snore, Dag,” she said indignantly getting up and putting her shoes back on. “As if you’d know.”

We headed for the door and I turned out the last light and locked up my office. When she dropped Maizie and me off at our house, she asked me a curious question. “Dag, where does the money go? Do they just spend it? They’ve owned the same house for twenty years. What do they do with it all?”

Hmm… I thought. Maybe there is more missing than Simon.

Table of Contents