Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
Harriet
Iroll into InovaSpire at around ten for one of my scheduled consulting days.
Back when I resigned my position, I promised I’d come in weekly as long as Serena and the team needed my help.
I had my fingers in so many different things—everything from organizing the company to dealing with clients and workflows—that Serena had to hire two people to replace me.
I stop into Serena’s office to say a quick hello and grab a lemon drop from the bowl on her desk, and then I head to Varla’s office to do “open questions” with her and Malik, which is where they keep a running list of non-urgent questions, and I help them see around the corners a little bit, because I have been around a lot of those corners.
Malik is interested and engaged, but Varla seems frosty—more so than even last week or the week before. She toys with her stylus and barely makes eye contact. I make a mental note to ask Serena about her.
Varla seemed great in the interviews. Is she unhappy with the position?
We order out a working lunch and we’re done by three. I walk out of there with Malik and ask him how everybody seems to be adjusting to the change. He tells me it’s all going great, and I can’t tell if that’s his usual optimistic self or what.
I pop into Serena’s office on my way out for a debrief. When I ask her how Varla’s fitting in, she gets a strange look on her face. “Good. She’s doing an A-plus job, but she seemed a little off on Zoom last night.”
“So she’s not always like that? In your experience?”
“Quite the opposite,” Serena says.
“Is it possible that she doesn’t like me coming in telling her how to do her work?”
“She knows that’s part of her job. I’m going to talk to her.”
“No, wait. If her work isn’t suffering, I’d rather you don’t get involved. It’s only been a few weeks, let’s give it time.” I grab a lemon drop from out of the little bowl on her desk. “Do you think I could use a workstation to check on something extracurricular?”
She grins. “For the hot boss’s empire?”
I roll my eyes. “It’s a bit of a true crime investigation.”
“Your credentials are always good here.” She waves her hand. “Nobody’s using the southeast terminal.”
“Thanks!”
I settle in at the southeast workstation, a.k.a.
the guest workstation, which has an amazing view of the Silverton River and the hill country beyond it.
I get to work on the dual monitors, and before long I have the network map building itself node by node—red for Dooley Brogan’s known connections, blue for Razor Johnny’s.
I’m hunting for purple. Any overlap at all.
It has to be there!
Their families have both lived in the Silverton Valley or Cleveland area for decades. Something must be in there.
I queue up a geographic clustering algorithm—addresses over time, work layers, school districts, utility records. I’m building a thirty-year social visualization.
Former intern KC appears at the edge of the cubicle, energy drink in hand, hair sticking up like he’s been running his fingers through it, though it could be gel.
“Harriet! Didn’t expect to see you here.” His gaze hits my monitors and he whistles. “Whoa. Dooley Brogan deep dive? Isn’t he the Crossbow Killer?”
I plaster on a smile. That is one of the problems with the southeast workstation. It’s kind of public.
“Is he, though?” I hit a button. “That first murder was so personal—a business partner he’d been arguing with. But suddenly he gets out of prison and shoots somebody random?”
“You do love patterns,” KC says.
I go back to the screen. “I love answers.”
“Fair.”
KC stays there watching me work. Does he not have something to do?
“You know you can layer timelines, right?” he says, reaching over my shoulder. “May I?”
“Uh, sure.”
He hits a few keys, and my flat network suddenly drops into depth—decades stacked like geological layers. “Wrote a plugin last month. Helps you see repeats. Crossings.”
I study it. “Not bad. Can we rotate it?”
He leans in. “Alt-drag. And if you want to filter by location type…”
We work together for a bit and suddenly I see purple. “Hmmm. County fair, 2007.”
“Both families had booths there,” KC says. “Want me to get the vendor maps?”
“I don’t want to pull you away from something.”
“Don’t worry, we got this.” He hurries off and returns a few minutes later with a printout. “Their booths were right next to each other! Brogan family was slinging venison jerky and Razor Johnny’s mom had a jewelry booth.”
“That’s pretty long ago, though,” I say. “Two families living in the same little cluster of towns, it might be weird for them not to intersect.”
KC wanders off, and I keep working on the network, digging up maiden names, nicknames, high school sports.
An hour later I sit back, frustrated. Dooley’s network glows red. Razor Johnny’s is blue. Two islands. Not a single purple node. Except that county fair.
KC is back.
I say, “They didn’t go to school together. Didn’t work together. Different families, different crowds. Dooley was a mechanic. Razor Johnny running with bikers. They’re not even adjacent.”
“Did Dooley ever fix Razor Johnny’s motorcycle?”
“No. The Snag Tooth Riders fix their own motorcycles. It’s one of their primary activities.”
“So why would Dooley kill him?” KC asks.
“Maybe he didn’t. It is kind of a lot that Dooley would take up crossbow murdering the week he gets out of prison.” I’m also thinking how Alexandru didn’t sense deception, but obviously I can’t say that to KC.
KC folds his arms over his chest. “The plot thickens.”
“Can it please not?”
“Hey, you’re the data queen. You’ll figure it out.”
“We’ll see. Thanks for the vote of confidence. And I really appreciate your help.” I start shutting things down.
“Of course! You’ve helped me so much. With everything. You’re my guru.”
I gather my stuff, trying to think how to phrase this next bit. “So, how is everybody fitting together? Like with the new team makeup. Do things feel cohesive?”
“You mean with Malik and Varla?”
“Sure. Any speed bumps?”
KC gets the strange expression. “Malik’s great. Varla, she’s great, like technically. She just needs a little time to settle in, I think.”
“What do you mean?”
KC sucks in a breath. “I don’t know. Like you saw her yesterday on that Zoom, she’s not usually that quiet. I don’t want to say she’s threatened by you…”
“You don’t want to say it? But are you thinking it? That she’s threatened by me?”
“Well,obviously, you don’t work here anymore, so it wouldn’t really make sense, would it?”
“It definitely wouldn’t make sense. Maybe I should talk to her.”
KC frowns. “It’s just been what, a month and a half? If you want my opinion, let it sort itself out.”
My best friend, Josie, is already in our favorite booth at Tres Hermanas, the steakhouse her family has owned for generations. I give her a hug and slide in across from her.
She waves at the two champagne cocktails sitting there. “I took the liberty.”
“Much obliged,” I say. “So, you have three urgent things for the cone zone?”
That’s what she had texted earlier as I was setting off from the InovaSpire offices.
Cone zone has been our name for this booth since middle school. What is said at the booth shall never leave.
“Three things…sort of. In a sec—”
I follow the direction of Josie’s gaze to see her mother, walking across the dining room floor toward us.
We rise for hugs. Her mom slides in next to her and we chitchat, and like everybody, her mother wants to know how it’s going up at Kingston Manor.
I’m the one local who’s been let into the strange and exotic palace on the mountain, and people need details!
I describe my wing and my new job and she leaves slightly unsatisfied.
“You need to get Alexandru to have an open house party or something,” Josie says. “Otherwise you’re going to be the lightning rod for this town’s curiosity forever.”
“An open house. It boggles the mind.”
“At least let the press in. Let somebody do an interior décor feature on it or something.”
“Dude, you’ve been there. You saw that bizarre chandelier of weaponry. And the weird serpent stairway railing? That place is not exactly Architectural Digest ready. More like Architectural Spanish Inquisition.”
She stirs her drink with a little swizzle stick. “Well, your prince is an eccentric.”
I snort. “Not mine and not a prince. It’s just some crusty heritage name. It’s not as if he has a kingdom.”
“But he has a castle.”
“White Castle has a castle. So does that putt-putt place off Highway J.” I take a swig.
“Somebody’s salty about their hot boss.”
I don’t even know what to say about that. Our waitress delivers us an artichoke ramekin, a warm basket of bread, and a plate of crabcakes with their house-made hollandaise.
I ask her if she’s heard anything on the crossbow investigation. Josie is on the city council, and she often gets news before everybody else. “Could that be one of the three things you need to tell me?” I ask hopefully.
Josie’s used to my interest in local crime by now. She thinks it’s all about my passion for justice and understanding patterns. Better than the truth: managing my employer’s monstrous appetites. Though I do hate lying to her.
She rips apart a hunk of bread. “Thing one: I can tell you that the police are looking hard at Dooley Brogan, but they don’t have enough to hold him, much as they want to.
Thing two is a piece of gossip I have that comes from ol’ Uncle Sam and Aunt Pilar.
” She tips her head in the direction of Hardware Sam’s.
“There were no prints on the weapon, and it’s the kind that could be bought from any big box sporting goods store, so the crossbow itself will be hard to trace, but they seem to think the bolt is traceable, so Maverick and his team are going all around to sporting goods stores, like literally traveling the region.
Nothing’s turned up so far, but they’re pretty hot on it, per Sam’s hardware store text chain. ”
“Your uncle is on a text chain with other hardware stores?”
“It’s the bro retail gossip network. I wouldn’t be surprised if Sam and Pilar find out where the bolt came from before the cops do.”
This is definitely interesting. It’s too late to pay a visit to the hardware store tonight, but it might be something for Alexandru and me to do tomorrow.
“And the third item?”
Josie glances at the dining room. Business is brisk with tourist season on the upswing, and this place gets consistently good reviews on the travel sites. “The third thing is more of an event.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It’s an event that will occur in five to ten minutes.”
I frown. “A polka band?”
“Take the last crabcake and sit tight.” Josie catches me up on her little boy, but she keeps glancing at the entrance.
Suddenly, there’s a hush in the dining room. I look up and spot them: Dooley Brogan, his sister, Tilly, and Tilly’s kids are shown to a table near ours.
“This is the event?” I whisper.
Josie puts on her fake innocent face, which is pretty much the opposite of innocent. “Whatever could you mean?”
“Somebody peeked at the reservation book,” I say.
Josie grins. “A little bird told me they were coming in tonight,” she whispers. That little bird being her mother, no doubt. “I thought you might want a chance to talk to him.”
“Well, Alexandru and I actually have talked to him.”
“Wow! You two are really getting serious about this mysteries thing!”
I shrug.
Nobody is looking at the Brogans, but everybody is aware of them.
I catch Tilly’s eye and wave. She waves back and then Dooley sees me and smiles and waves.
“What were your impressions?” she asks.
“He’s a bit of a doofus, but not a fool, and only a fool would go on the kind of public walk that he went on, visiting all these shops, and then do a murder where he’s obviously at the scene of the crime using a weapon he’s already associated with.
I’ve heard the theory that maybe he just wants to be back inside but then why not confess? ”
“There’s not a lot of rhyme or reason to some people.”
“What do you know about the prosecutor who withheld that fingerprint evidence during Dooley’s first trial?” I ask.
“Yeah. That guy. He was up for reelection. Ashwood wanted somebody caught, and Dooley was convenient. I’m not saying Dooley was innocent, but I am saying that partial print deserved to see the inside of a courtroom.”
“Will there be a retrial?”
“No way,” she says.
Our cheesecake dessert arrives, and I fill her in on the drama at InovaSpire, including Varla’s strange frostiness to me, and my very unhelpful evidence that Razor Johnny’s family and the Brogan family had side-by-side booths at a county fair in 2007.
Steaks have appeared at the Brogan family table. Tilly is smiling. The kids are laughing. Dooley savors a bite with a look on his face that is just rapturous.
He’s a man enjoying his new life. I try not to think about how short that new life might be if I don’t figure a few things out.