Foolproof (Iris Thorne Mysteries Book 4) Read online

  Kip turned from the keyboard. “No way, Summer. No book.”

  She stepped back from him. “Why not? I’m not going to say anything bad about you and Bridget. I love you guys.”

  “No book!” Kip’s face grew flushed and the veins in his neck bulged. “I have to draw the line somewhere. You women. Give you an inch… You write a book about us and you’re out.”

  “I’m sorry, Kip. I didn’t think you’d be mad. I’ll call the publisher tomorrow and tell them I can’t do it after all. No problem.”

  Kip gave her a piercing stare before turning back to the keyboard.

  Summer resumed rubbing his shoulders. “Besides, my editor was disappointed that the D.A. didn’t prosecute. She would have sold more books if there had been a trial.”

  Kip shrugged his shoulders hard, flinging her hands off. “What are you doing in here, anyway? I told you not to bother me while I’m working.” He smacked the heel of his hand against his forehead. “It breaks my concentration! Even when I’m sitting here, just staring, do not bother me. Got it?” He glared at the computer monitor.

  Summer jammed her hands onto her hips. “What’s with you lately? You got out of jail, you’re back to work. I’ve stood by you. What other girl would do that? Things aren’t that bad.”

  He looked at her incredulously. “Not that bad?” He raised his chin in the direction of the pool. “My wife was shot to death out there. I can still see her blood on the cement. My in-laws don’t want to give me my daughter back. You don’t want my dog here. Everyone is stepping over my dead wife’s body to get ahead. And I can’t work!” He slammed his hand against the laptop, which hit the wall with a brittle noise.

  Without a word, Summer left the room.

  Kip stared at the wall and leaned back in his chair, tipping it onto two legs. He folded his arms across his chest, pulled the hair of his left eyebrow between the fingers of his right hand, and rocked the chair. Abruptly, he stood. The chair tumbled to the ground. He began pacing back and forth, still stroking his eyebrow.

  Shortly, Summer returned, dressed in a clingy black minidress. “Show me what you’re working on, Kippy.”

  He looked at her as if he didn’t take her seriously.

  “Please. I want to see.” Summer grew bored when Kip talked about his work, but she knew getting him to talk about it was a good way to calm him down. He always tried to explain it in layman’s terms for her, and she was touched that he seemed to desperately want her to appreciate the majesty of it all. Regardless, it bored her to tears.

  Kip stopped pacing as he considered her request. He brightened as he went back to the desk and repositioned the laptop in front of him. As he typed, the anger seeped from him. “Okay, look. See the alien grunt?”

  Summer nodded as she watched a creature with a long, spiked tail and wings leap off a building into the street. The creature’s growls and snorts came through the computer speakers over the game’s heavy metal sound track.

  Kip rapidly pressed a key several times, and the nose of the double-barreled shotgun at the base of the screen hitched backward as the gun fired. The alien grunt screamed as pieces of his flesh flew off and blood spurted from his wounds. He collapsed in a heap on the street.

  “Now watch this.” Kip pressed the keys to make the screen look as if the player were bending over, closer to the creature.

  “We’re still okay here…and here…” The gory dead alien increased in detail the closer the player got, as would occur in real life. The alien rotated on the screen, as if the player were walking around it. “This is what made Suckers Finish Last unique. There’s not another game out there where you can move the image up and down and around as elegantly as this.” Kip’s voice was as fervent as one newly converted. “Instead of the image disintegrating into pixels the closer you get, the detail holds. It’s because of my graphics engine. No one else’s technology even comes close.”

  “It’s amazing, Kip,” Summer agreed.

  “But…” Kip moved the screen image closer to the alien. “You get too close and…whoops! There it goes.” The image of the alien deteriorated into colored blocks. Kip dejectedly leaned back into the chair. “It’s still primitive.”

  “But you said it was the best out there.”

  “It is. But it’s still far from top-shelf virtual reality.” Kip stood and again started pacing. “I’m not making progress on taking it the next step. It’s not coming.”

  “It will.”

  “I need more processing power. I can make the images beautiful and clear and have them hold together, but I sacrifice game speed. And that’s what the Slade Slayer games are about—action. The software technology exists, but the next generation of hardware is at least twelve to eighteen months away.”

  “What are ya waitin’ for?” Slade Slayer’s baritone said through the computer speakers. “Let’s party!”

  “You can’t just use your Suckers work again?”

  Kip shook his head with disdain. “No, no, no! The next engine has to be new, fresh. A complete revolution. A quantum leap beyond anything anyone’s seen before. There’s only one thing to do. I have to find a software solution that maximizes the existing hardware within its limitations.”

  Summer attempted to be encouraging. “That sounds like a good plan.”

  “In theory. But no ideas are coming.”

  Summer climbed onto a sofa, kicking off her sandals and tucking her feet beneath her. “Something will come. You’ve just started back to work.”

  “Maybe I’ve gone to the well too many times.” He clenched his fists in front of him. “I’m blocked.”

  “It’ll come, baby,” Summer said soothingly. “Don’t worry.”

  He walked onto the patio and began pacing around the pool, his arms tightly folded across his chest, his eyes on the ground. The sun was setting. The automatic timer had switched on the pool lights and the small spotlights that artfully illuminated the expensive landscaping. Summer followed him.

  Kip faced her from across the pool. “It’s started and I don’t know how or when it’s going to stop.”

  “What’s started, Kip?”

  “Cause and effect. Action and reaction.”

  “Are you talking about something like fate, or something? Or bad karma?” Summer frowned. “You never believed in stuff like that before, Kip. You always got mad when I tried to read you your horoscope.”

  “Not karma. Physics. The chain of events started the first time I cheated on my wife. Once you commit an act contrary to the laws of society, it’s easy for people to think you’ll do it again, or do something even worse. I did do something worse. I can trace how it unfolded all the way down the line.”

  Summer sat on a lounge chair and clutched her knees to her chest. “That wasn’t your fault. You wouldn’t have cheated on Bridget if she’d been a better wife.”

  “It was no fault of Bridget’s. It was completely due to my own ego. I’ve thought a lot about this. I blame myself for Bridget’s murder. I didn’t do it, but I set into motion a chain of events that precipitated it. I gave an enemy the opportunity to murder Bridget and blame it on me.”

  “But you didn’t do it, Kip. The police let you go.”

  “They’ll be back. But it doesn’t matter what the law thinks. The chain’s been put into motion. People think I murdered my wife. Do you have any idea what it’s like to live with that? It screws with your head. I don’t know who I am anymore. It’s amazing, the things total strangers feel justified in saying to me, the way friends look at me. I’ve never cared what people thought of me my entire life, but this is different. Wasn’t shunning a type of punishment in the Middle Ages? If a person broke a law or violated some tenet of behavior, everyone in the community would ignore the offender, taunt him, turn him into a social outcast. Eventually, he’d go nuts or kill himself or maybe end up doing exactly what he was accused of, like some self-fulfilling prophecy. It would be easier to be the person everyone expects me to be.”

  �
��C’mon, Kip. You’re getting all depressed.”

  “It’s happening. I can’t even do the one thing I’m good at, developing software.”

  “Hire someone to do it.”

  “Then what do I do with my life? Administrate? Make sure the bathrooms are clean?” He stared into the pine trees on the J. Paul Getty Museum property that abutted his. “Damn! I love designing software. I’m not ready to give it up.”

  He walked around the pool to where she was. “Sometimes I wonder if I’m too old for this profession. If I’ve lost my edge.” He held his hands apart in front of him as if he were holding the fragile thing that had vanished from his life.

  Summer reached to put her arms around his neck. “Kip, you’re only in your thirties.”

  “That’s old in this business. You get responsibilities, you get distracted. With each thing you move further from the edge. It’s like your imagination shrinks. Then there’s all this talk about taking Pandora public or selling it. Boards of directors, stockholders, people looking over my shoulder, their hands in my pockets. All I want to do is design systems the way I want to design them. I want to get back to work, bring my daughter home, and write programs.” His shoulders slumped. “I want things to be the way they were.”

  Summer pressed his head onto her shoulder. “It’ll be okay baby. I’m here for you.”

  They stood there for a while, with Summer swaying back and forth, rocking him and stroking his head. Finally, she held him at arm’s length away from her and tweaked his chin between her thumb and index finger. “Better now?”

  He nodded.

  “Let’s go inside. It’s getting cold.” She grabbed his hand and started to lead him into the house.

  “I want to stay out here for a little bit. You go ahead.”

  He watched her leave, then continued pacing around the pool with his hands clutched behind his back. After a few minutes, he walked to the back gate and punched the alarm code into the keypad. A light changed from red to green. He opened the gate, stepped outside, and looked up and down the cement stairway. There was no one around. He jogged halfway down the steps, bent double, and squeezed between the steel-tube railings, stepping into the dirt and brush.

  A few yards from the steps lay an aluminum storm drain, about a foot in diameter, installed to divert rainwater from his patio to the street below. He straddled the drain, struggling to pull apart two sections that were held together by a sleeve. He pounded the sleeve with his foot, tried to pull the sections apart, then pounded some more. Finally, they separated with a metallic squeal. A rat ran out the newly opened end.

  Kip kneeled on the ground and looked inside. He dug his hand in and scooped out a mulch of decaying leaves, dirt, bugs, and rat droppings. He straightened, rubbing the small of his back, mounted the stairs, and returned to the patio. Shortly, he returned, carrying a tool from his pool equipment shed—a long, white plastic pole with a large hook attached to the end. He fed the hook into the storm drain as far as it would go and pulled out wads of leaves and dirt. After three tries, he fit the pieces of the drain back together, dragged his fingers through the loose dirt, leaves, and pine needles to hide his footprints, and returned to his patio. Once inside, he reset the alarm.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Iris had worked all day on McKinney Alitzer business. Satisfied that her ducks were again in line, she punched the three-number extension for the research department into her telephone keypad. “Darcy? Iris Thorne. Did you get any information on 3-D Dimensions?”

  “I just finished pulling together some articles and reports for you. I’ll bring them down.”

  “Could you see if you can find anything on an organization called the Trust Makers?”

  “Trust Makers—the controversial men’s group?”

  “That’s the one.” Iris thanked her, hung up, and dialed Liz Martini’s extension. Her voice mail answered. Iris glanced out her window that overlooked the suite and saw that Liz was not in her office. “You know everyone, Liz. Do you know anyone who’s in the Trust Makers? How about someone named Darvis Brown? You’re probably in the lunchroom. Ignore this message. I’ll see you in there.”

  Iris carried her coffee mug into the lunchroom where Liz was talking with Kyle Tucker and Amber Ambrose.

  “Three thousand buys you a pair,” Liz said.

  “Three thou?” Kyle said. He was carrying the folded sports section of the newspaper under his arm and a half-eaten apple in his hand. His starched, blue oxford cloth shirt was creased down the back and around the elbows, and his fair hair was slightly askew—a sign that the end of the workday was near. Iris liked this slightly rumpled look on Kyle. Of course, she thought he was cute in any way, shape, or form. And he could sell, too.

  “But he’ll give you a discount on six or more.” Liz was wearing a bright orange, dropped-waist dress in thick polyester double knit. Her sharp pelvic bones protruded against the fabric, her breast implants the only thing saving her skinny figure from being completely shapeless.

  Iris thought Liz was too thin, but wouldn’t say anything about it to her. She had commented on it, once upon a time, and had endured Liz’s outraged objections during which Liz angrily slapped and grabbed at invisible flab on her behind and belly. Iris decided it was like trying to convince an alcoholic in denial that she was drinking too much.

  Liz began fussing with the collar of Iris’s suit jacket. “Darling, wear the clothes. Don’t let the clothes wear you.”

  Iris endured Liz’s attention as Liz continued talking. “So guess who the owner’s the spitting image of? Brad Pitt.”

  “Well then, I’m sold,” Kyle said before he left the room.

  Amber caught Iris’s eye and gave her a tiny smirk, telegraphing that she thought Liz was nuts. Amber was wearing one of the conservative coatdresses she favored. This one was forest green, a color that she wore frequently and that complemented her auburn hair and green eyes. She was barely five foot three inches tall, and the coatdresses and stocky-heeled shoes she also liked added mass and height to her diminutive figure.

  That was part of the power game—displacing physical space, looking like a force to be reckoned with, exuding an aura of energy, strength, and perceived danger.

  Iris was lucky in that respect. She was tall and conveyed high energy. She could look most people directly in the eye and down on many of them. And she was pretty and the world was kinder to pretty women. She didn’t care if her looks had helped her in some small way to get ahead. She’d had darn few lucky breaks in life and it didn’t bother her at all to take advantage of them. If asked about it, she’d respond, “The harder I work, the luckier I get.”

  Iris knew Amber’s smirk was an attempt to diminish Liz. Amber was jealous of Liz and Iris’s friendship.

  Liz addressed the issue straight on. “Amber, you’re looking at me like I’m a lunatic or something.”

  Iris smiled to herself. Liz did not suffer fools.

  “We do think you’re nuts, Lizzy,” Iris piped in. “But it’s one of the things we love most about you.”

  Amber blushed and stammered, “No, I…I’m just confused. I don’t see the profit margin.”

  “Amber.” Liz sidled over and grabbed Amber’s upper arm. Amber automatically took a step away, not enjoying this physical contact. Liz was almost certainly aware of that but continued regardless. She lowered her voice, which usually meant she was about to discuss something to do with money. Her hushed tones made one feel as if she were about to reveal insider information or international secrets that she had held on to waiting for the right person to share them with. It was a definite attention-getter.

  “Listen. Ostrich ranching is the fastest-growing agribusiness in the U.S. Ninety-eight percent fat free, they take less grain and water to raise than cattle, and they taste fabulous.” She gave Amber a searching look as if to make sure the other woman appreciated the gravity of what she was saying. She then pulled Amber even closer.

  “I know the right people. You ca
n make lots of”—Liz whispered in a reverential tone into Amber’s ear—“money.”

  Amber managed to disengage herself from Liz’s clutches and scurried from the room. “I’ll give that some consideration, Liz. Love to talk to you about it at length later.”

  “Humph,” Liz sniffed once she and Iris were alone. “No return on ostriches? I think not.”

  The lunchroom door opened and Louise stuck in her head. She peered at Iris and Liz over the top of her half-glasses in a manner that, in another time in Iris’s life, would have sent her scurrying to hide contraband under the bed and boys in the closet.

  “Sam Eastman’s here,” was all Louise said.

  Iris rolled her eyes.

  “And he’s not alone,” Louise added.

  “Is he with a tall, dark, handsome stranger?” Liz enthusiastically asked.

  Louise squinted at Liz. “How did you know?”

  Liz clapped her hands. “Goody! I love it.”

  “Love what?” Iris asked.

  “That’s what my telephone psychic from the Psychic Buddies told me just the other day. A tall, dark, handsome young man was going to become part of my work environment. This must be the day.”

  “Is this a positive thing, or what?” Iris asked cautiously.

  Liz mysteriously narrowed her eyes. “She said it was complex. Then she said it would be three dollars and ninety-five cents per minute for the next five minutes and I hung up. Ozzie has a fit when I spend too much money on those telephone talk-lines.”

  “Let’s go see what the stars have wrought.” Iris followed Louise out of the lunchroom and through the sales department. She turned to Liz, who was following close behind her. “Are you going to come all the way into my office?”

  Liz cocked her head at the notion that there might be someplace else she should be. “Iris, I have to see. I’ll come in to borrow something.”

  Iris conceded. “But just a quick look, okay?” She entered her office with her hand already outstretched. “Sam, good to see you.”

  Sam Eastman rose from the couch and eagerly grasped Iris’s hand with both of his. It was an unusually warm gesture for him and it immediately put Iris on guard. “Iris, how are you?”