Foolproof (Iris Thorne Mysteries Book 4) Read online

  “Alexa didn’t mention anything yesterday, but,” Bridget added ruefully, “I sort of monopolized the conversation.” She grew thoughtful. “There was this weird groundskeeper guy in the park who was giving us funny looks. You know how certain people can give you the creeps?”

  “I’m certain he was harmless,” Iris said reassuringly. “People who work alone like that tend to be a bit odd sometimes.”

  “I suppose you’re right.”

  “I’m sure Alexa will turn up.” Iris was trying to be optimistic but realized her comment seemed to imply Alexa wouldn’t be walking out from wherever she was under her own steam. It was, if she was honest with herself, what she secretly felt.

  “And I’m surprised to find out you’re also friends with the Crosses, Iris.” Sam surged ahead with his own agenda.

  “Since college,” Iris tersely answered.

  “I read an article about Pandora Software in Time the other day,” Sam said to Bridget. “And you and your husband are on the cover of Wired magazine this month.”

  “The information age has elevated computer programmers to the ranks of rock stars,” Bridget said. “Kip and I even get fan mail. Who would have thought?”

  Iris put her hand on Bridget’s arm. “She’s being modest.”

  Bridget stroked her daughter’s hair and frowned as if she’d lost her train of thought. “I picked up the material you prepared, Iris. I’ll read it at home. I’ve got to get Brianna to her grandma and myself to the office. We’re releasing the first two levels of Slade Slayer’s newest adventure tonight on the Internet.”

  “It’s called Suckers Finish Last, right?” Sam laughed.

  Bridget nodded wryly. “Our core audience is males, thirteen to twenty-two.”

  “Is Pandora still privately held?” Sam asked.

  “Not for much longer, I hope. Iris is helping me set up the initial public offering. She’s been in contact with your firm’s investment banking division about underwriting it.”

  “You have?” Sam smiled at Iris with surprise, but he didn’t look happy.

  Iris nervously raked her hair with her fingers. She didn’t think she needed to tell Sam about every deal she was into, but that was apparently what he expected. “I’ve talked to some people in I.B. about it. It’s just in the planning stages at the moment. Be quite a coup for us to bring an initial public offering into this branch.”

  “When were you planning on bringing me into the loop on this?” Sam was still smiling.

  “Sam, there isn’t anything to talk about yet.”

  “We’ve really just started the process,” Bridget interjected, sensing she’d got her friend into trouble. “We have a meeting with our investor tomorrow.”

  “You’ve got some venture capital invested in Pandora?” Sam asked. “Whose?”

  “USA Assets. It’s a group headed by T. Duke Sawyer,” Bridget responded.

  “T. Duke Sawyer?” Sam exclaimed. “You don’t mean T. Duke the Liquidator?”

  “He doesn’t like to be reminded of that nickname,” Bridget said.

  Sam seemed impressed by the company Bridget kept. “He’s in the high-tech arena now? He was one of the big corporate raiders of the eighties. I remember when he did a hostile takeover of that food conglomerate, Consolidated Products International.” He smiled dreamily at the recollection. “He dismantled CPI, sold off the pieces to the highest bidder, threw thousands out of their jobs and made a fortune. Of course, CPI was his most ambitious takeover. There were dozens of mom-and-pop outfits he gobbled up. He was worth a fortune,” Sam said with awe.

  “Until the indictments came in,” Iris said. “He was found guilty of tax evasion and securities fraud.”

  “Aaah,” Sam said. “Typical T. Duke—he struck a deal, paid some fines, served a few months in one of those country club prisons, and did some community service, ladling soup at a homeless kitchen or something.” Sam shook his head with amazement. “T. Duke the Liquidator…I’ll be damned. How in the world did you get connected with him?”

  Bridget looked amused. “Many times I’ve asked myself that same question. Actually, he approached us. He’d read about Pandora and essentially brought us a check.”

  “I’d love to meet him. We get this IPO going and I imagine I will.” Sam glanced at his watch, slipped Iris’s salary figures into a manila envelope, and handed the folder to Louise. “These are fine, Iris. Louise, would you be kind enough to FedEx these to New York, please? I’ve got to run.” He shook hands with Bridget and quickly left, patting Brianna on the head as she played with her doll on the carpet outside Iris’s door.

  Bridget turned to Iris. “So that was the boss from hell?”

  “That was Sam-I-Am.” Iris grimaced. “I can see this one coming. I land the Pandora IPO for the firm’s investment banking division, all of Pandora’s initial stock offering will be sold through my branch office, and Sam Eastman’s going to take credit for it.”

  “I’m sorry if I blew it for you by mentioning it.”

  Iris shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. He would have found a way to get his claws into it somehow.”

  “Guess I’m finished here.” Bridget slipped the thick envelope she’d picked up from Iris into her leather backpack, one strap of which she slung over her shoulder. “I’ll meet you at T. Duke’s office in Somis at ten o’clock tomorrow.”

  Iris glanced outside the door where Brianna was happily singing to herself and ignoring the rest of the world. “Kip called me. He told me about the big D.”

  Bridget frowned and angrily looked across the room.

  “You caught him with Summer?”

  Bridget flicked her hands as if feeling frustrated and powerless. “That was the last straw, Iris. Finding him with the nanny’s not the half of it.”

  She responded to Iris’s shocked expression. “Oh, yeah. There’s been more than Summer. And that’s not even mentioning our money problems. Spends it like there’s no tomorrow. He keeps saying we’re rich. I tell him, we’re only rich on paper. Everything we get I plow back into the firm to expand operations and hire new people. That’s why I accepted T. Duke Sawyer’s offer of five million in venture capital. Kip fought me on that because he didn’t want an outsider involved in Pandora. But then what does he do with the money? Spends most of it on that Ferrari and that mansion and on chasing around. I fudged the financials I prepared for T. Duke’s group to try and hide it. Everyone’s telling Kip he’s God and he believes it.”

  Iris sat in one of the Queen Anne chairs. “He’s still furious that you want to take the firm public.”

  “I can’t get him to see that we need the money to build the firm. Plus we paid our employees in stock options. They’re ready to realize the investment they made in coming to work for us.” Bridget raised her hands. “But Kip sees himself losing control over Pandora. Other than me and Brianna, Pandora is the most important thing in his life. Sometimes I think it’s the most important. But I own sixty percent, Kip owns twenty, and USA Assets now owns twenty. Bottom line, it doesn’t matter what he wants.”

  “I still can’t believe you had to force him to put even twenty percent of the company in his name.”

  “He wanted me to own all of it. Typical Kip. Naive. Trusting, I guess. Well, I never thought we’d get divorced either.”

  Iris remained quiet for a long time. She had tears in her eyes when she looked up at Bridget. “I’m so sorry. I really am.”

  Brianna came into the office. “Are we going?” She noticed Iris. “Why are you crying, Aunt Iris?”

  Iris, still sitting, held the child tightly. “Just thinking about something sad. You’re getting so big. You get bigger every time I see you.” She looked past Brianna at Bridget. “I forgot to tell you. I picked up the keys to my house.”

  “Wonderful, Iris! I’m so happy for you. I knew it was the perfect house for you the first time I saw it.”

  Iris held Brianna away from her. “And this little girl can come see me all the time and maybe eve
n spend the night.”

  “I want to!” Brianna jumped.

  “We have to go,” Bridget said.

  “Keep your chin up, kiddo. See you tomorrow.” Iris looked curiously at Liz on the other side of the suite.

  Liz was clutching the door of her office as if she needed it for support. When she caught Iris’s eye, she began walking slowly across the suite toward her. After a few steps, she leaned against one of the bullpen cubicles and began sobbing.

  Iris ran over to her. “What is it?”

  Between sobs, Liz said, “I just heard about Alexa. Jim Platt’s people called Ozzie.”

  “She’s missing,” Iris ventured.

  “They found her—”

  Bridget silently approached them.

  “—in a ravine in Coldwater Canyon Park. Her head was bashed in.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “Meet Miss Cherry Divine.”

  “She’s awesome.”

  “Totally gorgeous. But can you kill her?”

  “Of course,” Today Rhea responded without hesitation.

  Wearing a red, low-cut evening gown, the woman was leaning seductively against a wall midway down the street, one high-heel-clad foot pressed against it. Her tousled blonde hair fell past her shoulders. A come-hither look heated her eyes. A double barreled shotgun was aimed at her torso.

  “But do you want to?” Today asked.

  “Do I?”

  “Let’s find out.”

  Cherry Divine turned and slowly started walking down the street, her hips rolling from side to side. She looked back over her shoulder and cooed, “What are you waiting for? You afraid or something?”

  A multitude of oversized monitors scattered across a spacious conference table provided the only light in the computer lab. Images created by screen savers floated across the monitors: tropical fish, zoo animals, the Simpsons, space ships. Also on the table and around the perimeter of the lab were a maze of keyboards, mice, mouse pads, stereo speakers, joysticks, cables, electrical cords, power strips, CD-ROM writers, external hard drives, Jaz drives, cartridges, laptops, and CPUs—both whole and in pieces. Along one side of the room was a graveyard of computer components. Diskettes and CD-ROMs were scattered like cupcake sprinkles. In a chair sat Tickle Me Elmo with a cigar jammed in its mouth. Inside a CPU that had its cover removed was G.I. Joe in a compromising position with both Busy Gal Barbie and Christmas Barbie. A huge stuffed gorilla sat on the floor in a corner with a cardinal-and-gold USC Trojans cap jauntily perched on its fuzzy head. A sheet of paper scrawled with the message USC SUCKS was stuck to its chest with a steak knife.

  It was called the War Room. In it, Pandora’s core team was reviewing the final touches on their latest game—Slade Slayer’s Suckers Finish Last—which was about to be released to the public.

  Mick Ha stood to one side of Today. “Is that Bridget’s voice? It’s perfect!”

  Kip Cross was seated to Today’s left, his chair pulled out a few feet so that he was with the group yet slightly apart from it. His arms were crossed over his broad chest, and his long legs were stretched in front of him and crossed at the ankles. He was shod in rubber, dime-store flip-flops, which were the only shoes he ever wore, rain or shine, other than running shoes when he jogged. He’d started wearing flip-flops when he was poor. They’d since become part of his image.

  Kip had a strong nose and jaw and deep-set, dark eyes. He wore his prematurely gray hair in a short buzz cut. The style accentuated his prominent facial features and made him look erratic, even slightly mad.

  Kip was Pandora’s system developer, the programming genius behind the graphics engines that made Pandora’s games unique. The engine creates the illusion that images on a two-dimensional computer monitor exist in three-dimensional space. Walls have density, tunnels look claustrophobic, creatures have substance. The players feel as if they’re speeding through virtual worlds.

  Slade Slayer was Kip’s creation. Pandora’s team of artists and game designers put flesh on Slade and devised the shallow plots of his adventures—kill or be killed, using an arsenal of real and fantasy weapons in an ultraviolent world—but Slade was Kip’s baby. Everyone considered the unhesitating, direct, macho Slade Slayer to be Kip’s alter ego, a theory that he consistently rebuffed.

  Kip smiled at Toni Burton. “Toni and I listened to all the actresses she tested and both of us thought Bridget’s voice had the right combination of sweetness and danger.” His own voice was deep but the volume soft.

  Toni Burton widened her lively blue eyes and playfully wrinkled her pug nose at Kip. She was cute and willingly played the role. Twenty-six years old, she had worked at Pandora for five years, starting as Bridget’s secretary after dropping out of college. When she noticed Bridget observing the exchange between her and Kip, she hastily returned her gaze to the monitor.

  “Why did we bother doing tests with all those actresses if you were going to use my voice all along?” Bridget asked her husband. “We wasted three weeks.”

  The game’s heavy-metal sound track droned in the background along with reports from the weapons Today fired and the screams of the vanquished.

  “I wasn’t sure I wanted your voice,” Kip replied. “Toni convinced me it was right.”

  Toni smiled tentatively at Bridget. “I hope you’re not mad, B. Kip and I thought it would be a nice surprise for you to be sort of immortalized as the voice of Cherry Divine.”

  Bridget set her lips in a line. “I’m mad about the time we lost. Every computer-game company in the world is trying to be the next Pandora. We command the market now, but if we lose market share, we’ll never get it back.”

  “Just wait until they sample the shareware version of Suckers Finish Last,” Today said with confidence. He mashed a keyboard key, and the image on the screen, a 3-D representation of a darkened city street, quickly turned as if the player had spun to look behind. Today pressed the key again and the image swirled forward.

  “Whoa! And we thought we had a lot of complaints about motion sickness before,” Mick Ha said, shifting his attention between the computer monitor and his tennis shoe, which he grasped in his hand. The top of his white Converse sneaker was almost covered with a black pen drawing of a snarling dog.

  Mick was Pandora’s lead graphic artist, who drew and converted to computer images the Slade Slayer games’ sleek yet decayed postindustrial environment of streets, sewers, high- and low-tech structures, and their dizzying population of aliens, ghouls, zombies, rabid dogs, and deadly vixens. Mick’s black hair was shaved close around the sides and back and cut long on top. He wore thick, rimless glasses. He had an easy smile, was the most consistently amiable of the mercurial Pandora group, and had been with Kip and Bridget almost from the beginning.

  Today, sitting ramrod straight in the chair, furiously tapped one foot as his fingers madly traveled the keyboard. He shook his head with awe. “This game sucks like a vacuum.” It was high praise.

  “It’s totally immersive,” Toni enthused.

  “It’s great,” Bridget said. “I was impressed by the bits and pieces I saw, but the finished product is beyond belief.”

  “It’s your best work, Kip,” Toni said, smiling broadly at her boss and, until last week, her lover.

  Kip smirked with self-satisfaction at the images on the monitor, then said, almost as an afterthought, “It was a team effort.”

  “That’s right,” Today said as he worked the keyboard. “A freaking team effort.” He shot a glance at Kip. “That’s why Bridget is correct to take the firm public.”

  Kip’s face darkened.

  “Huh, buddy?” Today verbally prodded.

  In response to Today’s keyboard commands, Cherry Divine sauntered down the street. She paused at a corner and then disappeared around it.

  “Cherchez la femme,” Slade Slayer intoned in a deep, male voice through the speakers.

  Mick looked up from drawing on his tennis shoe, his index finger covered with black ink. “I can’t wait to
see how the final level looks.”

  “You don’t know?” Toni asked.

  “I did a bunch of work on it but Kip patched it together.”

  “Really?” Bridget said.

  “Same here,” Today added. “Our man Cross was intent on keeping the solution a secret.”

  “So only Kip knows how to win?” Toni grinned at Kip. “That’s so cool!”

  “Why, Kip?” Bridget asked.

  Kip shrugged. “Someone’s always leaking the solution. And I wanted you guys to have fun figuring it out too.”

  Bridget frowned. “That was a lot of extra work for you, Kip. You could have spent that time working on the engine for the next game.”

  “Bridget,” Kip said in a clipped voice, “I did it for fun. If this ever stops being fun for me, I’m out. You can tell that to your investment bankers.”

  The room grew quiet except for the game’s relentless music and the rat-a-tat, ka-pows, and death wails of the battlefield.

  “What’s this?” Today rapidly clicked some keys. “It’s random. Totally random. Dammit, a bug. Arrgh! I’ll fix it later. It’s not material.”

  Bridget put her hand on her hip and pointed at the screen. “I’m not wild about this cyber-bimbo. My idea was to give Slade a girlfriend, to build more of a plot into the game—”

  “A girlfriend?” Today bellowed. “Slade Slayer doesn’t have a girlfriend.”

  “Not a cyber-bimbo,” Kip said. “Not nearly.”

  “Slade’s going to blow her away, isn’t he?” Bridget said.

  “Not necessarily,” Kip said cryptically.

  “She has my voice, I think she looks slightly like me, and Slade’s going to blow her away.”

  “Not necessarily,” Kip insisted.

  “You didn’t make her the boss monster?” Mick asked with disbelief.

  Kip smiled broadly with his lips closed.

  “Arrghh!” Today yelled. There was a barrage of gunfire as he spastically tapped a key with his thumb.

  “I hate when that happens,” Slade Slayer’s voice said as the screen image shifted to look as if the player were lying on the street. Blood flowed across the asphalt.