Family Issues Ch. 13

"Where the hell is Shaun? He was supposed to guard this spot."

No one answered.

David spoke into his walkie-talkie, and five seconds later, the jail's alarm horns went off. More COs arrived huffing, carrying a gurney. They clustered around the wounded man, ignoring Helen.

She sat there in the pouring rain, splattered with black mud but feeling very clean. Absolved.

"Okay, on the count of three—one, two, three." The guards lifted the gurney, David motioned for her to get up.

They trudged toward the main building, but then Roy reached out from the gurney and grabbed Helen's uniform. "Helen, you got to tell Kevin what happened." He gulped.

"I will."

"Tell him he was right."

"About what?"

"About everything."

She stared at him, her mouth gaping open.

"Tell him he was right about everything. Almost everything. Tell him that people can change, even the worst kind. You got to promise me."

She nodded.

"Please keep my son safe."

"I will, pastor."

"Swear!"

"I swear."

–-

My dick's freezing. What are we waiting for?" Mike lit a joint and offered it to Kevin. Kevin ground it out on a lamppost and gave it back.

"Hey!" Mike hollered.

"I need you at the top of your game."

"I'm at the top when I'm feelin' breezy," Mike grumbled but didn't light another.

They hid from the rain under the Richardson and William's offices' awning, on 226 N. Clinton Street. The parking lot was empty, and the offices were dark, like a playground with no kids. Since the murder and the fraud investigation, the offices were closed.

"Why are we freezing our balls here instead of someplace with beer and trashed hotties?"

"We're meeting someone. Her." Kevin pointed at a scooter that waited patiently behind the line of vehicles at the traffic light.

"Is that your grandma? Who rides a scooter and sits in traffic with the cars?"

"It's Ginger."

Mike's eyes rounded to dinner-plate size.

"I knew you'd be thrilled."

"What do we need that backstabbing psycho-bitch for?"

"She's Helen's lawyer."

"Lady Macbeth and the Wicked Witch of the West were busy?"

Ginger pulled into the parking lot and lifted her pink helmet. Her blonde hair was peppered with rain, and she wore a short purple skirt with extra-tall boots to complete the effect. Ginger was a go-getter, always confident in a way that was the opposite of Helen. But as her heels clicked on the pavement, her steps faltered. Her sharp chin locked in half a surprise, half a snarl. She stood for a second, like a cat on the windowsill, hesitant before it commits. Kevin stared back at his friend. Mike's visage mirrored Ginger's.

"She's all I have," Kevin whispered. "Promise you'll be nice."

"Cross my heart. Yo, Hitler, wazzup?" Mike chirped. "Who's scaring the crows from the crops if you're here?"

"Choke!" Ginger flipped him two middle fingers. She looked like she wished she had more arms to flip more fingers. "What the fuck is Dopehead doing here, Kev?"

"Baiting fake blondes." Mike showed his white teeth. "You're the third."

"Me? I'm a fake? Oh, that's rich."

"See how she softens the 'TH' so you'd think she grew up in Manhattan? She's from the Bronx? Fake. Did you know her name used to be Jenny?"

"Yeah, she told me. Will you effing stop it?"

"She changed it because she thinks Ginger is more," Mike made air quotes, "exotic."

"Stop it!" Kevin raised his voice.

"Why? Let him, let him, Kev." Ginger struggled to put on a wide smile. "Mike, apparently, has been hoarding a lot more than just weed. It's unhealthy to keep so much frustration locked up. We don't want zombie-head to explode."

"Zombies eat brains. You're safe, Hitler."

"On second thought, suffering is good for an artist like Mike. And he is an artist after all. Like Amy Winehouse minus the talent and the fame.

It was Mike's turn to show his middle finger.

"How is the band, Mikey? Still playing at your cousin's bar?"

"Doing much better since we dumped your fat ass."

"Dumped?" She faked a chortle. "He begged me to stay, Kev."

"How is life in the fast lane, Jenny?"

"Blow me."

"You a hot shit lawyer yet?"

"At least I'm not living off my mom's salary like some loser we both know."

Mike gave a Bronx cheer. "Danielle told me Kaplan and Decker only hired you because her mom is a senior partner. I know exactly what they let you be in charge of. Coffee."

"So fucking what? The difference between you and me, Mike, that in ten years I'd draw a 100-grand salary while you will still be playing in your cousin's shitty bar and slinging weed to baghead students."

"Considering your GPA is even lower than your IQ, I doubt if they'll advance you higher than an over-qualified barista."

That hit the spot, because Ginger raised her fist, Bronx style, not Manhattan style. Kevin jumped between them. "Stop it, you two!" he roared. "Right now! Mike?"

"What?"

"What the fuck is wrong with you?"

"He's a loser and an asshole." Ginger contributed her opinion.

"Bitch."

"Have fun with Britney Spears, Kevin." Ginger turned on her heels. "I don't need this."

"Please don't go." Kevin grabbed her hand. "I desperately need you."

"I know you do." Her tone softened. "But what do we need him for?"

"Because we're losing." Kevin tried hard not to cry. "Because the woman I love is about to be sent to prison for life, and you and I are fresh out of ideas."

"I still don't see what we need him for."

"Mike is the smartest person I know."

"He's an idiot," Ginger said.

Mike snorted.

"An idiot who scored 180 on an IQ test," Kevin spoke fast before the winds of war blew again. "He's a hacker. With your warrant, we can search the office's servers and maybe prove that the Syndicate hacked into Helen's account."

"The FBI specialists didn't find anything." Ginger twisted her mouth as she scanned Mike.

"Maybe they're hiding the truth? Brigitte told me they have the cops and the FBI in their back pocket. I once saw an FBI agent coming down from Diana's office."

"I doubt that if there was a breach it happened in the office." Mike ruffled his dreads. "Helen worked from the penthouse through a VPN?"

"All the time." Kevin nodded. "See, that's why I needed you."

"Classic. Could have been guys pretending they're ISP service employees, a delivery guy, shit like that. Maybe someone broke in?"

"There was this one time when we had static interference with the cables. I called the cable company, and they sent two dudes." Kevin glared up at the dark clouds and picked his brain, trying to remember anything suspicious about the technicians.

"Could be it," Mike said. "Let's go, but we need to stop first at my cousin's shop and borrow equipment."

"Hey, hey." Ginger signaled a timeout. "The penthouse is part of the FBI investigation, and I only have a search warrant for the office."

"Can you get one?"

"In two or three weeks."

"Which we don't have." Kevin shook his head. "I've still got a key."

"I can lose my license, Kevin."

"Then my buddy and I will go." Mike patted Kevin's back. "And we'll call you, but we won't say where we are. That way you won't jeopardize your coffee-making future."

"Asshole."

–-

"Hey, Kev." Mike fiddled on his laptop and hooked up the equipment he'd borrowed from his cousin's electronics shop to Kevin's laptop. "Did you know every USB has three sides? Not this side, not this side either, and 'Oh, it was this side after all.'"

Mike always thought everything could be solved with a little humor. Kevin usually agreed, but not today.

"What the hell was that good for?" Kevin said.

"What?"

Kevin plonked himself down on Moody George and stared at his image in the black 70-inch TV screen. He barely recognized the person staring back. He felt stretched. Dry.

The modern living room was the Brion penthouse's pulsing heart, and now it had ceased. Moody George, a 13K vibrating massage chair, protruded in its midst. Kevin used to wait for Helen to go to the bathroom before conquering her seat, waiting eagerly to see her reaction when she came back. It never failed to make him laugh. She would make faces, and he would whistle, and she'd try to trick him off her throne. One time she flipped him over with the chair. Something broke, and since then Moody George had become manic depressive. It either hummed ineffectually, or it went into an aggressive vibration episode.

Happy memories.

Kevin closed his eyes and took in a deep breath. The room smelled of the love he'd lost. Where was Helen now? Was she thinking of him? Did she love him still? She had reasons not to.

"You and Ginger were an item, right?" he said. "Before Samantha?"

Mike snorted. "For like ten minutes."

"You told me you thought you'd found your one and only."

"To make you feel better about Helen and those dirty pictures." Mike frowned as he played on the laptop, his fingers quick like a pianist playing a well-practiced piece. "I thought was my one and only, and then she turned out to be...Hitler."

"I've never seen you like that. You were downright cruel."

"It rolled off her back. The bitch eats souls for breakfast."

"Dude."

"How come you're on her side?"

"I'm on Helen's side."

"She walked all over your you to get into that fucking jet-set sorority. Plus everyone on campus thinks you're a cheap skank. That's on her."

"She's representing Helen. She's risking the job she worked so hard to get just to help me."

"Gotcha!" Mike face lit up.

"What? What?"

"Thattaway!" Mike pointed at the hallway. Kevin followed him as he moved slowly, step by step, with the equipment at hand. They went past the bathroom and stopped at Kevin and Diana's bedroom. Mike sniffed like a hound dog, crawled into the room on hands and knees, looked under the bed, and pointed his equipment at the big empty closet.

"Well?" Kevin said.

"Patience, my young padawan. Impatience leads to anxiousness, and anxiousness leads to premature ejaculations." Mike disassembled drawers, then searched the interior with his iPhone's flashlight. He reached inside and pulled a black box the size of a smartphone. "Boom goes the dynamite!"

"What the fuck is that?"

"That's, my young apprentice, is an NBI5 military-grade key-logger. Well, this is the transmitter. It has a boyfriend. A small dongle in Helen's PC's USB port—very hard to detect if you don't know what to search for. It records every keystroke Helen makes and every file she downloads. The dongle sends it to this device, which in turn uses either WiFi or another network to send the information periodically to another location for safekeeping. Those cable guys didn't just fix the TV."

Kevin shook his head. "It wasn't them. This thing is a transmitter, right?"

"So?"

"It probably caused the interferences we had with the TV. That keylogger is the reason why we called the cable company in the first place."

"Who then?" Mike attached the black spying box to his laptop's USB port and fiddled on the keyboard again.

"I always wondered what Diana traded with Nadine for my father's debt. Jesus." Kevin felt bile going up. "That's Diana's closet, and she knows the WiFi password. I remember when we came back from Suzan Owen's mansion. Suzan gave her a mysterious box and a duffel bag."

"She sold her own flesh and blood?"

"Down the river." Kevin gave a bitter snort. "Jesus, she's so fucked up. I knew she hated Helen, but this? I..." Kevin dialed. "Hey, Ginger, we found the breach. They used a small spying device on Helen's desktop. That's how they hacked her passwords."

"The FBI got Helen's desktop," Ginger's voice sounded strained. She was still pissed, but she was trying to tone it down. Kevin decided he'd sit for a long one-on-one with Mike. "They let me inspect it. There was no spying device."

"And there was no CCTV footage showing Helen leaving the hotel either. Do you still believe a word the FBI or the police tell you?"

"That's good news, Kev."

"More good news over here," Mike waved. "Your master criminals aren't too sharp with their security. The NBI5 sends the data via a direct connection it opens to an Elasticsearch cluster. The user and password are in a configuration file, not encrypted or anything."

"No fucking way."

"Yes, fucking way."

"Can we? Can you...?"

"I'm already in."

"What's going on?" Ginger cried.

"Mike just hacked into the Syndicate database."

"I didn't hear you say that."

"Let's see what they have on Kevin O'Brien." Mike fiddled on his laptop and seconds later his face lit up with a massive grin. "What the hell is that? I think it's upside down." He flipped his laptop. "Oh, no, it's this side up. Swank, bro."

"What?"

Mike showed him the screen where Kevin starred in his debut BDSM film inside Sin's basement. "Who's the Asian hottie and more importantly, do you have her number?"

"Fuck!"

"What's happening?" Ginger said.

"Nothing!" Kevin blurted. "Try searching for Marianne Anderson. Let's dig dirt on the lying bitch."

"Nothing much, a few documents." Mike sniffed. "There is Brian Dunn Real Estate Services mentioned a lot."

"Probably the next company they're going to rob," Ginger said.

Kevin surfed his laptop. "Nope. According to Mr. Google, Brian Dunn filed for bankruptcy three years ago. Something about financial fraud."

"She's so going to be a defense witness!" Ginger's voice picked up a notch, she had forgotten all about breaking the law. "I'm gonna ride her ass so hard in court."

Kevin felt giddy. Hope was suddenly not a wishful thinking. "What about Helen Brion?"

"Just a sec." Mike's eyes crinkled at the corners. Kevin and Ginger's enthusiasm ignited his. "I'll ask Lucene."

"Who's Lucene? One of your floozies?" Ginger said.

"She's the Elasticsearch search engine, dummy. When God gave mankind brains, your ancestors must have been the control group."

"If you were half as smart as you think you are, Mike, you'd be twice as smart as you really are."

"You did the math on your own, Hitler? I'm impressed."

"Guys, we've got a bigger fish to fry. When we're done, you two can get a room."

"More like a doghouse for the bea—" Mike stopped when he saw the pain on Kevin's face. "Okay then. Over twenty thousand documents on the Helen Brion search. They even have her military records. Narrow it down, Kev."

"Limit the dates to the sixth of November."

"Murder day. Okay. Good call. A single email message, and a link to a bunch of movie files on Amazon cloud. Downloading now. They're heavy."

While they waited Kevin wrote on a piece of paper that Mike should ignore Ginger's provocations.

"First big file downloaded." Mike gave a thumbs-up. "CCTV footage. Looks like a hotel lobby."

Kevin checked the video. "That's the Comfort Inn's lobby."

"Right, right. The one near the university. Boom." Mike paused the footage. "That's Helen going in."

Kevin nodded.

"And that's you, Kev. Who's the hot brunette?"

Kevin shook his head. "I wasn't there. Those are Brigitte and Dima."

"He sure looks like you from the back. Got your blond spikes."

"Ginger, we just hit the jackpot," Kevin said. "This video could be just the thing we need."

"I hate to rain on your parade, Kev," Ginger sounded sincerely sad, "but stolen footage is inadmissible."

Mike pantomimed blowing his head with an imaginary gun, and Kevin pantomimed that he should zip it.

"Maybe I can spin it somehow," Ginger said. "Does it show Helen leaving the hotel?"

"Not yet, still downloading. The email mentions the murder, Mike?"

Mike went into his serious mode again. "Nice. They tapped her phone."

"How can you tell?"

"It's a message from S to M. Listen to this. 'Helen just texted William. She's onto everything. She mentioned names, including yours and mine. She knows about Destiny Mall. We might need D to contain Helen.'" Mike ruffled his dreads. "I'm guessing D is Diana, M is Marianne, and S is Suzan."

"Helen mentioned a message she sent to William on the sixth." Ginger sounded perplexed. "But I've got both William's and Helen's smartphones from the police. There was no message on either."

"You got the phones from the same investigator who couldn't find any CCTV footage of her leaving the hotel?" Kevin said.

"Yep."

"And you still think we can trust the police?"

"Not anymore."

"Okay, but if Helen said she sent the message, why didn't you try to get it from the cell phone company? They keep texting history."

"I thought...Helen also said it was you who invited her to the hotel. I couldn't find that text message either."

"So you figured Helen was making shit up." Kevin tried to control the anger, but some of it slipped. Even if the phone company saved text messaging history, it surely had a time limit.

"Kev—"

"Be honest, Ginger. When I asked for your help. You thought she was guilty."

"It doesn't matter what I believed."

"It matters to me."

"I...I didn't know then what I know now." Her voice broke. "I just, I just wanted to help, Kev, I felt so guilty about—"

"And the Oscar for being a calculating bitch goes to—" Mike made a drumroll with his fingers. "Admit it, Jenny, you don't give a rat's ass about Kevin or Helen. Coffee-making lost its charm, and you're looking for a way out. You figured Helen's case would look hot on your CV."

"That's not true! I—" She choked.

"And that's what you get when you hire Hitler as your attorney, Kev."

"You're a massive jerk, Mike. I'm so glad I had the brains to kick your sorry ass."

"What was that? I don't speak selfish-bitch."

"Mother fucker!"

"Cunt!"

"Stooooop!" Kevin roared at the top of his lungs.

Both Mike and Ginger went into awkward silence.

"You two have issues that are apparently more important than my girl going to prison for the rest of her life."

"Hey, bro, I didn't—"

"Shut the fuck up, Mike. I'm ending this now. Starting with you."

"Dude."

"Ginger dumped you and quit your band. So, she didn't think you're so hot. So fucking what? I've seen you dump dozens of girls.

"There's dumping, and there's dumping, Kev."

"Your ego is that fragile?"

"She called me a loser. She humiliated me in front of the entire band."

Kevin switched to kindergarten teacher tone. "Why did you call Mike a loser, Ginger?"

"Cause he's twenty-five, and he sells weed, and he's so proud of his stupid dreads. And he's a player and a condescending prick. My GPA sucks? When is he going to finish his B.Sc.? When he's fifty?"

Kevin gave a deep sigh. "Yeah, he's childish, so fucking what?"

"Bro."

"Mike, you're the older brother I've never had, but come on. You're partying into your Computer Science sixth year. It took me three years and a little to get to the finish line, and you're like ten times smarter. You should work for NASA. You could have been the next Bill Gates."

"I like to party; what the fuck's wrong with that? When the hell am I gonna party? When I'm fucking sixty, bald, and fucking breathing with an oxygen tank? And why am I even justifying myself? I don't fucking need to justify myself to either of you fucking idiots."

"See? Childish." Kevin could hear Ginger smirk over the phone.

"Still, that's no reason to humiliate him."

"He got what he deserved," Ginger said.

"Why?"

Ginger kept her mouth shut.

"How about little honesty? You're both full of shit. Your turn, Ginger. What was the terrible thing Mike did?"

"None of your fucking business, Kev."

"Come on, be a sport."

"Fuck off!"

"Once Helen is out of jail, I'll be happy to. I need to understand why, Ginger."

"Because he's a lying cheat, and a futaphobe bigot," Ginger screamed. "And I was just his futa-check."

Kevin took a few seconds to recover from the surprising outburst. When he spoke again, he dropped the condescending didactic tone. "His, his what?"