A Game of Murder (16 page)

“We’ve met.” Derek, as usual, was dressed all in black. Apparently Derek considered black appropriate for any occasion.

“Derek, Miss Andersen is going to be redesigning our website. I’d like you to give her a tour of our facilities and answer any questions she has.”

“Yes, sir.” His words were clipped.

Obviously, Derek had not been consulted about the new website or her potential contract to design it. That was awkward. Her enthusiasm for having a new site to design—and bill for—waned at the thought of having to work with Derek Bourne. If they couldn’t cooperate, she might be forced to give up the job.

“Anything else?” Derek asked.

“No, no. I’m sure you can handle everything.” Kaplan then said to Faith, “Stop by on your way out, and we’ll discuss payment.”

“I’m looking forward to working with you and your company,” Faith said. Standard sales-speak. Act as if you’re going to get the contract. Act as if you not only want the work, but there’s no other option than to hire you. Even if your primary contact was going to be a misogynistic a-hole.

She rose and addressed Derek. “Shall we get started?” she said sweetly.

* * *

“This way.” Derek stormed down the hall without waiting for her.

She followed his back past a number of offices, most of them with their doors closed, until they reached one with a keypad beside the entrance. He punched a series of numbers into it, not bothering to hide the code from Faith’s eyes. She guessed security wasn’t a high priority.

Derek stepped through into a noticeably cooler room that hummed with the activity of machines, releasing the door so quickly Faith had to stick out her hand to stop the door from smashing into her face. Racks of servers occupied one wall. A high speed printer spat out paper in the corner. Despite all the tools of online programs, a significant segment of people still preferred stacks of paper. Faith always found that ironic.

“Mario, this is Faith. She’s going to be doing some work here.” He said this to a young man sitting in the center of a circle of computer screens monitoring the network.

“Nice to meet you, Mario.” Faith smiled at a face as surprised as Derek’s had been when he saw her. Nothing like empowering your employees, thought Faith.

Derek kept walking, opened a door on the far side of the room, and passed through it. This one stayed open on its own, so Faith’s face was spared a second dangerous encounter. Derek circled the desk at the end of the office and plunked himself into his chair. He leaned back and clasped his hands behind his head. “Close the door, will you?”

Faith did as she was told, and the office immediately got quieter. Without being asked, she sat in the chair on the opposite side of Derek’s desk and pulled out her pad and pen again, although she had no intention of using either one right away.

“So you weren’t told I was coming, were you?”

Derek crossed one leg over the other, resting an ankle on his knee, and rocked back. “It’s not the first time. I keep telling Mr. Kaplan I need to be included in anything involving the computer system, but I’m not sure he understands. Yet.” Threat darkened the last word.

“Maybe he doesn’t think the website needs to be part of the business system. A lot of people have no idea how systems need to be integrated.”

“And maybe he doesn’t think I’m capable of building a website.” Black clouds rolled over Derek’s features as he uncrossed his legs and dropped his arms. His feet landed on the floor with a thunk.

Faith hurried to reassure him. “I’m sure that’s not the reason. I believe he specifically mentioned you’re not having time for it with all your other responsibilities.” This acting nice thing was beginning to grate on Faith’s nerves, especially since Derek didn’t reciprocate.

Derek’s hands grasped the arms of his chair. He spat out words laden with sarcasm. “Right. It takes a genius to run another set of sequel queries.” Like most computer people, he pronounced the acronym for Structured Query Language as if it were a word. Derek folded his arms across his chest. “Mario could do that.”

“You’re acting like a spoiled child. Grow up!” She couldn’t help herself from saying what she’d been thinking ever since Derek walked into Harry Kaplan’s office.

Derek’s thunderclouds grew darker at her outburst. Lightning flashed in his eyes.

Her temples throbbed. Had she just destroyed her chance at the contract? Faith took a deep breath and tried to get herself under control. “This will be much easier if we can work together. It’s not my fault Mr. Kaplan decided to hire me instead of asking you to do the website. And it’s not my fault you lost your last job. I lost mine, too.”

Surprise replaced the thunderclouds on Derek’s face. He untangled his arms and placed them on the desk as he leaned forward. “You worked at Four-W?”

Faith nodded. Her former employer—Wonderful Western Women’s Wear—was referred to internally as Four-W, the official name being too much of a mouthful for casual conversation. “We worked in different departments according to Lorna.”

“Hmmm…” Derek considered the new information for a minute. “Let’s start with the grand tour.”

It wasn’t exactly an apology, but at least he no longer sounded openly hostile. Faith would take it.

They started in the offices, walking through an endless number of undifferentiated cubicles as they went through the purchasing, sales, marketing, and customer service departments. When they finished there, Derek led the way into an enormous warehouse. Two thirds of the space was fully automated with conveyors and computer-controlled scanners. In the remaining third, a throwback to an older time, workers, generally women, mostly Mexican, pushed carts through the aisles and hand-picked merchandise off the shelves.

“The automated section is where we fulfill orders for the major chain stores. Usually we ship them full cartons, which go to their warehouses where they split the goods up by store. This section”—he indicated the smaller side with the pickers—“we use to fill orders for Mom and Pop bike stores. It’s a slower operation and doesn’t lend itself to automation.”

“So you don’t manufacture any products yourself?” Faith asked.

“No. We’re an import distribution business, the same as Four-W.” They wound up at the shipping doors where conveyors zipped lines of cartons down to each one, separating the shipments by carrier and destination. Again, a couple of doors were reserved for the smaller orders. A man in a familiar brown uniform checked in his order at one of those as merchandise was loaded into his truck.

Derek’s experience had probably been a major advantage in getting this job, Faith thought. Arizona Cycling wasn’t so different from the mail order clothing company where they used to work. Except their former company shipped directly to consumers rather than retail stores.

“Well, that’s the fifty-cent tour,” Derek said. “Any questions?”

“Not about what you’ve shown me so far.” Faith looked around, confirmed no one stood near them. She was unlikely to get a better chance to question Derek. Her conscience twinged, but she told it to keep quiet. Surely a serendipitous opportunity didn’t really count as detective work. Before her courage failed her, she said, “But I do have a few other questions I’d like to ask you.”

“About what?” Derek stiffened, grew suspicious and defensive.

“About Mira.” Faith paused for the briefest of moments to gauge Derek’s reaction. Whatever his internal reaction might have been, he hid it well. She continued. “How well did you know her?”

Derek shrugged. “About as well as anyone in the club—except the girls.”

Faith bit the inside of her cheek, focused on the pain instead of her irritation. While women often referred to themselves as girls, the term sounded degrading when it came from Derek. She donned her emotional armor and continued. “How long had she been a member?”

“A couple of months. I’m pretty sure Adam brought her and Cathy the first time. He should have asked first.”

“Oh? Is it a closed club?” Faith feigned innocence. As far as she knew, there were no formal requirements for membership, but there appeared to be plenty of informal ones, mostly consisting of being one of the accepted geek class, preferably male.

Derek looked uncomfortable. “Not closed, no. But there’s a certain kind of person who fits in, who can contribute, you know what I mean?”

“Not exactly.” It almost sounded as if Derek included her in the class of that kind of person. She didn’t know whether to be thankful or insulted. Time to change tack. “How do you feel about her murder?”

“She got what she deserved. She didn’t belong.” Derek scowled.

Tell me what you really think.
Faith resisted repeating her thought out loud. In a carefully neutral tone, she asked, “How do you mean?”

Derek, realizing how his words must have sounded, backpedaled. “Well, maybe not death, but it seemed to me she went out of her way to annoy everyone by pushing her political agenda. To Mira, life was politics. She never had the same devotion to game development the rest of us had. All she wanted to talk about was feelings and social justice. She got on my nerves.”

“Do you think someone in the club poisoned her?” Faith kept her eyes on Derek’s face, looking for any signs that might tell her whether he might be that someone.

Derek, as if aware of her scrutiny, covered his face in a blank mask. “It’s possible.” He shuffled his feet. His eyes didn’t want to meet hers.

A loud crash, followed by a stream of curse words, startled both of them. And gave Derek something else to look at. An oversize carton had fallen off the conveyor and burst open, scattering brightly colored streamers, bells, and flags over a large section of the warehouse floor.

“How about Ashley?” Faith asked.

Derek turned his attention back to Faith, his confusion evident on his face. “Ashley? What about Ashley?”

Either Derek was a good actor or he really didn’t know. “Ashley was murdered two days ago.”

“Hmmm…”

What did that mean?
Just as she was about to ask a follow-up question, Derek cut her off.

“Listen, I’ve got work to do here. I haven’t got time to stand around and jaw about girls who got themselves killed. Have you got any more questions that might be even remotely related to what you were brought here for?” Derek stood with his legs apart, fists planted on his hips, his tone sarcastic.

Much as she would have preferred to quiz Derek on the murders, she could tell that stage of their conversation was over. “I would like to see the current website and talk about how we can integrate the back-end systems.”

Derek nodded. “Let’s head back to my office.”

Once seated in front of Derek’s desk again, Faith asked, “Can you bring up the company website for me?”

Derek tapped a few keys, then turned his monitor so Faith could see the screen. “That’s it.”

As Faith had expected, it was a billboard style site. In addition to a logo, the page displayed the company’s name, address, and several phone numbers where people could be contacted. Plenty of work for her to do. “Wow. I expected basic, but not quite that basic. No online product catalog?”

Derek shook his head. “Nope. The marketing department makes up a print catalog, and the salesmen bring samples to the buyers. A lot of orders are written at Toy Fair.”

“What’s Toy Fair?” Faith asked, remembering Mr. Kaplan also mentioned the name.

“It’s a big show in New York City where all the vendors exhibit their products. The retailers come in and look through what’s available and decide what they’re going to buy for the next year. From what I hear, over half our business comes from orders taken at Toy Fair.” Derek adjusted the position of a small picture frame on his desk with a finger.

Faith wondered whose picture was in the frame. Did Derek have a girlfriend? Family? She hadn’t thought about his life outside of computers. She went back to the reason for her original query about the catalog. If photographs and descriptions and pricing didn’t already exist in electronic form, there’d be a huge initial investment in both time and money for the company to create the information. An investment that large might kill her contract. “Does marketing have the catalogs on their computers?”

“I don’t know.” Derek, who had almost become human during their discussion, resumed scowling. “I don’t have time to find out everything about the company. I’m too busy trying to keep this system running on a daily basis. I need to rewrite the whole blasted thing so the code stops breaking on me.” He turned his monitor back to face him.

“See, you
are
too busy to tackle the website. If you wouldn’t mind, I can go ahead and contact the marketing people and ask them. I’ll get back to you with what I find out.”

Derek waved a hand at her while keeping his eyes focused on the screen. “Be my guest. I’ll stick to my computer cave.”

The next night, Faith rushed into the clamor of conversation in Fellowship Hall, carrying her contribution to the Wednesday night potluck. With no time and little talent for cooking, she’d stopped at Safeway and picked up one of their pre-made fruit platters in the produce department on her way to the church. At least no one would be poisoned from it. A bit of gallows humor. As the words crossed her mind, she wondered if she was thinking of her cooking or Hope’s. She felt a pang of guilt that she’d considered, even briefly, that her best friend might be responsible for Mira’s death.

She halted inside the doorway and scanned the room until she spotted Hope and Walt at a table. After pausing to put the fruit plate on the desert table, where a chocolate cake and several pies already waited, she headed in their direction.

“So nice to see you, dear,” Lois Huffington, an elderly busybody with an overdeveloped nose for gossip, said as Faith passed her table.

She stopped to be sociable. Lois was seated with other members of the church council, Bill Harris, the McCollums, and Tom Fisher. “Nice to see you, too, Mrs. Huffington. I’m glad you’re looking so well, Bill.” Bill had been severely injured during the retreat last month, but had made a quick recovery for an octogenarian.

“So how are you and Pastor John getting along?” Linda McCollum asked, eying Faith’s appearance. A coy smile came to her face. “Any news for us?”