Full Frontal Murder (8 page)

Marian found herself wondering how much Walter Galloway really knew about his son's affairs. She'd pegged the elder Galloway as a stubborn old man who'd never budge from his position that Hugh had made a bad mistake in marrying the evil Rita but that Hugh himself was a good boy. And Alex Fairchild was every bit as biased in favor of his sister. Those two would be no help.

Thinking of Alex Fairchild reminded her of the private showing of his photographs scheduled for Thursday night—which was tomorrow, she suddenly realized. And still she couldn't remember the name of the gallery. Fairchild had given her a printed invitation; what had she done with it? Probably left it at Holland's. Or thrown it out.

Hoping she'd recognize the name if she saw it, Marian pulled the
NYNEX Yellow Pages
directory off the shelf. To her dismay she found page after page after page of galleries, all listed in tiny type. No way she was going through all that looking for Fifty-seventh Street addresses.

She reached for the phone and called the computer department. A woman answered by saying something that sounded like
Mahjelblmph
. Marian identified herself and said, “I want to locate a gallery on Fifty-seventh Street. I think I'd know the name if I heard it.”

“What kind of gallery? Art gallery?”

“It's a gallery showing an exhibition of photographs.”

“Yeah, that's an art gallery. I guess.”

“Do we have a database of galleries?”

“
We
don't … but hang a sec.” Marian could heard the soft click of a computer keyboard. “Yeah, here we are. Whooee—lotsa galleries on Fifty-seventh.”

“Could you just read off the names, please?” Marian stopped her when she got to
Albian
, the sixth name on the list of Fifty-seventh Street galleries. “That's it, Albian Gallery. What's the exact address?” She made a note of the number. “Thank you very much! But if we don't have a database of galleries, where'd you get the information?”

“On the Internet. NYNEX maintains a Web site.”

Oh. Marian thanked her again and broke the connection. Next she called Holland and told him they were going to go look at photographs tomorrow night.

8

A sardonic smile was on Holland's face as he hung up the phone. This sudden passion for photography on Marian's part could only be the offshoot of a case she was working on. Something in the pictures she wanted to check out? Or was it the photographer? Suspect, eyewitness, potential victim? It would become clear tomorrow night.

Sometimes she brought her work home with her, sometimes not. Tonight she wasn't even bringing herself home. On the phone she'd forestalled his offer to come to her place, saying she had a lot of things to take care of—getting clothes ready for work, checking her mail, stocking the fridge. It was an excuse, of course. She still needed time to herself.

Time away from him.

He understood
that
message. But what
she
didn't understand was that what was privacy for her was like being in solitary confinement for him.
My natural state
, he thought without self-pity or irony. He had been alone his entire life and in fact had preferred it that way; he felt nothing but contempt for those who whined about being lonely. It
was
man's natural state, standing or falling alone. But it had never hurt so in the past, before a cop named Marian had crossed his path.

Once she'd stayed with him ten days, the longest stretch ever. Perhaps one day she would not leave at all.

The phone sounded. Mrs. Grainger's voice said, “André would like to see you. He says it's important.”

“Send him in.”

The door opened and a well-groomed young man with a baby face entered. André Flood was not yet twenty, but he looked even younger. “Mr. Holland, we need to talk,” he said soberly.

How ominous
. “Do you talk better sitting or standing?”

“Uh, standing, I think.” Nervous: he kept shifting his weight.

Holland had stayed seated. “So? What's the problem?”

“Well, I, uh.” He blurted it out: “I've been offered a job by Chris Carnell.”

Holland smiled his sardonic smile again; he'd known this would happen sooner or later. It was just his good luck that Carnell happened to be the first. One of the world's aging computer whiz kids.

No computer system was truly secure; any system in the world could be broken into, given time and enough ingenuity on the part of the hacker. Businesses around the world hired systems designers to make their own computers impregnable; then they'd contract Holland's agency to test them. There hadn't been one yet his staff had been unable to crack. So then the businesses would hire a different designer, they'd call in Holland, the cycle would repeat. And the money kept rolling in.

Chris Carnell was one such systems designer. He'd bragged in print that he'd finally come up with the foolproof computer security everyone had been looking for since the invention of the modem. It had taken André Flood exactly eight days to break in.

And now Carnell was after André. “What did he offer?”

“A third more than you're paying me. Plus stock options, of course.”

Of course
. André was already well paid, and he knew it. “That's a great deal of money,” Holland said noncommittally.

André cleared his throat. “I thought I should ask you if you'd care to make a counteroffer … before I give him an answer.”

Holland propped his head up on his fist and stared at André, letting the silence grow. Chris Carnell was an erratic, temperamental genius who unfailingly drove his employees nuts. One reason he didn't own the world was that he couldn't keep a staff together long enough for any meaningful continuity to develop. André, on the other hand, was a precise, orderly person—almost anal with his list keeping and preoccupation with detail. He and Carnell were not a marriage made in heaven.

Holland sat up straight. “All right, here's my counteroffer. I'll hold your job open for you for one week. One week, André—not a day longer.”

The younger man's eyes bugged. “What?”

“Same salary, same perks, same office. Same job. Take Carnell's offer, if you must. You'll have five working days to decide whether you want to stay with Carnell or come back to your job here.”

André looked dumbfounded. “That's it?”

“That's it.” Holland waited a beat and asked, “Was there anything else?”

“Er, uh, no.” The young man backed out of the office.

Holland paid all of his people well, more than he needed to; it was the time-honored way of assuring employee loyalty. But André had a lesson to learn about loyalty, and Chris Carnell was just the one to teach him.

Holland got up and left his office. In the reception area, Mrs. Grainger looked up from her desk to see if he wanted something; he shook his head. Today she was wearing one of her pearl gray outfits with the white collar; Marian called her The Pilgrim.

He went down the hall to the last office. The door was open; inside, Bill Tuttle stood giving instructions to a new employee—a young woman not much older than André Flood.

Tuttle broke off in mid-sentence. “Mr. Holland?”

Holland held up a hand. “Finish what you're doing.” He perched on a high stool to wait.

Bill Tuttle was a skinny, clumsy, balding man who wore Sergeant Bilko glasses and had a nose for business Holland had come to respect. It was Tuttle who'd approached Holland, when the agency was only a month old, with a plan for a way a team of hackers could check out the credentials of job applicants. Holland's first inclination was to pass; it sounded penny-ante. But he'd given Tuttle a provisional go-ahead, warning him his team would have to show a profit fast. It did. Once the groundwork had been laid, Tuttle's gang of hackers could find out anything about anybody, and it didn't take them days or even hours to do it; Holland had had to take on extra staff to handle all the business Tuttle had generated.

But the credentials checking was one aspect of his agency that Holland never talked about to NYPD Lieutenant Marian Larch. The Computer Abuse Amendments Act had been expanded to cover not only federal agencies but all PCs online; Holland could be prosecuted for what Tuttle was doing. The new law had not put an end to hacking; it had merely made hackers more crafty about covering their tracks.

Tuttle wrapped up his instructions quickly; the young woman cast a shy sideways glance at Holland on her way out. “Okay, boss,” Tuttle said. “What's up?”

“I'm here to give you a mini-promotion,” Holland said.

Tuttle grinned and flopped down in a chair, which rolled back on its casters a few feet. “How mini?”

“An extra thousand a month.”

The other man rolled his eyes heavenward. “Thank you, lord!”

“Don't thank him, thank me.”

“Thank you, boss. Why, may I ask, am I the beneficiary of such unexpected largesse?”

“I want you to act as my backup. For those times I have to be away. Mrs. Grainger does a good job of managing the office, but she can't make decisions about the work we do. Someone needs to be in charge when I'm out of the country or if I get hit by a bus or something equally catastrophic happens. That means we'll have to find some time each week when I can brief you about pending cases—you'll need to have a rough idea of what everyone is working on. Do you think you can handle that?”

Tuttle snapped his fingers.

“Good,” said Holland. “I'll send around a memo. Sorry, but you don't get your office redecorated as part of the deal.”

Tuttle gazed around at the office in which every available surface was covered with paper. “Looks fine to me.” Then he leaned forward and turned serious. “Change of subject. I got a phone call about fifteen minutes ago from the CEO of Raiker Corporation in St. Louis. We checked the credentials of all their employees, not just job applicants—found quite a few college dropouts claiming to be MBAs. The CEO wants to know if we'd design a program that would allow them to do some preliminary background checking themselves.”

“Certainly not. We are investigators, not programmers. Doesn't the man know those are two different professions?”

“That's what I told him, but he thinks we're holding back so we can keep on charging him an arm and a leg. I don't think he's going to take no from me.”

“Switch him through to me the next time he calls. And come to my office Monday morning for your first briefing. Ten o'clock.”

“I'll be there. And thanks, Mr. Holland.”

Holland stopped by Mrs. Grainger's desk on his way back. “I'll be leaving in a few minutes,” he said. “If anyone wants to sneak off early, let them.”

“I'm always the first to leave,” she said with a sigh. “The others … they all get so involved in what they're doing they never know when it's quitting time.”

He knew that, but he enjoyed hearing her say it.

In his office, he typed up the memo announcing Bill Tuttle's new status and e-mailed it to all his staff. Five minutes later he was in the elevator on his way down. He had no urgent business to attend to; in fact, he didn't even have any place to go. It was just that sometimes he had to get out of that office.

Not that there was anything wrong with the office; it was a good office, as offices go. The problem was with Holland. After having been on the go his entire adult life, he was bound to find the office confining at times. He knew it would be, when he first decided to open an agency; but it was a price he was willing to pay for the stability the agency could bring him. He needed stability, now.

But even before he'd found Marian, he'd been feeling a need to put down roots somewhere. His young Turk days were over; he didn't
want
to go adventuring anymore. That kind of life was too insubstantial. It wasn't … enough. He needed to build something, to leave a mark that said “Holland was here.”
A monument to my own ego
, he thought wryly.

He walked the streets, heading downtown for no particular reason. Nearly eight million people in this burg, and the only one of those eight million he had any link to had to do her laundry tonight.

A little after five o'clock he tired of his aimless walking and ducked into the next bar he came to. Years of habit made him check out the place quickly before taking a seat. A tall, lean man sitting at the bar almost made him turn and leave. But …
Oh, what the hell
. He took a stool two seats away from the tall man and said, “Murtaugh.”

Captain Jim Murtaugh looked up from his drink. “Oh … hello, Holland.” He peered around to Holland's other side.

“She's not here.”

“Um. I'm on my own tonight too. Edie's out of town.”

Holland didn't care for that “too”; and Edie, he presumed, was Mrs. Murtaugh. The bartender, a woman wearing a badge that said “Maisie,” came up and asked for his order.

“Do you have Lagavulin—no? Laphroaig, then, with very little ice. And is your name really Maisie?”

“My mom was an Ann Sothern fan.”

“Then why didn't she name you Ann?” But Maisie was away looking for the Laphroaig.

Murtaugh was chuckling. “I asked her the same thing.”

“She probably hears it a lot.” A pause. “Who is Ann Sothern?”

Murtaugh looked surprised. “An actress. She played a secretary named Maisie in an old TV series. I remember watching reruns when I was a kid.”

“How fascinating.”

“Well, you asked.”

“So I did.” Maisie came back with his scotch; Holland fished out one of the two ice cubes and dropped it on the drain behind the bar, waiting for the remaining cube to dilute and cool the whiskey just the way he liked it.

She asked, “Why didn't you just say one ice cube? All you said was ‘very little.'”