For Blood or Money
10. A Day in Court
IT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE a preliminary hearing, but Jordan was hoping to push the defendant to an early confession, thereby getting an automatic conviction on the embezzlement in exchange for not bringing up the kiddie porn that I’d discovered.
I dropped Maizie off with Mrs. Prior. Maizie apparently speaks the same language as my landlady. I was listening to a pretty intense lecture on how worried Maizie was about how I was taking care of myself when Jordan drove up. I scratched Maizie’s ears and joined Jordan.
We headed for the U.S. District Court on Stewart. It’s the kind of building that you’d think would be corporate headquarters for a next generation dotcom company. It sits on close to three acres and rises 23 stories of glass and concrete into the sky, with a naturalistic monolith in its central courtyard, and a roof that looks like something off The Flying Nun.
It was just nine o’clock when we entered the building and I was already getting antsy—not for the opening arguments, but for what I’d put Riley up to while I was sitting here listening and waiting. We’d set up a new laptop, with the data from the old one that Mr. Oksamma had brought in, and some sophisticated hacking tools. The old computer had an early wireless card in it and must have been used to test the system when they were installing it. I was betting that of the dozen or so passwords we’d found on the device at least one was still valid on the network. One was all we needed.
I’d warned Riley about not being seen or recognized at BKL. Keane got a good look at her in the office, and I didn’t think he’d hesitate to call in reinforcements if he spotted her in his territory. With Keane’s current edginess around the idea of police, I had the image of the hulking Oksamma in the back of my mind.
I sat in the back of the courtroom and waited for Riley’s message as the hearing opened. It wasn’t long before a flash on my screen indicated I had an incoming message from her. She said she was in position and ready to start scanning for the network. She had managed to get into a bathroom right outside the doors of the top floor offices of BKL. We were ready to start hacking. This first part was going to be all up to her.
We’d set the laptop to mimic the old device that Oksamma had brought us, borrowing user names from Simon’s laptop and passwords from the old computer. They were old, but I was betting that the small firm never thought about old equipment as a liability, especially an abandoned laptop back in a storage closet. The passwords collected on the device had shown a pattern. If the current password we had was expired (as was likely) my extrapolating software was likely to be able to suggest the right password for this month. Very careless.
As expected, the password was rejected, but the third try was a hit.
Now it was my turn. I linked into Riley’s laptop through our VPN and began rifling through BKL’s network searching for vulnerabilities and backdoors. There were plenty there. We set up our own user account, backed up all BKL’s accounting data for the past three years, and closed up shop. If I needed back in later, I could now get in through remote access. Before I closed down my computer in the back of the courtroom, however, I gave Riley an encryption key and had her download all Simon Barnett’s and Bradley Keane’s e-mail, transfer it to our servers, and then set up a blind cc of everything that came into their inboxes forwarded to our account. We were going to have a fun afternoon.
By 2:00, having been called into the judge’s chamber and given him my testimony, it was obvious that the case was not going to trial. The attorneys had agreed to a plea bargain when presented with the evidence of child pornography on the defendant’s computer. Technically, the computer belonged to the enterprise and not the defendant. They would gladly give me a new directive to look for anything that violated corporate policy. Faced with the overwhelming evidence, the defendant pled guilty to the embezzlement charges and was remanded over to custody to await maximum sentencing. Even though part of the plea bargain was to make restitution, he’d still be facing five to ten.
Personally, I’d have preferred to nail him on the child porn, but some days you take what you can get.
Jordan dropped me back at my office at about 3:30 and I found Riley at her desk looking smug as she scanned through e-mail messages. I called her into the office to talk about what she’d found. We sat in the comfy chairs facing the window where the rain had resumed pelting down with a fury.
“So how did you manage to get in without being seen?” I asked.
“Oh, it wasn’t a matter of not being seen,” she said. “It was just being seen in the right place. I went up to the office, started to say I had an appointment, but before I said with whom, I suddenly remembered that I’d forgotten my organizer and would have to run back down to my car. ‘By the way,’ I asked, ‘is there a men’s room near?’ The receptionist was happy to point down the hall, out of sight of both the elevators and the reception desk. Once I was in, I went into a stall and camped out. It was very convenient.”
“Wait a minute. You asked for a men’s room?” I asked.
“Of course. James Whitcomb wouldn’t ask for a ladies’ room.” She was enjoying this entirely too much. I had to admit that it was creasing my own face with a smile. She showed me a picture she’d snapped on her cell phone of herself in disguise. Without knowing for a fact that it was a woman dressed like a man, I would never have been able to tell.
“So you spent the whole day in the men’s room,” I said. “Educational?”
“Disgusting is more like it,” she said. “I hung an out of order sign on the door of the stall and kept my feet out of sight whenever anyone came in. You can learn a lot in a men’s room, you know? Bradley Keane even walked in once with some other guy. I couldn’t see who, but I could hear everything they said. They really should not continue business conversations in the men’s room. You don’t know who else might be there.”
I was interested. I knew for a fact that men in restrooms and locker rooms tend to forget that they aren’t in their own secure board rooms. I’d heard a number of explicit conversations under those circumstances myself.
“What did you learn?”
“Keane is trying to track down a shipment that was supposed to arrive on a container ship sometime last week. Apparently it was a last minute change of plans when Simon disappeared with the private jet. They seem to have lost track of exactly where the ship was supposed to dock. Bradley thought it was supposed to come into Seattle, but the other guy said he was sure it was coming into San Francisco because of the problems they had last time,” Riley said. “There was considerable concern that the cargo not be investigated. I don’t know what the cargo is, exactly, but apparently it is not what is printed on the manifest.”
“Do you think it is being shipped to BKL?” I asked.
“No. They mentioned a fee warehouse, whatever that is. I’m betting that if we start digging into their finances, we’ll find some reference to it.”
We sat there looking at the rain for a few minutes. I was sure we had something to work with now. Somewhere Bradley and/or Simon were smuggling something. That in itself could account for a lot of their revenues and growth.
“Got any plans for tonight?” I asked.
“Hmmm… I’m hungry. Nothing particular on Thursday nights on TV. I’m single and don’t drink. So I guess I’m yours. What do you want to do with me?”
I had to bite my tongue before answering. “Feed you first. Then, I think we should plan on a late night digging through the records of BKL. We’ll set up a search routine on the e-mail first and look for key words. I’ve started a list already, but I think we should add to it based on your bathroom liaison. We can start tearing apart the company financials. If we divvy up the work, we should be able to find some of these shell companies that we know exist. Maybe we’ll even find out what a fee warehouse is.”
“Food first?” She looked pleadingly at me as I moved behind my desk. I paused, then returned and held out my hand to help her out of her chair. She took it and I pulled her to her feet.
“Food first, and then we dig into this.”
We started out the front of the office and toward the entrance to the pier.
“Dag?” Riley asked as if she were puzzled about something. “Are they always like that?”
“Who like what?”
“Men in bathrooms.”
“You mean talking business?” I asked.
“No, I mean talking all the other stuff. They were so disgusting.” She shuddered.
“There’s a reason it’s called toilet talk, Riley. It’s only good for flushing.” She took my arm as we walked down toward Elliott’s and gave it a little squeeze.
“Thanks.”
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