Fenway spent a minute processing the broken screen, like her eyes couldn’t correctly translate the information to her brain.
“It was almost finished processing all of the card key data,” Piper moaned. “It was about to spit out all the employees who were most likely to be the mole based on what information was leaked, what doors were opened when and by who—and who was in the jail building at certain times.”
“Sounds like a pretty complex algorithm.”
“It wasn’t that complicated. And the information is all publicly available.”
Would someone have broken the computer to prevent them from finding out who the mole was?
It was certainly possible.
Fenway popped her head up and surveyed the courtroom, scrutinizing everyone. It obviously wasn’t Judith Cygnus—although it was possible she’d been in cahoots with the person who had done it.
But if Judith had faked the seizure, she should win every acting award in existence. Fenway had never seen anyone who could shake the specific way that a seizure shook one’s body. Maybe in cop shows.
Fenway wondered if anyone in the room had close ties to Officer Todd Young. Maybe Leda? Maybe Officer Young was another lover of hers?
Fenway couldn’t ignore the itch in her brain anymore, though. Officer Young fit the profile of 37cuckoo37 in a lot of ways, but if he was the mole, he wasn’t the one to break the laptop. Fenway doubted that anyone in the room was close enough to Officer Moore to care about hiding his identity.
Of course, if the killer assumed they would be found out if the mole’s identity was established, that would be enough of a reason to bash the laptop to hide the mole’s identity.
But maybe the laptop was smashed for another reason.
She looked at Leda Nedermeyer. That business with her anxiety medication could have easily been a ruse. All she’d need would be a good knowledge of the symptoms and acting talent would get her the rest of the way there. She looked at Leda—she was fussily arranging herself on her chair, and looked like she was ready to lie down again. Plus, Nedermeyer keened about being sorry. She wouldn’t have had the opportunity.
Xavier had helped move the chairs with Piper.
Amanda had covered Judith’s body with her sweatshirt so Judith wouldn’t be embarrassed about her bladder letting go.
Her father had been at the door, screaming for medical help.
That left six people. One of whom had smashed Piper’s screen.
Cynthia Schimmelhorn, Bryce Heissner—and she wouldn’t have put it past either of them.
Rose Morgan, of course. She was like a bad penny—Fenway couldn’t get rid of her. Just when Fenway was ready to eliminate Rose as the main suspect, she leapt to the forefront again. In fact, smashing that laptop was exactly the kind of m.o. that Rose would have.
And Evans Dahl—that ankle injury was a sprain, but it appeared to make him feel worse, not better, but maybe he was faking it too. Maybe no one would notice him sneaking behind the judges’ bench.
Also, Fenway didn’t see Charlotte during the seizure. A few weeks ago, Fenway might have said that Charlotte had neither the brains nor the savvy to pull something off like smashing a laptop while everyone was paying attention to something else. Now Fenway had seen that Charlotte likely had both the book smarts and the street smarts to do it.
Oh—and ada Kim.
Hmm. Kim was certainly popping up in a few suspicious places. First her fingerprints were on the wrong bottle, then she had The World’s Biggest Cuckoo Clock near her birthplace. Plus, she was complaining constantly at Fenway and Piper. But no relation to the number thirty-seven.
There was that scratching in Fenway’s brain again. Something was there, she just couldn’t see what it was yet.
It wasn’t doing her any good sitting at the judge’s desk with a broken laptop, feeling sorry for herself. She grabbed the phone out of her purse. “Let me know if I can do anything, Piper. Otherwise, I’ll be standing on my head in the nook over there, trying to get a useable cell signal.”
“Your dad’ll kill me,” Piper said.
“Not likely. You’ve already emailed Imani Ingram enough evidence to clear him of one murder.” Fenway shook her head. “He’ll probably be so thankful he’ll probably give you his Porsche.”
“That doesn’t help find the mole.”
“Well, sometimes we have to celebrate every single victory we get.”
Piper nodded, and Fenway, clutching her phone, went around the witness stand for what seemed like the hundredth time that day, then through the gate.
She knelt at Judith Cygnus’s side. The widow’s eyes were closed, but she opened them, blinking a few times.
“How are you feeling, Mrs. Cygnus?”
“Still horrible, thanks for asking.”
“Can I get you anything? Water, maybe?”
“Ha. So I can piss myself again? No, thank you.”
“You need to stay hydrated.”
Judith patted Fenway’s hand. “I doubt I’ll leave with much of my dignity intact, Miss Stevenson, but surely you can let me have this little bit.”
Fenway smiled. “Certainly.”
“I can go to sleep, right? I won’t get an aneurysm or anything?”
Fenway shook her head. “No. You hit your head pretty hard.”
“Well, then, put me through a concussion test or something. My head is killing me. I want to go to sleep.”
Fenway looked up at Xavier and Amanda, sitting across the aisle and several rows back. “Hey—Xavier, grab Amanda and come down here.” Then turning her face down to Judith, she said. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Cygnus, I know you just want to sleep, but I hope that medical personnel will arrive any minute. They’ll be able to take you through concussion tests.”
“I thought you used to be a nurse,” Judith said. “You don’t even know how to give someone a concussion test?”
Fenway smiled tightly as Xavier and Amanda arrived. “Keep Mrs. Cygnus from falling asleep. She might have a concussion, and I want the medical personnel to get here before we do anything to jeopardize her health.”
“But after the medical personnel get here, you can jeopardize my health all you want,” said Judith, cackling, and then starting to cough, a dry, coppery hacking that soon wracked her whole body.
When the coughing fit subsided, Fenway said, “Are you okay?”
Judith, catching her breath, nodded. “That’ll keep me awake real good.”
Amanda stepped forward. “You’ve got a daughter, right? Where does she live?”
Fenway stood, not waiting for Judith’s answer, and hurried down the aisle, and turned left after the last row to get to the nook.
“What happened?” Cynthia Schimmelhorn asked as Fenway turned the corner around the last row of chairs.
“Did you see anyone go up to the judge’s bench when Judith was having her seizure?”
“Did I see—no, of course I didn’t. I was concentrating on the commotion around you saving the professor’s wife.”
I didn’t save her—but now wasn’t the time to correct her. “You didn’t see anyone going up the aisle or the side, or coming back? You didn’t hear a smashing sound?”
Cynthia shook her head.
“All right.”
“What’s happened?”
Fenway hesitated. Cynthia Schimmelhorn might be the person who had broken the laptop. She certainly wasn’t anyone that Fenway could trust. But this wasn’t exactly confidential information, and Cynthia had been the person who’d first complained about being stuck in the courthouse. “Someone smashed Piper’s computer. So—no way to contact McVie to let him know we’re ready. No way to research anything so maybe we could find the murderer.”
Cynthia Schimmelhorn laughed.
Fenway stopped, trying not to let a look of horror slide over her face.
“I’m sorry for laughing,” Schimmelhorn said. “I know it’s not funny. But, look, I was in the board meeting when your dad found out that your mother died. Immediately—and I mean immediately—he started thinking about how he could convince you to come down from Seattle and join him.”
Fenway was taken aback. “Really?”
“Yes. He asked if anyone knew of any jobs at the county. Someone reminded him that you were a nurse, and he opened his laptop and started researching you. Facebook profile, graduating class, everything.”
“Is that when you found out that your daughter and I both went to Western Washington?”
“I’d known before, actually, but he did bring it up that you graduated at the top of your class there.” Schimmelhorn leaned forward. “I know you don’t like many of the things he did—”
“Or didn’t do,” Fenway said under her breath.
“—but your dad should know that you love him. It’s probably the most important thing you can say to a parent.”
Fenway nodded. If she thought about it too much—and the one-hundred-thousand-dollar check in her purse—she might just go crazy. “Thanks for the advice,” Fenway said, stepping around her. “I’ve gotta see if I can get any service in here so I can make sure they know we’re having a medical emergency.”
“Of course,” Cynthia said.
Fenway walked into the nook. She held her phone above her head again, but there was no signal. She turned and spun, then she took her shoes of and climbed carefully onto a chair. She raised her phone above her head again.
There.
Two bars.
She immediately pushed the phone app and called McVie.
The screen turned into the black background of the phone app. craig mcvie—mobile appeared on the screen, and below that, it read calling.
Fenway pushed the speakerphone button and waited.
Please pick up. Please, please, please pick up.
Three beeps.
call failed.
She went back to the main screen. Still two bars. Not great, but better than one, and it should be enough to call.
One of the bars disappeared.
She twisted the phone in her hand, but there was no change. She raised it further, and the last bar disappeared.
no service.
Fenway wanted to scream in frustration. There was a medical emergency and they were locked in. The side exit was locked didn’t work—a lawsuit waiting to happen for sure, and one that both Leda and Judith had every right to file. If Judith died, Laura Cygnus would have one hell of a wrongful death suit against the county.
Then she heard it—and felt it.
There was a thunderous bang against the double doors. Then another one.
They were breaking down the doors.
Then a siren began to wail—so loud she almost fell off the chair she was standing on. She clapped her hands over her ears, dropping her phone to the floor, then feeling another bang, now two, now three, and then there were no more bangs against the door, just the wailing siren, buzzing like a chainsaw in her brain.
Almost by instinct, Fenway jumped off the chair and ran to the speaker enclosure—but the siren wasn’t coming from there. It was coming from up high, inside the walls, or maybe above the ceiling. The siren echoed through the courtroom, off the mahogany, making it difficult to discern where it was coming from.
The evidence safe—maybe the system was connected there.
Fenway raced down the center aisle, pushing through the gallery gate, and slid open the mahogany panel. Sure enough, the lights were lit and flashing red, and the readout said zone 3 attack. Fenway tried to remember the code to the safe Piper had given her earlier.
She closed her eyes and tried to shut out the siren. Three of the four corners—and then up and down the center column. There was a repeated number. And Fenway remembered that first half of the eight-digit code was all divisible by three, and the second set were all even numbers.
Kind of. The first half ended with a one, and the second half began with a zero. Which her high school math teacher would argue was neither odd nor even.
In her mind, she reached out with her right index finger and pushed the buttons.
9-9-3-1.
0-2-8-5.
The green light next to the blinking red lights came on, but the siren didn’t go silent. Instead on the display: turn off alarm.
Well, duh. It was a good security measure, not allowing the safe to be opened while the alarm was going off, but she didn’t have time to praise the design of the system.
In desperation—and in the middle of doing it, wondering how many chances she had—she entered 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8.
The siren stopped.
A slight ringing in Fenway’s ears was left, but she swallowed hard, and her ears popped a little, the ringing diminishing with it.
She turned her head. Xavier and Amanda were still with Judith, who was sitting up now, looking scared out of her mind, but otherwise okay. A bit of color had come back into her face.
She craned her neck. Evans Dahl, up on both feet, was ready to flee.
She stood, still in her bare feet—she’d abandoned her shoes in the nook—and slowly went around the witness stand and up the steps to the dais.
“You okay, Piper?”
“That was loud,” Piper said, and gave Fenway a nervous laugh.
“Why aren’t they breaking down the side door?”
“Because it’s a security door. Since the defendants go in and out of there, the committee ordered a steel door—almost impossible to smash through.” Then Piper’s head suddenly snapped up. “Hold on,” she said. “Hold on.” She pulled her backpack that was sitting on the desk toward her and pulled out a small tablet.
“You can’t to get anything from that,” Fenway pointed out. “That doesn’t have an Ethernet port. It can’t read usb sticks, either.”
“I actually have a converter,” Piper said in a low voice, “but that’s not what I mean.” She pointed to a soft blue light on the broken laptop. “Whoever smashed my screen didn’t turn the computer off.” She carefully reached to the keyboard and pulled her sleeve over her hand, brushing some of the broken glass off the function key and the top row. She held down the function and alt keys and with her right index finger pressed F15. Another blue light appeared on the top of the machine.
“Now,” she said, “I can get it.”
“What are you doing?” Fenway whispered.
“I turned Bluetooth on. I had it off because I didn’t want anyone getting into the machine, but I’ve got an rdp app on my tablet and I can continue working.” She sighed. “It’s slow, and I won’t be able to do some of the work, but it’s better than a broken laptop.”
Piper woke the tablet up and launched an app, then immediately started typing on the screen.
“Are you in?” Fenway murmured.
“Impatient much?” Piper said. “Just calm down. I’ve got a few security hoops to jump through.”
Fenway fought the urge to stare at the tablet over Piper’s shoulder as she typed. Finally, Piper leaned back. “Oh wow. I wasn’t sure that would work, but it worked. I’m in.”
Fenway nodded. “We’ve got to make it look like we’re despondent, though,” Fenway whispered. “The person who broke your laptop is in this room, and if they think you can still access enough information to figure out who the mole is, they could try something dangerous.”
“Since it’s on my tablet, maybe I won’t even sit near the laptop. You can say that I’m devastated that the laptop’s broken.” She paused. “Which I am—but I’m glad I found a workaround.” Piper glanced up at the double doors. “Do you think McVie will try bashing his way in again?”
Fenway shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess the mechanic wasn’t able to do anything to get the locks open.” Fenway sat down next to the broken laptop. “Did you do any searches on Yesterday Audio? Maybe try to find out who was assigned to be here over the weekend.”
Piper grimaced. “I started to, but then got sidetracked. But it should be easy enough to figure out.” She began tapping on the tablet. “Are you interested in the business, too, or just the workers?”
“Just the work—” Fenway stopped. “You know, there’s a very good chance that Yesterday Audio is one of the money laundering businesses too.”
Piper nodded. “I’ll look up the business license. See who owns it.”
“Okay. While you’re doing that, I guess I better play nurse. I swear, if one more person gets injured today, I’m going to scream.”
“Stay away from the double doors, then. McVie might bring in a tank next.”
Fenway turned and stepped down from the dais, through the gate and knelt next to Judith Cygnus. Amanda and Xavier were crouched next to her, deep in conversation.
“Oh, I see you’re talking with me now,” said Judith. “I was so boring that you left me with these two.” She pulled herself up slightly. “But the joke’s on you. Amanda might know more about the poetry of Adrienne Rich than anyone in the county. Besides me, of course.”
“My mom has a signed copy of The Fact of a Doorframe,” Amanda said. “It’s not worth a lot because my mom read it so much and it’s all ratty, but books are meant to be read. Right, Mrs. Cygnus?”
“Exactly right,” Judith said, patting Amanda’s hand.
“I take it you’re feeling better.”
“My headache’s going away,” Judith admitted.
“Good.”
“I probably don’t even need an ambulance. Just a change of clothes.”
“I wish I could help you there,” Fenway said.
“Well, Amanda and Xavier were telling me that you protected my head when I had the seizure. So thank you. I might have gotten badly hurt if you hadn’t done that.”
“It was my pleasure,” Fenway said automatically, putting on her nurse voice. She stood up. “Let me know if you need anything.” She walked across the aisle to Evans Dahl. “How’s your ankle doing?”
“Swelling up like crazy,” Dahl said. “I’ll be glad to get out of here and put some ice on it.”
“Can I take a look at it?”
“Don’t bother,” Dahl said. “I can put weight on it. It’s just sore.”
“You need to see a doctor, though,” Fenway said. “And do it soon, because there might be some injury to the soft tissue that won’t get better by itself. And—I might have missed a hairline fracture or a pinched nerve.”
“And you need to make sure you keep the Fourth Amendment in mind.”
“Touché.” Fenway turned and walked back three rows. Leda Nedermeyer was stretched out over four chairs, lying on her side facing out. “Professor Nedermeyer?” she said gently.
“Ummm.”
“Are you feeling all right?”
“Not really. I don’t know why I decided to take more pills. I guess I was feeling particularly anxious.”
“I’m sorry. Did Xavier take good care of you?”
“He did.” She paused. “I believe I told him I didn’t like his new stage name.”
“You might have.”
“Did I mention something scatological?”
“You might have.” Fenway couldn’t stop a grin from sliding over her face.
“Oh dear. I do like him. He’s a good person. I hope he wasn’t offended. Xavier really is an angel in disguise, you know. Such a good student, and such a calming presence in class, too.”
“An angel in disguise, huh?”
Then something clicked in Fenway’s head.
An angel in disguise.
Fenway turned as Leda said, “I’ll be all right then? Nothing else?”
“More water tonight. Make sure you stay hydrated.” Fenway hurried up the aisle and was back on the dais.
Piper looked up from her tablet, an excited grin on her face. “I think I found the mole.”
Fenway nodded. “And I think I figured out who’s behind everything.”