“Hey, how are we doing with that ad to hire a new tech assistant?”
“Just fine there, boss. Hyuh. Hyuh,” Graham said.
“Oh man, who knew when we went into business together I’d have to deal with the Bugs Bunny troop, well, at least Goofy.” Guy shook his head.
“Well, one of us has to stay sane, the other one’s getting hitched.”
“Happily getting married.”
“Yeah, I don’t know if those two words go together.” He laughed outright when Guy flipped him the bird. “All right, I’ll quit ribbing you. I really am happy for you. Bailey’s a hell of a catch. Not sure she got the same deal.”
He grinned at Guy’s response. Figuring he’d bugged him enough, he got back to business. “We have a few applicants but nothing very exciting. I haven’t checked in a couple of days, been busy going back through that ingenious tax fraud scam we looked into a year or so ago.”
“Do the cops have enough to charge him?”
“Yes and no. He’d been doing taxes for the past eight years in this little out-of-the-way town, a place small enough that everyone was thrilled to have him plus close enough to other towns to draw in a large customer base. And it was far enough north to tap into a region with high-income people that needed income tax expertise. So when this guy came along and greatly reduced their tax liabilities, no one looked too closely at how he was doing it. He had a huge client base. They figured he made about four million, although they’ve only been able to track about three and a half. Not bad pay.” Graham showed Guy his report.
“Christ. So he was doing their taxes, filing them on time but then claiming he’d received a government notice that they owed a bit more because of some new law or some such thing. He skewed the tax laws just enough for each client. He always had the cheques sent to himself. He’d then cut them a cheque, minus about ten percent. Crazy. Do the cops need more evidence to tie him to it?”
“Yeah. He was selective in the ones he embezzled—obviously the ones who knew little about tax law. Reminds me of someone else. You?”
“Yeah, it sounds like something my dear old Uncle Geoff would have been involved in if he wasn’t dead. Anyway, let’s not go there. So let’s get to work, see what we find.”
Graham opened the website for Knights Associates. Then he logged into another more secure site to check out new requests. They worked closely with the police, other government agencies and sometimes a business or two. They primarily investigated cyber fraud but also cases of abuse, prostitution, or child pornography, and truth be told, almost any illegal activity involving the internet was likely to involve them.
“Holy cow. We have twenty-seven new requests in the last hour. Doesn’t that seem odd to you? It’s been a year since we started the website, Knight Safe, for financial fraud research but we didn’t get a single hit until after Christmas. Now we go from four to ten a month, to this. In the last six months, there have been at least five times that we’ve had more than fifteen or more requests at once. Most I’ve deleted because we don’t have time to take more on. But something is really off about this.”
Guy sat at his computer and quickly logged in. “Are these even genuine companies?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t had time to even look at them all. Some are obviously garbage and some I’ve dumped because they just don’t seem like a good fit. As you can see, we have over a thousand that need to be explored, down from nearly two thousand. With the legitimate requests we get from our five biggest contracts, I’ve been swamped on this thing.” Graham scanned the list quickly. “How are they getting our contact information? My spidy sense is tingling.”
“Mine too. The question is what are we going to do about it?”
The two worked for the next couple of hours, going through the massive amount of messages. Guy worked on checking out the companies—verifying a website, a contact person named—and then he sent emails asking for additional information. Graham worked on those lacking a company name and website, sending back an email requesting more details. They’d done this before but rarely received a response. They were hoping this might at least determine whether they were legitimate requests or phishing. Nothing had shown up so far though. Graham spent a bit of time trying to trace some of the emails back to where they originated from.
Knights Computers constituted their downstairs business. Clients could drop off, call or contact the business through their website for computer work—removing viruses, trojans and malware, updating computers and doing general repairs. It was very different from their real bread and butter, Knights Associates, but very few knew about its existence upstairs except for an elite group that used them regularly. And now they had Knight Safe, strictly an online business. Even the employees downstairs didn’t know half of what Guy and Graham really did on the second floor.
“Okay, whoever has gotten our email address is good. I can’t find any valid IP addresses.”
“You mean there’s another Graham-computer-genius running around out there?”
“Sadly, it would seem so. I don’t like it. It’s probably some pimply faced little bugger raised on computers.”
“I’d say just like you but I know for a fact you have an amazing mom.”
“Yeah, not her fault I’m a geek.”
“Well, according to the last three women you dated, they all seemed to think you were pretty cute. You and your shaggy, hot look.”
Both men looked up as soon as they heard Bailey’s voice.
“Why thank you, ma’am.” Graham grinned as he looked at her and then at the locked outer door. There was no question about trusting her. She had a key and was welcome to use it any time; he just wished he’d heard her come in.
She smiled as Guy grabbed her into a bear hug. “I’ve learned a thing or two since hanging out with you guys.” Guy and Bailey started kissing.
“Shoo, love birds. I have work to do. Some of us aren’t sleeping with the boss, so we have to jump at the crack of a whip.”
Bailey laughed.
“How’s Grandma?”
“Exhausting. That woman has more stamina than a tank but she’s tired. She tried again to talk me into taking over the winery. I don’t think I could do what she does.”
Graham leaned back in his chair. “Any ideas on who could take over the CEO position? It sounds as though she’s ready to step down.”
“No, but I’ve put some feelers out. I think we need to add it to our list of things to do. We need to find someone soon. She’s looking haggard but won’t slow down. She’s so concerned that someone will find out family secrets, especially how evil her brother, Geoffrey, had really been and all he’d done to others, to her and to the company.” Bailey pressed her fingers to her lips.
“Thank goodness he’s dead. That son of a bitch really did a number on her and on...” Guy and Bailey’s eyes met.
There was a long silence. Graham knew they were all remembering what he’d done to Bailey as well.
“Let’s not get into it today. If each of us can look for an appropriate CEO for Caspian Winery, we’ll find someone suitable. We’ll do the background checks and run the people through interrogation,” Graham said in a stern, deep voice.
Guy and Bailey burst out laughing.
“Okay. Now you’ve hurt my feelings. I can be tough. Okay, well maybe I’ll leave the thumb-screw interviews to the two of you. I’ll do the background checks. Now git.” He waved them away as he went to the front office to pour a cup of coffee and grab a couple of muffins.
Guy and Bailey left for lunch, promising to bring him back a sandwich. They were smiling and holding hands. They finally looked happy, unstressed, and ready to move forward. They’d sure been through enough. Guy had told him it had taken a year before Bailey stopped having nightmares thanks to what Uncle Geoff had done to her. Kidnapping her with the intent of killing her would have messed up anyone. He was glad Guy and Bailey had each other and had reached the point where they were going to get married—not something in his cards but he was happy for them.
Needing a distraction, Graham sat down at his computer, which had logged off automatically after one minute of inactivity. He logged back on and after tracking a couple of his current cases, he opened one sent by Detmier, a PI they sometimes worked with. A mother swore her child was a genius and had hacked her computer.
Graham had been working on cyber-crimes for several years. After he and Guy left the police force, they’d fallen back on private detective work and Knights Associates had been born. Graham worked at tracking criminals on the internet and Guy did the private investigative work. Knights Computers, the division that repaired computers, had really come about to hide what they did at Knights Associates.
In the beginning, Knights Associates had taken on pretty much anything but only from a limited resource pool. Once they’d started making connections and getting a reputation as being one of the best, the requests had started coming in from high-end clients—government, police and other private investigators. They decided to limit their clientele and five contracts had kept them busy. But then they’d come across a company victimized by identity theft who had lost a lot of money. Afterward, they’d realized if they hadn’t helped the little company, it probably would have folded. It made them realize that a lot of companies were probably in the same situation. So they’d developed Knight Safe. They hadn’t needed more business but had seen the need and were curious as to the demand. They hadn’t advertised the service, which is what made all the incoming requests all the more fishy—especially since most of them never responded once they’d reached out to obtain more information. And some were so unbelievable.
Kind of like the situation he was currently looking through. It intrigued him, since he’d never had to catch such a young thief—but what made it so interesting was how creative people were in what they sent in. Usually they went after people who were laundering money, living a double life. His thoughts immediately went to Bailey. That had been a crazy case as well; thirty years after a baby was kidnapped, they had been expected to find her. And the kicker was their client had been Guy’s step-grandmother, Dorothea Lindell—not someone you declined. It was precisely that case that made him reluctant to discard some of the requests as crazy.
A computer alert reminded him he had other work to do, and he’d allowed himself to be distracted by noncritical emails that weren’t high priority. All the incoming requests frustrated him to no end. He was sure some punk had hacked their system and was sending fake situations to chase. What ticked him off was he didn’t know how the bugger had done it.
Graham slammed his fist onto his desk. Someone was screwing with them and it was driving him nuts. It wasn’t as though they could ignore all the cyber-crime requests but who had time to read them all and get any work done? What they needed was someone to go through the emails and figure out what was legit. Then he could spend some time figuring out what was really going on, catch the twerp and get some of their crimes solved.
He sure hoped some better applications came in for the Tech Assistant position.