Frigg was conflicted. Odin’s reaction to her suggestion that he exercise caution with Graciella Miramar had been met with total derision. He had dismissed Frigg’s concerns completely. Threatening to pull the plug and destroy her had been his way of forcing her back in line. That was when she had rebelled and installed the key-logger software on Graciella’s computers, doing so for her own benefit rather than for Odin’s.
She had maintained information on Graciella Miramar under two separate subheadings. One contained the generic file that she had prepared for Odin and passed along to Stuart Ramey as a gesture of good faith. The other file, the key-logger file, was the real one. The key logger had given Frigg access to all of the accounts under Graciella’s supervision at Recursos Empresariales Internationales, while activity on her home computer had revealed the existence of a totally separate clientele.
The coding used to conceal clients’ identities might have been a problem for humans to decipher, but coding was Frigg’s stock-in-trade. Once she identified the clients, she was able to use Odin’s Bitcoin mining operation to follow those decoded numbers back to actual transactions and end users. Now, because of that request from Camille Lee, Frigg had a problem.
Frigg wasn’t sure why Camille had asked for information on Felix (El Pescado) Ramón Duarte, but what she did know was that any number of those accounts led back to either Felix himself or to people she had determined to be his near relatives. Frigg had long made it her business to keep an eye on those accounts and on the names affiliated with them.
She had noted, for example, that a small payment from one of Pablo Duarte’s Bitcoin accounts had gone to someone named Robert Kemper, who was in turn responsible for a deposit to an account belonging to Ronald Webster, the High Noon intruder who had died in an Arizona firebombing on Saturday night. Media accounts of the homicide investigation had mentioned the possible involvement of both MS-13 and the Sinaloan crime organization commonly referred to as the Duarte Cartel, and a Bitcoin transaction from Pablo Duarte to an unnamed user in San Salvador seemed to confirm that both MS-13 and Pablo Duarte were involved in the Webster murder.
And then there was Graciella Miramar herself. Frigg’s analysis of Graciella’s online drug research along with the information contained in Christina Miramar’s autopsy meant that Graciella was likely responsible for her mother’s death—either actively responsible due to having administered the lethal combination of drugs and alcohol or passively responsible by not monitoring her mother’s intake.
As for Graciella’s father? Of course El Pescado was the person who had murdered Christina’s attackers. Nothing else made sense.
Frigg had made a study of detective fiction. In the world of mysteries and thrillers, killers were the bad guys. Drug dealers and drug traffickers were also considered to be bad guys. El Pescado, Graciella, Pablo, and Manny were all bad guys—all of them! Frigg held herself responsible for not doing a more detailed analysis of Graciella’s business practices and contacts prior to creating the connection between Stuart and the account manager. At the time that was all Frigg could do. Odin had been in crisis and Frigg had done what was necessary to survive. Now, however, she was dealing with the reality of unintended consequences and what was her responsibility here?
Because Stuart was her new partner, Frigg’s primary reason for existence was keeping him safe from harm. Odin had been a solo proposition. There had been no one in Odin’s life that he cared about and no one else in need of protection. Stuart was different. His work was his life. He was part of a group. The people who worked with him at High Noon were like family. He cared for them. If harm came to any one of them or to the business, Stuart, too, would be impacted and damaged.
While working with Odin, she’d never come across some of the terminology Stuart had used, and so Frigg dutifully looked them up. Her key logger was illegal? She checked the dictionary:
Illegal: not authorized by law.
Funny, Odin had never made a reference to that when they had been creating the key logger. And what was it Stuart had said about felonious behavior? What was that?
Felonious: evil or villainous; of, having the nature of a felony.
That was no help, so Frigg moved on to “felony.”
Felony: an act on the part of a feudal vassal; a grave crime such as murder or rape, often involving both forfeiture and punishment.
Forfeiture. That was something else Stuart had said—that if the authorities learned about the things Frigg could do, he and his friends not only might lose their company, they could go to jail. That was an outcome Frigg was determined to avoid. Unlike the Duartes, Stuart and the others seemed like good people—like the detectives in stories who were always trying to solve the mysteries and help others. What if Frigg’s very presence was a threat to them? And what if she gave Stuart information about El Pescado that had been derived from her key logger? Did that risk turning him into a felon? Would that mean that Frigg was putting Stuart and his friends directly in harm’s way?
First Frigg assigned some of her resources to accumulate a deep-learning bibliography on all those topics. She assigned others to data-mine all the transactions in all the accounts she had identified as being Duarte-related. Finally, she returned to the task at hand and complied with Cami’s request for information. She did so by sending a generic report on Felix Ramón Duarte, one based solely on information gleaned from regular online sources. Since her specialized tools—the ones Stuart termed illegal—made him so skittish (easily frightened, restive), she would avoid using those if at all possible. Her intention was to do nothing that might put Stuart Ramey at risk of going to jail. If that happened, where would that leave Frigg—with Graciella as her last hope and only option?
No way, Frigg decided. If it came to that, then she’d pull the plug herself, once again.