Лори Касс - Wrong Side Of The Paw

“But it could be done?”

“Well . . .” He hesitated. “Sure.”

That was good, but I needed more. “Would it be hard? I mean, could someone who’s never worked in a brewery do it?”

“I’d say so. It would take a little know-how, but someone could probably figure out how by spending a couple of hours on the Internet.”

After thanking him, I ended the call and started another one.

“Hey,” Josh said. “Don’t tell me that bookmobile laptop is down again. I spent half the day yesterday doing the upgrade.”

“It’s fine.” As far as I knew. “I have a question. Did you hear about all the servers at Bowen Manufacturing going down?”

“Yeah. Kind of weird. That shouldn’t happen.”

Exactly. I pressed on. “Could someone have done that intentionally? Someone who didn’t work there?”

“Depends on their security measures.”

It was déjà vu all over again. “But it could be done?”

There was a hesitation about the same length as the one with Jake. “Sure. If you knew what you were doing.”

“What if you only kind of knew what you were doing?”

He snorted. “Then it might be even easier.”

“Seriously?”

“No. You’d have to know something about computer servers, but if you had half a brain and knew what kind of servers they had, you could probably do some Internet surfing and figure out what to do. Might take a few hours, but it could be done.”

I thanked him, ended the call, and sat there, thinking.

“Minnie?” Julia asked.

Blinking away the web of assumptions I was spinning, I got to my feet, deposited Eddie on the headrest, and went to do my job.

• • •

As soon as the returned bookmobile books were hauled through the snow and into the library and the bookmobile was tucked in for the night, Julia headed off and Eddie and I made our way to my car. Just as I was buckling the carrier in, my phone rang. It wasn’t anyone in my contacts list, but it was a local number and seemed familiar.

“Minnie?” a man asked. “This is Jake Yurgelaitis. We talked earlier today.”

Rafe’s beer guy. “Sure. What’s up?”

“Well, your question about maybe an outsider contaminating the beer got me wondering, so I started looking at the video from our security cameras for the week before those people got sick.”

Video. Security video. Why hadn’t I thought to ask if they had security cameras? Mainly because it didn’t seem to me that beer was worth protecting, but I knew millions, if not billions, of people disagreed with me. “The police haven’t looked at those?”

“Why would they?” he asked. “No one thought there was anything going on. Until now anyway.”

The world went still. “You saw something?”

“These cameras only activate when there’s movement, so it really didn’t take long to review the files, but yeah, I saw a guy I’ve never seen before climb the stairs to the top of that tank. I couldn’t see what he was doing—his back was to the camera the whole time he was up there—but when he came down the stairs, I got a good look at his face.”

My chest was tight and I reminded myself to breathe. “What did he look like?” My words tumbled out. “Young? Old? Fat? Thin? Unique tattoo?” Preferably one with a name and an address.

“Old,” Jake said promptly. “He was using a cane.”

That narrowed it down a little, but the fastest-growing demographic in this part of Michigan was the upper age bracket. “But you saw his face,” I said. “Do you think you’d know him again if you saw him?”

“You bet,” Jake said confidently. “On one side he had this thing going on with his skin, like he’d had nerve damage or something. And his eyes didn’t track together. It was kind of creepy, watching it.”

Bob Blake? What on earth would he be doing there?

My brisk walking pace slowed as the connections finally snapped into place with a solid click . Donna’s neighbor had said Simon Faber had gone through all sorts of surgeries, including orthopedic, eye, and plastic. Bob Blake had difficulties walking and had something odd with his face and his eye.

All of which meant, at least to me if not to law enforcement and the court system, that Bob Blake was Simon Faber.

And this meant that Simon Faber was Leese’s new client. The client she was going to meet with on a Saturday, but which one? Today was Saturday. Was Leese going to be alone with the man who’d killed her father, the man who’d sabotaged the careers of her brother and sister? No. No no no . . .

I thanked Jake for his call, asked him to save the video for the police, cut him off practically in midsentence, and trying not to panic, called Leese.

“Hello, this is Leese Lacombe,” said her voice mail.

“Call me as soon as you get this,” I said. “It’s an emergency.” I tried her land line and got the same response. I looked at Eddie, who was sitting so close to the front of his carrier that his fur was sticking out through the wire gate.

“I have to go out to Leese’s house,” I told him. “What do you want to do? Go home to an empty boardinghouse”—because Aunt Frances and Otto were headed to Traverse City for a concert at the City Opera House— “or go for a drive in the snow?”

“Mrrowww!” he said.

“Glad you agree,” I said, starting the car and turning the defroster on high. “No time like the present to remember how to drive in the snow. Steer in the direction of the skid, brake gently, anticipate what the other guy is doing. All that.” I popped the trunk and rummaged around for the snow brush, finding it underneath a folding chair and next to the jumper cables.

By the time I cleared the hood, front windshield, roof, rear windshield, and dropped the brush into the backseat, the car was warm and toasty. “Timing is everything,” I told Eddie, who, judging from the tone of his snores, agreed completely.

Driving my small sedan through five inches of wet, heavy, slushy snow was far different from driving the bookmobile, and I used the brakes tentatively as I approached the intersections.

“This isn’t so bad,” I said to an uncaring Eddie. “I’m glad you have such confidence in my driving skills that you can sleep through all of this. Some cats would be all tensed up and whining.”

“Mrr,” he said through what I assumed was a yawn.

I glanced over and saw that he’d repositioned himself and the tip of his nose was now sticking out between the wires. “Nice look. Could you possibly look any dorkier than you are looking right now?”

“Mrr.”

“Wow, I could have sworn you said you could, in fact, look even dorkier, but I don’t see how . . . oh, geez . . .” I stopped having a one-sided conversation with my cat and focused on my driving. A deer had tiptoed out of the woods and was standing in the middle of the road.

I tapped the brakes and felt the metallic rush of adrenaline surge through my body. The deer, a buck with at least six points on his antlers, stared straight at me.

“Move!” I shouted.

Either he heard me, or far more likely, he had already decided it was time to move, because he suddenly leapt into action. His hooves skittered on the road’s snowy surface but eventually found traction, and he sped off the road and into the same trees from whence he’d come.

“Mrr!”

“Sorry,” I muttered. “Didn’t mean to yell. It’s just that we almost hit a deer and . . . oh, never mind.” Since he hadn’t seen the deer, talking to him about it would make even less sense than our normal conversations.

For the rest of the ride out to Leese’s house, though, my thoughts were a little jangled. Coming so close to hitting the deer had unnerved me; it was the closest I’d ever come. I’d lived Up North more than four years and everyone told me it was only a matter of time before I hit one, but I was planning on being the first resident of Tonedagana County to never ever hit a deer in her entire life.