Innocent Conspiracy Read online

  “Who was that local security company,” asked John Morton, the CEO, “the one we heard about on the news last week? I can’t remember the name, but I’m pretty sure that they’re based here in Denver, aren’t they?”

  Annie Porter, who was not only his executive assistant and fellow board member but also his girlfriend, looked up from going over the video of the event on her computer. “Windlass Security Services,” she said. “Do you think we ought to give them a call?”

  “Damn right,” Morton said. “We need to get them on board, get them established now, before we even start the winner’s tour that’s coming up. They do offer personal protection services as well as security guards, right?”

  “I’m looking at their website right now,” Annie replied. “Yes, they do. And get this, every single one of their security people is ex-military, like Green Berets or Navy SEALs. These people are a lot like Blackwater, and they actually have their own investigations section and everything.”

  “Investigations? Really? What can you find out about them, are they any good?”

  Annie spun her laptop around so John could see the photograph on the monitor screen. “I’m sure you’ve heard of Sam Prichard, right?” she asked, letting him look at the picture. “He’s the guy who stopped the terrorists from tossing in a nuclear bomb at Lake Mead, and tracked down that stolen super chip a few weeks back.”

  “He’s done all of that, and then some,” John said. “This says he’s actually in charge of their entire investigations team, and runs the whole show.” He looked up from the computer to her eyes and nodded his head. “Get us an appointment to talk to them, and the sooner we can meet with them, the better.”

  1

  “Daddy, look, come and look at Bo!” Kenzie called out. “He’s crawling all by himself, he’s crawling!”

  “I see that,” Sam said. He looked over at his wife. “Isn’t that just a little bit early? Isn’t he a bit too young for that?”

  Indie shook her head at him, and chuckled. “Sam, he’s actually coming up on seven months old, babe. It might be just a little early, but not really all that much. Wow, but would you look at him go?”

  Beauregard Prichard was named, to the surprise of many, after the ghost of an old Civil War soldier. Beauregard, almost everyone who knew anything about him was convinced, was actually nothing more than a figment of his grandmother’s imagination. Kimberly Perkins, Indie’s mother, seemed to have some strange, somewhat eerie ability to pick up bits and pieces of the future, but something in her childhood upbringing caused her to find that ability frightening. As a result, she had developed the habit of blaming all of her precognitive episodes on Beauregard, a ghost she was sure she had picked up years earlier while she and her daughter were living in Kentucky.

  Bo didn’t particularly give a rip who he was named after. At that moment, all he seemed to be concerned about was the musical toy on wheels that his big sister, Mackenzie, kept dragging away from him. He had followed it a good ten feet, with his proud parents beaming down at him as they stood by the front door, watching him and getting a kick out of his progress.

  “Mackenzie, I told you over and over, don’t tease him,” Indie said. “Let him catch it. If you don’t let him catch it sometimes, he’ll give up trying to get it.”

  “Okay, Mommy,” Kenzie said, “I’m sorry. Come on, Bo, you can catch it, I’ll pull it slower.”

  Bo suddenly found the toy stopping just within his grasp, so he snatched it up with a happy sound and then sat down. Picking it up caused it to make even more music, which in turn caused Bo to laugh even louder.

  “Okay,” Sam said, “C’mon, Kenzie, we gotta get a move on. If I stand here watching him much longer, I’m liable to forget that I have a job.”

  Indie turned to face him and stretched her face up for a kiss, which he was more than happy to provide. “Okay, babe,” she said with a smile and a hug. “You have yourself a good day, and I’ll see you tonight for dinner. I love you, Sam.”

  “Love you more,” Sam said quickly, and then he and his daughter were out the door like a shot. He leaned on the rail just a bit as he went down the front steps, then put his cane lightly to work as he walked to his car. He held the seat forward so Kenzie could climb in and get buckled up, and then the Mustang’s big, powerful engine fired up as soon as he turned the key. Sam backed out of the driveway and headed toward Kenzie’s school, dropped her off, and then turned the car toward his office.

  As the chief investigator for Windlass Security, Sam felt like he had just about made it to Easy Street. Most of the time, all he really had to do was sit in his office and send various members of his team out to handle whatever minor investigations were going on at the time. Usually, it would turn out to be something as simple as figuring out who was taking boxes of screws home from a factory, or determining how someone had gotten a compromising photograph of a local executive. The latter cases weren’t really all that hard to figure out, because compromising photographs don’t usually exist unless you put yourself into a compromising situation.

  Sometimes, though, something a lot bigger actually came along. Sam’s very first case after taking the job with Windlass had been to track down a stolen prototype of a chip that could allow a computer to communicate directly with the human brain, and find the thief who stole it. That case had started out seeming like nothing more than a simple theft, but rapidly evolved into a matter of national security that threatened the entire world. Sam and his team, after being infiltrated by the actual mastermind behind it all and led on a wild goose chase, had finally determined who the culprit was and taken steps to stop him from literally trying to take over the entire world.

  Since then, things had settled down and mostly been pretty easy. Sam admitted to himself and his wife that he truly enjoyed going to work at his office every day, and he felt certain that he had the best possible team working with him. No matter what case came along, Sam Prichard had absolute confidence that they could handle it.

  He pulled into his reserved parking space in front of the old automotive shop that was the Windlass Security Company’s headquarters building, and made his way leisurely inside. His hip wasn’t hurting too awfully badly that day, and that always helped, but he was feeling pretty good in other ways, as well. The toughest case the team had on their plate at the moment was almost comical, and involved tracking down the stripper who seemed to have left a party thrown by the CEO of a local bank with the memory stick that contained some of his bank access codes. It was encrypted and was probably secure, but if it were to find its way into the wrong hands, the bank could potentially be ruined.

  Sam grinned as he thought about it. He had decided to put Summer Raines on that case. A raving beauty, there wasn’t a man in the world she couldn’t crack, or a woman she couldn’t intimidate, if she really put her mind to it.

  He walked into the foyer of his office and broke out into yet another smile. Jenna Smalley, his secretary, was holding out a cup of coffee for him, something she tried to do every morning.

  “How do you always manage to know exactly when I’m coming this way?” Sam asked her, but she only grinned and put one of her pudgy fingers to her lips.

  “It’s a trade secret,” she said in a stage whisper. “You wouldn’t want me to give them all away, now, would you, Mr. Prichard?”

  “Oh, of course not,” Sam said with a chuckle. “Besides, I know good and well you can get into the building security videos from that computer of yours, so it’s not really all that hard to figure out.”

  “Spoilsport,” Jenna said. “Ruin all my fun! See how you are?”

  Sam chuckled again as he went into his office and closed the door behind himself. He sat down at his desk and turned on the monitor for his computer, then began looking through the reports that his team members had completed overnight.

  Summer had found the sticky-fingered stripper at a sleazy bar in LoDo and explained just how badly she intended to ruin the girl’s life if the missing m
emory stick wasn’t returned, which resulted in some frantic bra digging, which closed that case neatly. Sam added yet another memo praising her for a job well done, then approved her expense account request for the very small bar tab she had run up in the course of the night’s work.

  Walter Rawlings, Windlass’ somewhat legendary and almost supernaturally gifted crime scene analyst, had been sent on a trip to Salt Lake City a couple of days earlier to help determine how a thief had managed to walk off with a 600-pound statue of an angel. He always traveled and worked with a partner, Steve Beck, a retired police detective from Golden who was actually an old friend of Sam’s. Steve had reported that Walter had, as usual, figured out exactly how the crime was committed within 10 minutes of being on the scene.

  The statue was housed in a small room which was located just off the foyer of the building. A large, sealed glass window allowed all of the people passing by to see and admire the statute, but no one was allowed to ever get close or touch it. The room containing it could be entered only from the back, through a highly secure maintenance passageway, and the door to the statue itself was secured with 3 different locks that required three separate people to open them. It had always, until this theft had proven the thought wrong, been considered one of the most secure and theft-proof display systems in the world, but the statue had suddenly and inexplicably been missing one morning. A close examination of the room found nothing had been disturbed, other than the glaring fact that the statue itself was gone.

  The building had been built more than a century earlier, in the late eighteen hundreds, and was constructed of stone on solid ground. There was absolutely no conceivable way that anyone could explain how the statue had been removed from its accustomed place until Walter had walked into the room and looked around.

  “They took it out through the floor,” he said, and all of the police officers standing in and around the room scoffed at him.

  “Man, that’s impossible, because we’re standing on solid rock,” said the detective in charge. “There’s no basement, no way to take it down.”

  “They took their time, and they cut a tunnel in from the building across the street,” Walter said. “That building across from this one is the only one anywhere nearby that has a basement, so it had to start from over there. Then they used some heavy hydraulic jacks to hold up the floor under the statue while they cut all the way around it under the walls, and then they just lowered the whole thing down. They used some sort of lift to move the statue onto a flat cart and wheeled it away, then they just jacked the floor back up. You can’t see the cuts because they’re under the walls around the room, but they’re there, because the dirt that should be in the space where the floor meets the walls is gone. The jack is still down there and holding the floor up, so if you go across the street and find the entrance to the tunnel, you can follow it to find the jack.”

  A warrant to search the basement of the building across the street was quickly secured, and the basement entered. What looked like a small storage room had been built against one wall, and when it was opened, they found the rock and dirt that had been carefully dug out of the tunnel packed all around inside it. The tunnel was there, exactly as Walter had said it would be, and the police officers followed it all the way to the jack that was holding up the section of floor under the room where the statue had been kept.

  Security footage from a camera on the first floor of the building with the basement had captured images of four men going into the basement each day for two weeks, and then it caught them coming up a couple of nights earlier with something large on a hand truck. Still pictures were captured from the video and had been run through facial recognition, and the thieves had been identified. Now, the police only hoped to catch up to them before the solid copper statue could be sold or melted down for scrap.

  Sam couldn’t help laughing as he read the report not just once, but twice. He’d seen several times already what Walter was actually capable of, and it was just about as uncanny as Kim/Beauregard and her predictions of the future. Walter had assured him more than once that there was nothing supernatural about it at all, though; he just had a natural knack for seeing how things work and noticing small details that almost everyone else would miss, and determining what had to be truth out of the many possibilities that presented themselves.

  Each of his team members was able to report success in their individual cases, but this was something Sam had grown accustomed to. They were a good team, and each of them was already a highly trained and experienced investigator in his or her own right, and the respect they showed him as their team leader was awesome.

  The phone on his desk rang, and the light told him it was the intercom line. He picked it up and said, “Yes?”

  “Ron and Jeff are here to see you, Mr, Prichard,” Jenna said.

  Sam smiled. Ron Thomas and Jeff Donaldson were the two men who had founded Windlass Security, after they had left their jobs as electronic and computer technicians for the Department of Homeland Security. They had chosen to enter the private sector when their former boss, Sam’s old friend Harry Winslow, had been promoted and sent to work in the DHS headquarters in Washington, D.C. They had been after Sam to come work for them for quite some time, and he had finally decided to accept the offer a couple of months earlier.

  “Send them on in,” he said with a grin. He replaced the handset in its cradle and looked up at the door as the two men entered.

  Ron and Jeff stepped inside and closed the door behind them. Sam stood and shook hands with each of them, and then they sat in the chairs in front of his desk.

  “I just want to know,” Jeff said, “why it is that she always calls you ‘Mr. Prichard,’ but Ron and I are just Ron and Jeff. Can anybody explain that to me?”

  “It might have something to do with the fact that you used to date her,” Ron said. “I told you that was going to come back to haunt you someday, remember?” He turned and smiled at Sam.

  “Both of you at once,” Sam said. “Must be because there’s something big getting ready to happen.”

  “We think there certainly is,” Jeff said. “Sam, did you hear about the shooting at the Web Wide Awards show a couple nights ago? That kid that was shot, right on live video?”

  “Oh, yeah, Saturday night,” Sam said. “Indie and I were actually sitting in our living room and watching it when it happened. That kid was very lucky to live through that shot. Have you heard anything about who did it?”

  “I agree the kid was lucky,” Ron said, “but as for who did it, that’s still a mystery, and now the company has come to us to ask for our help in solving it for them. They’d like us to assign you and your team to find out who the shooter was and bring him to justice, and we’re going to be providing security for all of the winners as they go on their big victory tour next month.”

  Sam nodded that he understood. “Do the police have any leads at all? Or am I working in the dark, here?”

  “None that we’ve heard anything about. The shooter or shooters seem to have gotten in and out without being seen, and they must have known exactly where every security camera was, because there is no sign of anyone carrying anything into or out of the building that could be a rifle. They did find a few people, they said, who seemed to be carefully keeping their faces away from the cameras, but they’ve managed to identify most of them and cleared them.”

  “Has anyone tried to claim responsibility for it?” Sam asked. “Or has there been any indication of any kind of motive behind the shooting?”

  “The answer to both questions is a great big fat negative,” Ron said with a frown. “At this point, the sad fact is that you probably know just as much as the police do. How would you feel about taking on this kind of a case?”

  “I feel pretty good about it,” Sam said. “If anyone is going to be able to find the shooter, or shooters, it’s my team. Of course, we’ve got to consider the possibility that it was an inside job of some sort. I’d like to get Walter to look the
scene over as soon as possible, because that will probably tell us more than anything else, I think.”

  Jeff nodded. “He and Steve are due to fly back into the airport from Salt Lake City at noon,” he said. “I’m sending somebody out to the airport to pick them up, so they should be back in the city by one at the latest. Meanwhile, the two people who actually own Web Wide Awards are coming here in about twenty minutes, and we’d like you to sit in on the meeting with us. In fact,” he said, glancing around at Sam’s big conference table, “I think we should probably just have it in here.”

  “I’m more than happy to oblige,” Sam said. “Should I ask Jenna to get any kind of presentation ready? You know how she loves to do presentations.”

  “I don’t actually think were going to need one, in this case,” Ron said. “In fact, I don’t think you should even bring in any of the team. In this particular case, I think the only face they need to know is yours for the moment. We can introduce the others to them when and if the time comes, but it may turn out to be better for them to be unknown quantities, at least for now.”

  “I can agree with that, mostly,” Sam said. “However, I’m sure I’m going to want to put somebody inside their organization, and I think Jade would be the right one. They are primarily a web company, so just about everything they do is going to involve computers, and that was her specialty. How many people are going to be coming to this meeting?”

  “Just two, the owners,” Ron said. “John Morton and Annie Porter constitute the entire Board of Directors. John is the CEO, Annie is the COO and John’s assistant, but she’s also his girlfriend. The two of them own ninety percent of the stock in the company, so they are the ones who get to run the show. I really do mean that literally, with no pun intended.”

  “Okay, then,” Sam said, “no problem.” He reached over and picked up his phone and punched button one for Jenna.