Scheduling Conflict Read online

  “I always figure heightened security is better than that lackadaisical crap most of these places employ these days,” the chief said, and left it at that.

  So Riley was ready, the banks were ready, the entire force was ready.

  And she didn’t call.

  ***

  One month, five smash-and-grabs, two gang-shootouts, three murders, and yet another suicide later, the phone rang on Riley’s desk. He wasn’t contemplating his mug of coffee — he’d graduated to a styrofoam cup of designer joe at the suggestion of Dave, whose divorce became final the week before.

  Riley still wasn’t a morning person, still hadn’t learned how to shut off the tube late at night or how to shut off his brain once he went horizontal, so he still stared at his desk with bleary eyes, only now he would try to figure out what each and every stain was, and whether it came from yesterday’s lunch or last week Thursday’s.

  When the phone rang, he picked it up, only to discover the receiver was sticky from the mocha he’d spilled the night before.

  “What?” he barked.

  “Why, Detective Scott,” said that sexy, sexy voice. “Did you miss me that much?”

  He hadn’t missed her at all. He hadn’t even thought of her (except maybe a little — that voice in the middle of the night, when he had nothing better to do than stare at naked women on HBO2. Lately he’d kept the sound turned off, and the women — every single one of them — had a throaty, sexy voice that sent shivers down his back).

  “You haven’t called,” he said, sounding more like a jilted lover than he wanted to.

  He snapped his fingers at Dave, whose eyebrows went up. Dave knew the routine for finding that cell phone, if indeed, that’s what she was calling on, but he also had other duties this time. He had to make sure that the banks were notified, particularly the one she mentioned.

  “I’ve been meaning to call,” she said, “but I told you. I’ve had a busy week.”

  “It’s been more than a week since you called.” Yep. Jilted lover. Not that he had much of a choice. He wanted to keep her on the line, figure out what she was doing, what she was really up to.

  “It’s been two. Don’t you have busy weeks?” Her voice had a plaintive edge.

  “Sometimes,” he said. “Rob another bank?”

  “A couple,” she said. “First Federal Savings and Loan, although I don’t know if that qualifies as a bank. And McAdams Family Bank, on Eighteenth. I’ve been very busy.”

  “Sounds like it.” He wrote down the two banks, although he didn’t have to. People were listening in. “You still planning to come in?”

  “I never said I’d come in.” Her voice had a pretty pout to it. “I said I’d turn myself in.”

  Interesting distinction. “Have you changed your mind?”

  “Should I?”

  “You’re the one that’s been calling me, Miss—”

  “Oh, detective,” she said. “That’s cheating. I’ve told you what I’ve been doing. I know what you’ve been doing. You’ve been increasing security at area banks.”

  “Does that create a problem for you?”

  “I wouldn’t use the word problem,” she said. “I rarely have problems with security.”

  “Why is that?” he asked.

  “Because no one’s caught me yet,” she said.

  “Is that why you’re offering to turn yourself in?” he asked.

  “Detective.” There was just a hint of sarcasm in her tone. “I have other reasons for calling you.”

  “What are they?” he asked.

  She chuckled. He wasn’t sure he could survive many more of those chuckles.

  “How about I call you on Wednesday, and we’ll discuss the terms of my capture?”

  “Why not now?” he asked, but he was talking to a dead line.

  Dave came in from the other room, sighing. “New phone, again. Different tower. She likes to tease you, Riley.”

  “She’s doing a good job of it.” He hated that she knew he’d raised the security levels at the bank. “You checking out those banks?”

  “They’ve all been notified,” Dave said.

  “Then let’s go.”

  ***

  Riley wondered if she was watching him as he went to the two banks she’d mentioned. Despite its name, First Federal Savings and Loan was a bank, and had more security systems than Fort Knox. And despite its name, McAdams Family Bank had no McAdams working for it, no family in charge, and was barely a bank by federal regulations.

  Riley would have loved to get the financial geek squad on McAdams Family, but that wasn’t his job. At the moment, preventing a robbery at the so-called bank was all he was supposed to do.

  And while he went through the same questions over and over — Robbery? (no) Embezzlement? (no) Missing items (no) — he mulled this case over and over in his head.

  All he had was her word that she had done something, and if she had, her word wasn’t worth much. She had once told him she had never lied. And all of these banks had been robbed before.

  So he sent Dave on a new part of the wild goose chase: he had to go through the archives to find out if the previous bank robbers had ever been caught.

  Riley continued going through the motions, asking, receiving the answers he already knew, and going over and over those conversations with her in his head.

  Finally, he hit on something she shouldn’t have known.

  Increased security. It had never been a problem for her in the past. Why would it be a problem now?

  Why indeed?

  So he finally got to ask a new question, and he asked it of the president of McAdams Family Bank. “Did you update your security like we asked a few weeks ago?”

  “Oh, yeah,” said the president, a man so young he could have been Riley’s son. “We hired a new firm and everything.”

  “When did they test the systems?” Riley asked.

  “A few days ago,” the president said.

  “Did they run a mock robbery?” Riley asked.

  The president smiled. “How did you know?”

  ***

  The firm, Blue Chip Security Ltd., had offices on the far edge of town. Riley called Dave off the deep background, and picked him up on the way to Blue Chip’s offices.

  They looked secure enough. Various cameras, bugging devices, and computers stood on shelves around the reception area. As Riley and Dave walked in, Riley saw himself reflected on a hundred surfaces. He couldn’t locate all the cameras in such a short period of time.

  The owner of Blue Chip, Bob O’Dell, was slender, young, and balding, the kind of guy who would seem more at home behind a computer than running a security firm.

  Of course, security had changed since Riley was young. Now it was about cameras and lasers and motion detectors instead of muscle and proficiency with a gun.

  O’Dell’s office which was in the back didn’t seem like an office at all. He didn’t even have a conventional desk. Instead, two laptops sat on tables, and other computers ran in the next room.

  He readily admitted to doing security for all the banks mentioned, and like a good security guru, wouldn’t mention any problems with the systems at all, except to say that they were now properly updated.

  “And tested?” Riley asked.

  “We’d be remiss if we didn’t test,” O’Dell said.

  “How do you test?” Riley asked. “Run diagnostics?”

  O’Dell grinned. “You know how we do it. We have outsiders try to break in.”

  “They have any success?” Dave asked.

  “Can’t tell you if they do or not,” O’Dell said. “Confidentiality. You’d have to get a warrant, which might be hard, since there was no crime.”

  “Only the admission of one,” Riley said. “We’d like to be able to check.”

  O’Dell nodded. He grabbed a file from a desk drawer, shoved it forward, and grinned. “Y’know,” he said. “I need a bathroom break. I’ll be back in about five minutes.”

&nb
sp; He headed for the door. When he reached it, he stopped.

  “You do realize that we have pretty tight security here, too.”

  Dave nodded, looking a bit clueless, but Riley wasn’t. He glanced at the file, and flipped open the manila edge.

  “He said there’s security,” Dave said.

  “Plain sight,” Riley said. “That’s clear, even on the tapes.”

  “Digital,” Dave said.

  “What?” Riley asked.

  “No one uses tape any more,” Dave said.

  Riley didn’t care. What he did care about was the names of all the banks and credit unions that O’Dell provided security for. Only five of them refused to upgrade their systems after break-ins.

  Five, and Riley knew the name of four of them: National Bank and Trust; Eastern United; First Federal; and McAdams Family. All of them had been tested a few days before the phone calls. All of them had failed, and all of them, when contacted, said they couldn’t afford the additional outlay of security.

  Four of the five — the same four — accused O’Dell of creating the flaws in the system so that he could charge extra money.

  Riley closed the file and sat back in his chair. A minute later, O’Dell came back into the room.

  “One more question,” Riley said. “Do you have a favorite company for security testing?”

  O’Dell smiled. “We have several. If I were you, I’d start with Kat and Mouse Incorporated. They specialize in systems first. I’ll give you a list of the others.”

  Kat and Mouse. Somehow Riley’d expected something with Goose in the title. But that would have been much too obvious.

  ***

  She wasn’t at all what he had expected, sitting behind her desk in that tiny office, with thousands of dollars of computer equipment behind her. She was a few pounds heavier, a few years younger, and a few degrees plainer.

  But that voice made up for everything.

  “And you call yourself a detective,” she said, leaning back in the leather chair that was the center of the small room. “Three phone calls. Three, before you could clear your schedule enough to come and see me.”

  Riley smiled at her. Her name was on the door: Katharine Mauser, Detective. Only of the private kind, specializing in security systems, computer fraud, and white collar crime.

  Kat, of Kat and Mouse.

  “You didn’t rob any banks,” he said, leaning against the door jamb, effectively blocking Dave’s entry into the space. For some reason, Riley wanted this interview all to himself.

  “Oh, but I did,” she said, giving him a half smile that made up for even more. Those eyebrows added a bit too — made a few promises that no naked woman on HBO2 could ever fulfill.

  “You didn’t take anything,” he said. “Did you?”

  “Only their security,” she said. “And silly them, they really didn’t want it back.”

  “So you called me. How come you didn’t call anyone else?” he asked.

  She smiled. “Have you looked in the mirror, Detective Riley?”

  He had. He’d only seen a craggy face that got more and more lined as time went on.

  “Have we met?” he asked, thinking he’d remember her.

  “I’ve only watched,” she said. “But since I got to chose a detective, I figured I’d chose one worth talking to.”

  “What made you come to the police?” he asked. “No crime had been committed.”

  She shrugged. “I’m supposed to protect people from fraud and crime. Call me cynical, but banks that don’t update their security get robbed. Banks that get robbed get federal insurance money. I’ve noticed, in my line of work, that a number of those banks then close. And sometimes, no one notices that the banks ignored procedures — at least, they don’t notice in time to prevent the managers and presidents from disappearing to some warm place that lacks extradition treaties with the United States.”

  “You don’t like that, huh?” Riley said.

  “I’ve seen it too often,” she said.

  “You think anyone on your list is a potential?” he asked.

  “They all have potential,” she said. “But until I called you, I would have banked on the family bank. There was always something a little shady about them.”

  “So,” Riley said, “you were doing this out of the goodness of your heart.”

  Kat stood. She was short — not even five feet — but well proportioned. When she stood, the weight redistributed into all the right places.

  “Actually,” she said, those eyebrows dancing and that voice lowering even more, “I was getting tired of playing with myself.”

  Which was when Dave excused himself and went back to the car.

  “Need someone else to play with, do you?” Riley asked, his eyes twinkling.

  She waved a ringless left hand at him. “It gets lonely, sneaking around in the middle of the night, robbing things.”

  “You just want to get caught?” he asked.

  She chuckled, that throaty, throaty chuckle. And he got another shiver—and enjoyed it.

  “I’d rather do this properly,” she said. “Y’know, dinner first? And then, maybe, we could turn in—together.”

  His breath caught. “All right. How’s your schedule look?”

  “Free, detective,” she said with a smile. “Quite free.”

  ---

  Kristine Dexter’s odd sense of right and wrong has made romantic suspense her ideal genre. She has published other novels under other names, but her first novel as Kristine Dexter is The Perfect Man, also being published by WMG Publishing in the Spring of 2011.