Murder in the Dorm (6 page)

“I agree with that part and both of those things are being worked on. We’ve got a very good guy going through McDermott’s apartment right now. In the meantime, I believe it could be useful for you to pursue your efforts to find out more about McDermott and Kelsey from your colleagues and students. Someone might know something suggestive of just what they were up to.”

With that DeVries checked her watch and hurried out, telling Charlie she didn’t want to be late for a meeting. Charlie had another cup of coffee and wondered what else he could do about talking to people regarding Kelsey and McDermott.

In his office Charlie looked over his notes and gathered what he needed for his epistemology class. He sat for a bit turning his mind from his talk with DeVries to the subject matter he was to discuss. Once in class he was quickly absorbed in that day’s topic and welcomed the questions it prompted from the students. The time went quickly and all too soon class was over and he took his books and notes back to his office.

At lunch there was a new face at the Club table. A man in his late fifties, casually dressed in a blazer and open-collar shirt, sat next to the historian Evan Jones.

“Charlie, I want you to meet Richard, Richard Baynes. He’s the past chair of Computing Science and has some information you’ll find of interest. Richard, this is Charlie Douglas from Philosophy.”

“Charlie.”

“Good to meet you, Richard. So you’re in computing?”

“Was, Charlie; I took early retirement when my term as chair ended last Summer. I met Evan here at a welcome party for new members of staff and we discovered we’re both avid concert fans. But to get to the point, Evan tells me you’re helping the police with the deaths of Kevin Kelsey and Lawrence McDermott.”

“Well, I’m trying to provide them with information. Did you know Kelsey and McDermott?”

“Mainly Kelsey. I spoke with McDermott a few times, but have only a rather negative impression of him. Basically, I came not to trust him. It’s not that I know anything about what he might have been doing; it’s got to do with the things he asked me. He wanted to know what sorts of responsibilities interns have. That’s a legitimate question, since many of our graduating students intern for a year or two, but McDermott pushed it with respect to things like how much oversight was usually involved when interns were assigned to projects and he was interested in what sorts of liabilities interns incur if something goes wrong. None of this was particularly notable on any given occasion, but it added up and left me with the strong impression that McDermott saw an internship more as an opportunity for something than a first step in his career. But it’s Kelsey I want to tell you about because of a specific situation.”

“Richard, I can see you’re done with your lunch. May I suggest we move over to a small table and have some dessert and coffee? You too Evan?”

“No thanks, Charlie. You two go ahead. I just wanted to get you together.”

Baynes and Charlie went over to a table for two and Charlie insisted that coffee and dessert needed to be accompanied by a brandy or perhaps a liqueur. Baynes didn’t put up much of a fight and Charlie ordered a sandwich and a glass of wine for himself and an espresso, biscotti, and a brandy for Baynes.

“This may not amount to much, but I had a little trouble with Kelsey while chair. It started with an irate member of the Information Technology Services shop. Kelsey had had a laptop worked on and caused a scene when he was told the cost of the work done. That much wouldn’t have gotten to me, but apparently Kelsey tried to bribe the repairperson.”

“He wouldn’t pay for the repairs but was willing to give the guy money?”

“No; that’s what made the matter memorable. What Kelsey did was offer the repairperson a supposedly failsafe way of doubling whatever he might be willing to put into a particular stock. Kelsey told him that if he made the repair bill go away, Kelsey would give him the name of a stock that would double in price in a week or ten days. The repairperson couldn’t believe it, told Kelsey to pay up or he wouldn’t get his laptop, and came to my office.”

“What happened then?”

“Well, Kelsey was called to my office and denied the whole thing. He said he’d only been joking around with the repairperson. He gave me a check for the cost of the repairs and asked that his laptop be returned to him. It was basically a ‘he said, she said’ case, so I took his check, called the shop and told them I had the check and to give Kelsey his laptop. As far as my involvement went, that was the end of the matter. I ran into Evan yesterday and we were chatting about the two killings, so I told him the story and he said I should repeat it to you.”

“I’m very glad you did. It actually fits in rather well with some other stuff I’ve heard or pieced together about both Kelsey and McDermott. Did you ever speak to Kelsey in any connection after that?”

“No; I saw him around, but we didn’t speak again. What do you think was going on?”

“I think Kelsey and McDermott were involved in some sort of scam, and I learned that Kelsey won prizes for his work on model stock and bond portfolios. Your story confirms that Kelsey was knowledgeable about stocks and not averse to using his knowledge for his own gain, and that supports my theory about what they were up to.”

“So Evan was right; it was important for you to get this information. Well, I won’t press you further, but I would very much appreciate it if you’d keep me informed on this business. Let me give you my card. You might need to call me, too, if you want me to verify what I’ve told you to the police. I’m also sure that somewhere in the chair’s office there’s some brief note recording what happened regarding Kelsey.”

“Richard, this has been a great help. I definitely will keep you informed and we’ll have lunch again soon.”

With that Baynes and Charlie left their table and started on their way out of the Club. By then Jones was gone from the Club table, as were most of the others who’d been lunching there, so Charlie couldn’t thank him. He’d see him later. Charlie accompanied Baynes to his car, thanked him again, and returned to his office.

It seemed things were coming together, but it was still all speculation. DeVries had to find that external drive or one or more of the computers, preferably both. With that thought Charlie wondered if inviting Kim Berger to lunch might not loosen her tongue a bit. He didn’t know how much DeVries would tell him, and it would be very useful to learn what sort of level McDermott’s day trading reached on average.

That evening Charlie told Kate what he’d learned that day. She then asked the key question.

“What sort of money do you think was involved? If McDermott was moving a lot of bucks around, it shouldn’t be hard for DeVries to gauge the scale of his activity. It’s another matter, though, whether she’ll tell you.”

“I know. I was thinking of inviting Berger for lunch and seeing if I could worm anything out of her about McDermott’s trading.”

“Waste of time, Charlie. She’s not about to risk her job to whisper secrets in your shell-like ear, not for a Club lunch.”

Chapter 9

The Second Friday

Charlie was just pouring his breakfast coffee when the phone rang. It was DeVries.

“Charlie. Hope it’s not too early for you, but I felt I had to tell you: we found McDermott’s external drive. It’s impressive what he did; he’d actually removed the lintel of his bedroom door. You know, the top part that goes across, and had the drive hidden in it. Our guy was getting desperate but then thought the lintel looked just a tad off. It wasn’t perfectly level because McDermott had put in a catch so he could remove it by pulling down on it and snap it back in place. It was cleverly done. I think our guy got lucky.”

“That’s great. Do you know what’s on it?”

“That’s where it gets hairy. It’s encrypted and, I’m told, very professionally. We have a couple of techies on it, but it’ll probably take some time. They think it might even have to be sent off somewhere. I’m hoping they’ll crack it. Anyway, I know I shouldn’t be blabbing so much, but really wanted to tell you.”

After DeVries rang off Charlie started thinking hard about what he knew and surmised. What was likely was that the scam involved hacking into a brokerage or more than one and messing with trades and accounts. That would take the sort of expertise McDermott and Kelsey had. The more he thought about it, the more confident Charlie became that he was on the right track. It wouldn’t hurt to shore things up, though, so he called Mason Blake.

“I’ll buy you lunch if I can pick what’s left of your brain. Club at noon?”

“Only if this is aside from my other sundaes.”

“It is.”

“Noon.”

With that out of the way, Charlie spent the rest of the morning making good progress on his paper. The only interruption came a bit after eleven, when a student from the epistemology class needed some help with Foucault’s somewhat slippery multi-faceted view of truth. Charlie and the student had a good talk and wrapped up just before noon. Charlie walked to the Club and found Blake waiting for him at a table for two.

“Okay, what’s this about?”

Charlie explained his thinking about the sort of scam Kelsey and McDermott probably had going.

“Hmmm. I think you’re right. If it were something involving people producing money, like a Ponzi scheme, computer use would be fairly basic. Mainly to advertise and keep records. I think a hotshot like McDermott would find that boring, regardless of the money. No, you’ve got it right. It had to do with hacking. The big question, though, is what they hacked. To be serious money, it’d have to be a bank or brokerage.”

“Can you think of an example?”

“One that intrigued me when I read about it a year or so ago had to do with currency conversion and fractions.”

“Fractions?”

“Yeah. Look, you convert dollars to pounds or euros or whatever or the other way around and the bank rounds up or down to the nearest cent in debits and credits, but the computers carry the fractions. So you hack in and transfer the fractions to your account.”

“Is that really worth the time and effort?”

“Oh, definitely. I read about it in the New Scientist and some guy took a British bank for thirty thousand pounds before they caught on.” (Vol, 220, No. 2937, pg. 22)

“That’s quite something.”

“Certainly is. The tough part is hacking into the bank. Once you’re in, you’re good because no one will notice anything for a long while. And when they do, you move on to another bank.”

“There’s something else. We know that at least one of these guys had an account with Raymond, Teller. Is that important?”

“Very. Raymond, Teller is Kingsford’s biggest brokerage. Having an account with them he’d know how things work. He could hack his own account pretty much with impunity and learn whatever codes it used as well as internal addresses. Then they could hack into automated sell orders, trigger them, buy the stocks, then sell them after the triggered sell orders were corrected. Mutual funds, financial companies, and some individuals regularly place automatic-sell orders on stocks at a certain point to protect against sudden losses. Say a stock is trading at ten bucks and they trigger an auto-sell order at eight bucks. Kelsey and McDermott then buy the stock at eight and sell it at ten when the correction is made and make two bucks a share. Now, how about my sundae?”

Back in his office Charlie thought he’d made real progress. What Blake had said convinced him he was right about the sort of scam Kelsey and McDermott had been running. Did he have enough to call DeVries? It was really all speculation. As he was trying to decide the phone rang and it was DeVries.

“Charlie, our techies got into the files on the drive. That’s the good news. The bad news is that there wasn’t much on it, and some of what there is makes no sense, even unencrypted. First of all, we found his electronic statements from Raymond, Teller. They’re of interest, but it’s the rest that’s puzzling. It’s a bunch of files, each devoted to a particular month. There are eleven, ending with last month and going back ten more. That part is clear enough, but the files are just three columns of numbers. There are no names, no text. The left hand column has eight and ten digit numbers and most of them repeat once or twice down the column. One techie thought they’re probably account numbers. The middle and right hand columns could be dollar amounts, but there are no decimals, so it’s not clear. The numbers run from five to seven digits, with most being six digits. What’s most puzzling is that there are two numbers in the right hand column, separated by a dash. The two numbers in the right hand column add up to about two-thirds of the number in the center column. The second of the two numbers on the right is always lower than the first.”

“That’s all there is?”

“Yes. The only other thing is that the techies say the numbers files were overwritten dozens of times, which means each was updated often before the next one was started. What we’re doing now, and it’ll take a while, is comparing the numbers in the left hand column to credit card accounts, bank accounts, brokerage accounts, and anything else we can think of. I don’t understand the lengths to which McDermott went to hide the drive, given both the encryption and the puzzling nature of the contents. I’ve got to go. If you think of anything, give me a call.”

Charlie thought the techie was right; that the left hand column was account numbers. The middle and right hand columns sounded like dollars. No need for decimals. Either McDermott hadn’t been concerned with cents or hadn’t bothered with periods, simply reading the first two figures on the right as cents. If the numbers ran from five to seven digits, that would make them hundreds of dollars, allowing two digits for cents, and up to tens of thousands, again allowing two digits for cents. Charlie didn’t think it likely that cents weren’t represented because that would make the seven digit numbers millions, which wasn’t credible.