Sex and Murder.com: A Paul Turner Mystery by Mark Richard Zubro Page A

head of the creativity division.”
    “Where were you early this morning?”
    Waldron looked pained. “I got up like I do every morning. I shaved, showered, dressed, stopped for coffee, and came in. I was here before seven. I have no witnesses. Although, I stop at the same coffee shop every day. The clerk might recognize me.”
     
    Rian Davis was the woman who had not spoken in the first group they’d met. She wore black jeans, a highly starched, pink cotton shirt, covered by a black silk vest, which was buttoned in a bustier effect. She spoke quietly, calmly, and authoritatively. “Waldron hasn’t got an ounce of creativity in his body. He can crunch billions of numbers, good for him. My division was the heart and soul of this company. We were engineers, creators. The real lifeblood of the operation.”
    Turner said, “He mentioned problems with people getting into your systems.”
    “Sabotage? Hackers! Crackers!” She snorted in derision. “We were the company everybody turned to for preventing just such problems. Only we could develop systems faster than crackers could break into them. We were the ones governments from around the globe turned to. The security area is a gold mine. Spending on security is up to five percent of corporate operating budgets now. It used to be around one percent.”
    “If you specialized in it, didn’t they try and break into your computers?” Turner asked.
    “Sure, crackers and hackers targeted us. They’d try every trick to best us. They never could. Brooks and Craig were too smart and too clever. We spent innumerable hours on it. Every computer company has to. Unfortunately, Brooks believed it was good for the company to hire the most successful crackers. I told him he’d be sorry. It’s like hiring the criminals to police the streets. It’s a pleasantly liberal notion, until it goes very wrong.”
    “And did it go wrong here?” Turner asked.
    “No one ever got into our files from the outside. We were just too good for that, but we hired a cracker a couple years ago, Eddie Homan. About ten years back he broke into the Pentagon computers and supposedly was three clicks away from starting a thermonuclear war.”
    “Is that true?” Turner asked.
    “True enough that he got a seven-year prison sentence. Against my advice, we hired him. No question, he was good—very, very good. I warned them about internal sabotage. Craig and Brooks could be very arrogant about their abilities. They wouldn’t listen to me. Homan ended up trying to sabotage everything we were working on.”
    “Why?”
    “Perversity? He’s nuts? That he was a brilliant nut case made it very difficult for us to figure out what was going on. One day a teenage intern accidentally came upon an anomaly in one of our programs. He reported it to me. It took me an hour or so to realize we had a major problem. I immediately notified Craig and Brooks. We worked forty-eight straight hours to find out where the problem originated from. Homan was aware of us from the first. He and his files were long gone by the time we went to confront him.”
    “Did the company lose much because of him?” Fenwick asked.
    “Time, energy—but nothing monetarily. At least Brooks learned a lesson about hiring known felons.”
    “When was this?” Turner asked.
    “A few months ago.”
    “And where is Eddie Homan now?”
    “He’s disappeared into the Internet ozone. He has no known address. Every once in a while when we get a nibble trying to get into our computers, we assume it’s him. We had to change all the codes very fast when he left.”
    Turner asked, “Who fires employees?”
    “We didn’t fire Eddie. He just walked out and never came back.”
    “Who fires people who are not Eddie?” Fenwick asked.
    “Each department head is in charge of their own personnel. Frankly, I don’t remember anyone having to be let go. The screening process for hiring is pretty thorough.”
    “Are there business rivals?” Turner