Free The Woman Who Stopped Traffic by Daniel Pembrey Page A

She heard the murmur of the hotel’s air conditioning system, and felt cold sweat at the nape of her neck. Rubbing her wrists, she remembered the events of the previous day. The fraudulent Clamor page. She reached for her laptop and groggily googled herself. But before she had time to check the results, the room phone exploded –
    Nguyen: “Are you avoiding me?”
    She couldn’t tell whether he was pissed, joking or what. “I just woke up,” she said.
    “Natalie. It’s almost ten o’clock.”
    “No way! – Shit , I’m sorry!”
    “Never mind. What did you want to talk about?”
    She came right out with it: “I’m having second thoughts about this.”
    “About what?”
    “I don’t know, me taking over Malovich’s security role – it feels like it’s stirring things in ways I don’t understand, or like. It feels as though it’s starting to make someone very unhappy – likely Malovich himself...”
    “I doubt it,” Tom said. “At least, not any more.”
    The phone silence rumbled loud in her ear.
    “Yuri Malovich just took his own life.”

CHAPTER 8
     
    “I’ll be there in a minute,” Ben Silverman said over the phone.
    Natalie was leaning against the side of her over-heating Taurus Limited in the Silicon Bean parking lot. “But why? – Do we need to meet here?”
    “One minute,” Silverman repeated and clicked off.
    The meeting she’d just had with Nguyen hadn’t gone at all well. Indeed, he’d been uncharacteristically beside himself: “You come and sit in on the most sensitive strategy session of the hottest company in the Valley, about to go public … you take it all in – and then you decide you WANT OUT?”
    A colleague and member of the company’s executive team had just died. It did rather put her fake profile page into perspective.
    Silverman’s graphite grey Porsche sluthered to a halt alongside her.
    She’d finally found a clothes store and was wearing a long crepe skirt. Chocolate-brown boots sheathed her feet – far too warm for outdoors in the Valley. Her toes wriggled uncomfortably. The smell of burned tire-rubber drifted. Silverman’s legs seemed to appear from the sports car long before he did.
    “Follow me.”
    Huh?
    He strode not into the coffee shop but rather round to the side, past the cardboard boxes spilling out back. A Hispanic barista with sensitive eyes was on smoke break, sitting quietly on the back steps. Asphalt gave way to rough ground, which descended into a culvert caked dry with desiccated brush. Ascending the other side, they came to a wall of faded eucalyptus bushes splotched angry maroon-red in places, the leaves crinkling in the airless noon heat. Silverman held aside a branch.
    “Where the hell are you leading me?”
    “You’ll see.”
    On the other side, they dropped down into the rear parking lot of a residential complex comprising twin level-blocks, all built in classic Californian motel style, outdoor stairs leading to the upper units. The amount of parking surface made the units seem like an afterthought to the automobile. The blocks were set at off-ninety degree angles to the street beyond, like huge airplane wings; everything seemed designed to connote with mobility and ease.
    Blocking a street exit was an unmarked Crown Victoria Interceptor, electric-blue flickering ominously in the grill. For the first time, she heard the fierce crackle of police radio. Beyond gawked a kid on a pushbike and a Hispanic lady cradling a baby.
    One crime scene operative was leaning into the shade, scrutinizing the screen of a black SLR camera. Another was showing a bottle of chemicals to a third team member. What appeared to be the medical examiner was talking into her recording device about “the conjunctivia of the eyelids caused by strangulation –”
    A team like this didn’t attend to a straightforward suicide case – even one involving a senior software executive in the heart of Silicon Valley. But the question foremost in her mind was just