Free Murder in the Dorm by C.G. Prado

are good points, Charlie, and they jive with some of what Guy and I’ve been thinking. I need some time to talk to him and of course we have other cases. You go to your class and I’ll call you this afternoon or perhaps not till this evening.”
    Charlie was just in time for class and was soon immersed in the topic they were covering that morning. Things weren’t over at noon because three students had questions, but Charlie was at the Club table by twelve-thirty. Conversation was mainly about the increasing tendency of students to lawyer up when questions arose about cheating. Things took a turn when Evan Jones showed up with Richard Baynes in tow.
    Charlie and Baynes exchanged looks, smiled, and the two newcomers joined the conversation. Eventually people starting leaving and finally only Charlie, Jones, and Baynes were left at the table.
    “Okay, I think I see what’s going on. I have a class, anyway. See you both later.”
    With that Jones left and Charlie and Baynes ordered more coffee and brandies.
    “Looks like we understood one another when I sat down.”
    “Definitely. Let me fill you in.”
    Charlie then told Baynes pretty much what he’d said to DeVries and asked for his thoughts.
    “Well, I can’t help you with Berger, but Kelsey is a different matter. I do think that because of his manner he was easy to underestimate. That business I told you about the laptop charges? He handled it very well. I had my suspicions, but he gave me no reason to favor the techie’s side of the story. As for whether he could do the sort of hacking you think he might have done, I don’t doubt it. He had adequate skill, in my view. He might have needed a little assistance, but once he knew what he was doing, there’d be no problem. Just what do you think he was actually doing?”
    “My guess is that McDermott was getting into brokerage accounts and triggering automatic-sell orders. Given that Kelsey seems to be the one who had expertise with stocks, I assume Kelsey told McDermott what orders to trigger, McDermott triggered the sell order on a stock and the price dropped even if only for a couple of minutes till someone realized what happened. In the meantime Kelsey bought the shares at the artificially depressed price. Then when the price of the stock stabilized, Kelsey sold the shares.”
    “I see. Now, maybe I can help here. I know a little about buying and selling stocks from my own experience. If Kelsey and McDermott had an accomplice in a brokerage, evidence of the trades and could probably be expunged.”
    “I do think having someone on the inside would make all the difference.”
    Baynes didn’t respond immediately and Charlie could see he was thinking. Charlie sipped his brandy and waited.
    Baynes looked off into the middle distance, took a drink of coffee, picked up his brandy glass, and spoke.
    “You know, Charlie, there’s a rather simpler way to structure the scam you’ve been describing. If Kelsey and McDermott did have the help of someone in a brokerage firm, that person could supply them with specific account numbers of accounts using automatic-sell orders. If Kelsey and McDermott had those numbers, they could work their scam like this: Say a given stock was trading at six dollars. They find an account with an automatic-sell order. One puts in a bid for the stock at the automatic-sell order price. The other triggers the automatic-sell order and they buy the stock. They then turn around and sell the stock at the price it’s actually trading at and pocket the difference.”
    “But if the stock were trading at six dollars, wouldn’t there be other bids below six but higher than the automatic-sell order price? How could they count on getting the stock at their price?”
    “I’m sure that’s where the difficult hacking comes in and why it took two of them to work the scheme. While one is handling the buy order, the one triggering the sell order would have to insure that their buy order was the one