Free Cyber Genius by Patricia Rice

software—almost totally impossible.
    I e-mailed Graham to ask if he’d lowered himself to hacking
into the company’s internal network yet. I got a message back from Tudor saying
he was on it. I tried not to gape in astonishment.
    Fine, we were all on the same page. Next.
    I went through the Department of Health reports and found
the names of the kitchen staff who had been there that night.
    Reading the report, I’d say if Graham hadn’t intervened, the
killers would have won a Get Out of Jail Free card. Accidental puffer fish
poisoning would have gone on the autopsy report of five wealthy men.
    It was Saturday. Few employees in the DOH would be working
today unless they were on emergency calls. I rifled through Graham’s files from
the health department—rudimentary at this point. Fugu chefs are trained in
excessive cleanliness. The instant the soup had been served, the pot and all
utensils, including the cutting board, used for the soup had been scrubbed with
special cleaning compounds.
    According to the health department reports, Adolph Nasser,
the head chef, asserted that the fish guts had been properly disposed of per
regulations. This involved wrapping them in layers of plastic and taking them off
to be destroyed by chemicals—burning doesn’t kill the poison. They’d tried to
question the soup chef—one Hiroko Kita—but he’d left work on the day the DOH
showed up and wasn’t answering the phone. I didn’t see any evidence that the
police were getting a warrant, so they might be in touch with him by now.
    At the time of the report, the DOH hadn’t known about the
botulism and hadn’t tested for anything else. There wasn’t much hope of finding
contaminated salsa or anything else lying around days after the meal was
served, although they were apparently turning over the kitchen looking for any
violations. I didn’t think that was a useful avenue of pursuit.
    One of my specialties is tracing people through the sticky
web of computers—it’s paid the bills on many an occasion. I ran Hiroko Kita
through the routine and discovered he’d not been with the kitchen for long.
    Suspicion alerted, I ransacked the hotel’s personnel
files—even an amateur hacker can slide into most of those. Human Resource
departments tend to be run by extroverts who like to talk, not people who care
about passwords or computers. All I needed was the hotel’s email address, an HR
employee’s name, and after a couple of tries—the password 4 people. I sighed and shook my head at the predictability.
    Skimming through Hiroko Kita’s slim file, I noticed he had
been recommended by Tray Fontaine, a chef on the west coast. Tray didn’t give
an employer, so I looked him up—he ran the fancy dining room at MacroWare’s
corporate headquarters. Who knew nerds got their own chefs?
    Having MacroWare’s chef send a puffer fish cook to serve
poison soup to MacroWare’s execs certainly sounded... fishy... to me.
    It was a wee bit early to call the coast, so I dug into Tray
and Kita’s backgrounds a little more. I didn’t find anything that appeared
potentially blackmailable on either of them. I wasn’t planning on
blackmailing—unless I thought it was necessary—but chances were good that
whoever wanted Stiles dead might have coerced one or both of them into helping.
    I can’t help it. That’s the way my mind works. Blackmail and
money are the grease that turns the wheels of governments—why not corporations
as well?
    I could tell from the files falling into our shared cloud
account that Graham and Tudor were tracking down hotel security staff and happily
erasing Graham’s existence from the meeting room. I’m more of a let’s-get-the-bad-guy
person. I wanted to talk to Kita before the police got there.
    There was a nine-year-old fly in my ointment however.
    EG would be sulking because Tudor wasn’t there to play with
her. Nick had taken off to have his own life and couldn’t keep her entertained.
She was capable of