“What an amazing world you’ve created, PC Monroe. Now, where the hell are you so we can sharethisworld?”
I looked around the room but found no answers. There were no big “I’ve gone to find Amy” notes pinned up anywhere, no clues to tell me what he was up to and why he hadn’t called me. Like the rest of the house, this room was silent, nothing but the swish of the air-conditioning, a faint hum from the computer’s fan, and the soft, muted flutterings as the hard drive fired up to carry out some task.
The thump of Holder’s footsteps as he came back downstairs broke my angsty thoughts. “All right. Now I’m worried. His bed hasn’t been slept in. His bathroom is spotless, which means he hasn’t used it since the housekeeper cleaned up yesterday afternoon.” Holder stopped in the middle of the room and pinched his lower lip while he thought a moment before grabbing the phone on the table next to me. “I’m calling the police.”
My eyes widened, the sick feeling inside me morphing into something much, much worse. “Police? You think something’s seriously wrong? Like he might have been robbed or attacked?”
“No. But I don’t like this. The security system was off when we came in, the lights were all on, and nothing is out of place. If he was robbed, there is a good fifty grand worth of computer equipment in this room alone. Something is going on, and I don’t like it. What’s my emergency? Oh, sorry, police. I need the police, please. I’ve got a missing person to report. A missing millionaire person. Yeah, I can hold.” Holder covered the mouth of the phone and asked,
“Is there anything on the computer there that says where he went?”
“No,” I said, scooting slightly to the side so he could see the monitor. I clicked around to show him the open programs. “There’s just the game client, some sort of financial program, what looks like a user database, and a document full of computerese.”
Holder peered at the screen. “That’s the game control, not just a client. And yes, that’s the user database—looks like he was pulling up your daughter’s info.
Probably was looking for your phone number. That looks like his bank client.
No idea what he was doing with that, unless it was to check and make sure he has enough bucks to keep you happy. That file isn’t computerese; it’s codese—
part of the security protocol code used in the game. No doubt he was locking down the game so Paul couldn’t hack his way into it again. Hello? Yes, I want to report a missing person.”
Holder turned away while he gave the pertinent info about Corbin. Something about the computer bothered me, but I couldn’t figure out what it was. I saved the document with the computer code, then closed it, looking at the icons on the desktop, wondering what it was that was making me uneasy. I closed the user database, glancing over to the computer’s front. The little green hard drive light was blinking away madly. I clicked on the game client and brought it to the fore.
“Is it okay if I close the game control?” I asked Holder.
“Yeah, sure. The server has the same control panel running,” he answered quickly before explaining to the police dispatcher for the third time his relationship to Corbin, and why he felt the disappearance should be taken seriously.
I closed the client, frowning at the computer unit. The green hard drive light was still flickering, indicating the hard drive was running. “That leaves you,” I said softly as I maximized the financial program’s screen. It wasn’t one I used, but it was simple enough for me to do a little snooping into Corbin’s financial state. Bank accounts, investments, tax information—it was all there.
That’s when I noticed what the program was doing. Before my astonished eyes, one of Corbin’s accounts suddenly generated a transfer and zeroed itself out.
“Holder?” I said, clicking back to the account tracking page, pulling up a history. Goose bumps crawled up my spine as I did some mental addition of the amounts that were involved in the last few transactions. “Holder, can you come here?”
“Busy with the cops,” he muttered. “Fools don’t seem to understand how unlike Corb this is.”
“I seriously think you need to see this,” I said, investigating the transactions with a few clicks of the mouse. “You said that Corbin is a millionaire.”
“Yeah, but he puts most of it back into the company.”
“Well, according to this, he has approximately one hundred and eighty-two thousand dollars to his name,” I said, clicking on the sum function. “But another one million, four hundred thousand has been transferred away in the last couple of hours.”
“What?” Holder yelled, leaning over me to look at the screen. “Holy shit!
What’s going on?”
The hard drive ran again. I clicked back to the account screen just in time to see another account transfer trigger. “Someone is moving Corbin’s money.
See?” I pointed to the transaction list. “Those are the accounts the money is being sent to.”
We looked at each other and said the same word at the same time. “Paul.”
“He’s stealing Corbin’s money,” I said.
“Trying to ruin him any way he can.” Holder nodded. “Can you stop him?”
“I’ll try.”
“Officer, I think I know where he is,” Holder said, turning away from me. I tried to cancel the transaction in progress, but the program wouldn’t allow me to. I would have closed it to stop it, but the program was tapped into Corbin’s bank, and there was no way I could shut down the bank’s servers.
