Chapter 15: Nailed it!

AMAZING WHAT A GOOD NIGHT’S SLEEP will do for you now and then. With the Condo secured, I removed all my makeup, showered, and slept. I had Davy make sure I was supplied with food and coffee before he left yesterday. I finally got my luggage up out of the Mustang and checked with the building manager to make sure where I parked was okay. Now I felt safe. At least for long enough to get some sleep.

Red letter day

I told Davy he wouldn’t be needed again until party time on Thursday night. Everything else was fine in the Condo. That meant this morning I had time and energy to spend pulling pieces together. I’m monitoring a lot of accounts Brenda had set up and am tightening my grasp of her schedule. I’m guessing she moved from Acapulco pretty quickly after she arrived but if she flew internally, there probably isn’t a record I can find unless I search every flight out of Acapulco since she arrived.

I’m hoping her sense of security in having escaped will make her careless. There’s sure to be a charge on one of her credit cards or a ticket purchase or a customs record sometime.

In the meantime, everyone seems to think the thumb drive holds the mysteries of the universe and the careers of some very important people. So, I think I’d better get down to cracking it. It’s just a matter of waiting for Simon to say what’s next.

I waited and now I’m stuck. I plugged in a backup and got the familiar message asking for the encryption key. I entered the thirty-two digits in the order I’d worked out and waited. I got the same message. “Simon says, ‘Find me if you can.’ All the clues are here. Everything you wanted to know. I never expected you to get this far but I’m not making it any easier to uncover the secrets on this drive. It’s too bad you’re colorblind, Dag!” Then, “Press Esc to continue.” No deal this time, Simon. I waited.

Sure enough, there was a new message popping up after about ninety seconds. “Simon says enter the next encryption code.” Oh shit. Now I’m stuck. If I hit the wrong thing, I risk losing the whole thing again. I looked at the keyboard for a while and pressed the one key I thought might be safe. The computer went into immediate hibernate mode. Now if I can wake it up without triggering anything, I’ve got time to figure out what the next encryption code will be.

I sat back to think about it for a while. What did Simon’s message say? Too bad you’re colorblind. Simon knew Dag was colorblind and it affected the puzzle. But how? I was going to have to risk going back to the office. I locked things up and headed for the waterfront. I hoped Jordan was serious about dropping the warrant and no one was watching for me.

In and out. I can’t believe I was so dense. I’ve got two parts of the mystery and I know where the third is. Then it’s on to solving the fourth part. It was all in the file on Brenda. He left it on the desk after he searched the office. I suppose he wanted it to look like no one had been there. They did a good job.

When I read about Brenda’s tattoo, it said the tattoo was red and black. Sure enough, the detail said the 1 and d and pillow were red. Everything else was black. I checked my photo of Bradley’s tattoo and found two letters on it also in red—the b and 1. If there are two letters in each tattoo in red, they would make up a second 8-character code. What I had so far were the first and last pair if the order of the original tattoos holds true. B-1-----1-d.