Chapter 4

When the head of the RCMP fraud squad, Janet Shouldice arrived at eight am with a coffee in one hand and her briefcase in the other, she stopped at Stacey’s desk for a report on the night’s activities. The junior member was waiting for her. She eyed her boss who wore her usual dark-colored pantsuit, and man-tailored shirt.

“Something strange happened with the computers last night. At first, I thought there was a glitch in the programming that made it emit false email signals, but then I thought it must be an alarm because it keeps beeping. See, there it goes again,” Stacey announced.

Her boss frowned as she listened to the series of pings. “You sure it was an alarm?”

Stacey stifled a yawn. It had been a long night and she was looking forward to eating breakfast, before going to bed. “Yes, I’m pretty sure because I checked the computer out, and that’s the only thing that makes sense. The computer is definitely sounding an alarm, but I don’t know why.”

Shouldice caught Stacey yawning and told her. “Go home, your shift is over, so I’ll get our IT whiz, Roy Cummings, in here to see what’s going on.” As Stacey turned to leave, her boss added. “Thanks for the heads up.”

As soon as Shouldice entered her office, she sat her coffee on her desk and buzzed Cummings on the inter-office phone. “You busy? No. Good. I need your expertise on something.”

Moments later a baby-faced guy with an ultra-short haircut, wearing a short sleeve shirt with a button down collar, and khaki pants with a razor sharp crease, stepped into the office.

“You called? What’s up?”

“Stacey on the night shift says an alarm on the computers went off last night, wanna check it out?”

Cummings shrugged. “Sure. She thinks it was an alarm, eh? This should be interesting.”

“Let me know as soon as you get it figured out. It could be important,” Shouldice ordered.

She looked up a short time later, when Cummings reappeared in the doorway of her office.

“Stacey was dead on. It was an alarm all right. Near as I can figure it out, it was created about five years ago, and set to go off whenever anybody tried to access a certain account in the Bank of Montreal.”

Shouldice almost dropped her coffee on her desk. “Any idea who owns the account, and why it was alarmed?”

Cummings gave her a slip of paper. I scribbled down the account number. I believe the correct term is tripwire...”

“ ... Set to go off when anybody shows interest in the account,” Shouldice finished off the sentence. She glanced down at Cumming’s scrap of paper and studied the account number which meant nothing to her. “That’s it. No name of the account holder or who’s showing interest in it?”

“That’s all the information I have for the moment, but give me a bit of time and I can dig up a lot more,” Cummings promised.

“Then get to it. I want all the details about this account on my desk as soon as possible,” Shouldice ordered. She sipped on her coffee while sorting through paperwork piled up in her in basket. It wasn’t long before RCMP Detective Ron Baldwin poked his head into her office.