Johan's Joy (Heroes for Hire #22) - Dale Mayer Page 0,18
said that, instead of making her wary or more alert, the crime had fascinated her and had made her more determined to get to the bottom of it. And somebody who followed software processes to figure out where the pinch points were must have an interesting turn of mind. The fact that she was even intrigued by it fascinated him. Galen was right; something was very unusual about her. And Johan wanted to know more.
After they dropped her off again at the front entrance to the building, Johan drove around to the far side of the parking lot and parked. He hopped out, and Galen switched over to the driver’s side.
“I’ll be back with a different vehicle in an hour,” Galen said.
“Right. I’ll head back to the books,” Johan said.
He wasn’t really looking at the books, of course, but at the network, the security access for each employee, and the timing throughout the day when files were accessed and things like that.
When he came to the States to temporarily stay at Levi’s compound, Johan hadn’t really expected to be doing cyberwork. But he should have because that was a lot of what Levi did. As Johan walked down the hall toward his assigned space near the back exit, he passed a couple people who completely ignored him. Of course that had been the way of it since he’d arrived. He and Galen were strangers. Nobody knew anything about them, but nobody seemed to care one way or the other. And that was good with Johan. Being a shadow in the hallway gave him all kinds of access.
Just as the men were about to walk out the exit, Johan turned to catch sight of one of them turning to look at him. Johan smiled when the other man hurriedly turned away.
“Nice to meet you too,” he muttered to himself, as he meandered his way through the building, checking out what was behind various doors. Mostly storerooms were down here and several underground truck accesses, per the blueprints he had seen. He needed to make his way down there to the docks at some point and the lower levels as well.
He paused, thought about it, and, when he came to an exit with stairs going down, he decided it was the perfect time. He slipped through and headed all the way down, noting the cameras on various landings. Only in this one, there wasn’t any at the door he had come through. So far, people could come and go easily.
He’d have to check the hallway to see what cameras focused on that door. And he needed to find out how long they held the video feeds. Some places didn’t have the space to store endless security feeds and ditched them after twenty-four hours, which was completely useless in Johan’s mind.
As far as he was concerned, thirty days was a minimum. Particularly given the high-tech level of what this theft could have been. That also bothered him. Missing a physical case of drugs like that was a very low-tech theft, as if somebody made a quick decision, grabbed it, and ran.
He couldn’t put that thought out of his mind either. It’s quite possible that Chelsea, the woman Joy replaced, could have done just that, but why? Johan knew nothing about her really. She had been here for three months before she died. No, that doesn’t track, Johan thought. If she had come here to work with Westgroup, intent on stealing drugs, she’d have done it her first week here and then disappeared, before all her employee data was proved to be fabricated. Unless she had somehow been embraced by the thieves. Nah, doesn’t make sense either to accept a newbie within a long-term crew. More likely she had found an inventory problem, like Joy had, and had mentioned it to the wrong people.
Johan continued to ponder it further as he headed down yet another set of stairs. There had been one landing above, but, when he’d seen the other stairs, he couldn’t resist. He was now two stories below where he had been. It ended here, so he opened the double doors and stepped out.
He checked the darkened hallway, but he found no signs to direct him down here. And this level wasn’t the actual research lab; that was down the block. This may have been where some of the online research was done behind locked doors, he presumed, but not with animals. He sure hadn’t seen any here.