Category: Thriller

Yeah. Well.

The Alibi continues to grow and get restructured.

Surprise!

Quite a bit got added and edited in June. The throughlines are pretty well established, individual character plotlines are merging. Characters are changing and growing, allegiances are shifting.

The Alibi‘s Boston is a fun place to be.

This chapter is one of the ones added while you were busy doing other things. Everything from this point on got shifted. At least once. Often more than once.

It’s interesting playing god. Ever seen Kevin Bacon’s The Big Picture. It’s worth a watch.

For that matter, I’m not sure if The Alibi had five sections the last time we chatted…

 
Virginia Lister hated fucking Briggs Lane. She cherished the days he had lunch appointments because it meant he wouldn’t call her on the intercom with that sickening, slightly husky voice and ask her to come in and review something with him.

She kept his calendar so she knew the days well in advance. Sometimes something came up, sure, but he was usually meticulous in his scheduling. Rarely did anything happen without notice.

She called him her BACMan: blowjob, anal, cunt. Three times in three different orifices and all in less than an hour.

She knew where he kept his Viagra.

She kept making plans and backing down.

Lane recruited her on one of his “scouting” missions. He kept a series of low-to-mid level plants in all the tech companies within an arc stretching from Providence to Amherst to Brattleboro to the Upper Valley to Portland.

And because he was Old School, he kept a squad of stringers employed out to NYC, Troy, Carnegie, and Chicago; south to Reston, Roanoke, and Duke; and north to Montreal, QC, and Dalhousie.

If it happened, and it was valuable or had potential value, Briggs Lane knew about it.

Ginni started as one of his plants at a mid-level biotech. She demonstrated other assets he found worthwhile and the deal was done.

He didn’t travel far to find her. Emerson’s Theater District campus made for easy pickings and her studies in the Visual & Media Arts, Performance Production Center, Advanced Projects Lab, and Communication & Marketing Labs made her a valued addition to any company’s digital marketing initiatives. He visited saying he was scouting schools for his daughter.

Ginni knew Penny. She’d never get into Emerson.

Previous entries in The Alibi (A John Chance Mystery)

 
Leddy sat across from Penny Lane in the Boston Public Library’s Johnson Building. Leddy always thought she and Penny’d look like a tower salt&pepper shakers if Penny could get on her shoulders. Leddy, stocky and dark like her father, Penny thin and fair like her father if he didn’t get to his Bermuda home for a weekend.

Out the window she watched firetrucks and ambulance race towards the waterfront until people crowded around her and blocked the view. She switched her tablet from screen to dVids, a gift from Penny’s father, and guided her drone with a specialized pen she designed inside MIT’s Media Lab as part of the Future Entrepreneurs Club. She couldn’t stop actionable ideas from coming to her. Her advisors wondered if she were adopted. Grad students and professors attempted to copy her designs. Penny’s father, Briggs, told Penny to keep an eye on her and bring any things she came up with to him.

Briggs had Penny and Leddy to lunch at least once a week. He ate little, a salad if anything and rarely more, bottled water on the side, made sure Leddy ate like a queen, and probed her about anything Penny brought to his attention, but gently, conversationally, so she wouldn’t catch on.

Leddy thought him a playable fool. He could get her hands on tech even her Media Lab buds knew nothing about and Leddy always let him think something profitable would come of it.

But gently, conversationally, so he wouldn’t catch on. After their third lunch she started picking at her food.

She’d order everything and anything, then have it boxed up to go and pass it around when she got back to the lab.

A lot of those students were just getting by.

And Leddy liked to pay it forward when she could.

She tapped Penny’s tablet. “People will see what’s on your screen.”

Penny laughed. “I’m going inside. I’ll be able to sell this, create a bidding war. We’re the first on the scene.”

“You take too many chances.”

Penny kept her tablet active. “You don’t take enough. What are you doing?”

“Watching vehicular and foot traffic.”

“Do you listen to yourself? You sound like your father.”

“You sound like yours.”

“Yeah? How ’bout you give those dVids back. Briggs won’t mind.”

Previous entries in The Alibi (A John Chance Mystery)

 
Cranston stopped at the doors to the precinct’s central office. John Rhinehold knelt beside Cranston’s desk. Rhinehold was the latest edition to the BPD’s undercover cybersecurity squad. Undercover Cranston could get. Rhinehold, too-thin for that tall a frame with an unruly, bushy black beard and always in a tshirt and jeans no matter the weather, looked like an early to mid-twenties heroin addict desperate for his next score. But that’s where the undercover aspect ended. That thick, long braid got caught in drawers, doors, was long enough to strangle him and was the perfect handhold for someone wanting to do damage to Rhinehold’s head.

His head popped up and watched Cranston’s screen light up. Rhinehold smiled, stood, and his head fell back as some cables came up with him, his hair snaked in among them.

Cranston shook his head as Rhinehold extricated himself. Leddy’s ring sounded from his mobile. “POPS?”

He TXTed back. “K U?”

The precinct’s wall mounted blues flashed ON-ON-off ON-ON-off. Chairs screeched across the hardwood floor.

Leddy TXTed “C THS?” and Cranston’s attention returned to his phone. Leddy sent her video through. “SIMON GOT IT ALL!”

SIMON. Situational Intelligent MONitor. She sent him pictures at every stage of SIMON’s development and he had them made into a tshirt collage with the heading “Leddy’s Little Project.”

She loved it.

But “SIMON GOT IT ALL!”?

She had it working?

He needed to pay more attention during dinners.

Its cameras moved through hazy clouds flecked with ash. He wasn’t sure what he was seeing until the drone cleared the clouds. It flew just above street level and revealed the clouds as billowing smoke.

“WRU”

“BPL Johnson w Pen.”

Cranston’s jaw tightened briefly. He didn’t like to interfere in Leddy’s friendships. Getting into that special high school MIT-Harvard thing really made her blossom. She hadn’t been able to focus on anything since her mother passed five years back. Cranston knew his daughter was special, used his connections to get her time with top grief counselors and therapists, but it wasn’t until Penny Lane and her father, Briggs, that Leddy got into the program.

She didn’t make the cut and the reason infuriated him more than her; she didn’t meet their BIPOC or LGBTQ diversity requirements. “Was that a requirement for all the white kids who got in?”

Previous entries in The Alibi (A John Chance Mystery)

 
Briggs Lane stood at the window of his Lane, Cuomo, and Greenberg top-floor corner office. He held a pair of MIL710 Optical Enhancers to his eyes and focused on Innovation Square. “That stupid bastard. Didn’t he know enough not to shit where he eats?”

He placed the MIL710s back in their padded box, placed that in a desk drawer, closed the drawer, and pressed his thumb against what appeared to be a lock. The drawer hissed as the desk sucked it a microscopic inch or two further in and sealed it in place.

He stepped around his desk – mahogany and large enough to play shuffleboard on – and past a five hundred gallon salt-water reef tank dominating a windowless wall and custom made by a team from the New England Aquarium in exchange for time, materials, and an anonymous ten million dollar donation towards unspecified marine research.

A post-doc from NEAQ came in once a week to make sure the tank and its highly illegal denizens were in good order. Lane ran his hand along the side of the tank and something flashed out from under the reef. It smashed itself against the tank’s clear acrylic wall and Lane smiled down at the circular rows of teeth before continuing on to the wall opposite his desk. Hokusai’s The Great Wave off Kanagawa hung there. He smiled, lifted his fingers to his lips, kissed then touched his fingers to the carving’s frame.

The wall opened and revealed what Lane’s deep intimates referenced as variously “the weapons locker,” “the Predators’ trophy array,” and “Elon Musk’s wish list.”

That last one always gave Lane a chuckle.

Musk was an ass.

Never invited Briggs to any parties, never accepted Lane’s invitations to dinner when he was in Boston.

What a fucking ass.

Lane lifted a smallish disco dance club’s glitterball from its birth in the hidden compartment to reveal a small, gold nameplate with HIVE engraved on it.

Lane turned the glitterball over and placed his hand inside. A moment later the HIVE – a prototype Human Immersion Visual-audio Enhancer – hummed and Lane fitted it over his head.

The HIVE’s separate facets, much like an insect’s compound eyes, captured video-audio feeds from whatever was available – a newscast, a store camera, municipal video, people livestreaming, devices uploading to the cloud – and built a real-time 3D immersive environment for the wearer. Tilt your head forward and you walked forward, lean forward and you ran, turn your head and you saw from side to side, tilt your head back and you looked up, down was down and so on.

Previous entries in The Alibi (A John Chance Mystery):

Previous entries in The Alibi (A John Chance Mystery)