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Chapter 9
Wednesday
As Julia followed Nico into Madeline’s, the faint, familiar smell of garlic, onions and spices calmed her. She needed to be here.
Re-living the day her family was destroyed had torn through all the barriers she’d erected against those memories. Now they prowled her mind, dragging all the remembered pain behind them. Torturing her with all she had lost.
Madeline’s was her refuge from those awful memories. So she’d let her work consume her, as it always did, and hope it could beat back the ugly, painful images filling her brain.
She flipped on the lights and glanced around the kitchen. Took a deep breath. Let it out. Nothing was out of place, different or unusual. Her refuge was all hers. Untainted by horrible memories.
She headed for her office, hearing Nico’s steps behind her. She hadn’t shown him the office yesterday, because why would a busser need to know where the owner’s office was? But today, as she stepped into the small, cramped space, she turned to face him.
“This is my office,” she said, waving her hand around the tiny room. Her desk sat in the middle, with a file cabinet snug against its side. A bookshelf filled with cookbooks stood against one wall. A small safe was installed in the wall behind her oldest cookbooks, and she pulled them off the shelf and nodded at it. “My safe. All of my recipes are in there, plus five hundred dollars in cash. My important papers, like my lease. My mortgage. My diploma from CIA -- not a spy school, the Culinary Institute of America -- and my recommendations from my instructors and the internships I did.”
“That safe is fireproof, right?” Nico said.
“Absolutely.” She dropped her purse into the deep bottom drawer of her desk and locked it, then stuffed the key into the pocket of her jeans. “Let’s go look at that computer system.”
A few minutes later, Nico frowned as he studied one of the screens. “Tell me how this works.”
“Okay.” She drew a deep, steadying breath. She had this. “In a nutshell, every server has a number. When they enter an order, they start with their number. Then they select the item. Say they want a hamburger.” She pointed to that screen. “Once they do that, for a burger they’d choose how they want it cooked. Then the toppings -- what kind of cheese, any changes to the usual lettuce and tomatoes. Then the side they want. After that’s done, they start the next entree.”
Nico nodded as he studied the screen. “So what happens if a customer changes their order after the server enters it on the screen? Because I’m sure that happens, right?”
“Yeah. A few times every evening. The server has to ask Delia, Carole or me to override the system and remove the order so they can enter another one.”
“Okay,” he said, studying the screen. “That would be done before the cooks start working on an order, right?”
“Almost always,” she said. “If someone’s going to change their order, they usually do it pretty quickly. And it’s easy to delete one order and put in another one.”
“Okay,” Nico said slowly. “What if someone wanted to delete an order after it had already been served?”
“Only Delia or I can do that. Carole can’t. And it doesn’t happen often. If there was a problem with the order, or the customer complained, one of us might comp the meal. But that’s pretty rare.”
“But if Carole is deleting orders and pocketing the cash, she has to be doing it somehow. Right?” Nico asked
“Yes. But she’d need my password. Or Delia’s. I change mine once a week, and not always on the same day. I told Delia to do the same thing, and as far as I know, that’s what she does.”
“Can you ask her about that today? Make sure she’s changing her password? If she is, there must be another way to hack into the system.”
“Yeah, I can ask her that. I’ll think of an excuse.”
Julia stared at the screen, wondering how Carole was manipulating it. And how they could prove that she was.
Her chest hurt as she acknowledged she’d accepted that Carole was likely stealing from her. She didn’t want that to be true -- she didn’t want to think a woman she trusted was ripping her off. But a tiny niggle of suspicion had lodged in her head, and now she had to get to the truth.
Turning away from the screen, Nico said, “Mel’s sister is the person who sent you to Blackhawk Security, right?”
Julia nodded. “Yeah. Zoe. A friend of mine. She started a company here in Seattle, and she’s got mad computer and technology skills. Online security, too.”
“Do you think she could help you with this problem?” Nico asked. “She might be able to create a program that could trace when a meal is deleted from the computer, and who deletes it. Whether it had been served or not. Who the server is for that meal. That would give us some hard data. It could show us patterns.” He shrugged. “Just an idea.”
Julia studied the blank screen, seeing the scratches on the surface where servers had stabbed in orders with their pens. Did she want Zoe messing with her system?
She trusted Zoe completely. And she was the one who’d found the spyware on Julia’s computer. She turned to face Nico. “That’s a good idea. And it’s the kind of problem Zoe would love solving. I’ll give her a call.”
“Thanks. If you think she wouldn’t mind.”
