“Maybe they do,” Nancy said. “But I don’t know about it. I hope I don’t wind up having to go over a ton of paperwork to check which grades have been changed,” she added, sighing. “But if that’s what it takes, I’ll do it. I’d rather catch this hacker by checking the bank’s information.”
“Hacker,” Carson Drew repeated. “What a funny word that is! I remember the first time I heard it. It was six or seven years ago. A high-school girl here in River Heights managed to figure out how to monkey with the billing on the telephone company’s computer.”
“Uh-oh, I think I see what’s coming,” Nancy guessed. “She had a boyfriend in Tokyo, right?”
Her father smiled. “Not exactly, but you aren’t far from wrong. At summer camp she had gotten to be very close friends with her counselor, who was also from River Heights. But in September the counselor went off to college on the West Coast. The girl was having some emotional problems, I gather. She got into the habit of calling her former counselor two or three times a week and talking to her for an hour or more at a time.”
“Sounds like a pretty expensive habit,” Nancy remarked. She scooped up the last of the chicken with her fork and popped it into her mouth.
“Eventually it was,” Carson replied. “But for several months, she managed to, ah, hack the telephone company computer and erase the calls from her parents’ bills. Apparently she was very clever about it, too. The telephone company had quite a job catching up with her.”
“And when they did?” Nancy asked.
Her father leaned back in his chair. “Her parents asked me to step in and deal with the telephone company. I talked them into settling for the amount they were owed on the calls, plus a detailed explanation from the girl of how she had broken into their system and altered the bills. They needed that even more than the money, you see. Otherwise, someone else might have come along and found the same weak point in their security. I understand their computer experts were very impressed by the girl’s skills.”
“So she didn’t end up with a police record or anything like that?” Nancy said with a laugh. “She was lucky to have you for a lawyer!” She stood up and collected the plates from the table. “Hannah left fruit salad in the fridge. Want some?”
“I think I’ll pass.” Her father stacked the serving dishes and followed Nancy into the kitchen with them.
“Whatever happened to the girl?” Nancy asked. “Did she go on to be a computer crook or a computer genius?”
“Genius, I think,” her father answered, laughing. “I remember hearing that she started her own computer company right here in town.”
Nancy paused with a plate in midair between the sink and the dishwasher. An idea had occurred to her. “You know, I might need to consult someone like her if I get in over my head in terms of computer know-how. What’s the woman’s name?”
“Can’t tell you. Sorry, honey,” replied her father as they stacked the dishwasher together. “That’s privileged client-lawyer info.”
“Dad!” Nancy moaned. “I can just go to the library and look it up in a newspaper.”
Carson Drew grinned. “I was able to keep the story out of the papers. You could try, but it wouldn’t do much good.”
“You’re a great lawyer, Dad,” Nancy told him, laughing. “Too good!”
There was a teasing glint in his eyes as he said, “I am, aren’t I?”
Nancy checked her watch as she approached the front door of People’s Federal Bank—ten minutes to nine. The bank wasn’t open yet, but Nancy saw through the heavy glass doors that Harrison Lane had spotted her. Holding a large ring of keys, he opened the door from the inside and let her in.
“I have some information for you,” Lane said in a low voice. Behind him, tellers and bank officials were getting ready to start the day. Some of them glanced at Nancy with mild curiosity, but returned to their business right away. “That account you asked about—it’s in the name of I. Wynn.”
“I. Wynn?” Nancy repeated, breaking into a laugh. “Get it? I Win—You Lose,” she explained when she saw Lane’s questioning look. “It’s obviously a fake name, don’t you think?”
Lane shook his head. “It’s real. We checked it against the Social Security number the person gave.”
Suddenly Nancy remembered the initials in Sally’s message-sender’s password: I.W.! “Can I speak with the bank official who opened the account?”
“Certainly.” Lane ushered her over to one of the customer service desks, to the left of the long tellers’ counter. A slender African-American woman in her thirties sat behind the desk. She smiled at Nancy as Harrison Lane introduced Nancy and explained what she wanted.
“Mrs. Tillman here opened the account. I’ll let her tell you the rest,” said Lane, leaving them.
“Do you remember what I. Wynn looked like?” Nancy asked as she settled into the chair beside the desk.
“I certainly do. It was about ten days ago. She was a strange-looking little thing—”
“She?” Nancy interrupted.
Mrs. Tillman nodded. “Oh, yes. A dark-haired girl, about your age, maybe a little younger. Her skin was very pale and her hair was jet black. It looked dyed. Perhaps it was a wig.”
“And you say she was small?” Nancy prompted.
“Yes, very petite, and nervous. But, you know, I figured she was just a kid. It’s easy to be nervous in a big bank like this. Her information checked out—at first, anyway.”
“What do you mean?”
Mrs. Tillman opened the desk’s file drawer and flipped through the manila folders, pulling one out. Nancy could see the name I. Wynn written across the top. “Well, like this, for instance,” Mrs. Tillman told her. “The previous bank reference she gave was for a savings and loan company in Texas. There is such a place, but it folded a few months ago.”
After consulting the file again, Mrs. Tillman added, “She used her Brewster Academy student ID for signature verification.”
Nancy nodded. “Do you have an address for I. Wynn?” she asked.
Mrs. Tillman punched some numbers into the computer terminal on her desk. “Fourteen twenty-one Sycamore,” she read off the amber writing on the screen. “She opened the account with one hundred dollars. Ninety-five of it was withdrawn from a machine two days later. A few days after that a thousand dollars was deposited in cash. That was all withdrawn the day after that.”
Nancy looked over Mrs. Tillman’s shoulder to check the dates. The thousand dollars had been deposited the previous Tuesday—exactly when Sally said she’d made her deposit. There were three other similar deposits and withdrawals. It seemed as if Sally was not the only student the grade-changer had contacted.
“Were all these transactions done at a cash machine?” Nancy wanted to know.
“Two different cash machines—one located at Archer Avenue, the other at Ivy Avenue,” Mrs. Tillman confirmed.
Both those branches were quite close to Brewster Avenue, where Brewster Academy was located, Nancy noted. “Thanks very much,” she told Mrs. Tillman.
Ten minutes later Nancy turned her car onto Sycamore Street and began looking for number 1421. The neighborhood was run-down and deserted. Most of the houses were faded and sagging, as if they were simply waiting for a good excuse to collapse. Scraps of paper and debris littered the branches of the scraggly bushes lining the cracked sidewalk. There were only a few cars parked along the curb, but Nancy had a feeling that few, if any, people actually lived there.
She parked in front of the address Mrs. Tillman had given, then took a long look at the place. If the other houses on the block were neglected, this one looked flat-out abandoned. She was tempted to leave. Still, it was possible that the house held some clue to the identity of I. Wynn. She had to check it out. After taking a flashlight from the glove compartment, she got out of her car and walked up to the front door to ring the bell. No one answered.