Outfoxed: An Andy Carpenter Mystery Read Online Free PDF

Sam asks after answering the phone, as per usual, on the first ring. He always starts our conversation with that question, since he likes investigating a hell of a lot more than accounting.
    “We might.”
    “Let’s crank it up, baby,” he says.
    “‘Let’s crank it up, baby’?”
    “It’s an expression, Andy.”
    “You need to come up with some different expressions, Sam.”
    “I’ll work on it.”
    “Good, but work on this first.” I proceed to ask him to find me any and all information on Brian’s life, his former company, and his criminal case.
    “I’m on it,” he says. “When do you need it?”
    “Yesterday, if not the day before. And I also want to know who Gerry Wright called the week of his death, as well as who called him.” Sam can break into the phone company’s computer with ridiculous ease.
    “I hear you,” he says. “Starting on it right away.”
    “Just crank it up, Sammy.”
    My next call is to Edna, my secretary/assistant. She’s filled that role since I started my practice, and even though she’s now well past retirement age, she hasn’t hung up her typewriter. Apparently, when you have a job that pays well and requires you to do absolutely no work, retirement is not that appealing a prospect.
    Edna is a crossword puzzle wizard and spends pretty much all her time preparing for crossword tournaments. Our not having any clients fits in quite nicely with her schedule.
    I can hear the fear in her voice when she answers the phone; obviously her caller ID has told her it’s me calling. Her preference would be to limit our contact to my mailing her checks. “What is it, Andy?”
    If a voice can cringe, that’s what hers is doing. “Great news, Edna. We’ve got a client.”
    “Another one?”
    “It’s the first one in almost a year,” I say.
    “Time flies. Are you going to plead it out?”
    She has no idea who the client is, or what crime he or she is accused of, but she’s openly rooting for a plea bargain. “Is that what you’d recommend?” I ask.
    She ignores the question. “What do I have to do?”
    “I need you to go to the office and—”
    She interrupts. “The office?” It’s twenty minutes from her house, and she hasn’t been there in a while.
    “Yes, my office, the one where you work,” I say. “Go into Nathan Cantwell’s files and pull the one on the Brian Atkins case, and then bring it to the house. Call me if the trial transcript is not in there.”
    “That’s it?” she asks. Apparently this isn’t quite as bad as she anticipated.
    “For now.”
    It comes as no great surprise that Sam arrives at the house before Edna. He shows up with a large folder filled with stuff he’s printed off the Internet. I could have had him hack into the courthouse and get the trial transcript, but there’s no sense breaking the law when it’s not necessary, and Edna hasn’t called to say it’s not there. Of course, Edna may not have summoned up the energy to look yet.
    Much of what Sam has brought me are media reports both before and after Brian’s fall from grace. For a while, he was a business star, if not superstar. In a partnership with the now-deceased Gerald Wright that began when they were roommates at Dartmouth, he built Starlight Systems, a small but very successful technology company.
    The company reinvented itself a couple of times, but they hit pay dirt about five years ago. Basically they built computer routers and servers powered by software that was simply faster than their competitors. Their customers were Wall Street firms, who were voracious in their quest for speed.
    Stock trading, which once had been done by runners with slips of paper on the exchange floor, has completely changed over the years. Now it is done by computers, amazingly fast computers, which accomplish trades in milliseconds. It is a business conducted at warp speed, and to the fastest goes the advantage.
    So Brian became a very wealthy man, and must still be so today, even