A Stolen Future

Written by Doug Fellin

George Wilson slid his access card through the reader and entered the office. He walked past the rows of empty workstations and stopped at the desk of his assistant, Donna Blake. It was 6:30 in the morning and no one else had yet arrived. As was his routine, he asked for his messages and continued toward his office. Instead of entering his normal, tidy work area, he stumbled into a chaotic one where Mr. Wilson’s desk and chair were shoved up against the far wall with papers all over the floor. The safe was blown open and all its contents were missing; at least that’s the way George described it to me, Mike Murphy, the lead detective on the case.

When I first arrived at the office suite, I phoned George’s assistant, Donna Blake, to gain access. There was a card reader at the main entrance that prevented unwanted visitors; a turnstile allowed only one person to enter with each card swipe. After her corporate office had remotely disabled the security system, Ms. Blake met me at the door and escorted me back to Mr. Wilson’s office.

By the time I made it to the burgled safe, my team had already dusted for prints (none were found) and sent for a squad car to bring the company’s local IT manager in for questioning because he was the closest person the company had for a security expert. In the meantime, I sat down with George Wilson, the office manager. After he described what he found in the office this morning, I asked him to tell me what happened last night before the robbery.

“Well, we had a big office party to celebrate the completion of our new computer chip. It represents a new technology that puts us miles ahead of the competition,” he explained. “Since it was just approved for production, I displayed the chip last night to our whole team, and we celebrated its pending release. We shut down just before midnight because I had to be in early today to prepare for a meeting.” He hesitated: “If our rivals get hold of that chip, we are sunk.”

Mr. Wilson seemed to have genuine grievances, but I‘ve seen too many good actors in my day to prematurely bank on his honesty. The last time he saw the chip, he explained, was when he put it back in the safe at midnight; moreover, it was right after the party, and in front of several different witnesses who knew he had an early and busy day ahead of him.

I next interviewed Ms. Blake, George’s assistant. She seemed friendly enough, but looked very tired. She told me that she had left with everyone else last night, and had returned around 6:00 a.m. to prepare several reports for Mr. Wilson’s teleconference, which was scheduled for this afternoon. She showed me the reports; the bags under her eyes coincided with the stack of papers she juggled in her arms.

“I didn’t have time to go into his office today,” she said. “I had to fix a bunch of mistakes. My lack of sleep must be affecting my concentration because I keep putting tomorrow’s date on all his reports. Maybe I subconsciously want this day to end already,” she sarcastically huffed. “I don’t know why they aren’t automatically dated like they usually are. I suppose it’s some computer glitch.”

“Who else has been in the office since the party last night?”

“Only Mr. Wilson, me and ... the night janitor,” she recounted. “Someone had to clean up the mess we made with our celebration.”

I asked an officer to go round up the janitor, a Mr. Pete Thompson.

Next I talked to Jeffery Sharp, the computer tech. According to Donna Blake, he’s in charge of the office’s computer system. He looked just as tired as Ms. Blake; apparently, Jeffery had been working overtime lately, trying to wrap up the computer maintenance before he went on a two-week vacation, which started today.

Mr. Sharp seemed agitated from the start: “Look, I don’t mean to be disrespectful, but my plane leaves in less than three hours,” he spat. “And I was up all night packing.”

“I’ll do my best to get you there on time.” I replied with as much diplomacy as I could muster. “Where is it that you’re headed?”

“Aruba.” He answered. “With beautiful beaches, and, best of all, no computers!”

“Can you can get me a printout of everyone that has been in this office since the party last night?” I asked.

Without answering, he led me over to his workstation, wiped the sleep from his eyes, and began to type. Soon he handed me a printout of a very short list; it showed that only two people had entered the office that morning: Ms. Blake at 6:10 and Mr. Wilson at 6:25.

“You can see I wasn’t here after the party. “Send me on my way,” he pleaded.

“Let’s get all the facts, and then you can go. Stick around for a bit and we’ll wrap this up.” I said as I exited to question the last suspect.

Pete Thompson, the janitor, puzzled me the most, especially because there was no record of him using the access card last night. He said he had come in at 1:00 a.m. to clean up after the party, and that he had left around 4:00 a.m. for his next shift at another location, which ended at 5:30 a.m. He had just gone to bed when the officer arrived to get him.

A quick call to Pete’s second job confirmed that he had indeed arrived there at 4:00 this morning. And, from the disheveled description of the office, three hours seemed to be an appropriate estimate of time it would take to clean up. On top of that, I figure it would take at least an hour to break in to the safe. Where would Pete have found the time?

I decided to make a call to the chip manufacturer’s corporate offices. Mr. Connelly, the head of security, could not explain how the janitor had entered the building without using his card. If there had been a system malfunction, he assured me that the system would simply shut down all access. I also asked him if someone in Jeffery’s position would be able to tamper with the system. Mr. Connelly said that very limited access is granted to an employee in Jeffery’s position; however, he could adjust the system to synchronize with events like daylight savings and leap years because the company’s security system is directly linked to the rest of their computer system. Jeffery couldn’t have shut the system off without also shutting off all entry — or exit.

When I returned to the crime scene, I saw Jeffery complaining that he now only had two hours to make his flight. He waved his tickets around and threw them down on top of the “office access” printout he had given me earlier.

I looked at his tickets and the printout again. I told Jeffery he should first meet me in the conference room — before he took to Aruba — so I could explain to him what had happened to the computer chip.