The E-Mail Mystery (Nancy Drew Book 144) Read online

  Bess and Nancy were protected behind the low coffee table, but the heavy cup struck Henry in the leg, and he stumbled, groaning in pain. Bess screamed again.

  “Henry, are you okay?” Bess asked.

  “Never mind me, just stop her,” he said, holding his leg. Nancy was sure he’d been injured pretty badly. The cup itself was heavy, and it was mounted on a large wooden base with sharp edges.

  “All right, Henry. Call the police and an ambulance, too. Come on, Bess,” Nancy said. “Can you walk?”

  Bess nodded. Though still shaken up from her fall, Bess joined her friend.

  The heavy glass office doors had locked automatically after Blaine’s exit, and by the time the girls buzzed themselves out, the elevator door had closed behind Blaine, and she was gone.

  “Oh, no!” Bess exclaimed.

  “The stairs,” Nancy cried, and they headed for the fire stairs.

  “Four flights,” Bess groaned, panting a little after her recent ordeal. They rushed down the stairs, only to see Blaine exit the building and run into the street. “She’s going to get away,” Bess cried.

  “No, she’s not,” Nancy said. “Look.”

  Right outside the office building was a police car, lights flashing and sirens wailing. Mr. Drew was pulling up behind it in his sedan.

  “There she is, officers,” Nancy cried, pointing to Blaine Warner.

  Mr. Drew rushed over to Nancy and Bess. “Are you two all right?” he asked. “When the phone was cut off while you were telling me about the conspiracy between Blaine and John Brown Junior, I thought the worst. So I called the police and rushed over as quickly as I could. I’m afraid I may have broken a few traffic rules on the way.”

  “I’m glad you got here so fast,” Nancy replied. She gave her father a hug. “I’m fine.”

  “Blaine knocked me down,” Bess said breathlessly. “I’m okay, but I’m afraid Henry may be really hurt. She threw that big award cup at us, and it caught him in the leg.”

  “Where is he?” Nancy’s father asked.

  “We left him upstairs in the reception area,” Nancy answered. “We didn’t want to let Blaine get away, so when we missed the elevator we ran down the stairs.”

  “Four flights,” Bess said again with a groan. “With his leg hurt, Henry really couldn’t keep up,” Bess added. “But he was going to call the police and an ambulance.”

  Just then Henry appeared in the doorway to the office building, limping. “The police got here really fast,” he said.

  Nancy smiled at him. “My father called them when our call got cut off.”

  “Good thing,” Henry said. He flashed his famous grin, a little wearily. “I called an ambulance, too. I ought to get this dent in my leg checked out. It hurts a lot. At the very least, it’s going to be purple by tomorrow. Did you catch Blaine?” he asked, wincing.

  “Yes,” Bess said. “She’s right over there with the men in blue. Let me help you over to that bench, so you can sit down.” Bess put her shoulder under Henry’s arm.

  Nancy and Mr. Drew walked over as the police took Blaine Warner into custody. “What’s the charge, Mr. Drew?” the officer asked.

  “How about assault with a deadly award cup?” Henry called out, his face pale.

  “This is industrial espionage, Blaine,” Mr. Drew said gravely. “You stole information from my firm. This is a criminal matter, so you will be prosecuted as a thief. And if you or John Brown Junior used privileged information to threaten my clients, or coerce them into taking settlements—in fact, if you had any contact with them whatsoever—you will both be disbarred.”

  “John will post bail for me before sunrise,” she retorted. “And you’ll have to prove the rest of it in court.”

  “We have all the proof we need,” Nancy said, looking straight at Blaine.

  “Oh, right. Miss Junior Detective here is going to testify against me in court,” Blaine said sarcastically. “Well, Williams and Brown will back me up all the way. After all I’ve done for them, it’s the least they can do for me.”

  “Remember, miss,” one of the police officers said. “Anything you say can be used against you in a court of law.”

  “I know that, you fool,” Blaine snapped. “I’m a lawyer.”

  As the police led Blaine away, Nancy asked her father, “What are you going to do, Dad? Can you still help the clients who were scared into accepting those settlements?”

  “I’m afraid it’s too late for that,” he replied, “but I’m going to bring a suit against Blaine and John Brown Junior for theft and fraud. Maybe we can put together a class-action suit against them as well. At the very least, they’re going to be disbarred. They might even go to jail. And despite Ms. Warner’s wishes, I’m afraid Williams and Brown won’t be able to back her up at all, or their firm will be destroyed. This will rock their reputation as it is.”

  Mr. Drew looked at the three young people and said, “Nancy, you can fill me in on this case—on our way to the hospital. We need to make sure Henry and Bess here weren’t injured too badly.

  “Honestly, Nancy,” he added with a grin, “you sure know how to make a summer temp job interesting.”

  16

  Summer Vacation—At Last!

  The next day at the office Ms. Hanson, Henry, Byron, and Mr. Drew gathered to discuss the case with Nancy and Bess. Henry’s leg was in a cast, and he leaned jauntily on his crutches.

  “How did you figure out what Blaine was doing?” Ms. Hanson asked.

  “A lot of it was just plain luck,” Nancy said. “My father had expressed his concern about these cases settling so early. And I knew something was up when I found that E-mail log file and saw that the dates on those transmissions were on the same days the cases were first received,” she explained. “And then I overheard some conversations at Williams and Brown that gave me a possible motive. When I called Bess to ask for her help in tracing the E-mail, Blaine must have been eavesdropping and heard us plan to meet at the Sacred Cow restaurant.”

  “Then Blaine and John Brown Junior sat behind us, and overheard us plan to go on-line and look for a computer expert,” Bess continued. “So when I posted a note on the local computer users’ bulletin board, Blaine left us a reply that same night, pretending to be a computer expert called SEEK.”

  “SEEK. So that’s what you were talking about at the Cyber Space that night,” Byron said.

  “You didn’t help matters, always sneaking on-line to do your poetry stuff,” Nancy said.

  Bess turned to Byron. “You know, you left a disk with one of your poems on it in the library last night. I really liked it.”

  “You did?” Byron said, blushing and smiling at Bess. “Well, you and Nancy have to come to my poetry reading at the Cyber Space tonight. Everybody else, too.” He added, after a pause, “Did you guys really suspect me?”

  “Both you and Henry were suspects for a while,” Nancy admitted.

  “I know, I know,” Henry said. “Finding that list of the clients I wrote down must have made you suspicious. But I was suspicious, too. I just wanted to figure out what was going on here.”

  “Which I appreciate,” Mr. Drew said, smiling at his paralegal.

  “And we wouldn’t have gotten the proof we needed if it weren’t for your computer expertise,” Nancy said generously.

  “Yeah,” Henry said, grimacing, “but if you hadn’t pointed me in the right direction I would’ve done just what Blaine wanted, and blamed Ms. Hanson for everything.”

  “Henry, how could you think I’d do anything like that?” Ms. Hanson asked. “I must say, I’m a bit surprised and hurt.”

  “I’m sorry,” Henry said. “I just followed the clues I found. I didn’t think about the fact that you can use someone else’s password and log-on. And I’m supposed to be the computer whiz around here.” He looked at Bess and Nancy and blushed slightly. “If it weren’t for Nancy and Bess, I wouldn’t have figured anything out.”

  “So after Blaine left you this not
e, pretending to be a computer expert called SEEK, then what happened?” Ms. Hanson asked.

  “We had an on-line chat with SEEK,” Bess explained, “and arranged to meet at the Cyber Space Café.”

  “Blaine must have been on-line as SEEK in her own office, while we were in the library,” Nancy said.

  “That’s kind of creepy,” Mr. Drew said. “This whole thing is like a spy movie.”

  “I’ve learned a lot about the Internet from this case,” Nancy went on. “On-line, you can pretend to be anyone—and anywhere.”

  “So the next night,” Bess continued, “when Nancy and I went to meet SEEK at the Cyber Space, I had to run home for my on-line chat group, and when Nancy left the café alone, Blaine attacked her.”

  “You should have told me what was going on then,” Nancy’s father scolded. “You could have been in real danger.”

  “I told you about my suspicions,” Nancy said. “But I needed proof. I had to show a solid connection between someone here and someone at Williams and Brown before I did anything. Anyway, when she jumped me, Blaine dropped a disk she was carrying with files from the Harris case. That made us pretty sure it was her, but we decided to stake out the office the next day to see if we could catch her in the act.”

  “But I caught you in the act, instead,” Henry said with a grin.

  “And it’s a good thing you did,” Bess said. “We all worked together and found the notes from the old case files and the mail-server information, which proves that Blaine was E-mailing John Brown Junior at Williams and Brown.”

  “Their reputation’s going to suffer for this kind of illegal activity, you can bet on it,” Ms. Hanson said. “I don’t care if they claim they didn’t know what John Brown Junior was up to. They profited from his and Blaine’s scheme.”

  “That doesn’t help us,” Henry said. “Mr. Drew doesn’t handle the kind of insurance cases they do.”

  “I’m not going after Williams and Brown for their business,” Mr. Drew said. “I’ve got enough of my own. And I don’t have anything against the firm—just John Brown Junior for doing illegal things to advance his own career. We’ll get Blaine’s banking records and follow the money trail.”

  “You can match up deposits with the dates and dollar amounts we found on that disk in Blaine’s office,” Nancy said. “I’m just glad it’s all over. I’m really looking forward to going sailing with George.”

  “I think I’ll invite myself along, if that’s okay,” Bess said.

  “Fine with me,” Nancy said.

  “Good,” Bess replied. “I deserve a little R and R at sea. Sailing isn’t hard work, is it?” she added, smiling at her friend.

  “Not at all,” Byron said, gazing at Bess. “It’s very romantic.”

  “Send me a poem while I’m away,” Bess said with a grin.

  “You’d make a good lawyer,” Henry said to Nancy. “A lot of legal research is just snooping around.”

  “I prefer to call it investigating,” Nancy said. She and Bess laughed together, and the others joined in.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  First Aladdin Paperbacks edition October 2002

  Copyright © 1998 Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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  ISBN 0-671-00121-3

  ISBN 978-1-43911-453-7 (eBook)