The Heist

eating all that fast food,” he said.
    “How do you know these things?”
    “Facebook.”
    “I’m not on Facebook.”
    “But your sister is and so is everybody else in your family. I love the pictures from your thirteenth birthday party. What was with the braces on your teeth? I’ve never seen anything like it, all those wires, rubber bands, and headgear—”
    “I had crooked teeth and an overbite, okay?”
    “You were cute.”
    “I wasn’t cute. I looked like a demented chipmunk.”
    Nick smiled wide. “I thought you looked cute.”
    Kate narrowed her eyes at him. “You’re playing me.”
    “I’m not playing you. I’m serious. I’m attracted to you. You’re sexy and exciting.”
    “That’s it.” She slapped the file shut, tucked it under her arm, and got up. “Forget about a deal. Let’s see what your smile is like after ten years in prison.”
    Kate stormed out, slamming the door behind her. She squinched her eyes closed and slapped herself in the forehead hard enough to rattle things loose. “Ugh!” she said. “Crap, damn, phooey!” She threw the file against the wall, ran over to it, and kicked it twenty feet down the hall.
    The door to the observation room opened, and Carl Jessup stepped out and eyeballed the file scattered over the floor.
    “Feel better?” he asked.
    “No. I’m sorry, sir. I let him get to me.”
    “He’s a con man, it’s what he does. But it doesn’t matter. He’s sitting in there in irons. You got him and he knows it,” Jessup said. “He’ll end up giving us what we want, every dollar that he stole, to avoid extradition and the possibility of ending up in a Russian gulag. So don’t beat yourself up over this.”
    “I should have gone with the French braid,” she said. “The ponytail isn’t my power look.”

Kate spent the next couple days back in Los Angeles, gathering all of her notes and files on Nick Fox and handing them over to the federal prosecutor who was leading the trial team. She offered to stick around, to do whatever additional investigation might be necessary, but the prosecutor thought it was best for the case if she stayed out of it until she was called to testify. So she was finally free of the investigation that had occupied most of her time and attention for years.
    She enjoyed that freedom in the privacy of her cubicle for five whole minutes before marching into Jessup’s office. It had a commanding view of the Santa Monica Mountains and the hilltop Getty Center museum, which she knew Nick Fox had twice tricked into buying fake paintings, not that she’d been able to prove it.
    Jessup looked up from his desk. “Did you give the Justice Department everything?”
    “I cleaned out my files,” she said. “I even gave them my paperclips and the half-eaten turkey sandwich that’s been in my desk drawer since January. What have you got for me?”
    He handed her a thin file. “Pirates.”
    “You’re sending me to Somalia?”
    “There’s a ring in Southern California that’s been duping DVDs of movies and TV shows and posting the digital files on the Internet for people to download for free,” Jessup said.
    “We go after that stuff?”
    “Haven’t you seen the FBI warning at the beginning of every DVD?”
    “Yeah, but I thought it was a joke.”
    “It’s not,” Jessup said.
    “It is to me,” Kate said. “I brought in Nick Fox. I should be going after the next Nick Fox.”
    “This is big-time crime, Kate. The ring has cost the studios millions of dollars,” Jessup said. “One of the movies that they uploaded to a file-sharing site was downloaded twenty-seven thousand times in ninety days. And they’ve uploaded hundreds.”
    “I’m not feeling it,” she said.
    “The maximum penalty for conspiracy to commit copyright infringement is five years in prison, a two-hundred-fifty-thousand-dollar fine, and damages, which are computed by taking the sales price of the DVD and multiplying it by the number of times the digital file has been downloaded. On a twenty-five-dollar DVD downloaded twenty-seven thousand times, that’s six hundred seventy-five thousand dollars. Now multiply that by hundreds of movies, and you get the picture. This is a huge case.”
    Kate shook her head and put the file down. “I should be going after someone in the same league as Nick Fox. What about Derek Griffin? That big-time investment guy who ran off with fivehundred million dollars that he stole from his clients? I should find