Having met the widow, Melody Scott, it's not in the least bit difficult for me to imagine that first meeting between her and the child hacker. Ms. Scott would have made the arrangements through her children. For an adult to call in a favor to a teenager would come across as creepy or perceived as a trap.

Feeling like a rebel in her Pink Floyd tee-shirt and ripped jeans, the widow would have been utterly unprepared for a fourteen-year-old girl with facial piercings and spiky blue hair.

Of course, I didn't witness any part of their meeting. I'm only guessing, but my guesses are accurate more often than not.

The girl most likely slumped into the kitchen, stoop-shouldered and glaring at a world she perceived as innately unfair.

I imagine Ms. Scott would have laughed nervously and offered a cola or a cookie, apologizing that all she had were the store-bought variety. Ever since Timothy died, she hadn't had it in her to deal with baking anything fresh. After the mistrustful girl refused the offer, it might have played out like this:

"Andy told me that Freddie told him that you needed some computer help. He said you'd pay me."

The widow flinched at the mention of payment. Parting with valuable pennies required an act of extreme faith.

"Have a seat." Hoping to ease suspicion, Ms. Scott led the girl to the kitchen table where she'd built a makeshift office, spreading her laptop computer and paperwork across one end. She caught herself biting her nails, a habit she'd formed in recent weeks, and folded her hands together to prevent herself from gnawing them down to nubs.

"What's wrong with your computer?"

"Nothing." The widow took a shaky breath and peeked over her shoulder to find all four children huddled in the doorway, watching with wide eyes, mentally recording her every law-breaking word, storing this moment away to be related in future therapy sessions. "Freddie tells me you have a certain skill set."

The teen's eyes, encircled with thick layers of black makeup, darted to the children for a split second. "I don't know what you're talking about."

"I need a hacker." Might as well dive in with both feet. Tip-toeing around the subject wasn't going to make it any less illegal or unethical.

Knowing a trap when she saw one, the girl pushed her chair back and jumped up to bolt for the door without a word.

"I'll pay you fifty dollars." She hadn't intended to offer so much. It just came out that way. Fifty dollars was a lot of money for a family already a month behind on their mortgage payment. Fifty dollars could keep them in store-brand pasta and cheap cuts of meat for a week, but the widow was gambling. If she could enlist the hacker's help, she had a slim chance of earning her fifty bucks back with a pretty bit of interest.

The girl paused, but didn't agree.

Quiet Freddie crept away from the litter of children. "It's not a trick."

She studied his face for any sign of deception. Friends of younger siblings were certainly in no position to demand instant trust, but this boy's expression was so perfectly innocent and untouched by signs of guile that she couldn't help herself from believing him. "A hundred dollars, and we only use your equipment. If it goes sideways, all evidence points to you."

Thinking about that moment, my guy twists with anxiety for the widow. She must have trembled in the face of such a choice. Of course, in the end, she had no other viable options. Her course was already set. She agreed, and the greedy juvenile delinquent opened Ms. Scott's laptop.

"What are you looking for?"

"I need to see the security footage from the MacKenzie House from closing time on October fifteenth until opening the following morning."

"Who provides their security? They must store the files offsite somewhere."

"White Circle Security."

That must have given the girl pause. WCS was the foremost security company in the eastern half of the United States. How tight would security be inside the organization that secured some of the most prestigious private buildings in the world?

"You got Red Bull?" A young hacker would slurp stimulants and thrive on the wild energy pulsing through her veins, feeding the adrenaline rush that was only beginning as she cracked her knuckles and laid her fingers upon the keys.

"I'm afraid not." Ms. Scott would never keep such unhealthy beverages in the house, no matter how low her domestic standards had fallen.

"You need to get some."

Even the best hackers require time. No matter how fast, using a computer to run combinations of numbers and letters isn't an instant process. Ms. Scott could have packed her children in the minivan and traveled to the nearest grocery store, purchased the energy drinks and a cart full of necessities for the family, returned, put her groceries away, and prepared that evening's dinner, and still the hacker might not have answers. Seeing as how it would have been well into the afternoon before the girl was out of school, it must have been after the Scott children were in bed before she smiled triumphantly at her new employer.

"I'm in."

Ms. Scott pulled a chair close. "Show me."

The girl pressed a button and the screen flickered to life with a picture of the third floor gallery of the museum. "You can zoom in and switch perspectives." She demonstrated, and the camera landed on a clear image of the Dobson Rubies glimmering under the security lights.

"Stop on that angle."

The two of them watched nothing happening for a full two minutes before the rubbery squeak of the guard's shoes came out of the laptop's speaker.

"What is that?"

"Security guard."

"This tape has sound?"

The teen rolled her eyes. "It's not a tape. This isn't 1987, and yeah. Audio and visual footage is one of the things White Circle brags about on their webpage. It's not the norm. People pay through the nose for that kind of security.

"For all the good it did them."

They watched a while longer, until the guard's steps faded into the distance.

"Can you fast forward?"

In the corner, the seconds ticked away at two times their usual speed, four times, ten times.

The bracelet disappeared.

"Wait. Stop." Ms. Scott leaded closer to peer at the screen.

The hacker backed up to show the bracelet there at 11:59 pm 10/15. At 12:00am 10/16 it was gone.

"What happened?"

Half a dozen times they watched the magic trick. They watched it from three additional angles.

More savvy to the criminal mind, the younger woman would have figured it out first. Someone had tampered with the images. "Changing them after the fact would leave traces. They tapped in and found a way to feed an old image into the system on a loop. It's not a very creative trick. They do it in the movies all the time."

I've considered different reactions Ms. Scott might have had to this revelation. This one is the most probable.

"Is it something a person with your skills would know how to do?"

The girl shrugged. "Maybe, but you'd still need someone to actually lift the bracelet without setting off alarms or being seen by the guard."

"It seems like it must have been an employee. Who else would know all that, not to mention getting in and out of the building?"

"I'm guessing the guards there make crap wages like everyone else in this state. It wouldn't be all that hard to bribe them. Keeping them quiet under pressure would be a different thing."

Sucking on two fingers, little Dillon emerged from his hiding place in the shadows. "The police have seen this same video. They would have started with the employees.  All the obvious choices would have already been investigated a hundred times."

The boy's mother pulled him up onto her lap, chastising him gently for being out of bed so late at night.

"I wanted to see what you found out."

"Now what?" the hacker asked. She'd seen the bracelet disappear and she was intrigued now by the mystery.

"A large percentage of crimes are committed for the purpose of financial gain," the boy-genius told them.

His mother shook her head. "The Dobsons have more money than God. No way they did this for a measly insurance settlement or anything like that. Anyone who stole the bracelet wouldn't be able to do anything with it. It's too well-known." She rubbed her tired eyes. "This is stupid."

The hacker closed the laptop and stretched her spine, causing it to crack in several places. "I think the kid's onto something. People like you look at people like me as if we're criminals, but it's the folks with money that commit the really awful crimes in this world."

Ms. Scott was too polite to point out that the girl was, in fact, a criminal, and she was too self-conscious to admit out loud that, as of that day, she was, as well. Her hesitation provided her a moment to process the statement and decide that it wasn't entirely false. Riffraff might traffic baggies full of drugs or hold up a convenience store for spending money, but the really horrific crimes against humanity were often done by those who'd grown up so privileged it never occurred to them to think of themselves as anything other than untouchable.

At that moment, the widow, Melody Scott, became my greatest adversary. Cops and PIs operated under a hierarchy dictated by the person with control over their paycheck. Control the right one, you control them all. Ms. Scott was just a woman seeking truth and surrounded by clever children. The bright offspring came by their brains honestly. A lack of job experience didn't mean she wasn't possessed of extreme intelligence. Her line of reasoning took an unsettling turn.

"So, it was done for some other crazy reason by a person with so much money that it simply isn't a factor."