Executive Dirt: A Sedona O'Hala Mystery by Maria Schneider Page A

screen, making it difficult to use. “Joe Black?” I guessed.
    Nothing.
    My mind ran through what Radar had said about speech recognition. That sort of thing was exactly what Borgot hoped to be very good at, in addition to providing translations for foreign languages. Radar had also said his smartwatch was essentially just a watch without his mobile phone.  The cell phone was the brains; the watch was just spitting out text messages or supplying basic information that his phone had already obtained.
    Joe had a phone that talked Pig Latin.  If this watch worked with that phone, it probably had some of the same basic functionality loaded. “Oh-Jay?”
    “Owhay, ayay oingday?” the watch asked in Joe’s voice.
    Chills ran up my arm, freezing my teeth shut.  I set the watch down rather than fling it across the room.  As often as I’d been forced to hear Joe’s voice after he was dead, it felt like his ghost was stalking me.  “How ya doing,” I translated in a whisper.  Louder, I said, “Better than you.”
    I swallowed, studying the watch.  “Burglaries.  Was he stealing high-end watches?” Huntington hadn’t exactly specified why he wanted Joe’s mother questioned. This watch didn’t look high-end anything, either.
    “What is the current temperature in Denton, Colorado?”
    “Sixty-two degrees.”
    The watch responded to the same question asked in Pig Latin.  This thing was definitely set up to work with Borgot code.
    I played with questions and features.  The watch appeared to try to synch to a phone or other smart device more than once.  Without the right phone in close proximity the functions were very limited.
    I needed Radar and the code from Joe’s phone.  Maybe there were calendar events or other meaningful appointments we could access once the watch connected to the phone.
    I called Radar and told him what I’d found.
    “If there were appointments on the smartwatch, they’d be on the phone too,” he said. “And that phone didn’t contain anything very useful.  From what I can tell, it may have been his personal phone, but the only real difference between it and any other Borgot test phone is that his voice was used for a lot of the commands.”
    “That’s the same with the watch,” I said.
    “What kind is it?  There aren’t that many smartwatches out there. They are very expensive and the more capabilities, the more the watch will cost you.”
    I checked, but there was nothing on the watch casing, no name, no insignia.
    “I’ll come by in a couple of hours,” Radar promised.
    While I waited for Radar to stop by, I called Mark and left him a message about the smartwatch.
    Since neither he nor Radar was available right away, rather than chew my fingernails asking a watch stupid questions, I started on the baby bibs and the bra.  It had to be easier to cut the patterns all at once.
    Then too, maybe I was procrastinating using the sewing machines because once those patterns were cut, I downloaded and cut out a t-shirt pattern. I messed up the sleeves, so decided it was going to be a tank top.  “Everyone needs a tank top.”
    I checked the time on Joe’s watch.  It had only been an hour.
    “Fine.”  I sat down and shoved the first bib under the regular machine. Sewing a back to the front meant I didn’t have to put a binding along the edges.  Binding looked hard and time consuming.
    The bib turned out more rounded than square.  That is to say, the corners were funky diagonal edges.  And one diagonal was way larger than the other.  “I’ll make a round bib instead.”
    I cut some off the edges and sewed it again.
    It was now rounder, but extremely lopsided with one side higher than the other.  “Well, Auntie Sedona made it, right?  The next one will be better.”  I added straps to tie around the neck, but boy did they make the edges bulge where they fit against the bib.
    Since I was practicing and learning, I tried to use the finishing machine for the top.