by G. K. Lund
“Ben?”
“Yeah.”
“He was really scared. Think about it.”
“I want to know why.”
“Have you considered the possibility that you might have… done something to him?”
I turned and looked at Peter. “Done something?”
“He freaked out when he saw you.”
“So?”
“I don’t think that means you were on friendly terms last time you met.”
I considered this. Had we met? If so I had certainly not looked like this. But the man had recognized me. Then it occurred to me what was bothering Peter.
“Walter said that… I was not a violent person.”
Peter winced, clearly uncomfortable. “You’re not.”
“Okay then. So let’s figure this out.” I rang the doorbell again. Granted, Param had been inebriated at the bar, but it shouldn’t take this long to answer the door. Unless he wasn’t home of course. I pressed the lips tightly together. Why couldn’t he be home? I needed to talk to him. I knocked at the door in frustration, and in response, it slowly slid open a fraction.
“Shit,” I heard Peter whisper at this. “No, wait,” he added louder when I pushed the door open and walked inside. “Ben, no. This isn’t right.”
“Hey. It’s not my problem that he’s too drunk to remember to lock his door.”
“I’m not sure he actually came back here,” Peter hurried in behind me and closed the door. I looked around in what turned out to be a fairly tidy house, though it was cluttered with all kinds of artifacts. Almost like a small museum. We walked past paintings and sculptures. Most of the paintings were of landscapes, a few were abstract and a few portraits as well. Especially sour-looking clergymen stared down at us. None of it was particularly modern. How I knew that, was as big a mystery to me as everything around me.
Peter gave a whistle at the sight. “Do you think we’ve come across an art thief?”
“Doubtful.” I picked up a wooden plate with a sharp looking dagger attached to it. “Arkansas Toothpick.”
“How do you know that?”
“No idea,” I said absentmindedly, seeing a flash of a man’s stomach being ripped open as someone slashed an identical weapon such as the one I was holding. Blood, pain, and fear. All written on the man’s face. Shades of movement around him. He was not alone, the open fields ripe with his brothers in death. I put the thing down and entered the kitchen.
What met me there surprised me more than the vision of a dying soldier. Empty bottles lined the kitchen counter and table. All of them had contained different brands of alcohol; the sharp smell of it present from the bottles. Somehow I had no problem identifying this sickly sweet odor.
“Are you okay?”
I turned to look at Peter. “Should I not be?”
He shrugged and averted his eyes. “Not now, no.” He picked up a random bottle and eyed it with a surprising sadness. “Drinking at a bar in the middle of the day is the least of this guy’s problems.” He put the bottle down and went and looked in the fridge. It was dominated more by beers than food. In the top freezer, Peter found a half-full bottle of vodka.
We continued into a living room that presented us with the same array of empty bottles lined on shelves and small tables. There were more artifacts as well as newspapers and books strewn around the room. A television that was not a flat screen like Old Ben’s, but fat and space consuming. A recliner in front of it was the only thing without any clutter, as well as a narrow, mustard yellow and worn couch that had a rumpled blanket on it. It all made me forget my own mission for a moment. It was a sad impression of the person living like this, and I felt something akin to a pang in the stomach. Pity?
“Oh wow,” Peter said and brought me back to my own problems. “Look at this.” He handed me some old and grainy photos he’d picked up from the floor by the couch. I obligingly looked at them, and then arched an eyebrow at him.
“Those are Winter’s ancestors,” Peter said. “See?” he pointed at a fair-haired man in what looked to be the oldest picture. Peter took it from me and turned it around. It was dated 1856, but nothing else was written there. We looked at the motif again.
“How do you know he is a Winter?”
“Well, look,” Peter held the three photos up for me, and he was right. In each photo, there was a Winter. They had the same lean, muscular build, and the same narrow faces, elevated cheekbones, straight noses and a controlled smile for the photo. Hair and clothes were different of course, though there was an element of wealth in every single one. In the 1856 photo, the Winter ancestor posed next to a middle-aged man, both of them sporting pocket watches in their vests. In a 1911 photo, the Winter stood next to a dark-haired man, Asian and wrinkled, and with a slightly stooped posture. The next one was dated 1944, the only one with color, and this Winter stood next to a young dark-haired man dressed in a military uniform.
“Who are these people?”
“Well, the Winters are easy. Did you know they go by more or less the same name? Like farmers used to. The current one is a Ward, and it’s always that or Edward. Every other generation. These other guys though…” he looked closely at the photos. “Maybe they’re former recipients of the grant money? Not like that Ms. Bishop was particularly forthcoming with us. The whole Moreau foundation could be older than we know.”
I nodded and handed the photos back to him so he could, in turn, put them where he found them. The photos were old though. How often did someone get a stipend from the Moreau Foundation? What were the criteria? Why Param?
“This has to be enough, Ben,” Peter’s voice interrupted me. “We need to leave before one of the neighbors call the cops.”
“Okay,” I agreed, seeing surprise in his eyes at once.
“Really?”
“Let’s go,” I added and headed for the hallway. I could learn nothing more from this house without its owner. Anyone calling the police would hinder that. The mere thought of that suspicious detective getting in my way, made me see reason. Though only for the moment. Despite Peter’s discomfort, I could not give up.
Chapter 26
As Olivia and the four officers cleared the security check, they were met by Saphia Bishop who waited for them by the foot of the large stairs in the lobby. Someone had alerted her the moment they laid eyes on the uniformed cops. They probably had procedures to deal with these sorts of things with quick efficiency. Olivia kept her face passive as she neared the director of internal services. Ms. Bishop was dressed in a dark pencil skirt and a long-sleeved white blouse. Standing next to her was a middle-aged man in a tailored suit. Olivia guessed at corporate lawyer. She turned out to be correct.
“What is this, Detective Jones?” Ms. Bishop asked. She looked calm, even smiled a little. Olivia assumed it to be a show for the people milling around, watching. “Mr. Winter is not in today either.”
“Why would he be when you run the company with such efficiency for him?” Olivia remarked. “Anyway, we don’t need to see him. We need something else.”
“And that would be?”
Olivia tried handing her the warrant she had come armed with, but Ms. Bishop, hands clasped in front of her, only nodded toward the man beside her.
“And you are?” Olivia didn’t give him anything yet.
“Kolya Kessen. If that is what I think it is, I want to see it first.”
Lawyer.
Olivia handed him the paper and waited patiently. It was something she excelled at.
“They want our surveillance tapes,” Mr. Kessen told Ms. Bishop. Olivia noted the slight annoyance on the woman’s face.
“Turns out Mr. Cooper was working here the night of the murder of Mr. Dimitri Okanov. The same night the police were called here—”
“Obviously a prank call,” Ms. Bishop interrupted.
“Nevertheless, we have to follow up on this.”
An almost imperceptible sigh escaped Ms. Bishop before she nodded to Mr. Kessen. “Take them
upstairs, Kolya. Make sure Christine arranges for them to have the copies of what they need.”
“Oh, we need everything from that night, Ms. Bishop.”
Ms. Bishop smiled so stiffly Olivia wondered if it hurt. “Of course,” she said, voice curt.
Olivia brought two of the uniforms upstairs while the others waited downstairs, ready to ask around when Ms. Bishop’s attention was directed elsewhere. Olivia had thought she would linger around them when they got the tapes. She did, however, see her leave in the direction of her office as she walked past the conference room at a brisk pace.
Half an hour later, Olivia and the uniforms walked out of the Fortress with a flash drive full of digital surveillance tapes, as well as confirmation Okanov had been spotted in the building.
“Two of the security guards recognized him,” Officer Heep informed her as they headed for the parking lot.
“Even with that photo?”
“It helps when you give people a little warning.”
Olivia nodded. They didn’t have a recent photo of Okanov, so they had to use one of his lifeless face, taken in Dr. Ogden’s morgue.
“Anyway. Neither remembered the date.”
“Well. That’s not too weird.”
“No. But they were certain they had seen him both outside on the grounds and inside. He didn’t do anything wrong exactly, but he was there for a while.”
Olivia nodded and fought back a smile. One thing was for certain – Okanov’s murder was connected to WGI somehow. Then she remembered her boss. He knew of the warrant of course, but now she needed to inform him that she truly was on to something.
As it turned out, she found more than expected as she went through the tapes later that day. Secluded in a small computer room, she watched the comings and goings of people at the Fortress. Not everything was covered, of course, especially the offices inside the buildings, but she focused on the entrances for the most part. The security guards were right. Okanov had been there that day, and as they’d informed Heep, he had spent time both inside and outside scoping the place out.
She watched her murder victim’s movements with mixed feelings. She had read his long file, obtained from Interpol. The suspicions, as well as confirmed crimes following in the man’s wake, did not leave an impression of a normal human being. There would forever be a path of dead bodies behind him. She watched him move around, aware of the cameras, like he had been down in Harrow later that same night. Then he vanished from the screen.
Olivia went through the recordings for the rest of the night, but could not find any evidence of him entering the building again. As Ms. Bishop had informed her, the building closed for visitors at nine p.m. After that Olivia watched late employees trickle out over the next couple of hours. Then, near midnight, Ms. Bishop showed up, moving fast down the main stairs, greeting the policemen that had responded to a mysterious 911 call. Olivia watched them talk, saw Ms. Bishop convincing them there was nothing out of the ordinary going on. After a couple of minutes, the officers left. Ms. Bishop hurried upstairs.
Olivia realized she was drumming her fingers on the table as she sat slumped to the side in the uncomfortable chair while watching this. It had happened as both the officers and Ms. Bishop had told her.
“Something caused that call,” she murmured to herself and exited the current video file. She began looking through the footage from the other floors, going through them systematically. There were fewer cameras on the upper floors, but the fancy glass walls made them capture more than one would think. There was nothing of interest until the seventh floor. That didn’t really surprise her. Ms. Bishop knew something. The question was, was she involved or had she seen something she shouldn’t have?
The floor was vacated by the last employee a little before nine thirty p.m. After that, nothing much happened for a long while, almost two hours. The lights were switched off, so she couldn’t discern too many details, but she could see the frame of a man in one of the offices nearer the elevator, though still set apart a little. Would that not be the CEO’s office? Olivia’s brows furrowed into a frown as she kept watching. The figure was looking for something in there, bending down to open a drawer perhaps? It was a little difficult to see, not only because of the poor lighting, but because a large piece of furniture blocked the view. A couch most likely.
Then, without warning, another figure showed up in the office, running for the first figure. She saw the second intruder raise his hands and strike down on the first one. He tried getting up but was struck again. She watched intently as the figure fell down on the floor, landing on his stomach. The second intruder kept striking. Was that a weapon in his hand? She counted ten strikes. Then the second intruder backed up a little, assessing the damage, Olivia thought. After that, he disappeared from view. There had to be an alternative exit somewhere. Away from any cameras.
Olivia saw no movement in the office. Was the man dead? She could only see the shadow of him, under and to the side of the couch. Emergency-exit signs the only light source. And then she noticed the figure further down the floor. In the conference room? Or just outside? Hard to see with the glass walls merging in the half darkness. Didn’t matter exactly where. The figure stood stock still for a full thirty-six seconds before it ran in the other direction, away from the camera.
“Damn it,” Olivia hissed. She hit rewind but did not become any wiser. It might have been a woman, but it was difficult to tell. What was worse, five minutes after this, there was no more footage. One moment she saw the office abandoned, the next the screen went black.
She huffed out air in frustration and sat back in the chair. Someone had tampered with the tapes. It was too much of a coincidence for anything else. But if she was right, she was beginning to see what might have happened. Many people had reacted and acted emotionally that night. And where was Ms. Bishop’s elusive boss anyway? Dead in Ashdale River as well? He should have washed up by now if that was the case. Anyway, he had made a public appearance a few days after this, had he not? Olivia exited all the windows on the screen and removed the flash drive. The best thing to do now was to start with Alwin Cooper and hope his lawyer would see some reason. She just needed to make a short detour first.
Chapter 27
Olivia watched Reed as he reemerged from the coffee shop, a paper cup in his hand. He only lived a block from there, but maybe he preferred it to making it himself. He walked with a slow pace, more preoccupied with the hot liquid than anything else going on around him. It was Sunday morning though, so the streets were not overcrowded. As Olivia had noticed during their earlier encounters he showed no interest in her beyond the annoyance of her investigation. She was used to being on the alert for it, to avoid situations when unwanted attention caused problems. It came with working in a male-dominated job. But there had been nothing from this one, not even when she’d caught that guy staring at her chest in the coffee shop. She might not be Reed’s type of course, which didn’t interest her anyway. But his eyes never searched anywhere to rest on someone in any appreciative or wanting manner. Now that was interesting. It was like he didn’t care about people more than avoiding walking into them. Like now. A few pretty women and handsome men out there. He never turned his head for any of them. Olivia made a decision and flashed the lights on her car. She was parked by the curb, but was certain he would not have noticed her otherwise. He glanced up and saw her, made a small frown, but didn’t stop. She pointed at the unoccupied front seat next to her. At least he got the message. He put his coffee cup on top of a nearby garbage bin and got in the car.
“You’re not going to drink it?” She nodded toward the cup as he closed the door.
“I’m not supposed to,” he said. She could see he was squinting his eyes a fraction. It wasn’t annoyance at her, though that was there too, but likely a headache. “What do you want, Detective?” he added, confirming the annoyance. She found it somewhat fascinating. He didn’t strike her as afraid. With his supposed memory loss one expected him to
be confused and worried about his suspected involvement in a murder, but she had never seen that in him. Confusion at smaller things going on around him? Sure, but not that. He didn’t seem worried about her investigation, more annoyed at her presence. Like she was in his way somehow.
“I want you to help me with something,” she told him, watching him carefully. He was more disheveled now than he looked in the photos of him on his own and his friends’ social media accounts. Ben Reed was a man who had at least taken care to run a comb through his hair. He had also stuck to being clean shaven. Not anymore it seemed, with golden stubble that would soon turn into a full beard, and hair that fell where it wanted. It was still short enough not to be noticed much, but Olivia did. It was her job to read people and learn about them. She also noticed that despite him sitting in a comfortable position, leaning back in the seat, hands resting on his thighs, he was not relaxed. Not because of her. He simply looked like he didn’t belong. Like an oversized man would look in a tiny car.
“Help you?” he almost gave a smile at that. “With what?”
“Come now, Mr. Reed. I think we’ve established that I’m investigating Okanov’s murder.”
“And I’m supposed to help you arrest me for it?”
“Turns out the evidence has led me in the direction of WGI in this case.” As expected she got his full attention mentioning that name. His whole upper body turned a little toward her. He was dressed in jeans and a dark shirt. Unlike before the fall from the bridge, he now appeared to only view clothes for their sole purpose, not something that could look nice, or send signals. It was something about the way he wore them. A little more casual than before perhaps? One could learn a lot from photos.
“WGI?”
“Mm-hmm… and it turns out… you were there. Before I connected it to my case.”
He lifted his head back a moment before nodding in understanding. “Should I just stay in my apartment until you are done with this case?”
