Saving Mr Rodgers

Summary: Kate Beckett is investigating a homicide when she reveals the plot to assassinate the billionaire Richard Rodgers. After meeting her Richard demands that she'll be the one leading the team of his body guards, and she is persuaded to accept. What follows is undeniable forces of attraction - and the investigation of who wants Richard dead.

A/N: I would like to make a disclaimer to this story that my knowledge of finance is very shallow, embarrassingly shallow, and what I do know is… well let's just say that I'm studying humanitarian subjects at university, meaning that economy is treated more as a social construct and a way to describe the world, rather than "this is how it works". I got this idea reading about the "Davos Man", and thought it would be an interesting subject to explore. I also know very, very, little about technology. I can do the EASY software parts of it, the actual computer-thingies? No, obviously because I call it thingies. So I made something up!

The title is a play on "Saving Mr Banks", but I have not seen the movie nor do I plan to. This story is not based on that movie, nor the premise of it.

Monday August 24th, 2009 – The Lakes

It was the sirens that woke Kathrine Beckett. Despite having lived in New York her whole life her sleep was light, easily jousted out of deep sleep. Prying one eye open she saw one of her favorite books on the bed next to her, face down marking the page she had gotten to before the fight against sleep had proven to be a futile battle. The taste of cotton in her mouth, and the gray light in the room, was all information she needed to know what type of day it would be.

The clock on her bedside table glared the red numbers 5.28. Groaning in discontent she hid her face in her pillow, knowing that in only two minutes the alarm clock would go off. If a dead body didn't appear before then.

Turning the alarm off she dragged herself out of bed, pulling off her sleep shirt as she went. Since her last failure of a relationship a few months back– she would deny a pattern, but once the one year anniversary came along she had ended it, like always – she had started to question the whole idea of propriety. Certain that things needed to be changed she had chopped off a good part of her hair, and had relished in the ease of it. 5 am showers had turned into 5.30 am showers, for one. Her one friend Lanie had been the only one to mourn the loss of the long locks of hair.

The knobs in shower had settings of frigid, warm, and scalding. The exact twist of them was a skill she was proud of, one which had, when she was in a relationship, resulted in that none of her companions could shower on their one. Unless they sought a cold shower, or enjoyed being scalded alive. Massaging her shoulders she tried to relax, but thoughts of the day ahead intruded. Being the youngest female homicide detective in the precinct, even the force, had been a dream of hers for a long time. The relentless pursuit of this position had marked the good part of her twenties, and now that she was only a few months shy of her thirtieth birthday, she still felt as if she missed something

Through Facebook she had learned that most of her friends were married, had partners, a good portion of them had kids, expecting kids, or at the very least had pets. She avoided the site most of the time, only when she had forgotten the infestation of gullibility on it did she venture back, dose herself with a strange sort of envy of their lives, and at the same time pity. It was impossible to empathize, her life was far from what they had.

It was not that which was missing, children that is, it was the abruptness of how her mother's life had ended, and how meaningless it had been. Her days were spent finding other people's killers, one day hoping that her mother's killer would appear. That one day she and her father would get the closure they needed.

After drying herself, she dressed in the clothes she had bought months earlier when she had been promoted. It were clothes that reminded people of her profession and superiority first, gender second. The importance to be a police officer first was one that was life, and career, saving.

It was during breakfast, ham on toast and a big mug of black coffee, that her phone started ringing. Earlier than she had hoped, but it was not unexpected. After she had been informed of the address where she would begin her work day she stuffed the last of the toast in her mouth, and poured the rest of the coffee in a travel mug, one she had invested in after realizing the hole bought coffee made in her budget.

In her line of work she had seen many dead bodies, most ended up dead because of domestic arguments, some from gang violence, random street violence; there were all types of deaths. For the most part they ended up like the victim now, lying on the floor of an apartment in a pool of blood, the chaos surrounding bearing witness to an intense struggle. Some went silently, accepting their faith, others fought until the very end

Kate had wondered quite a few times who she would be, if the time came. She had faced the other end of a gun many times, but she had never been convinced they would actually pull the trigger on her. This man had fought for his life, the smashed glass table, overturned chairs, haphazardly strewn papers witnessed of a struggle, and a desire to live.

"He was shot at close range," Lanie informed her when heard Kate's footsteps approaching, squinting at the wound in the middle of his brow.

"Can you tell what type of gun that was used?" Kate asked, her eyes shifting from Lanie to the body. There was something that didn't seem right, something that was missing, but she couldn't quite place it.

"No, I will have to get back to you on that, there is something peculiar about the wound and blood spatter… look here, it's almost as if the vessels were cauterized by the bullet." Kate realized then what it was that was missing; lots of blood.

"What type of gun would do that?" she wondered out loud, and she squatted beside the body, trying to register all the details, catalogue them for later use. "Is there an exit wound?"

"No, and I hope that the bullet remained intact, and it looks that way considering the minimal blood spatter, because then I can extract it and see if I can find a match for it." Lanie was writing on her clipboard as she spoke, Kate sensed that whatever she needed to know she would be informed of in the crime scene report, and the subsequent autopsy report.

"Esposito, do we have a name of the victim?" she shot out, seeing the man in the corner of the room talking to one of the uniform men who had responded to the first call.

"According to the ID in the victim's wallet his name is Colin Lake, 28 years old," he said, hands resting on his hips – he knew what he was doing, and that he was good at it, too. "Neighbors say Lake was a quiet neighbor, he worked nights and slept most of the day, the next door neighbor was the one who called in after hearing what sounded like a fight, didn't hear a gunshot."

"Did they know where he worked?" she asked, once again looking around at the apartment that had been torn upside down in a struggle.

"No, but the neighbors son said he thinks Lake was a security guard."

"Okay, thank you Espo," she said. "I'm going to talk to the landlord and hear if there were any security cameras in the building that could've picked up the murderer."

The talk with the landlord proved fruitless; while there were cameras in the building they had stopped working following a power outage months before, and had decided not to invest in the reparations required to get them working again. Instead she left the crime scene without much insight to the victim, more than his next of kin: a brother. Colin Lake's parents had died in a car crash 5 years earlier, and the brother was the only one he had left in life.

Kate knew about loss. Losing her mother had made her all too familiar with grief, but she still had her father. For many years he, too, had been lost to her, when he found comfort at the bottom of a bottle and spent most of his time too out of it to remember why he got drunk in the first place, and that he still had a daughter

It was her job to make the calls. There was no way to tell people that someone they loved had been murdered that would lessen the pain, the only thing she could do was minimize the additional pain. The brother was older than Colin, and Kate could hear children in the background when he picked up the phone.

"Hello, I am Detective Kathrine Beckett calling from the New York Police Department, I'm looking for Ethan Lake," she said. It was easy for her to say, it poured out of her mouth without thinking. Sometimes when she made private phone calls she had to stop herself from saying that sentence.

"This is him," the man confirmed, a weariness had entered his voice. As Kate slowly explained to him what had happened, there was only minute changes in Ethan's voice. Those were changes that Kate had learnt to pick up on; changes that either meant grief, indifference, or that they were in part, or fully, responsible for the death of the victim. In Ethan's case, all she could hear was the realization that his family was gone.

The hardest part about being a detective was telling the family; the rest of it she loved. Solving the murders, bringing justice and closure was the reason she woke up in the mornings. If she couldn't do this job, she didn't know what she would do. Her whole adult life had been spent with this goal in mind, doing this. That's how she got through those phone calls, those talks with the families; because at the end of the day she brought justice for them.

What followed was a day of questions. Despite being relatively new to the job – definitely the newest at the precinct, she had understood a routine in a homicide investigation, and that was that the first day usually always was one for questions. Colin Lake was a security guard at a company called Castles, a company that was owned by billionaire Richard Rodgers, and dealt with high risk, and highly profitable, hedge funds.

Esposito and she decided to head to the offices that the company resided in. The office had pristine windows, and an open space plan in the reception area. It was a room too large, in Kate's opinion, to house only a simple wooden reception with one smiling woman behind it. Both Esposito and she noticed the guards standing with stiff backs beside the two doors on opposite ends of the room, and two standing by the door they had just come through, and gave each other knowing glances. Their suspicions were even further piqued when showing their badges wasn't enough to prove their status as cops, since the woman called to confirm that the badges were real, and that Kate and Esposito were supposed to be there.

Granted one hour to interview Colin's colleagues by the head of security, they intended to make the most of it. However, most of the people he had worked with had little to say, which they had been warned about by the head of security. A signed non-disclosure agreement left them with little room to talk. Most of them had only nice things to say. According to a beefy read-headed man Colin Lake had been a nice person, if only somewhat quiet and reserved. It was him that told them that even without the signed agreement there wasn't much to say about his dead colleague anyway.

When the hour was up the head of security met up with them to see them out. When he had made the call to let them in it had been over the phone with the receptionist, and Kate had a few prejudices against security detail, and had expected a brusque ex-military –esque person. The person who stood in the door was a man in his early thirties with floppy blond hair. Contrary to what Kate had imagined he was soft and kind. As he walked them out he introduced himself as Kevin Ryan, and apologized for the way things needed to be handled. As a gesture to show that they had nothing to hide, when it came to the murder, Ryan slipped them his card.

They had left the offices without any more leads, just the nagging feeling that it didn't seem as if Colin was the type of person who would be murdered like he had been. People who were murdered like that were people who were deep into something they couldn't get out of. People's whose activities before their death would tell a story.

Nothing showed up when they checked his financials. The only relationship that his brother could tell them about was an ex since several years back. All they had was one phone call Colin had made to his brother the day before he was murdered where he appeared to be a bit upset. According to his brother this was nothing unusual for this time of year; it was nearing the 5 year anniversary of their parent's death.

What they had was Colin's work place, that seemed to deal with things far more sensitive than hedge funds – but Kate was unsure of how secretive that sort of business was. Were there trade secrets? Classified documents that revealed where investments would be most profitable? Was there, possibly, illegal activities within the company which caused it to be this profitable? What she knew about the financial world was basic, hedge funds bordered into a territory where she had to admit that her knowledge was lacking. Which made this that much harder to investigate.

The next couple of days was spent trying to find a reason find a reason to return to the office that Colin had worked at. Any billionaire was bound to have multiple lawyers whose only task was to keep the police out, meaning they needed solid proof to get a warrant. What they found was circumstantial, or irrelevant: a woman had filed a sexual harassment suit which had lead nowhere just the year before after leaving the company, and a person working in the mail room had sustained work-related injuries resulting in indefinite disability leave from the company. Nothing that could be tied to Colin, nor to anything that would get him killed.

By that point Kate had started to suspect that maybe the killer was after someone else, and killed the wrong person. I wouldn't have been the first time. That was until four days after Colin was found that they received information from another precinct in New York that Colin's brother Ethan had been murdered, too. With the same shot to his head. Neighbors heard nothing. The only difference was that only hours before Ethan had made a phone call to them, alerting them of a letter that Colin had sent him before he died. They got a copy of it before Ethan was murdered.

The letter yielded little information as to who the killer was, nor the reason they were murdered. What the letter contained was Colin's worry that he was being followed, and that someone was after him. There was one line in it, though, which was the golden ticket into Castles; ever since I was promoted I've felt watched, I think this promotion was my death sentence.

Ryan met up with them in the lobby the second time they visited, and showed them up to his office on the third floor. It was a decent sized office, with video screens that covered most of the south wall of the office, and the eastern wall had small windows to minimize the reflections on the screens.

"Please, sit down," Ryan offered them, and she and Esposito complied. They were simple chairs for visitors who weren't supposed to linger long.

"Thank you, Mr Ryan, for taking the time to meet with us," she said, careful about not leaning back in the chair. "As you must understand that now when we're dealing with two murders this has become a much more delicate investigation, which we will need all help we can get to solve." Diplomacy, she had learnt, was the best first approach when dealing with strung up and wealthy people. While Kevin Ryan most probably was a middle class man, the company he worked for required him to think as an upper-class man while on the job.

"Of course, we'll do what we can do help out." Ryan's smile was kind. There was no ring on his finger, or any photographs in his office, but Kate didn't peg him as a bachelor. No, he had someone, at least.

"We appreciate that." Pleasantry was tedious, but necessary. "Mr Lake sent his brother a letter before he was murdered, and his brother Ethan Lake received it, and read it, only hours before his death. We managed to secure a copy of the letter before Ethan Lake was killed, but the original was stolen after the murder. We have some questions about the content of this letter."

"I will do my best to answer them, but I am only head of security, I have little insight into the business conducted in this building," Ryan said, weighing back in his black leather office chair.

"In this letter Mr Lake writes about a promotion, what type of promotion was this?" Ryan's lips were clamped shut for a moment, hesitating to answer the question.

"He was promoted from front desk to security on the eight floor, the one Mr Rodger's office is on," he eventually said. "The details of what he did I can't discuss."

"We understand," Esposito said, a contemplating look on his face. "When we searched Mr Colin's apartment we didn't find any type of key card, which I noticed you using on multiple occasions on our way up here, nor indication that this was his work place. How does that work?"

"Well, the simple explanation is that each employee has a key card which they can only have on them within this building, and one they leave at the end of the day. Mr Lake's key card, somehow, disappeared the day before his murder, and we recognized a breach in our system before he was found. We have updated our key cards now, though," Mr Ryan explained with reluctance.

"Why didn't you report this to the police, or tell us the first time we were here?" Kate asked, trying to lay a puzzle with half the pieces missing. It didn't add up.

"We have a private contractor that we utilize for this type of thing, involving the police has a tendency to blow things out of proportion." Esposito coughed to cover his reaction, and his amusement for what he knew was about to follow.

"Mr Ryan, two people are dead, I don't think bad press should be your main concern." The steel in her voice was hard to cover up, she did manage to cover the white hot anger that boiled in her chest.

"Detective Beckett, I sympathize, but the reputation of this company is what keeps other companies, even countries, afloat, which means that bad press is more than a few lost investments." She was met with equal amount of steel.

"What type of breach did you discover?" she said, moving on.

"Nothing important, it was to a file cabinet which contains mostly copies of public information. Nothing had been stolen." Ryan shrugged.

"I would like a list of files that were in that cabinet, if that is possible?" she asked, trying to resume to the pleasantries that had been there at the beginning of the conversation.

"Of course, I will have someone send them over to you." Ryan began shuffling a couple of papers on his desk, to make a show of how busy he was.

"Thank you." Esposito said, looking over to the wall of screens. "We would also like the recording of the breach. You said cabinet, so it was not a breach into your security system, but an actual physical cabinet."

"I… will get back to you on that," Ryan said, looking a bit nervous.

"We would hate to have to get the courts involved with a warrant," Esposito said, a fake smile in place.

"Right, as I said I will get back to you on that."

It was only three hours later when they received the digital copies of the inventory of the filing cabinet, and the security tape footage. Handing it over the footage to the IT-specialists Esposito and Kate divided up the inventory, and started to sort through the files. Most of them made little sense to a person without economic literacy, the course she took in college helped a little, but it still left some lacking. It also left them with a hanging question: everything in this inventory was, as Kevin Ryan had informed them, public knowledge that could be found on Castles website.

The only lead they had left was the security footage from the break in after Colin Lake had been murdered. It took a few hours for the tech department to get a clear enough picture of the suspect. They'd been called to view the footage with the tech, to get all the information they needed about the recorded footage.

According to the tech the video was clean, there had been no tampering with the footage. The suspect was around 6'3, and spent approximately 7 minutes in the room which the cabinet was in before leaving seemingly empty handed. He wore the uniform security guards in the building wore, which meant that they would have to make a phone call to Kevin Ryan to hear if they could identify the man on the video. Ryan informed them that he did not know who was on tape, but suspected that the suspect wore Colin Lake's uniform, as they appeared to be the same size.

Seven days after Colin had been murdered, and three days after Ethan had been killed, Kate worried that the trail was starting to grow cold. Murder investigations generally yielded a suspect quickly, or not at all.

After spending most of her Monday morning looking over the tape, over and over, she decided to pay a visit to Castles, again. Esposito had the day off after working the whole weekend, meaning she was on her own for the day. By the time she reached the front desk the woman behind smiled, and informed her that Mr Ryan was already on his way down to meet her.

"Detective Beckett, what can I do for you today?" Ryan's face wore a genuine smile. "Come on up, we'll talk in my office."

"I'm here about the breach," she said as they walked into the elevator. Long legs made her able to keep a high pace with men, something she had discovered was an advantage when establishing her authority with men.

"I appreciate your eagerness detective, I would prefer that you wait to ask questions until we're in my office," he said. "How was your weekend?"

"Just work," she answered honestly, looking at her reflection in the stainless steel of the doors. She shifted uncomfortably. Being questioned of her free time always made her uncomfortable, namely because she did not have a social life to speak of at all.

"Wow, I didn't know just how hard detectives worked." They stepped out of the elevator, and Ryan swiped his keycard at the first door, letting her in in front of him. "I was in the police academy before I got this job, was just a few weeks from finishing when I got a job here… the pay is a lot better."

"How long have you worked here?" Walking through a few more doors they got to Ryan's office, where he punched in a code to open it.

"Ah, since 2001, so about 8 years, I started as a security guard, though, and worked my way up. Please, sit." They sat opposite each other, on different sides of his desk. "What has brought you back here?"

"I have a few questions about the cabinet that you discovered a breach in, as you said there was no information in it that could not be accessed online or via public record, which makes it a strange cabinet for a person to break into, did you rearrange the storing recently?" she asked, trying to read Ryan's expression, but found no reaction at all to her queries.

"No, we have not," he said. "The files are digital, what is inside that storage room is encrypted back-up disks, which have not been tampered with."

"Were there other files stored in there which contains information that others could want?" She received a deadpan expression as an answer.

"Detective Beckett, this business is run on speculation, it predicts where the capital will go, and when it will go, that is information that could make a lot of people very rich," Ryan explained. "So the answer is yes."

"Are you sure no other file has been tampered with, a minor file that doesn't seem of importance," she asked. The people she had interrogated in her life had taught her that she needed to be really clear about what she was asking, and to double check with them. People had a tendency to lie, skip over parts they didn't think were necessary, and forget things, no matter how high up they were in the food chain.

"Yes, I'm sure."

"That's strange." She furrowed her eyebrows and thought it over once more. "Is it possible that I can see this room?"

"Uh." Ryan turned to the computer on his desk, and clicked on a few things before turning back to her. "Yes, that should work."

"Where is this cabinet exactly?" she asked, following him out of the office and down the corridor towards the elevator.

"On the 8th floor," he said.

"That's on the same floor as Mr Rodgers' office?"

"That's correct," Ryan said, looking amused at the inquiries, as if there was an inside joke she wasn't privy to.

"That's a bit odd, I'd have guessed the files were in the basement." She shared his amusement at the peculiar choice of location.

"If you ever have the chance to meet Mr Rodgers, you will understand." It seemed to her as an odd way to speak of one's boss, especially one as powerful as Richard Rodgers. Esposito had during a dry-up of ideas googled the man, and realized he could buy the whole New York police force if he wanted to. It was possible that he had at least a finger into it.

She questioned Ryan about Mr Rodgers on their way up, but Ryan was a firm believer in that you need to meet a person to understand what they were like. The only thing he could say that Mr Rodgers was not like most people who were new to money, and that he still good friends with his childhood self.

They reached the floor in no time, the speed of the elevator made her a bit queasy. Into the corridor where Castle's office was there was no key card needed, there was however several security guards at seemingly random spots, and some appeared to be armed. Ryan greeted them all with a smile and a nod, and the guards replied back. From the way they smiled at each other it was easy to tell that Ryan was the sort of boss who lead with ease, and who the people under him could feel at ease with.

At the end of the corridor there were two double doors leading into what she suspected was Mr Rodger's office, and Ryan confirmed it. Right next to it was the door to the filing cabinets, as they had called the digital files.

"It looks dark in there," she said, after noticing that there was light coming through the frosted windows.

"Mr Rodgers is out of town," Ryan said with the tone of finality she had come to get used to, indicating she would get no more information of Mr Rodger's whereabouts.

They entered the room, and just as she imagined it was a simple room with processors that stored digital copies of files. Ryan punched in a code that disarmed the alarm system, and then leaned against the door frame as he watched over her.

"Had anything been moved after the breach?" she asked, turning around in the tight space that wasn't occupied by processors.

"Nothing that we noticed anyway." She looked at the shelves hanging on the walls where papers and office supplies were stored, and up higher towards the vent.

"Have you checked the ventilation system?" She remembered that the man who had broken into this room had looked sweaty when he left.

"No, we haven't," Ryan admitted.

"Okay, I'm going to go up there and check," she said, climbing up on a desk that had been stored in the room, pushing away blank copy paper with her feet. She thanked that she was tall because she could just barely reach and look into the vent. "I think I see something in there... do you have a screwdriver, or something?"

Ryan found one with the office supplies and handed it to her, and she opened up the vent to see what was inside.

"Mr. Ryan, what date did you say Mr Rodgers was returning to the office?" she asked, Ryan noticed that she was tense.

"I didn't mention it," he said, vaguely. He knew he wasn't supposed to tell anyone, but sensed that now was not the time to stick strictly to protocol. "He'll be back tomorrow morning." Kate looked down at him with wide concerned eyes.

"There's a bomb up here, and it's set to go off tomorrow at 10 am."

Thank you for reading! Updates will be irregular, since I have my studies and obligations in the way, but I did write this now during exam week so... it all depends.

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