Agent Fairholm gestured for Jack and Martin to take a seat in the small living room, while he wheeled himself back to his place by the radiator.
"Agent Fairholm, I'm Agent Malone. I called you earlier. We are here about the Northern United robbery back in 1994."
"Former Agent Fairholm," Fairholm corrected Jack. "Yes, I was the lead agent on the case. It was my first case when I headed up the robbery division. It was the biggest case of my career. I guess I missed that train. I always had the feeling that we were just one step short of catching them. But we had to close the case without any viable suspects. What reopened the case now?"
Jack hesitated. "A witness came forward. We are still waiting for confirmation from the DNA, but we are fairly certain that we know who the robbers were. Did you ever come across Eric or Richard Dane or one Clyde Buckner?"
"No." Fairholm shook his head. "We talked to a lot of people, but I'm pretty sure we didn't talk to them. When the robber trio turned out to be a dead end early on, we concentrated on the helpers behind the scenes. My team and I went over it a dozen times; there is no way they pulled this off without inside help from at least two people. First, they knew exactly what security systems the banks had and they were able to shut down the cameras. And second, they were able to cause a power outage covering twenty blocks. For that..."
"About the power outage. How did it happen?" Martin interrupted him.
"We never found out for certain. The manager at Manhattan Central Power was stonewalling us. They were going through a crisis at the moment, and probably didn't want any bad publicity. The manager insisted that it was all just a system glitch, a random malfunction."
"Ever find any evidence to say otherwise?" Jack asked. It was as clear to him as it had been to Fairholm that power didn't just go out right when three men were robbing a bank.
"The manager, Doyle I think was his name, wouldn't let us have anything without a court order.
Judge gave us one, and we turned the place upside down. If there was any physical tampering, they cleaned up. Nothing in the logs or security reports about an incident. We even checked out the computers and that was before cybercrimes existed. Back then, we didn't have the means we have now to restore data that's been wiped. We were awfully behind the bad guys on the technology in those years. Honestly, a group that's able to completely shut down a bank's alarm system, open a time lock on a vault and evade the police for ten years and counting, I'd estimate them capable of creating some sort of computer virus. There was someone very smart behind this robbery," Fairholm said intently.
"Unfortunatly all we have so far are the grunts of the enterprise," Jack remarked.
"How certain are you that you have the right guys?"
"Well, as he said DNA will give us the final confirmation," Martin said. "But everything else fits."
"That will be all then." Jack pocketed his note block and pen. "Thank you for your help, Mr Fairholm."
"I hope you have more luck than we did. We talked to almost four hundred people in total and nothing came of it. They shot a seven-year-old girl in the leg and left her to die. They don't deserve to be out there." Fairholm accompanied them to the door. "Good luck, Agents."
The moment they were out in the corridor, Martin turned to Jack. "What was all that about us having a witness? If you are playing something, I need to be in the loop!" Martin snapped.
"I received a confidential tip about the robbery from an informant," Jack lied.
"You are basing all our investigation on this tip? What if it isn't reliable?" Martin challenged, still angry.
"I trust my source. Besides, we will have confirmation from the DNA test by tomorrow." Jack tried to calm thongs down. He could see where Martin was coming from. They had chased after false information from sources before.
"If Clyde was really one of the robbers, his share of the money has to be gone by now. Maybe he contacted his old buddy Eric, they met in the City and things escalated. Clyde kills Eric and takes off," Martin proposed, changing the subject.
"CSU found signs of blood in Clyde's house. There might be something to your theory. But I have the feeling there is still a lot that we are missing. You heard Fairholm, there were at least two players in the background. I'd like to know who they are. If Clyde wanted to get money out of his partners, he might have contacted more than just Eric Dane," Jack thought out loud. "I want you to go back to Clyde's wife. Grab Danny."
"Where are you going?" Martin asked as they walked to the car.
"I'm going to catch a flight to Seattle."
oOo
Danny pressed down on the doorbell for the third time.
"Think she has taken off?" Martin asked Danny.
"Might have. If she has any idea what her husband used to do in her spare time, it was the smart thing to do."
"Martin raised his fist and pounded against the door.
"Mrs Buckner, FBI! Open the door!"
No reaction came from inside.
"I'm hearing nothing. I'll go around back and have a look in the windows." Danny announced and went around the corner.
He peeked into the kitchen window. The curtains were partially parted. He couldn't see much, but there was a glass tipped over on the table, water spilled over and a bottle of milk standing next to it.
Walking further, he reached the back window. The living room was in order, aside from the TV still being turned on.
"Martin! Come over and have a look!" he called out to his fellow agent. Martin jogged over.
"What is it?"
"Looks like something happened. Exigent circumstances? Think a judge will buy it?" Danny asked with a sly grin on his face.
"I'm sure of it. If not, I still have the private number of Judge Thayer from the Fourth Appellate Court, if you want us to get a warrant." Martin shrugged.
"Getting a warrant would take us at least an hour, I say, we'll go right now. Better call CSU." Danny decided, walking back to the entrance.
Martin took an appraising look at the door, trying to decide how to get rid of the obstacle. It was when Danny tried simply opening the door first that they gained entrance to the Buckner residence.
Immediately they were hit with the smell of something turning into charcoal briskets.
"I think we came just before the fire department. Kitchen?" Danny called over the blaring of the smoke detector.
Martin nodded and headed for the kitchen. Smoke was wafting from the edges of the oven. Martin grabbed a dishrag and pulled open the oven door, releasing a cloud of smoke. He coughed and waved away the smoke from his face.
"Crap. Burned biscuits. Someone beat it out of here." He pulled out the baking sheet.
He looked around. A bottle of milk was on the table, along with a tipped-over glass. He felt the milk bottle; it was warm. It had been outside for a few hours. Everything else looked like a typical suburban kitchen.
Martin wandered into the living room, joining Danny.
"Look at what I found." Danny pointed to the wall. There was definitely a bullet imbedded in the wall. "Bullet. I'm sure that wasn't there when CSU was here the first time."
"Yeah, someone made a point here," Martin nodded.
oOo
Half an hour later, the premises were swarming with CSU agents. Agent John Fern rolled away a large white rug from in front of the couch. On the light hardwood floor were smears of blood.
"Agent Taylor! I found something here," Fern called out.
"What have you got?" Danny leaned over Fern's shoulder.
"Look for your self. Blood smears. Wiped up and covered up with the rug, but they didn't do a very thorough job of it. I'll send a sample to the lab," Fern said, bagging the sample.
"How long till you have a result? We could be dealing with the kidnapping of a child," Danny said, not thinking of that possibility for the first time.
"I'll put in a good word for you with the night shift techs," Fern replied. "I dug out the bullet. If the same gun has been used before, you'll know by tonight. If not, ballistics might still be able to narrow it down a little, if you are lucky."
"Thanks, doc," Danny said and walked back towards the front door. The door was wide open and Martin was standing in the driveway, talking to an elderly couple when Danny walked up to them.
He caught snippets of their conversation.
"A dark SVU, sometime last week," the man said.
"Do you recall what colour it was?" Martin asked, taking notes.
"Maybe black, or it could have been blue. Might have been green," the woman piped up in a high voice.
Danny sidled up to Martin.
"Have you ever seen any visitor?" Martin asked the couple.
The man shrugged. "Clyde was talking to a young man out here. I was driving by when I saw them. I think it was two days ago."
"What did he look like?"
"A young man. Red hair," the man recalled. His wife nodded in agreement.
"We'll need you to come to our office later to look at some pictures," Martin told them.
"We're glad to help. They are such a nice couple; the girl sometimes came by bringing us cookies from her mother. She's such a sweet girl," the woman told Danny.
"We'll do what we can," they reassured the couple. Walking back to the house, Danny turned to Martin.
"I just don't understand this. Clyde Buckner had it all. House in a nice neighbourhood, wife, kid. Why is he risking it all?" The question had been bugging Danny since they had learned about Buckner's past. He knew how hard it was to work your way up.
"We don't know what happened between Buckner and Eric Dane. The past might have caught up with Clyde, no matter how much he changed. You can try to forget, but one day it's going to catch up with everyone," Martin answered quietly. Danny wondered whether the man was speaking from experience. He would have thought that someone like Martin with the perfect family had the perfect past as well. But as they saw on the job, digging into people's lives, there were skeletons in everyone's closet and he had the feeling that their investigation hadn't even begun to uncover what bodies, literally, Clyde Buckner had buried in his basement.
oOo
Vivian hung up the phone. The investigation was expanding rapidly, now that Jack had decided to pursue the robbery theory aggressively. There was no forensic evidence that any of the three men had been involved with the bank robbery, but the co-incidences were starting to pile up and Jack seemed to have an informant he trusted who could confirm the identity of the robbers.
The team would have to re-investigate the robbery again as, while the question of the doers was answered, the MO was still unclear and part of the money
unaccounted for.
Now that people were starting the die, they needed to find the masterminds behind the robbery. There was a record of an interview with the city power company on file, but apparently nothing had ever come of it. Vivian had not been able to find any trace of an investigation into the security angle. But with a foot worth of files, she wasn't sure that it wasn't in there somewhere.
oOo
The office looked like it hadn't been cleaned since the sixties. The windows were deeply stained, tinted yellow brown. The smell of stale cigarette smoke exuded from the worn carpet. A dreg-encrusted coffeemaker stood forgotten between heaps of files and loose paper.
"Doyle's desk is in the back. Can't miss it." The receptionist showed her into the cluttered office at the Central Manhattan Power Company. Vivian carefully walked by heaped desks. A few people looked up as she passed by.
The last desk was occupied by a middle-aged man with whitening hair. His gold-on-black nameplate said 'Dr. Kyle Doyle'.
"Mr Doyle?"
"Yes. You must be the FBI agent. I would offer you a seat, but as you can see, space is at a premium here." Doyle smiled apologetically.
"Hopefully it won't take long. I'm here about a power outage on April 21st 1994." Vivian kept the information to a minimum, waiting to see what Doyle was willing to volunteer.
"Yeah, I was here in 1994. Been here since 1989. I recall that outage. And it wasn't really an outage. It was a computer glitch. Those were pioneer times after all. Some whiz kid from MIT was working our systems back then and next think I know, it's on the fritz all the time. Maybe it just wasn't the time."
"Your software was unstable?" Vivian asked. She wasn't buying the frequent glitches explanation.
"Maybe; most of the time, our systems were reacting too slow and we couldn't deliver enough power soon enough at times of high usage. But luckily we only had one big power failure," Doyle said.
Doyle really had no clue about the technical aspects of the company, Vivian realized. There was power or no power in his world.
"Do you remember anything about this whiz kid?" She changed directions.
"I hired him straight from MIT. In those days there weren't that many computer programmers out there yet. I think his name was Ryan Kensington. I fired him sometime in summer '94 because of the shoddy programming and hired someone with actual field experience. Did have to pay twice the salary though."
Doyle didn't sound overly broken up about his software engineer.
"The FBI is investigating this incident because it is possibly related to a crime committed the same day. Your co-operation in this matter would be very much appreciated." Vivian decided to come clean with the facts, in the hopes to get Doyle's interest.
Doyle looked clueless.
"Surveillance videos, computer logs?" Vivian prompted, her patience starting to wear thin.
"We have video surveillance on the corridors. But there was no spyware back in '94. Pioneer days as I said. It's best if you ask Mr Marquette, our security chief; he'll know what's still in our archives from back then." Doyle seemed relieved to have found a way to delegate responsibility.
"Thank you. I will still need a list of all your employees in 1994, with home addresses," Vivian added.
Doyle hadn't been overly helpful. Apparently the twenty-block blackout had been chalked up to human error and the matter had been left at that. It would be a lot more difficult to investigate a case of potential sabotage now, ten years after the fact when memories had faded and people had moved on.
oOo
The best place to start and their only concrete suspect was the so-called whiz kid, Ryan Kensington. His address was listed only a few blocks from the office of his previous employer, so Vivian decided to get his story right away, given that he was still living under the same address.
The apartment building was a sixteen story, modern building with expensive looking big windows. The classy entrance hall, furnished in warm tones combined with polished aluminium, confirmed the impression that this was not the typical place for a guy's first apartment after college.
Behind a counter in the hall sat two burly men, their broad shoulders and black suits practically screaming security team. As soon as she entered, their entire attention was focussed on her, and only when she showed them her badge, the tension dropped.
"I'm looking for Ryan Kensington. He lived in this building in '94," Vivian asked, not liking the way the security guards were still looking at her even after she had identified herself.
"Kensington? He moved out in August the same year. Still owns the apartment though. Lived there with his fiancé, Rodnina Villeroy. She still lives up there. But I haven't seen him in ten years. I guess the wedding is off." The smaller one of the guards chuckled.
"Did Mr. Kensington leave a new address where he could be reached?"
"He didn't even really move out if I think about it. All he had was a suitcase. Rodnina probably chased him out one night. He asked me to call him a cab and that was the last I saw of him," the small guard shrugged.
"Do you by any chance recall where he wanted to go?" Vivian asked, hoping to get to the point since the security guards obviously took an active interest in the lives of the tenants.
"I think he wanted to go to the airport, but I don't recall to which one," the guard replied.
"Well, thank you. Is Rodnina Villeroy home?"
oOo
Rodnina Villeroy fitted her apartment perfectly. Tall, slender, with long copper hair and dressed in a cream designer suit, she reminded Vivian of a European fashion model.
Rodnina gracefully moved to sit down on the black leather couch in the living room. Sunlight streaming in through a floor-length window brightened the spacious room. Rodnina folded her arms in front of her chest and narrowed her eyes, focussing on Vivian.
"You said you were here about Ryan. So I guess it was true after all. I always suspected that he was dead."
"Why do you think that?" Vivian had gathered that Ryan Kensington had dropped off the face of the earth in the summer of 1994. He could by buried in Central Park or living in Panama; their chances of finding him weren't good after ten years.
"It was in August '94. Ryan is, or rather was a software engineer. Back then it was called computer scientist. After he was fired at the power company, I encouraged him to look for jobs not just in the city. I eventually got him an interview with the Kale Institute, a private think tank. They offered him a job. It wasn't what he wanted. Kale was building an office in Asia at the time, Singapore. When Ryan couldn't find anything here, he decided to take the offer from Kale. But he didn't really want to. He packed a suitcase and walked out that door. That was the last time I ever saw him." Rodnina told Vivian, sadness ringing in her voice.
"You haven't tried to contact him?" Vivian asked.
"Kale was supposed to arrange everything for him when he got there, so he didn't know his new number yet. He said he'd call me. When the weeks passed and nothing happened, I figured he wasn't going to call anymore. I guess I didn't want to face the truth, whatever it was." Rodnina paused. "Kale disbanded in 1998. Then I knew that Ryan was dead."
"I heard that you were engaged at the time. How were things in your relationship if Ryan was leaving for Singapore?" Vivian asked, sensing that there was more to Rodnina's story. She didn't get the impression that Rodnina was involved in Ryan's disappearance, but maybe Ryan had run from more than the police.
"We were young and stupid," Rodnina said angrily. "Ryan was a genius. He had his master's when he was twenty-two. But my parents didn't approve of him. We didn't exactly run in the same circles before we met. Back then I refused to listen to my parents."
Vivian nodded. "But now you think that they were right?"
Rodnina dropped her head into her hands. "I have been thinking about Ryan more in the last ten years in the time that I have known him. Ryan had a dark side. I knew he had some shady friends; they were over here a few times. As my father would have said: They weren't our kind of people."
"Do you know the names of any of his friends?" Vivian asked.
"Dick, I think he called this one guy. And there was a young couple here a few times as well. The word 'white trash' comes to mind. They sat around the computer, ate junk food and smoked pot. I nearly kicked Ryan out after that," Rodnina recalled.
"Any idea where the drugs came from?"
"God no! It might have been the 90s, but I only drank. I was too smart to smoke away my brain," Rodnina laughed. "But I do have some pictures of Ryan and his friends from our New Years Party." Rodnina got up and walked to the shelf, pulling out a thick scrapbook. She carried it over to the table.
"I made it after Ryan disappeared. I put in everything I could find about him, about his life. Only then I realized that there was so much that I hadn't know about him. Maybe if I had, he would still be alive today," Rodnina whispered.
"Ms Villeroy, until we have a chance to verify official records, there is no way of knowing what happened to your fiancé," Vivian reassured her, knowing they were empty words to the pained woman who had lost the man she loved ten years ago.
"Have you ever reported Ryan missing?" Vivian asked.
"No, I haven't. I couldn't prove that he wasn't off somewhere in Asia, me and New York out of his mind," Rodnina said sadly. She opened the scrapbook at the first page.
"Ryan's hometown, Red Sun in Ohio. Population 2789, at least the year Ryan was born, in 1973. I always wanted to go there with him, but he didn't want to take me. I got the impression there were some bad memories at home." Rodnina smiled.
Vivian could imagine why Ryan Kensington would have wanted to stay away from his former hometown. In a town this small, he had to have met the Dane brothers at one time or another. Three out of three thousand in the same city, the same month and all involved in a bank robbery. There was no such luck of the draw.
Rodnina interrupted her thoughts. "This is from the bar where we met. I still have the receipts. Ophelia's Tavern. It closed down a few years ago. I have been asking around a bit. You know, just Ryan's favourite spots, to see if anyone ever saw him again." She smiled.
"But that's what I really wanted to show you." She flipped ahead several pages and turned the scrapbook to face Vivian. "Our New Years Party, 1993. We had a strange crowd in here."
Vivian looked over the pictures, scanning smiling faces, but when her gaze fell on the photograph of a group with raised glasses, all smiling into the camera, the realization dawned on her like a shower of ice. She knew what Jack had known all along. The pieces of the puzzle were starting to come together.
In the photograph, two men with red hair framed a young couple. A very familiar blonde woman with her arm wrapped around a young Clyde Buckner.
"Agent Johnson, is something wrong?" Rodnina's voice penetrated the rush of her thoughts.
"No, I'm fine. Could you please try to make a list of the people who attended the New Years party in '93?" Vivian struggled to regain her footing.
"Was there someone at the party who was involved with what happened to Ryan?" Rodnina asked anxiously. She had been waiting for ten years and there wasn't a possibility she hadn't considered. She had accepted that Ryan was dead.
Vivian weighed her options. Rodnina's pain was genuine, she had no doubt about that. She really had loved Ryan Kensington. But love and hate were sides of the same coin. Rodnina was a smart woman and her instinct told her that the woman knew more than she was telling.
"It's a nice apartment. Great view of the river," Vivian commented lightly.
Rodnina smiled, but there was tension in her features.
"My parents made sure that I was well cared for, even once they weren't able to look out for me anymore." She paused. "But I have my own business: custom designer clothing. Each piece is unique. Two stores here in the city, one in L.A. I don't have to worry about money. Recession or not, there are always people with money."
"So you paid for the both of you?" Vivian asked, determined to find out just what Rodnina was hiding.
"Ryan was doing well, financially." Rodnina hesitated and Vivian knew that she had struck a nerve. "He worked sometimes for private contractors on the side. Computer security."
Vivian guessed that it had been more than computer security and that Rodnina had at least suspected.
"Do you still have his computer or any of his files, back-ups maybe?" Vivian asked.
"Yes. His computer is still here. He couldn't take it with him; there were no laptops at the time. But he wiped it. I tried finding something on it myself. All his discs are gone; he must have taken them with him," Rodnina said.
"I'll still send someone to pick up the computer and any documents related to his work that you still have. They might help us find Ryan," Vivian explained.
"Why are you starting to look for him now, after ten years? Ryan really did something illegal, didn't he?" Rodnina asked, suddenly insecure again. Her worst suspicions about her fiancé were about to come true, she feared.
"We don't know anything yet." Vivian didn't mention her very concrete suspicions.
"Please, can you at least keep me informed? I need to know...even if Ryan really is dead. Ten years is a long time, Agent Johnson," Rodnina asked quietly.
"We might..." Vivian broke off, realizing that Rodnina was in enough pain. "I will let you know when I have something."
TBC