The Lost Key (5 page)

Near Wall Street

10:00 a.m.

Mike knew Nicholas was tense, angry, just as she was. She touched his arm as they watched the techs load Mr. Olympic's body into the medical examiner's van. “It's always tough, the waste, the not knowing why,” she said. The van doors closed with a clang. “And now he's dead and can't tell us. But we will take care of Mr. Pearce, we'll get him justice. You know that, Nicholas. Are you okay?”

He let out a deep breath. “Yes, I know that. I'll be fine.”

Mike shielded her eyes from the sudden glare of the sun off the glass windows of Trinity Church, to their right. She saw a crowd was gathered a little farther down the street, in Zuccotti Park, watching them.

“Good.” She popped him in the arm, grinned at him. “You know, I really didn't expect you to be Superman on your first day, but there you were, flying right out of the gate.”

“Talk about fast, Mr. Olympic would have gotten away from us if you hadn't known that shortcut. This is strange, Mike, all of it. I mean, Mr. Olympic hung around, then he was so afraid when we got him, he popped cyanide in his tooth?”

“Or whatever it was. You're right. Leave your cape on, okay?”

“I wonder, did Superman ever get a pilot's license, or did he wing it?”

“He winged it, absolutely.” She glanced again at the growing crowd. “Let's go back. Maybe there's an update on the video, and we can see for ourselves what happened.”

“Yes, let's. I'd like to see how Pearce was taken down.” He paused, gave her a long look. “You know, you could be Ms. Olympic.”

She said coolly, not looking at him, “I tried, but I wasn't good enough.”

He pictured a younger Mike, all long, strong legs, blond hair in a ponytail, focused, determined— “Long distance or sprint?”

“Long distance.”

He believed it. He paused for a moment, frowned. “It's strange. I feel like someone's been watching us, but how could anyone do that? Forget it, come on, let's get back.”

It took them only a few minutes to walk back to Federal Hall. Officer Wilson stood by the crime scene tape, keeping people out.

“We heard there was an incident with the suspect and he's dead,” Wilson said. “What happened?”

Nicholas said, “Well, he led us on a merry chase, Tasered me, then managed to get himself dead when I caught up to him the second time.”

“Did you have to kill him?”

“No, it was something else entirely, something he ate, maybe. Next time, Wilson, you can chase him.”

“Nah, I'm not as young as I once was.” He gave Nicholas a manic grin. “You look worse for wear yourself, Agent Drummond. Anything we can do for you? You need a medic?”

“I'm fine,” Nicholas said. “What we need are the video feeds of the murder, if you have them.”

“Happens we do. The agent over there, Louisa? She has them downloaded.”

Louisa was sitting on the edge of the truck's gate with a laptop balanced on her knees, her bobbed blond hair blowing a bit in the light spring breeze. She looked up. “Hey, you're back. Good.” Then she really looked. “Whoa. You guys look like you've been in a war. What in the world happened to you two?”

“Not all that much, really, and the suspect is dead,” Mike said. “We really need that video feed now, Louisa.”

“Or yesterday, whichever is fastest,” Nicholas said.

“You got it. You're in luck with the video. I'm almost done enhancing it. Like the witnesses said, the men actually argued for a while before he killed Pearce.”

She turned the laptop around and hit play.

The feed was grainy, angled down, so Mike knew immediately it had come from a traffic cam, but it was clear enough that they could see Mr. Olympic loitering on the corner when Pearce rushed into the frame. Pearce had been jogging. They watched him bend down to catch his breath, rub his knees, check his watch, and look around. When he didn't see who he was expecting to see, he sent a quick text message on his cell.

Such mundane acts, Mike thought. He had no clue he was about to die. She'd seen death videos too often, and it always made her sad and angry to watch a person's life end violently.

Mr. Olympic walked over to Pearce and said something. Pearce jerked in response. They spoke, then it became more heated. Mr. Olympic slipped a knife from inside his Windbreaker. He was careful with it, practiced. No one on the street level would have been able to see it; the angle from the traffic cam showed it gleaming between the two of them. When Pearce turned away, obviously
angry, the knife sank into his back. They watched Pearce's face change from bewilderment to disbelief. And then he was down, Mr. Olympic with him.

Louisa said, “I know, it's horrible. Now, listen, I was able to catch up the audio to the video before he knifed him.”

The voices were faint; they had to strain to hear.

Pearce said,
“He won't come. He's too smart, he'll know, he'll see you.”

“He'll come, see me with you, and he'll think everything is fine. We're going to wait for him to show, and then we're going to have a little chat.”

“So you're the one who sent me the text?”

Mr. Olympic held up a cell phone, waggled it in his hand.
“The power of technology. While we wait, you can tell me what he told you last night. The call between the two of you lasted for thirty minutes, then you made some very interesting calls yourself. Exciting news travels fast, yes? He found it, didn't he?”

“I won't allow it, I won't
let you have him.”
Pearce jerked around, but Mr. Olympic was fast. He said something they couldn't make out, then suddenly the knife was out, five inches of tempered steel, and seconds later it slammed deep into Pearce's back.

Pearce went down on his knees, the suspect cradling him.

He said,
“Tell me. Tell me everything, or I swear to God, I'll kill your whole family and everyone they love.”

Pearce had little breath left. He was facing the cameras, his eyes blank with shock.

“Tell me or they're both dead!”

“The key—”

“The key what?”

“The key is—in the lock.”
Pearce's head lolled against the man's chest.

“What? What the hell does that mean?”
He shook him, but Pearce was gone. He pushed Pearce onto the pavement, and Mr. Olympic, clearly furious, pulled out Pearce's cell and punched in numbers, but then looked wildly around at the shouts, saw two large men closing on him, and jumped to his feet. He tripped on Pearce, dropped the cell phone, and ran.

The screen showed people running to the body, several people calling 911, then Louisa turned the computer back around. “That's all I have for now. I'll keep working on this, see if I can further enhance it. You say our suspect is already dead; at least Pearce got payback, right?”

Nicholas said, “Mr. Pearce's dying words:
The key is in the lock.
What does that mean? Louisa, play it again, please.”

She did. He listened and watched, and when it was finished, nodded to himself. “We need an ID on this man, Louisa, as quickly as possible. Upload this video into the facial-recognition database. There's a good still shot to be taken as he turns to run away. Put in a parameter to have it search the European databases through Interpol as well, and all the incoming flights from Germany to New York.”

Mike asked, “German?”

“I caught it the second time through. A moment before he stabs Pearce, he says,
‘Deinefruedemögevergehen und übelmögedichereilen.'”

So he spoke German, did he?
She said, “So that's what he said exactly, is it? Excellent. Thanks for clearing that right up for me.”

“A bit of sarcasm? Sorry, yeah, I speak a little German, enough
to catch what he said. It's a curse of sorts. It roughly translates to
‘May your joy vanish and evil be with you.'”

“Lovely sentiment.”

“It doesn't sound all that dramatic in translation, but it's powerful in German. I suppose in this context, it's more of a way to ward off evil spirits following him, which turned out to be us.”

“Too bad the curse didn't work,” Mike said. “But, Nicholas, Mr. Olympic sounded American. He was fluent, colloquial.”

He nodded. “I'm willing to bet, though, that German is his first language. I've often found it true that a person curses in his native tongue automatically.”

“Good catch,” Mike said. “Louisa, I'd also like you to upload all the video onto the servers so it will be ready for us to look at again when we get back to the office. And please be sure you add in all the footage from the crime scene, throughout the morning. There might be more there, small details we're missing right now. The two men were waiting for someone, someone Pearce was willing to die to protect.”

“And still he told him when Mr. Olympic threatened his family,
‘The key is in the lock.'
Was he lying? Or was it true? And another question: Why did Mr. Olympic hang around? Did he think this EP would still show up?”

“Maybe he did show up,” Mike said. “This EP is obviously someone close to Mr. Pearce, that's all we know. Keep an eye out for someone you don't think really fits, Louisa.”

“Like anyone not wearing a suit, and hanging around,” Nicholas said. “Find out about Mr. Pearce's family as fast as you can. That threat Mr. Olympic made, we're taking that seriously. Call me as soon as you know.”

“Got it.” Louisa smiled and disappeared into the mobile
command unit. Nicholas watched the ME, half a block away, move Mr. Pearce's body into a black bag for transport.

He said slowly, “I don't think murdering Mr. Pearce was part of the plan. At least he wasn't meant to be killed before Mr. Olympic got what he came for. Whoever he was, he wanted information about what EP had found, and Mr. Pearce wasn't about to tell him.”

Mike shook her head. “We'll back-trace the cell phone number. Speaking of which, dropping Mr. Pearce's cell phone sure wasn't part of the plan. Thank heavens he got rattled when people started coming at him and dropped it.”

“Good luck for us. Clearly this was a trap, but we need more information. Mr. Pearce wasn't wearing a wedding ring, but we know he has a family. Let's go to his home.”

Mike nodded. “I hate this, but we have to do it. Hopefully, someone knows what this was all about. What Mr. Pearce said—
The key is in the lock
—don't you wish just one time things would be straightforward?”

“That wouldn't be much fun, now, would it?”

Jonathan Pearce's Apartment

117 East 57th Street

10:30 a.m.

The doorman was too upset by Mr. Pearce's murder to give more than a token protest about letting them in without a warrant. He took them in the lovely 1920s elevator to the twenty-third floor and unlocked Mr. Pearce's apartment.

Mike and Nicholas first saw the walls of windows on three sides overlooking Manhattan, the clear blue skies, the warm sun spilling through the glass.

Mike whistled. “This is breathtaking.”

Nicholas joined her, pointed. “You can see the George Washington Bridge.”

She nodded, then turned to study the long, narrow living room. “It doesn't seem to be disturbed—nothing seems out of place. I want to get it fingerprinted before we go poking around too much. But we can have a look.” She tossed him a pair of gloves.

He snapped them on and cocked an eyebrow at her, hands raised like a freshly scrubbed surgeon. “Where's my patient?”

“Idiot.”

The apartment was large, well furnished in a mix of modern
and traditional, with neutral colors and exquisite paintings and sculptures. “This is the sanctuary of a Renaissance man,” Nicholas said.

“And a very neat man who slept alone,” Mike said. “There are no female signs anywhere. Only a single toothbrush, shaving kit, and brush were in the bathroom. The five bedrooms have been redone so there was one large master with a huge walk-in closet with built-in cabinets, plus a private library, an office, and a massive theater room.”

Nicholas stepped into the library. It was darker than the rest of the apartment because the windows were tinted, all the shelves behind locked glass. He saw books ranging from antiquity to what he bet was a first-edition Hemingway. His fingers itched to open the cabinet and touch the beautiful leather. The books were not only special, they were very valuable.

He called to Mike, “What does Mr. Pearce do?”

She stuck her head into the library, looked around for a second. “It looks like he's in the rare-book business. Would you look at this, he has letterhead on his desk.”

Made sense, for a Renaissance man. “What's the name of the company?”

“The letterhead says Ariston's, Second Avenue, between Fifty-fifth and Fifty-sixth. I wonder where he got that name, Ariston's?”

Nicholas said, “From whom sprang all rational thought. Ariston was Plato's father, a fitting name, considering. The business must be successful. See all the books in here? They're very old, very rare. And very valuable.”

Mike looked around. “Maybe this explains the locks in the master bedroom closet, which is, I might add, bigger than my whole apartment.”

“It seems like overkill. Let's take a look. Was there a key in his desk?”

“Better.” Mike reached into her pocket and pulled out the key chain Louisa had given her at the crime scene. “Let's go see what he keeps under lock and key in his bedroom closet.” She looked first at the lock, then studied the keys, picked a small silver key on the ring. Sure enough, it went in, and the lock clicked free.

“More books,” Nicholas said. “Old, very valuable. Let's see what's in this second locked cabinet.”

She studied the lock for a moment, then found an even smaller key, this one gold, and it slid in perfectly.

There were three shelves of books. Nicholas gently touched the spine of a small vellum book that looked like it might crumble away into dust. “These must be the ones that can't get exposed to light. Let's lock them back up. The crime scene techs will have to inventory everything for us—they can take their time and do this properly. I don't want to be the one responsible for devaluing a masterpiece.”

Mike tried to shut the cabinet, but the hinge hung. She fiddled with it for a minute, then said, “This one doesn't want to close and I don't want to force it.”

“Let me see.” Nicholas ran his hand along the edge of the door. He pulled it toward him, but the hinge stayed stuck open. “That's strange. Maybe these haven't been opened in a while. Let me try once more.” Instead of pulling again, he pushed, and the hinge suddenly popped free, the door coming away with it. They saw a small compartment, one that would have been impossible to see if Mike hadn't overextended the hinge when she'd opened the door.

“There's something back here, Mike.”

“What is it?”

“I have no earthly idea. Best take a picture, then I'll fish it out.” Mike snapped a shot with her cell, then he stuck his finger into the dark slot and pulled out a small clear plastic bag. He turned it over in his gloved hand. “Looks like a common everyday SD card, nothing at all special, like one you'd have in your digital camera to stick in your computer to upload your photos. It's 256 gigabytes—this holds a lot of data. As much as some laptops.”

“All on that tiny card. Amazing.”

“Mike, let's head to the computer in Mr. Pearce's office. I saw an iMac on his desk.”

“Trust you to stumble into something.”

He waved the SD card at her. “It was all you. Let's go see what Mr. Pearce was hiding away.”

Of course it wasn't that simple. Like Pearce's phone, the iMac was password protected. Nicholas sat at the desk in the expensive high-end Aeron chair—Mr. Pearce's business was clearly quite lucrative—and inserted a small thumb drive into the slot. The machine booted up with a system prompt. Nicholas launched a program he'd designed to crack pass codes, and a few minutes later the solution came up on the screen. He wrote it down on a sticky note, then ejected the thumb drive. There would be no trace of his program in the system. Elegant, and useful.

Mike watched him carefully. “I certainly like you being able to do this kind of forensic accounting work legally, Special Agent Drummond. Keeps my blood pressure under control.”

He smiled, inputted the newly acquired pass code into the machine. It whirred to life, bringing up the clean desktop with a face-on photo of a young dark-haired woman about Mike's age. She was smiling, eyes shining at the camera. “Mike, come look. I think I found a photo of Mr. Pearce's daughter.”

Mike leaned over his shoulder. “She has something of the look of her father. I really hate this, Nicholas. Louisa should be calling us with a name and her information any minute and we'll be able to contact her. I saw a photo in his bedroom of a boy maybe about eight years old, and the girl, she looked about fourteen or fifteen, their mother between them, hugging them close.” She sighed. “I pulled the photo out of the frame, but nothing was written on the back. But I do know that no woman lives here, so either they were divorced or Mr. Pearce was a widower.”

“So his family now consists of a son and a daughter.” Yes, she did have the look of her father, he thought, and hated it as much as Mike. They'd be the ones to change her life. He kept working. “Okay, we're in. Now let's see what sort of skeletons Mr. Pearce was hiding in his closet, literally.”

Nicholas inserted the SD card into the slot and opened it. Again, an encrypted password screen came up. He ran the program again, and like putting a key in a lock, the computer screen suddenly filled with a stream of extensive images and files.

Mike leaned close to the computer screen. “Good grief, what
is
all that?”

“I don't know, but there's a lot of it.”