Donovan appeared to consider this for a moment.
‘That’s a weak link by any stretch. There’s a more likely scenario: our professional robbers use hired hands to do their dirty work and then silenced them afterward, permanently.’
‘I doubt that a well-educated clerk would have much to gain from working with professional criminals, except to report them to the police at the first opportunity,’ Ethan pointed out. ‘And your theory doesn’t explain how the criminals supposedly killed two men without leaving any evidence behind whatsoever.’
Donovan chuckled and shook his head.
‘This case isn’t going to be solved by two gumshoes,’ he said. ‘There’s no link between these two murders and—’
‘Yes, there is.’
The voice came from behind them all, and Ethan turned to see Tom Ross standing in the now open office doorway.
‘Tom?’ Donovan said in surprise. ‘You should be at home.’
Karina hurried to his side. ‘Tom, you shouldn’t be here.’
‘I’m fine,’ Tom insisted to her with a faint smile. ‘I want this case solved and any avenue of investigation is fair game for me right now. I’ve been able to dig up one piece of information that might be useful.’
‘What’s that?’ Ethan asked.
‘The connection between the two men found dead in the warehouse and the clerk.’
Donovan rolled his eyes. ‘Go on, then, what’s the story?’
Tom gestured to a picture board nearby, where images of the two dead thieves and the clerk were pinned.
‘Those two men were involved in the raid,’ he said.
‘You don’t know that,’ Donovan insisted. ‘Even we don’t know that.’
‘And that clerk,’ Tom went on, ‘was responsible for the paperwork assigned to the case. The signatures that failed to make it onto the statements must have been doctored, and that means that she must have been involved, because I won’t believe that the two men we have in jail right now could have walked from the interview rooms without having signed and dated their own statements.’
‘That’s very thin,’ Donovan pointed out, ‘and speculative, too. There’s nothing to suggest that the clerk was in any way involved in some kind of cover-up, or that there was one in the first place.’
Jarvis stepped forward. ‘Worth checking out, though, don’t you think? We’ll need access to that camera footage.’
Tom looked at Karina in confusion. ‘Who the hell is he?’
‘Defense Intelligence Agency’s handling the case now,’ Donovan explained, then turned to Jarvis, ‘not that we’re happy about it. Okay, go ahead, but I want to be informed of anything that you learn. I can’t imagine why a clerk would be involved with two dropouts.’
‘That’s why we’re doing it,’ Lopez replied tartly.
Karina turned to Tom. ‘We’ve got this, Tom, really. You need to get some rest.’
Tom sighed. ‘I need to do something to help. Sitting at home all day is driving me nuts.’
‘And being here could compromise the validity of our investigation,’ Karina replied. ‘You know that. You’re too emotionally invested. I’ll keep you posted, on everything.’
Tom glanced at the team in the office and then reluctantly turned and walked away. Karina watched him leave for a moment and then turned to Donovan.
‘I’m worried about him, he’s not taking care of himself right now.’
Donovan glanced at Jackson, who’d just walked in. ‘You want to keep an eye on him?’
Jackson nodded. ‘I’ll drop by, tonight.’
‘I’ll visit him tomorrow,’ Karina added. ‘He needs people around him as much as possible.’
Ethan stepped forward. ‘The tapes,’ he said to Donovan.
The chief pressed a button on his desk. ‘I’ll have them sent up.’
32
Ethan sat down behind a monitor that showed a grayscale image of traffic flowing across the Williamsburg Bridge on the day of the Pay-Go heist, Jarvis and Lopez standing behind him in an interview room.
‘Quality’s not great,’ Lopez observed.
‘Doesn’t need to be for traffic observation,’ Jarvis said, ‘but, if we can place our two suspects in the morgue at the scene, then at least we’re a little closer to solving this. I can get the guys in the labs at the DIA to clean up anything we find, enough for it to be admissible in court.’
Ethan spun the footage through, accelerating time to the moment of the auto wreck.
‘We could do with Project Watchman right now,’ he suggested.
Jarvis shook his head. Watchman was a covert government-funded surveillance program that Ethan and Lopez had encountered during a previous investigation in Florida, a series of KH-11 ‘Keyhole’ spy-satellites providing a high-resolution three-dimensional virtual replay of the entire globe that a viewer could walk through. Essentially, the government could look into the past at any location on Earth or follow any individual, anywhere.
‘My clearance is no longer sufficient to access Watchman,’ Jarvis replied. ‘Besides, we got control of this case because I asked for it through the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Our agency doesn’t have any stake in these homicides, so we wouldn’t have been able to use it anyway.’
‘Clearance,’ Lopez echoed his words. ‘Stakes. People have died and your agencies don’t give a damn unless there’s something in it for them.’
‘They’re concerned with national security, Nicola,’ Jarvis replied, ‘not one-upmanship.’
‘You expect us to believe that?’ Lopez challenged. ‘After what they pulled in Idaho and DC?’
Jarvis pointed at the screen. ‘There, that’s the flatbed, right?’
Ethan had already spotted the flatbed truck swerving violently through traffic on the outside section of the bridge. They watched as the truck raced beneath one camera and was picked up on the next as the image switched.
The pursuing police vehicle closest to the flatbed accelerated, and its front fender smashed into the truck’s tail lights.
Ethan watched as the truck swerved, lost control and then crashed against the barriers guarding traffic against the long fall into the East River. It rolled violently, the two men in the rear tumbling out, and then it slid to a halt, balanced on the barrier.
‘There’s Karina and Tom,’ Lopez identified the officers as they jumped from their vehicles.
The doors to the truck flew open as the two men in the cab leaped out, leaving their two accomplices lying comatose in the road behind them. Several shots were fired at the police, but the men had their backs to the camera as they retreated, their faces obscured. The truck lay with its chassis hanging over the precipitous drop and the balance altered as the men jumped free. Slowly, the truck tilted backward as the cases of money spilled out and tumbled away toward the river below.
‘There goes the cash,’ Lopez said wistfully. ‘A few million bucks turned into fish food.’
‘Come on,’ Ethan snapped at the camera in frustration as the armed robbers disappeared from view, ‘there must be a better angle than this.’
The cops whirled as, behind their vehicle, a huge tanker swerved as it tried to brake and avoid the suddenly stationary traffic, but then hit the cars in an explosion of shattered glass, smashed plastic and rending metal. The cops hurled themselves clear of the wreckage.
Ethan stared at the monitor in disbelief. ‘Where’s the next camera’s shot? The one of them running down the bridge?’
‘There aren’t that many cameras on the bridge,’ Jarvis said. ‘There’s this one on the overhead, plus the one that captured the first images, which is a surveillance camera on the north side of the pedestrian-and-pushbike path.’