by Peter Kozmar
“Mark, is the person who did this still nearby?” Natasha asked.
The line went dead.
CHAPTER 4
“Could I have a copy of this, please?” Andy asked, indicating the recording.
“Yes, of course, I’ll have a copy made. Do you want to go through the autopsy reports?”
“No, I think it’s pretty clear how they died. Aside from being shot, was anything unusual picked up by the autopsies?” Andy asked.
“Nothing. They all died at around the same time, shot with the same weapon, and the evidence suggests no one committed suicide.”
“Can you arrange for me to have a copy of the CCTV footage from around the building at the time of the shooting as well?”
“That’s not easy, we have multiple feeds from all over the city so the volume of data is huge, and you’d only be looking at a single feed each time.” Copeland paused for a moment while deep in thought, “How about you come to our review suite and we re-run the day from the cameras across the city? It will be easier as we can hop from camera to camera and pick up any potential persons of interest and track them.”
Andy thought this would help in helping find where Mark had gone and could reveal critical information about the killer. “Okay. Sounds good.” Andy nodded in agreement.
“Would you be available tomorrow afternoon to do this? How about four o’clock? If it runs late we’ll get some pizza in. Just come here and ask for me at reception,” Copeland replied.
“Great,” Andy said with a smile, then turned to Carter, “Can we head over to Plimmer Towers?”
“If we’re all done here,” she replied.
Copeland opened the door and led them back to the reception area and continued to the main entrance door which he opened for them. “I’ll see you both tomorrow,” he said as he shook Andy’s hand and gave Carter a parting kiss on the cheek.
Making their way down the steps from the police station onto Victoria Street, Carter made a brief call on her cell phone. Within minutes they were walking past the statue on Plimmer Steps and took the escalators up to the fourth floor. They alighted into a large, open area which had a number of seating areas serviced by a café and a hairdresser. Andy saw there were young people occupying many of the seats inside and outside he could see a small group of smokers talking animatedly in a small huddle.
Carter guided Andy towards the café located to the left of the elevators and made a bee-line for a middle-aged man wearing light slacks, a light brown tee-shirt and dark blue casual cotton jacket. Andy assumed it was Marcel Durand. He was wearing glasses with thick black plastic frames and had long hair tied up in a ponytail. “Marcel, thank you for meeting with us so late this afternoon,” Carter said, as she went to greet him. Durand reached out and held Carter’s waist as he kissed her on each cheek.
“Amy, I can always make time for you,” he released Carter and, turning to Andy, extended his hand, “and you must be Monsieur Flint. It’s not every day I get to meet the father of a drug addict and murderer.”
Andy was stunned by Durand’s hostile welcome and pointedly ignored the Frenchman’s hand. Andy studied Durand to get the measure of him. He was shorter than Andy, with a slight build, long hair, clean shaven, clearly a snappy dresser and wore expensive cologne. He had a perfect smile which he was using almost continuously, however, his eyes looked cold, even when he greeted Carter.
“Have you been in Wellington for long, Monsieur Flint?”
“No, he arrived only a short time ago,” Carter answered.
“We’ll take the elevator to the office on the twenty-second floor, once we enter, do not remove anything and, please, no photographs,” Durand instructed, wagging the index finger on his right hand from side-to-side to emphasize the direction.
He led them to the elevators and pressed the button. The elevator arrived and they were swamped by a crowd of workers on their way home for the day. Durand entered the elevator passing his access card over the security panel before pressing the button for the twenty-second floor. When the doors closed, the three of them had the elevator to themselves and stood in an awkward silence as the elevator ascended.
After what seemed like forever, the elevator reached the designated floor, the doors opened and they stepped out into a narrow corridor with light blue carpet and walls illuminated by recessed LED downlights. Andy looked to the left and saw a solid wooden door, to the right, a glass door, this one fully frosted.
“Which way?” Andy asked.
“Follow me,” Durand replied, turning right and using his access card on a security panel to the side of the glass door. The doors opened into a small reception area, furnished with two dark blue couches facing a coffee table on which were spread half-a-dozen magazines. On the wall was a large generic framed photo with an inspirational quotation from James Dean telling you to “Dream as if you’ll live forever, Live as if you will die today”. To the casual observer, the room had the appearance of an anonymous satellite office of a global corporation. Durand headed over to an internal door and used his access card, again, to gain access into the main office, where he held the door open for Carter and Andy to follow.
Andy saw two men sat at the nearest workstations, they switched off their screens and stood as the group entered the room. “Amy, Mr. Flint, this is John Tasker and Carl van Hoot. They work with me in Singapore and are part of the team heading up the investigation.” Andy walked confidently up to Tasker and van Hoot and shook their hands. Carter followed suit.
“Can you give us the guided tour of the facility and tell me what you’ve found so far?” Andy asked.
“You came in via the main entrance through our reception area. It’s deliberately set-up that way in case someone tailgates an agent out of the elevator onto this floor and makes it through the outer door, that’s all they would see.”
“Okay,” Andy nodded.
Durand continued, “Greg Darcey died in the kitchenette.” Durand gestured with his open hand towards the kitchenette to direct Andy’s attention. Andy looked inside the kitchenette and could see it had been thoroughly cleaned and the items from the photo he’d seen earlier had all been removed.
“This is the main office area, where the team worked. The meeting room on the left is where Fiona Armstrong and Murray McDonald were killed. Over to the right, Jose Fernando and John Hunter were killed as they sat at their workstations.”
Andy walked around the workstations noting that the immediate area had been cleaned of all traces of blood and gore, so he had to imagine where the bodies had fallen. He looked at the desks, again, the scene looked different from the video footage. The desks were clear of the notepads, pens, scraps of paper and sticky notes that had been evident on camera. The area had been sterilized by Durand and his team, it looked like any brand new office set-up.
Andy pointed to a glass wall with its single glass door dividing the office, and the workstations, from the server farm. “Anyone die in there?” Andy asked already knowing the answer.
“Ivan Rubtsov,” Durand replied, but he didn’t make any move towards the door.
“Can we go inside and look?” Andy asked politely.
“Sure,” Durand said moving towards the glass door. His access card did its job to open the electronic lock and, when it emitted a high-pitch bleep, Durand pulled the door towards him and gestured for them to enter.
The server room was cold, and Andy found the hum from the air-conditioning louder than he expected. The room looked much the same as the video, except only one of the server cabinets remained open, a void – indicating something had been removed – was still evident, as were the cables dangling in mid-air.
“Ivan has shot over by the far wall,” Durand informed them as he led them over to the area where Ivan fell. It too was spotless!
“What was taken?” Andy asked as he pointed at the void in the server rack.
“The office security video footage. We have camera feeds from the lifts, stairs, office and server room
. The hard drives are housed in here,” Marcel pointed to empty slots, “the feeds were stored on the missing drives.”
“Was anything else taken?” he asked sensing that Durand wasn’t being completely honest. It seemed a lot of effort to go through for the killer to get their hands on security footage.
“No, just the hard drives containing the office video,” Durand replied, a slight edge in his response confirming to Andy that he was lying.
“What does all this do?” Andy asked.
“That is classified and on a need to know basis … you don’t need to know,” Marcel replied tersely, “knowing what goes on in here isn’t in the scope of your remit.”
“Just curious,” Andy replied, knowing he would need to find a way of getting the information without Durand’s help. It was clear that the staff had not been killed just to lift a few security tapes and he needed to find what was really taken to understand the reason for the massacre.
Durand led them out of the server room and back into the main office.
“What do you think happened here?” Andy asked.
“To me it’s quite clear. It was your son.” Durand replied emphatically.
“What? Why do you say that?” Andy struggled to comprehend what he’d just heard as it didn’t make sense to him.
“Mark had been under considerable stress. I have reports from his co-workers saying he worked too hard and needed a break. Both told me they thought he needed to take some time off,” Durand stated.
“What reports?” Andy asked, “Can I view them?”
“Emails from Fiona Armstrong and John Hunter,” Durand turned away and reached across one of the desks picking up printed emails which he handed to Andy. “They were concerned enough about his stress levels to discuss it with me and then put it in writing. Mark hasn’t taken much leave all year and they believed he’d burnt out.”
Andy quickly read the emails. Both were dated from the previous month and were curiously similarly worded.
‘Further to our earlier conversation, I’m putting into writing my concerns about Mark Flint….’
The two emails varied slightly after that, one said that Mark worked long hours, not taking much rest and hadn’t been taking vacations. The other said Mark had burnt himself out and had been obsessing about something to the point of being paranoid. Both used the phrase:
‘as discussed I recommend he be stood down to take an enforced vacation or counselling.’
Andy passed the emails to Carter. He sensed Mark was being used as the fall guy, but he’d have to be careful as he needed to gather more information and to do that he needed Durand’s cooperation.
Durand continued, “I believe he developed PTSD during his service in the US Army and he never got over it. He's a trained killer. He was being treated for severe depression and I wouldn’t be surprised if he was also taking drugs. Something, maybe a memory, triggered a psychotic episode and that drove him to kill everyone in the office. Your son is the killer. To cover his tracks, he removed the video archives and called the police, he probably doesn’t even realize what happened here which is why he’s gone to ground.”
“I’ll find him and prove he had nothing to do with this,” Andy replied, looking Durand directly in the eye.
“I hope you do, and when you realize I’m right, I hope you can persuade him to give himself up. If he doesn’t, well in five days, my orders change to, shoot on sight.”
“Okay, I have seen enough here,” Andy said, desperately wanting to be anywhere else rather than in the company of a man who was willing to kill his son without any firm evidence.
CHAPTER 5
Andy walked out of the office block in a daze, not speaking for several minutes until the shock of Durand’s words slowly wore off and he could finally speak.
“I didn’t know Mark had PTSD or was being treated for depression,” he stated truthfully.
After a long pause Carter spoke, “Are you close to your son?”
“I’d not seen him in years. Long story, but messy split and divorce sums it up perfectly,” he said shrugging his shoulders while looking straight ahead and not daring to turn towards Carter, “but I was slowly starting to get to know him again. We talked on the phone every few weeks and had arranged to meet in Queenstown this weekend.”
“So how would you know he had PTSD or depression?”
Andy pushed his hands deep into his pockets and kept his gaze low as if the sidewalk provided some sort of barrier to the emotions trying to reach the surface. “What did you think of the emails?” he asked.
“They looked a little too convenient. Firstly, both of your son’s colleagues had spoken with Durand before they sent the emails, did he ask them to put it in writing? Secondly, they both use the same words at the start and the end of their emails. Now what are the odds on that? And, finally, did they even write the emails, we can’t ask them as they are dead and Durand is using them as evidence to push his version of what happened.”
“Very convenient.” Andy replied. Her response gave Andy fresh hope that not everyone thought the same as Durand. “Mark saved his annual vacation to have a few weeks touring around the South Island over the summer. He’d planned to walk the Milford Track with me and Vladim, but something urgent came up at work so he pulled out at the last minute.”
“How did he sound to you when you last spoke?” Carter asked.
“He was coherent, articulate and looked forward to spending time with me in Queenstown and then in Wellington before I was to fly out.”
“What do you think about him being treated for depression?”
Andy knew Carter’s questions were aimed at getting an idea of who Mark was so she could decide, for herself if he was capable of killing people in cold blood. He tried to fill in a few blanks. “He’d never have told me, well not at the moment, but he sounded happy and was looking forward to having some shared experiences and exploring New Zealand.” They arrived at the hotel as he finished speaking.
“I’ll say my goodbyes here. I’ve got a family waiting for me, my husband’s been texting me all afternoon and I want to see my daughter before she goes to bed. I’ll see you tomorrow at eleven. I’ll swing by the hotel and we can go out for morning tea, Wellington is known as the coffee capital of the world and it’s a title that’s justified,” Carter smiled and went to turn away.
“Thanks for your help today. Before you go, why didn’t you tell Durand we had been with Copeland and seen the camera footage immediately after the attack?”
“I wanted you to meet with an experienced investigator and have access to the raw data from the crime scene. If I’d told Durand we’d been with the New Zealand Police, he’d probably not have been so welcoming.”
“That was him being welcoming? I’d hate to meet him on a bad day! I’ll see you in the morning,” he said. Carter smiled and with a brief nod, turned and left.
Andy looked at his watch, it was almost eight o’clock and Andy wondered what to do in the short time before he met up with Vladim. He considered going up to his room and use the time to write his notes, but he stopped before he reached the elevators.
He turned and headed over to the bar and joined a small group of pre-dinner drinkers. Only one drink. It wouldn’t do any harm. He had the self-control to stop after a single Bourbon.
“Hi, what can I serve you?” the barman asked.
“A Bourbon. Make it a large one,” he said. He didn’t think he was an alcoholic anymore and he deserved a large one. He felt his heart beat faster; his head was dizzy with anticipation. His hands trembled as he waited for the barman to pour his drink.
The barman placed the Bourbon filled crystal tumbler on a paper coaster in front of him; the familiar aroma of Bourbon greeting him like an old friend. He visualized himself holding the glass and slowly drinking the golden liquid. He imagined its taste. He remembered how it burnt his throat and warmed his stomach. Andy touched the glass with his sweaty hand.
“Mr. Flint,” at the sou
nd of his name he snapped out of his reverie. He pulled his hand away from the glass as Dortman appeared at his shoulder. “Mr. Martirossian will be here shortly. Have you had a good afternoon?” Dortman said looking at the full glass resting on the bar in front of Andy. His face couldn’t hide the look of disappointment.
“I didn’t drink any of it,” Andy said defensively.
“You were about to,” came the response, in the clipped German accent that Dortman used to indicate his disapproval while attempting to control his temper.
Andy felt ashamed at his lapse of judgement. “I’m sorry,” was all he managed to say as he pushed the glass and its contents away.
“I don’t have to live with it,” Dortman replied, clearly unimpressed.
“Gentlemen, let’s go!” Vladim announced loudly as he stepped from the elevator and saw Andy and Dortman together. Vladim had dressed in denim jeans, a dark blue tee-shirt and dark blue cotton jacket. He’d shaved and looked sharp.
Dortman addressed them, “I’ve booked a table for two on the waterfront.”
“Tomas, I’d like you to join us, I believe you’ll be able to provide valuable insights,” Vladim replied.
“Thank you, that is very kind, the restaurant is only a short walk from here,” Dortman said as he made his way to the door.
They enjoyed the evening warmth as they walked to the restaurant. They were guided to their first floor table which was situated next to a large window which presented a panoramic view of the harbor from the container port on the left through to the Te Papa Tongawera, the Museum of New Zealand, on the right. In the distance across the harbor they could see Matiu/Somes Island and beyond that, the Hutt Valley and Tararua Mountains bathed in the dying day’s golden rays of sunlight.
“Can I get you something to drink while you study the menu?” their host asked.
“Vodka for me,” Vladim responded.
“Diet Coke,” Dortman replied.