In that sense every day was a little disappointment. Not much glory out there. But on this morning, as most of them, she was willing to try again. Hold the line! as a handwritten birthday card announced over her bathroom mirror, along with a few other messages and images left by her father for her mother: Carpe Diem/Carpe Noctum. Big Blue. A painting of a tiger couple. Another of Mickey and Minnie Mouse. A photo of a statue of a pharaoh and his sister/wife, which Gen’s father had thought looked like him and Gen’s mom. As they almost did.
Gen kept meaning to take all these down, they were dusty, but she never got around to it. Her parents had had a good marriage, but Gen’s one youthful attempt had failed badly, and after that she had let the NYPD occupy her time. Following her father’s death she had taken care of her mother, until she too passed; and that was that. Here she was, another day. She wouldn’t have thought it would turn out this way.
Down to the dining room for breakfast with Charlotte Armstrong. Funny how you could live in a building for years and never meet someone just a floor away. Of course that was New York. Talk to one person and then the next, find out if they were someone you could talk to. It was one of the things she liked about her job. So many stories. Even if most of them included a crime. It was always possible she could make things better, for someone anyway. For the survivors. Anyway it was interesting. A set of puzzles.
She got to the dining hall at the same time Charlotte did, both right on time. They commented on this as they got in the line for bread and scramblies, then got their coffee and sat down. Charlotte took her coffee white. People came to look like their habits.
“So did your assistant find out anything about our missing guys?” Charlotte asked after they sat down. Not one for small talk.
Gen nodded and pulled out her pad. “He sent me some stuff. It’s kind of interesting, maybe,” she said, and tapped up the note from Olmstead. “They work in finance, as you said. They’re maybe what the industry calls quants, because they did coding and systems design.”
“They were mathematicians?”
“I’m told finance doesn’t require very complicated math. One guy told me that if you just designed a clean data display, people were amazed. So it’s more just advanced programming, maybe. Ralph Muttchopf did his graduate degree in computer science. Jeffrey Rosen had a degree in philosophy, and he worked as a congressional staffer for the Senate Finance Committee about fifteen years ago. So they weren’t the typical quants.”
“Or maybe they were, if it isn’t a pure math thing.”
“Right. Anyway, couple things about Rosen that my sergeant found—while he was working for Senate finance, he recused himself while they were investigating some kind of systemic insider trading, because a cousin of his was head of one of the Wall Street firms involved.”
“Which firm?”
“Adirondack.”
“No way. Really?”
“Yes, but why do you say that?”
“Was it Larry Jackman who was his cousin?”
“No, a Henry Vinson. He runs his own fund now, Alban Albany. But he was the CEO of Adirondack at the time of the Senate investigation. But why do you ask about Larry Jackman?”
Charlotte rolled her eyes. “Because Jackman was the CFO at Adirondack. Also he’s my ex.”
“Ex-husband?”
“Yes.” Charlotte shrugged. “It was a long time ago. We were going to NYU at the time. We got married to see if that would help keep us together.”
“Good idea,” Gen said, and was relieved when Charlotte laughed.
“Yes,” Charlotte admitted, “always a good idea. Anyway, the marriage only lasted a couple of years, and after we broke up I didn’t see him for a long time. Then we crossed paths a few times, and now we’ve got each other’s contacts, and we get together for coffee every once in a while.”
“He’s something in government now, if I recall right?”
“Chairman of the Federal Reserve.”
“Wow,” Gen said.
Charlotte shrugged. “Anyway, he doesn’t talk about family much, so I just thought this Jeff Rosen might turn out to be one of his cousins.”
“Lots of people have lots of cousins.”
“Yeah. Both of Larry’s parents had lots of siblings. But go on—it was Vinson who Jeffrey Rosen is related to, you say. So why do you find this connection interesting?”
“It’s just a way in,” Gen said. “These guys are missing, and there’s been no trace of them physically or electronically. They haven’t used their cards or pinged the cloud, which is hard to do for long. That can mean bad things, of course. But also it leaves us without anything to look at. When that happens, we look at anything we can. This connection isn’t much, but the Senate investigation included Adirondack, and Rosen recused himself.”
“And Jackman now runs the Fed,” Charlotte added, looking a little grim. “I remember something about how he left Adirondack. The board of directors chose Vinson as the CEO over him, so pretty soon he left and started something on his own. He never said much about it to me, but I got the impression it was kind of a painful sequence.”
“Maybe so. My sergeant says it looks like Adirondack blew up. Then more recently, Rosen and Muttchopf did some contract work for Vinson’s hedge fund, Alban Albany, enough to get them tax forms for last year. So there’s another connection.”
“But it’s the same connection.”
“But twice. I’m not saying it means anything, but it gives us something to look at. Vinson has any number of colleagues and acquaintances, and so did Muttchopf and Rosen. And Adirondack is one of the world’s biggest investment firms. So there are more threads to follow. You see how it goes.”
“Sure.”
Gen watched her closely as she said, “Please don’t say anything about this to Larry Jackman.”
Would she understand that this request meant there might be lines of inquiry that led back to her?
She did. She followed the implications and blanked her features. “No, of course not,” she said. “I mean, we very seldom see each other, as I said.”
“Good. That means it won’t be hard.”
“Not at all.”
“So tell me again how the two guys came here?”
“They had a friend in the Flatiron Building, and they were camping out on its roof farm looking across the square at us, so when the Flatiron board told them to leave, they came over and asked if they could stay.”
“So they applied to the residency board?”
“They asked Vlade, and Vlade asked me, and I met with them and thought they were okay, so I asked the residency board to let them stay on a temp permit. I thought we could use their help analyzing the building’s reserve fund, which isn’t doing very well.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“It’s been in the minutes.”
Gen shrugged. “I don’t usually read those.”
“I don’t think many people do.”
Gen thought it over. “Do you often intervene like that with the residents’ board?”
Now she would definitely know she was being questioned with purpose.
She nodded as if to acknowledge that, and said, “I do it from time to time, if I see a situation where I think I can help people and help the building. I think the board doesn’t like it, because we’re a little overfull. So they have enough going on with the regular waiting list. Plus special cases of their own.”
“But openings keep happening.”
“Sure. Hardly anyone actually moves out, but a lot of residents have been here for a long time, and there’s a certain mortality rate.”
“People are reliable that way.”
“Yes.”