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“AT BLOODY LAST.” MANNY took a sip of his milky tea and sighed deeply. “Thanks, big guy.”
“No problem, old man.” Vinnie smirked when Manny grumbled. “There’s a lot more food if you want.”
Vinnie had laid out a large breakfast on the kitchenette counter. I’d only had a bowl of fruit and yogurt, but Roxy and Francine were both on their third croissants with strawberry jam. Vinnie had reluctantly included his pastries, complaining that he’d wanted to serve them straight from the oven. They were all still warm.
Ivan and Daniel had joined us three minutes ago, both still standing at the counter, filling their plates.
“You outdid yourself, Vin.” Colin rubbed his stomach. “Those little pastries with the bacon were really good.”
“They are good.” Daniel walked to where we were sitting on the sofas, taking another bite of the small pastry and nodding at Vinnie.
“Okay, so where were we?” Ivan sat down next to Daniel.
“Well, that’s pretty much it.” Francine smiled at Phillip, who’d been elected to brief Daniel and Ivan on our meeting with Bree. Manny had insisted that Phillip would be the one to least irritate him. I’d agreed.
“At least now we know who sent that email,” Ivan said.
“Technically, it wasn’t Bree who sent it. Her AI did.” Francine’s smile widened. “But I’m not going to split hairs. Not on this one. I actually like the woman.”
“Only because you liked her clothes.” Manny shook his head. “Why don’t you be more useful and tell us what you found in your research.”
She laughed. “Okey-dokey. Tell me who you would like me to start with.”
“Jan Novotný,” I said before Manny could answer. For once I hoped we could stay on track and even follow the evidence in chronological order, the way we discovered the information.
“Doctor Jan Novotný.” Francine winked at me and looked at her tablet. “I looked far and wide, but didn’t find anything significant to add to his social life. The man lived for his work and only his work, it seems. And boy, am I now excited about his work.” She shifted on the sofa, her eyes wide. “He wasn’t working on just a boring old cure for opioid addiction. He did his research and discoveries using AI and deep learning.”
“Deep learning?” Ivan asked.
“You don’t know what deep learning is? Ooh!” She clapped her hands. “I get to explain it. Okay, deep learning is when AI has networks that can extrapolate data that is unstructured or not labelled. This helps us then to train AI to predict an outcome or outputs when it is given inputs.”
“Holy hell.” Manny’s top lip curled in disgust. “That doesn’t mean anything to me.”
“Maybe I can simplify it.” Roxy said. “Deep learning is when computers learn by example. Facial recognition is a perfect illustration of deep learning. Once the computer correctly recognises a face, it goes a level deeper, taking the first lesson with it to build on top of that. Each success is stored and used as a reference.”
Francine looked at me. “You should understand. It works like our brain. Deep learning even uses the term ‘artificial neural networks’. It’s essential to voice control in phones, tablets and even the AI that sent Bree’s email to Phillip.”
“It’s an exciting development in the medical field,” Roxy said. “Deep learning is being used to find cures for cancer. It can do the work of many scientists, doctors or experts in minimal time. And sometimes the accuracy exceeds that of human experts.”
“Yet a scientist from a Houston university has recently warned peers about using this.” I’d been alarmed when I’d read that article. “She found numerous instances where the results given from deep learning were misleading and often wrong. She called it a crisis in science.”
Ivan blinked a few times. “Look, I consider myself quite smart, but this just flew right over my head.”
“You and me both, dude.” Vinnie scratched his head and the two men laughed.
“Hmm.” Manny looked at me. “Doc? Is this useful? Do we need to understand this twaddle?”
“I don’t know yet.” We still had far too little data. My theory about how Jan Novotný’s victimology could differ so much from the Strasbourg case was still fluid, without any evidence.
“I have more technical detail about Doctor Jan’s work.” Francine looked at Manny. “Should I continue or would you rather hear about Patrik?”
“Patrik.”
“Doc.” Manny’s lips twitched. “I might get a complex if you keep answering for me.”
“You won’t.”
Everyone laughed. Manny smiled.
“Okey-dokey.” She looked at her tablet. “Patrik registered here in Prague as a resident under his new name, but the address turned out to be a home-sharing place.”
“My team checked it out and found no trace of Patrik,” Ivan said.
“He never revealed any location on his few social media posts.” Francine’s eyes stretched with disbelief. “What kind of student isn’t active on social media? Mind you, he wasn’t really posting that often before he ran away from his dad. Once here in Prague, he posted a few times on Instagram and Twitter, but nothing significant. The only friends he had were classmates. His posts were months apart, the longest period three months and a few days. But he hasn’t posted in six months.”
“Six months.” Colin leaned back in the sofa and looked at the ceiling. “Jan Novotný went on a sabbatical six months ago. Coincidence?”
“Okay, so what do we think happened to him?” Ivan asked, looking at me.
Francine snapped her fingers to get his attention. “You are so asking the wrong person. Genevieve doesn’t speculate. But I do. I really do. Want to hear my theory?”
“Oh, boy.” Roxy smiled when Manny swore and Ivan nodded.
“So...” Francine wriggled in her seat. “Six months ago, Shahab wanted Doctor Jan to do something for him.” She lifted her manicured index finger. “I don’t know what yet, but I’m working on a theory for that too. Anyhoo. Doctor Jan gave Shahab a hard no. Shahab didn’t like that and looked for leverage to convince Doctor Jan. He found Patrik.”
“You think Shahab kidnapped Patrik to get Doctor Novotný to work for him?” Ivan rubbed the scar on his hand.
“But what would Shahab want from Doctor Novotný?” Daniel asked. “I mean, Shahab has been dealing in heroin for a decade and looting his own country’s art for a few years. What would he want with someone who is working on a way to end an international epidemic? A way to nullify the effects of the drugs he was selling?”
No one answered Daniel. I assumed it was a rhetorical question since we had no means to find an answer. Not yet. It remained quiet in the large room for a few more seconds.
Manny turned to Francine. “What did you learn about the Korn Art fellow?”
“I learned that no one on this planet should work without any computer.” She rolled her eyes. “Apart from that, I was looking through those lists Genevieve found.” She looked at me. “You were right. The one list is the names of clients. I haven’t done a deep-deep dive into these people, but my light-deep dive tells me all of the people on the list are on the up and up.”
“Light-deep?” I knew my expression conveyed my dismay. “You’re too intelligent to be using such a contradictory term.”
“Pah. Everyone knows what I mean.” She glanced at her tablet again. “But the second list is the interesting one. It definitely has some suspicious characters. I sent the list to Ivan.”
“My people are checking through it. Already Antonin’s correspondence has given us a lot of useable evidence against numerous individuals.”
Francine looked at me. “These are the people on the list you thought could be Ant’s suppliers.”
“So far we think you were right about this as well.” Ivan smiled at me. “There are seven names of people we’ve already suspected deal in black-market art. We are looking into the other names, but I’m confident we’ll find enough to make my superiors very happy.”
I took a moment to analyse his nonverbal cues. There was something connected to his superiors that made Ivan uncomfortable. I wondered if this was related to the issue he had asked us to refrain from pursuing for the time being.
Then I thought about something else. “Have you received information about Doctor Jan Novotný’s autopsy?”
“I did.” He took his smartphone from his trouser pocket and swiped the screen a few times. “Ah, here it is. He died from a fatal dose of opioids, but the ME said that if that hadn’t killed him, his injuries would have. He had seven broken ribs and two of those ribs didn’t just puncture his left lung, they tore through it. The damage was terrible. His spleen, liver and one kidney were so badly injured that he could’ve died from any of those internal traumas as well.”
“There is something else,” I said when he paused. His creased forehead and tilted head revealed his puzzlement.
“It will really take me a long time to get used to being so easily read.” His smile was genuine. “You’re right. Of course. The ME was a bit mystified by what he’d found. He took a good look at it and told me that he’s convinced it was self-inflicted.” He tapped on his phone and turned it towards me. “This is a photo of Doctor Novotný’s left hip.”
I leaned forward, but the screen was small and I couldn’t see the detail. What I could see was letters and numbers on the skin—red and risen as if they were burn wounds. I shuddered and shifted as far back on the sofa as I could. “What am I looking at?”
He tapped the screen a few times. “I’m sending this to Francine and she can forward this to you for a better look.” He looked at his phone again. “The ME thinks Doctor Novotný burned these letters and numbers onto his skin with acid.”
“Bloody hell.” Manny pushed back into the sofa. “That had to hurt.”
“Oh, the ME assured me it did,” Ivan said. “But this happened around the same time as the torture, so Doctor Novotný was already in great pain.”
“Why didn’t the dude just use a sharpie?” Vinnie grimaced as if he was feeling the acid burning on his skin.
“No idea.” Ivan shrugged. “Maybe he was scared it would wash off? I really don’t know. What I am sure of is that this had to be something very important for him to put this onto his body for us to see.”
“How do we know he did it for us to see?” Manny asked.
“Good question. I’m working on the assumption that he knew he was going to die and he was hoping that the police would find his body and there would be an autopsy that would reveal this... key? Password?”
Francine finished tapping her phone’s screen. “PY%7H-A07P. I’m thinking this is a password for something. If this is GPS coordinates or an IP address, we would need another key to decipher this. Which kind of makes it stupid. Yup, I’m thinking password.”
“Do we have his devices?” Colin asked Ivan.
“The forensics team went through his house yesterday afternoon while we were at the hospital and didn’t find any personal devices.” The corners of Ivan’s mouth turned down. “They did find Patrik’s room. At least now we know where he lived. There were also no devices there. It is most unusual to not find a single computer, tablet or phone in someone’s house. We know that Doctor Novotný sent a lot of emails, so we know that he used a computer.”
“And Patrik had social media accounts.” Francine shook her head. “Shahab must have taken all their devices. This will make things more difficult. I was hoping to have a look-see into Doctor Jan’s personal emails. I only have his work emails and those were already personal. I was hoping to find some juicy things that could help us with the case.”
“If Shahab took their devices, then that password could be for his phone or tablet or some encrypted data or files on his computer.” Colin frowned. “Or it could be for an online account or a cloud account. Damn. It could really be for anything.”
“Let’s take one problem at a time,” Ivan said. “We know that Doctor Novotný left us a clue. Now we can move onto the next... er... challenge.”
“Please tell me you found a magical way to deal with all Antonin’s papers?” Francine pressed her palms against the sides of her head. “There’s no way I would ever be able to get data from all those destroyed trees.”
Ivan chuckled. “I have young officers scanning all the documents. Last year we got very lucky. We were given two large scanners. My team is telling me that it’s taking them about thirty minutes to scan all the pages in one of those ring binders we found in Antonin Korn’s office.”
“Have they scanned his correspondence yet?” Francine leaned forward. “If they did, please send it to me.”
“Yes. My apologies. I should’ve mentioned it earlier. That’s why we’ve found incriminating evidence already. Those letters are going to send a few people to prison.” Ivan blinked a few times. “You know what, I’ll just tell my team to email you the contents of each binder as soon as it’s scanned.”
“Or even better.” Francine tapped on her phone. “Let them upload it to a shared cloud folder. I’m sending you the link now. It’s completely secure, so no worries about any data getting lost or into the wrong hands.”
The more they talked, the tenser I became. It was extremely difficult for me to trust anyone with collecting data. How did I know they scanned every page and didn’t miss a page by accident? That overlooked page could hold key information that would help us catch Shahab and stop whatever he was planning.
Yet I was realistic enough to know that we needed all the help we could get. If I wanted to scan those documents by myself, then analyse them, it would take weeks, if not months. So I forced my shoulders to relax and took three slow, deep breaths.
“I have some information on Antonin.” Phillip put his empty tea cup on the coffee table next to the sofa. “I was on a call with Adam Lendl from the National Gallery Salm Palace when Vinnie brought Bree in. With all the excitement, I almost forgot about it. Adam is the curator at the National Gallery and an old friend of mine. He immediately recognised Antonin’s name when I asked about him.
“Apparently, Antonin had become the go-to expert on Iranian art, especially Near Eastern antiquities. Adam said he had a feeling that Antonin had been in close contact with these artefacts. There was something in the way he talked about the works. Adam thought that Antonin had not only studied the era, but worked with and on some of these pieces.”
“Does he have any idea where we can find Antonin?” Manny asked.
“No. I asked, but he said that his relationship with Antonin has been that of a professional acquaintance. Nothing more.” Phillip’s depressor anguli oris muscles turned the corners of his mouth down in disappointment. “I’m sorry that this is not of more help.”
An unfamiliar electronic notification sounded and Ivan lifted his phone. “Oh, good.” He tapped on the screen and looked at Francine. “Last night I asked for access to Antonin Korn’s bank accounts. I just got it. We have three bank accounts that we can work through. Do you want to do this or should I ask my team?”
“I’ll do it.” I took a breath when I noticed the reaction to my abrupt response. “We’ll do it. Your team is already busy with scanning and working through the paper documents.”
“Yeah, Genevieve and I just love digging through other people’s finances.” Even though Francine was presenting this in jest, I knew she was being completely truthful. Whereas I thrived on facts, data and statistics, she took alarming pleasure in knowing about people’s habits and more intimate activities.
“Done.” Ivan got up. “Vinnie, thank you for this breakfast. I’m heading in to meet with my team and help them work through that mountain of paper.”
“Rather you than me.” Francine picked up her tablet. “I prefer a paperless office.”
Vinnie and Roxy got busy cleaning up after breakfast and I went to my room to collect my laptop. I loved working through data. It was a safe place for me and I was looking forward to working through Antonin Korn’s financial data. Hopefully Francine and I would find something that could take us a step closer to finding Shahab.
Four hours later, we had not found anything yet. It had been a bit easier to trace transactions since Ivan’s team had sent us scans of his sales records. It had helped to connect each bank transfer or deposit to the sales he had meticulously recorded. Francine had eventually admitted that even though it was inconvenient, Antonin Korn’s paper records were so well kept that it made the task a simple one.
Simple as it was, there had been no sign of any illegal activities. We’d looked at transactions of the last three years and I found it highly improbable that we had not come across any irregularities so far.
I wondered if Colin had found any useful information. He’d been on his phone for hours, using different accents and different levels of charm. At the moment he was in our bedroom, speaking as Sean with an Irish accent. Daniel was sitting next to Manny on the sofa across from me, both of them busy on their tablets.
I sat back on the sofa and closed my eyes. Mentally I pulled up an empty music sheet and slowly drew the F, then the G clefs. With great care, I wrote the first line of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No.5 in D Major. And smiled.
I opened my eyes and pulled my laptop closer.
“Have you got something, girlfriend?” Francine leaned closer to look at my laptop’s screen. She’d insisted on sitting next to me on the sofa so we could work as ‘bestest besties’.
I moved away and frowned when she giggled. It didn’t take me long to highlight the transactions that had eluded our attention. “This is what I have.”
“Share with us all, Doc.” Manny looked up from his tablet.
“I don’t know yet exactly what this is. Give me a moment.” I went into our case files that we had been working on the last year. Researching every movement Shahab had made in the last nine years had been a lengthy process and there were numerous periods in this time that we couldn’t account for, but my memory for dates was such that I was confident in what I was about to find. I opened the right file and sat back. “I was right.”
“For the love of the saints, Doc.” Manny got up and sat down on my other side, then grunted angrily when I cringed. He moved closer to the arm of the sofa. “See? Bloody fifty centimetres or even more. Now talk.”
I moved my laptop to rest on my knees. That way both Francine and Manny could see the screen. “Look at these transactions. They all went to the same account. The expense in Antonin’s record is listed as office equipment and the account name is for a company called Seppo-Tommi.”
“I checked the company. It’s in Finland. It’s legit.” Francine held up one finger. “But I didn’t do a deep-deep check. I’ll do that now.”
I highlighted one specific transaction. “See the date of this transfer?” I changed windows and pointed at the timeline we had built for Shahab’s movements. “He was in Finland at that time.”
“Huh.” Manny nodded at my computer. “Are all the other transfers to that company at the same time Shahab was in Finland?”
“No.” A small smile lifted the corners of my mouth. “Not all. Some of those dates he was in Norway, Denmark, Estonia or Sweden.”
“All a hop, skip and a jump away from Finland.” Manny leaned forward to look at Francine. “What is that company?”
“Seppo-Tommi.” Her fingers were flying over her laptop’s keyboard. “What I have so far is that the owners of this company are a Seppo Vauramo and a Tommi Harlen. It seems like they are not the founders. Wait. Huh. I have to go back in the registration records to find out what’s what.”
“Do it.” Manny lifted his smartphone and looked at me. “Do we want access to Sonny-Tammy bank accounts?”
I thought about this. “Yes. And it’s Seppo-Tommi.”
“I will need some time,” Francine said. “If there’s more to this company, it’s well hidden. I’ll have to dig more.”
Manny got up and stiffened when there was a knock on the door. “Are we expecting anyone?”
“Not me.” Francine didn’t look up from her laptop.
“I’ll check.” Vinnie walked out of his room to the door, his weapon in his hand. Daniel also got up and joined Vinnie at the door.
Vinnie lifted the intercom phone and the camera engaged, but I couldn’t see the small screen. I relaxed when Vinnie’s posture lost its readiness to act. He put his handgun in the holster behind his back and opened the door.
“Hi! Did you miss me?” Bree walked into the room, her smile warm and genuine. “I missed you guys.” She lifted a pink confectionary box. “I brought cupcakes.”
