He walked up to Sam the guard and asked him if he knew of any movers coming into the building to take some things out.
He shook his head. “Not while I’ve been here.”
“Can you check with the night guard?”
“Sure, I can try. He’s probably asleep by now. What’s up?”
“Just wondering about something.”
“Hey, I heard on the news about the guy being found in Mr. Cowl’s pool. What the hell is that about?”
“Yeah, I was wondering that, too.”
“I haven’t seen Mr. Cowl for a while. Everything okay with him?”
“That’s way above my pay grade, Sam. Any idea where Jerry Myers is?”
“Yeah, third-floor dining hall. Some snafu with an oven.”
He found Myers in the kitchen working on one of the ovens, and asked him if he’d seen any moving trucks at the building.
“No, but if it happened last night, I wouldn’t know about it. What got moved?”
“I’m not sure.”
He next located Wanda Simms and decided to be more direct with her.
“I was on the fifty-first floor this morning, Wanda.”
“What?” she said sharply. “You couldn’t have been. It’s off-limits.”
“Come take a ride with me.”
They got on the elevator, and he made a theatrical show of hitting the button. When it lighted up, Simms gasped.
When they got to the fifty-first floor and he showed her the vast, empty space, she looked at him suspiciously.
“Why did you come up here in the first place?”
“Do you still think they were running their high-frequency trading platform from here? Because I can tell you for a fact that runs out of a building in Queens.”
“Who are you, Travis? I mean, who are you really?”
“Just a guy who stumbled onto something.”
“Onto what? Do you mean”—she looked around—“something criminal?”
“Why else would this room have been cleared out?”
“So you knew what was in here?”
“Did you know of any moving company coming to do it?”
“No. There was nothing in the office memos. What was in here?”
“I can’t tell you. But five people connected to this firm have died.”
“Five!”
“A guy named Christian Chilton was part of what was going on in this room.”
“I don’t know who that is, but the name sounds familiar.”
“He was the man who ended up dead in Cowl’s pool.”
Her hand flew to her mouth. “Oh my God, that’s right. I heard his name on the news. Should I start looking for another job? My husband and I just bought a vacation property in Connecticut, and the mortgage payment is a real bitch.”
Well, thought Devine, everyone has their priorities. “If I were you, I’d get my résumé dusted off.”
Devine left her and went to his cubicle. By now the other Burners were all there. But he noted that fingers were not flying across the keys. Some of the Burners were actually out of their chairs and talking together in small groups.
The same woman he had argued with before, Lydia White, came over to him. She looked pale and distraught. “What is going on, Travis?”
Though she had angered him before, he now felt sorry for her. For all of them, really. They had busted their humps all this time for maybe nothing.
“Nothing good, that’s for sure. Area 51?”
“What about it?”
The other Burners were now gathering around the pair.
“You can go up and see for yourself. It’s accessible now.”
White said, “But I thought that was where the firm did high-freq—”
Devine interjected, “That’s what they wanted everyone to think. The place is cleared out now. It was full of computers and servers and now it’s all gone. They emptied it out in the middle of the night.”
White said, “So this is all connected with the murders?”
“It’s definitely connected to the guy who was found dead in Cowl’s pool.”
White was fighting back tears. “My father told me to accept the offer I got from JP Morgan. But I thought Cowl would be more exciting.”
“I would take boring old JP Morgan over this kind of excitement.”
“What should we do?”
“Keep working, make sure your paychecks clear, and get your CVs out to as many other places as you can.”
He watched as the Burners scrambled to their computers to do just that.