In the early hours of March 18, 1990, green clover flags fluttered in the wind under the dim streetlights, the statue of the Duchess of Cambridge in Central Park was wet with a cold frost, and the citizens of Boston were dreaming after a revelry to celebrate St. Patrick's Day at the Isabella Stewa Museum at 180 Fen Street

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Museum) was quiet and solemn, and the guard officer on duty was named Richard, and the good man Richard was pale and lethargic.

Richard's father was an electrical appliance merchant who was busy with business and often went out a lot, and his mother was in poor health and often went to the hospital. The family's lack of discipline led Richard to befriend several delinquent children at school, and he slowly began to drink and take drugs. Earlier it was just for simple indulgences, but later it slowly became more and more dependent on these. His parents were horrified when they found out, and in order to free him from alcohol and drugs, his father managed to find him a part-time security guard job through a familiar museum insider. For this, his father had to donate a large amount of money to the museum.

So this unsuccessful addict became the guard of Boston's most famous museum. There wasn't much to do with this job, and when the crowd dispersed during the day, he only had to stop anyone who wanted to enter the museum in the security room at night. But strictly speaking, minimalism is extremely complicated, and this responsibility now seems like a joke. For example, who is this "anyone" referring to? If the curator goes out and asks Richard to forbid anyone from entering the office, when the curator returns, he is also prevented by Richard and cannot enter the office again. This kind of regulation is a piece of waste paper. Soon, this rule and this dude accidentally became hot spots in the news across the United States.

In the wee hours of the morning, Fen Street was deserted, and suddenly, a police car stopped in front of the museum, and two tall officers in police uniforms walked up the steps and rang the doorbell on the gate. The screeching doorbell woke Richard, who stumbled out of the security room and opened the doors to the museum as he tried to shake off the vertigo caused by the drugs. When he realized that it was a police officer standing outside the door, Richard, who had just taken drugs, couldn't help but get nervous, and he asked why the other party was ringing the bell. The police told Richard that they had received a call that there had been a disturbance inside the museum and that they had been ordered to come and check. On this night, it was in the proper drinking area of St. Patrick's Day, and after getting drunk, it was very easy to make trouble in museums or churches on the street, so this reason was high-sounding.

Richard, who was already in a daze, seemed to have forgotten his duty at the moment - to stop anyone who wanted to enter the museum after work. Perhaps thinking that the majesty of the police made him unable to refute, or perhaps because he had done something wrong and was worried about being taken away for questioning, he hurriedly led the two policemen into the museum, and then said that he was going to call the curator for instructions. But the curator didn't receive the call.

There are two worlds inside and outside the museum's door, and there are many cameras outside the gate, recording every face entering the museum, but there is no surveillance inside the gate. So afterwards, judging from the surveillance, Richard talked with the two police officers for a while, and then took the two into the museum, as for what happened in the museum, everything has become a mystery.

Hours had passed since dawn when people finally knew what was going on inside the building. In the basement of the museum, the staff found Richard bound in a strange way: his hands were handcuffed behind his back, his feet were fixed, and his head was wrapped in a large circle of duct tape, which looked like a strange mummy.

The damage to the museum was even greater than Richard's injury: 13 exhibits were stolen, including some of the most famous masterpieces, including Monet's Water Lilies, Rembrandt's The Storm on the Sea of Galilee, and Vermeer's Concert, with a total value of $300 million.

Realizing the seriousness of the problem, the museum staff immediately called the police, and the Boston police immediately dispatched a huge police force, and the director Wildman personally went into battle, and even the FBI was alarmed, forming a team led by senior agent Matt to rush to the scene. When they arrived at the scene, they first conducted a comprehensive inspection of the museum and checked the list of surviving and stolen artworks in the museum one by one. It turned out that the two thieves did not seem to be very professional, like rough robbers, and it was difficult to have any clever tricks. There is no surveillance footage in the museum, and because there are no witnesses in the middle of the night, the police can only guess from very few clues, and the thief's movement trajectory and modus operandi have become the top priority. The burglars dispersed after entering the museum, and they went through almost every room, seemingly searching for what they considered to be "precious" artworks. For example, a Rembrandt seascape, the only surviving seascape painting by the master, was rudely smashed open of the gilded frame and torn away from the canvas, a process that greatly damaged the painting's auction value. The painting was the focus of the two thieves. In addition to that, some of the details are also interesting. A bronze piece plundered from China, a fine Western Zhou bag foot tripod, was also stolen by the two, and it is the oldest collection in the museum, and of course it is priceless; But there is another flag used by Napoleon, which has almost no artistic value, even a modern ornament bought in the supermarket, but it is also taken by thieves, so that experts don't even bother to list it as stolen.

Because some of the paintings were donated by wealthy Europeans, and in consideration of their concerns and anxieties, the European Union Police Headquarters has also sent a team of police officers called observers who are actually supervisors. In this case, the police first gathered together to hold a discussion meeting on the facts of the case. But soon there was a huge disagreement within them, which was so serious that it was almost irreconcilable, and it also directly affected the later thinking of solving the case. The first group, represented by Boston Police Chief Wildman, believes that these two thieves are the most ordinary thieves in Boston, and they may be two gangsters who are short of money, just to steal property for money to meet their basic survival needs. Perhaps these masterpieces will soon appear at auction, or even in ordinary art stores. If this conjecture is true, then all you need to do is trace the whereabouts of the auction money, and you may be able to find the thief.

The second group, led by Matt, believes that the two thieves are not ordinary, and they are very familiar with the interior of the museum, which can be inferred from the fact that they did not commit the crime immediately after contacting Richard, but chose to avoid surveillance. Including Richard, other staff members, and even the curator could be their accomplices. If this assumption is true, then the police may be facing a powerful art theft ring, and it is not realistic to simply wait for the thieves to show their feet.

A third group of dissenting critics argues that the two thieves are in fact top art thieves, and that their suspicious targets are not unprofessional, but rather that they are likely to be deliberately requested by their employers: a group of top art connoisseurs. If this conjecture is true, then the art treasures will flow directly into someone's safe and disappear from public view forever. The third group consisted of Rutte, the EUPHQ observer in the Americas, and Martin was his subordinate at the time. At that time, Martin was just 25 years old, graduated from the world's top Paris police officer university, and after only less than a year of work, he was favored by the European Union Police Headquarters and became the glorious European Interpol. Soon after, he was selected to join the Americas Task Force to investigate the theft of the Boston Museum. At that time, he was not married, but he was proud of the spring breeze, and he had a relatively regular girlfriend named Eva, who was also a police officer and handled civilian work.

The disagreement between the three factions has also brought about a real problem, that is, there is not much hope of taking the initiative and successfully solving the case. However, the citizens of Boston, who regard art as part of the city, the media and some pretentious art masters who fear the chaos of the world, do not care about this. Media outlets, led by the Boston Globe and the New York Times, are pressuring the police to give an account to the public as soon as possible. Due to the artistic value of the lost artworks, as well as the mystery of the whereabouts of the thieves and paintings, the Boston Museum theft was quickly dubbed "the first art theft of the 19th century" by the mass media.

More and more onlookers are watching the progress of the case, and even the governor and president are beginning to interrogate. However, the subsequent operation of the Maite team almost indicates that the case will definitely become an unsolved case. After the FBI intervened, the Boston Police Department announced that it was withdrawing from theft detection, citing a lack of staff. The feud between Matt and Wildman has become almost a well-known secret in Boston, and the FBI looks down on the declining old forces of European police as being in the way; Rutte argues that the FBI doesn't understand reasoning at all, and is just a bunch of violent machines. Matt prides himself on being a detective-level figure in the FBI, but he never imagined that this case would become the Waterloo of his career. The first is the suspicion of Richard, at that time, most people, including Matt, thought that he was the most suspicious, which is the so-called "thousands of precautions, but it is difficult to prevent thieves". Matt assigned his subordinates to conduct a carpet investigation of Richard and his family, and even accidentally obtained clues about Richard's father's extramarital affair, which eventually led to the divorce of his parents, which caused public opinion. But when confronted with Richard, a young drunkard and addict, he couldn't ask any useful clues. Rutte jumped on several occasions but was blocked by the FBI in the name of jurisdiction. Fortunately, Matt's men did everything possible to fool Richard into making two sketches of suspected suspects, which can be regarded as proving to taxpayers that he is not a simple "tax robber". The ICPO scoffed at this, and Rutte said that it was better to find two inmates in prison to confess. The tape that binds Richard, stained with the thieves' fingerprints and DNA, is the most important evidence in this case. For a time, Matt kept it himself, and Rutte couldn't even see it. But later, he was asked by the city prosecutor and the state prosecutor to take out the evidence, and after several "evidence" collections, he couldn't find it for some reason. Rutte realized that the case was about to enter deep waters, so he stopped asking questions, arranged for Martin to follow up as his representative, and then managed to transfer himself back to the European headquarters. Matt was also unlucky, was transferred out of the task force, and was soon ordered to retire. After retiring, Matt had nothing to do, and his life was not going well, and he was seen in and out of VIP lounges in Las Vegas several times to have fun. At a gathering of old friends of the FBI, the specially invited Matt was drunk and furious about exposing some "ugly things" about the case within the FBI, and not long after, he was hit and killed by a truck while exercising on his bicycle. Knowing that the road where the accident occurred was not wide, neighbors confirmed that they had not seen a truck on the road for many years. The truck was loaded with a cart full of soybeans, and it is said that a member of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange forgot to close the expiring contract and was forced to deliver it physically, but the soybeans ended up dumped in the backyard of an uninhabited house, which is difficult to explain. The black driver, after investigation, was said to have no problems, he simply received a commission and executed it faithfully. Matt was not replaced by his former deputy, the FBI brought in a Chinese-American police detective, Mike Lee.

Gradually, the case team was disbanded, and the personnel were dispersed to other projects or tasks, and only when the superiors interrogated were they promoted in an emergency meeting or centralized office. It was also because the United States was very chaotic at that time, and the most notable feature was that gangs were rampant. At that time, the first task given to the FBI by the superiors was to crack down on mafia under various names. Removing the appeal and actual benefits of an organization is far greater than helping a museum recover a few paintings. Mike went on to solve many big crimes, arresting several big gang leaders, including James Balger, who was saddled with 19 murders, and the criminal world was influenced by the popular cartoon "Tom & Je" at the time

Y", and they all call him "Mike Old Wolf". But the old wolf finally died in the revenge of the gangsters, and was hit by dozens of bullets before his death, and was disfigured and thrown away, and the end was extremely miserable. Old Wolf is widely regarded as one of the most famous detectives in the history of the FBI. It's just that he really didn't have time to care about the biggest art theft in history at that time. Martin was also preparing to return to Europe shortly after Rutte's departure, and was said to be promoted to the post of chief police officer of the 16th arrondissement of Paris, and Lui would no longer be his boss. He gets along well with the old wolf, this Chinese detective is gentle and humble, does not like to be sexual, his biggest hobby is drinking kung fu tea, and he loves to eat duck neck. Martin still vividly remembers a children's song he taught them on the spot when he was treated: e, e, e,

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g...... I don't remember later. The old wolf gave Martin a set of purple clay pot tea sets before parting, especially Martin's set, the old wolf reluctantly introduced that this is the mud of the 24 mesh sieve, from the high disciple of the Yudao people, and there is a line of poetry engraved on it, "The crab eye has passed the fish eye, and the wind is about to make a pine wind." Martin naturally couldn't understand it, and the old wolf warned them not to use it for wine, especially fruit wine. In return, Martin gave him a Paris Ch

Istofle silver necklace with a crusader knight's shield and short sword. "It's a 100-year-old shop," Martin said, adding: "The shield symbolizes safety. ”

After the old wolf's death, Goldman took over his unsuccessful business. But at this time, the FBI was already under huge pressure from public opinion, and had to come up with some "explosive" news every now and then to prevaricate the outside world. For example, if a thug becomes the first suspect, this kind of news will immediately attract media hype. But a few days later, a tabloid corner will appear in the news: the suspect has been investigated and cleared of suspicion of stealing art.

Morse Connor was a crazy rock singer. In 1975, the dude stole a valuable painting from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and was caught by the police shortly after. Nian had no criminal record, and the FBI offered to offer a condition that he would receive a reduced sentence as long as Morse returned the stolen goods intact, and the latter obediently accepted the FBI's terms. So years later, when Morse was released from prison and returned to society, his experience was hyped by the FBI. It's clear that the FBI is building momentum. They hope that the real culprit of the Boston Museum theft will change his mind after reading the report, change his ways, come to surrender with stolen paintings or stolen money, and strive to change his sentence from hundreds of years to decades. Later, the FBI offered a huge reward of $5 million, but there was no progress.

Speaking of this, Lao Lin laughed. Then he said that the actions of these fools left a huge mystery, which was where the hell did these famous paintings go? Lin Mu didn't speak, but looked at him. He paused for a moment and continued, this time in Paris.