Criminal Enterprise, page 5
Tomlin snatched the bag. “I didn’t come for a sermon.” He turned back to the brunette, who was fumbling with her own bag. He studied her flushed face as he approached her counter. “Look at me,” he said. The teller didn’t look up. Kept filling the bag. Her whole body was shaking. Tomlin laid the gun on the counter. “Look at me.”
This time, the teller looked up. Her eyes were wide, terrified. Her lower lip trembled. “What are you afraid of?” Tomlin asked her. The woman shook her head. Didn’t reply.
“Tell me,” he said.
There was movement behind him, furtive. The young teller’s till was empty by now, her bag full. The police would be here soon. It was time to get moving. Tomlin held his gaze on the woman. “You’re afraid I’ll kill you,” he said.
The teller didn’t react.
“Aren’t you?”
Now she nodded, quickly, and looked away. She was crying. The thought didn’t disgust him. “I could do it,” he said. “I could kill you right here. Pow. Just like that.”
She nodded again. Pushed the money bag at him. Tomlin smiled at her and leveled the gun, feeling a thrill as he watched her shrink back. “Pow,” he said again. Then he shouldered the money and walked out of the bank.
—
WINDERMERE STARED AT Darcy Passat. “Pow.”
Passat nodded. “Pow. Just like that.”
Windermere stared at the woman. It’s the same guy, she thought, her heart starting to race. Somewhere along the way he found himself some friends.
Passat watched her. “So what?” she said. “You get what you came for?”
Windermere smiled and started back to her car. “I’ll say I did,” she said. “Pow.”
14
WINDERMERE UNLOCKED THE DOOR and walked into the apartment. The whole place was dark, and the air was dead still; she barely lived here anymore.
She walked through to the kitchen and turned on the light, looked around at the spotless countertops and the empty sink. Mark hadn’t been much for doing the dishes, but since he’d gone, she’d kept the whole place so clean it looked soulless, like a showroom suite or a spread in a high-end magazine.
Windermere set her keys on the kitchen counter. She took a beer from the fridge and walked into the living room and stood in the darkness, looking around at the gloomy silhouette furniture and beyond to the window and the Minneapolis skyline. She drank her beer, slowly, and she thought about Mark.
He’d practically had his bags packed when she finally came home from the Pender case. Had walked out a month or so after. He’d gone back to Miami, and was probably fishing every day, and dancing, eating ceviche on South Beach. He was working again, no doubt, and Windermere wondered if he was happier now, if he’d found someone new.
Not for the first time, Windermere wondered if it hadn’t been a mistake to leave Miami. She’d had a good life in Florida, a happy relationship and good friends, a promising career and a ’69 Chevelle she could drive every day. Now she was single, getting older alone, one of a handful of black cops on an otherwise whitewashed FBI force.
And as far as she could tell, there was no good goddamn ceviche anywhere in Minnesota.
Windermere finished her beer. Right now, Mark’s alone in Miami and wishing he could call you, she thought. You sure as hell don’t need him to make your life better. She chucked out the bottle and turned out the light. Walked to the front door and pulled on her coat. It was late, but she wasn’t tired, and what the hell was she going to do in her apartment all night?
Twenty minutes later, she was in the FBI building, sipping bad coffee and staring at her computer screen. The office was empty and silent around her, but Windermere barely noticed. She sat forward in her chair and clicked through Rachel Hill’s bank robbery reports, her mind working faster with each new page she read.
This guy, the Prospect Park guy with the Camry, he’d gone from pulling single-shot robberies with a handgun to taking over a bank with a driver and a sidekick. So where did he come from?
She worked through Agent Hill’s robbery files again. Hill made the guy for another job in Robbinsdale, northwest of downtown Minneapolis, a few weeks after Prospect Park. Then another job, in Lowry Hill, southwest of downtown, a month or so later. A couple weeks before Eat Street.
Hill had come up with nothing before Prospect Park, though, and Windermere figured she’d double-check her colleague’s work. She paged through the unsolved bank robberies for December, November, the fall. Found nothing that fit the Prospect Park MO, no gold Toyota Camrys, no men with guns and aviator sunglasses terrifying the tellers.
Maybe Hill’s right, Windermere thought. Maybe Prospect Park’s his first score. She broadened her search. Every bank job in the state. Just lonely men with notes, mostly; one sad-looking woman in a Bugs Bunny sweater. Windermere brought up the Prospect Park file and copied out the man’s note: “I have a gun. Empty the till.”
She searched through the files again. Got a couple of hits. A job out by the airport. Another in Midway, about halfway between Minneapolis and Saint Paul, a Bank of America heist last November.
According to the file, the Midway guy was a rank amateur. He’d panicked and bolted midway through the heist, made off with a shade under two grand. By the time the first police cars arrived, the man had vanished.
He’d scrawled his note on some kind of receipt, the file said. Wore woolen winter gloves. Aviator sunglasses.
Windermere stood and rode the elevator down to the evidence locker. A kid named Lucente sat guard at a desk, reading a paperback novel. He buzzed her in. “Welcome to the dungeon,” he said. “What do you need?”
“Notes,” said Windermere. “Bank robbery notes.”
Lucente yawned. “Most recent stuff’s that way,” he said, pointing. “We keep it for a year before it goes to the warehouse.”
Windermere thanked him and walked into the stacks. The shelves stretched to the ceiling, a jumble of bankers’ boxes and dusty plastic bags. She found Hill’s Prospect Park file quickly, glanced at the note. Blue ballpoint pen on white printer paper. The same unimaginative instructions.
Windermere walked farther and found the Midway evidence box. Not much inside besides the bag with the note. She picked up the bag and studied it in the light. The writing was shaky, in a hurry. Still, the wording matched the Prospect Park note, and the handwriting looked almost identical.
Windermere turned the bag over and examined the receipt. A parking receipt, she saw, squinting at the faded ink. Saint Paul E-Z Park. Dated last July. Whoever owned the receipt had parked in downtown Saint Paul on a Tuesday, from eight in the morning until almost six at night, and had paid twenty bucks for the privilege. Windermere walked out of the stacks and had Lucente make a photocopy of the receipt, both sides. Then she climbed back on the elevator and studied the receipt again as the elevator climbed back up to CID.
A worker bee would park in downtown Saint Paul all day on a Tuesday, she thought. Someone with a job in an office somewhere. But what kind of worker bee robs a bank?
Windermere looked at the address on the receipt. Memorized it. Only one way to find out, she decided.
15
THE INMATE CHEWED on the Snickers bar. “Sure, I seen a car like that. Wasn’t nowhere near Duluth, though.”
Stevens watched the man across the desk. A guard watched them both from the doorway. “An old Thunderbird,” Stevens said. “Red.”
The inmate finished the candy bar. Wiped his mouth, nodding. “I can see it in front of me,” he said. “Could take you to it tomorrow, if you wanted.”
Stevens leaned back in his chair and studied the man. Tried to gauge the odds he was telling the truth. The odds that this T-Bird was Sylvia Danzer’s.
He’d been working the Danzer murder for nearly a week now. Had spent most of it retracing the Moose Lake sheriff’s work, reviewing the BCA agent’s notes, calling old contacts and reopening wounds. Hadn’t come up with much but what was in the report: The Danzers weren’t newlyweds, but by all appearances, they were happy together. Neither had had an affair. Stevens had even talked to their accountant. Neither Elliott nor Sylvia Danzer had any particularly eye-opening debts. They were comfortable financially; neither had any unusually large life insurance policies. As far as anyone could guess, there was no reason for Sylvia Danzer to have murdered her husband.
After a couple days of paper cuts and dial tones, Stevens had exhausted the high-percentage plays. Time to play the long shots. He had the Danzers’ pictures printed up and sent around to every jail, drunk tank, and correctional facility in the state, along with a description of the Thunderbird and a rundown of the crime. Asked the guards and wardens to pass out the pictures, get the inmates talking, figuring maybe someone knew someone who knew something. The play netted about a hundred oddball claims in the first two or three hours, mostly desperate criminals looking for a reduced sentence. But then there was Ernie Saint Louis.
Saint Louis was a chocoholic serving a three-to-nine for marijuana possession with intent to traffic. He told Stevens he’d trade information for candy bars and a good word to the judge, so Stevens drove down to the federal lockup in Waseca with a bag full of chocolate bars and agreed to hear the guy’s story.
Saint Louis rummaged in the bag and came out with a Milky Way bar. Opened the wrapper and took a bite. “Sure, I seen it,” he said. “I seen that old T-Bird every week for about five or six months.”
Stevens nodded. “Good,” he said. “Where?”
“North.” Saint Louis chewed. Looked across the table at Stevens. “I had a real good thing going,” he said. “It was just pot, anyway, no big deal.”
Stevens leaned forward again and looked through the man’s file. He’d been picked up in Big Falls, maybe thirty miles from the Canadian border. Had nearly eight kilograms of marijuana stored in his Ski-Doo. “You ran drugs across the border,” Stevens said.
Saint Louis shrugged. “Just pot, like I said. No big deal.”
“And you saw this Thunderbird somewhere.”
“In the bush, man.” Saint Louis blinked, shook his head. “Just rusting away. Two years in a row. A damn shame.”
“Sure,” Stevens said. “You get a good look at it?”
Saint Louis shrugged again. “Wasn’t really concentrating on seeing the sights.” He winked at Stevens. “Kind of time-sensitive cargo.”
“So what the hell was it doing out there in the bush?”
“Figured it was abandoned.” Saint Louis shook his head. “Somebody got tired of it, drove it out on that old logging road and forgot about it. Was my guess, anyway.”
“Abandoned it. An old T-Bird.”
“Crazy, right? It was that same car, though. Same vintage, everything. Just rusting away in the bush.”
Stevens stared at the ceiling, thinking. Saint Louis chewed, loudly. Finished his Milky Way bar and sat forward, his eyes hopeful. “Could take you there tomorrow, if you want.”
Stevens pushed his notepad across the table. “How about you just draw me a map?”
16
TOMLIN SETTLED INTO a rhythm. A few days a week doing taxes for senior citizens, a couple contract jobs for friends at big firms. A robbery every few weeks, when the money got low.
Or, more and more, whenever the mood struck him.
It wasn’t just about the money anymore. Not even close. It was about the excitement, the power, the quick jolt of electricity he felt when the pretty tellers wilted at the sight of his gun. It was the same thrill he’d once felt when he walked through his office, watching the worker bees stiffen at their cubicles, knowing the room’s collective sphincter had tightened the moment he walked through the door. It was power. Control. Robbing banks filled the void while it paid off his mortgage. And nobody had figured him out.
Tomlin found a small office in Lowertown, east of downtown Saint Paul. It was an old, musty low-rise with patchy off-white walls and buzzing fluorescent lights, graffiti on the sooty façade. But Tomlin didn’t much care for looks. An office would provide cover. An easy way to launder the robbery money.
He hired a receptionist, a punk-rock college dropout he found through a classified ad. A pixie named Tricia with neon-pink hair. She came in two or three days a week, did Sudoku at her desk and answered the occasional phone call. Lent an air of legitimacy to the place.
Rydin came to visit. “Freelance,” he said, looking around. “You’ll either get very rich or go broke. Probably the latter, from the looks of this building.”
“Baby steps,” Tomlin told him. “It’s coming together.”
Rydin promised to talk to people at his office, find some work to throw Tomlin’s way. A couple other friends came through with leads, and Tomlin made up the difference hustling for contacts. Put an ad in the paper, another online. Craigslist. “Accounting Service. Your taxes done cheap.” He spent long hours hammering out income tax forms for old ladies, a hundred dollars a pop. Bored him worse than bingo, but the work kept him busy.
He slept in some mornings, ate long breakfasts, read the paper. Came home early one or two nights a week, enjoyed the home and the life he was trying to maintain. He spent hours with Becca, reading novels together and walking the dog. They holed up in the bedroom for endless afternoons, feeling like two high school kids who’d skipped out of class, emerging fresh-scrubbed from the shower just as Heather and Madeleine returned from school.
Heather came home one day and announced that her school needed someone to help coach the basketball team, and Tomlin figured, Why the hell not? Now he spent Tuesday afternoons in a public school gym, teaching a gaggle of teenage girls how to shoot a jump shot. Thursdays were game days.
In the evenings, he watched movies with the girls in the rec room, or stayed up late puttering with his model train setup. He cleared out the spare room in the basement and built a tabletop empire, a miniature world of mountains and cities and tiny plastic people.
He stashed the guns in the train room—the Ruger in its case under boxes of spare train cars and supplies, the assault rifle in an alcove behind a hollowed-out mountain. The shotgun he left lodged in the bracing underneath the table, and he hid the spare shells inside a factory on a spur line in the model town he’d patterned after Saint Paul. It could be a munitions factory, he decided. Schultz’s cocaine he hid at the office. Locked it away in his bottom desk drawer with the robbery money while he tried to figure out how to get rid of it.
Little by little, Tomlin rebuilt his life. Kept up with the mortgage payments, bought groceries, birthday presents, a new cell phone. Made love to his wife and went to bed happy almost every night.
And when the money started to dwindle, or he started to get bored, he dug out Schultz’s pistol and hit another bank. It worked out well, in the short term. It would work, anyway, until the accounting business started to take off.
Life seemed perfect again, almost. Until one day in January, when it all changed again.
17
HE’D COME IN TO WORK early. It was about a month after he’d robbed Tony Schultz, four or five bank heists after that first Midway job. Heather had Spirit Club before school, and Tomlin dropped her off and drove straight to the office. Walked in and found Tricia with her nose in his bottom desk drawer.
She stood up, too fast, when he walked into the room. “What are you doing here?” she said. “You’re early.”
“I work here.” Tomlin circled around to where she stood and examined the lock. She’d jimmied the thing with a nail file. “What are you doing?”
“It was unlocked,” she said. “I was looking for staples.”
“Bullshit.”
She was silent for a minute or two. “I’m so sorry,” she said finally, her lower lip trembling. “My boyfriend just dumped me. I don’t know what I’m doing.”
Tomlin glanced down at the open desk drawer. The cocaine and the cash. She had to have seen it. He studied her face, her pretty, scared eyes. “Get out,” he said.
“No.” She reached for his arm. “Mr. Tomlin, please. Please don’t fire me.”
He shook her away. “Get out of my office.”
She stared at him, tears in her eyes. Tomlin held her gaze until she looked down again, at the nail file on the thin carpet, the desk drawer still partially open. Something hardened in her expression. “What are you waiting for?” Tomlin asked her. “I said get out.”
She shrugged his hand off her shoulder. “That’s a lot of cocaine.”
“It’s not cocaine.” Tomlin slammed the drawer closed. “It’s none of your business. Get out.”
“Bullshit.” She turned to look at him slowly, a new look in her eyes. She wasn’t scared anymore, Tomlin realized. She was smiling. “So what are you, a drug dealer or something? Does your wife know about this?”
“For Christ’s sake.” Tricia’s smile widened. Tomlin rubbed his forehead, looked at her again. Then he looked down at the drugs. “So what?” he said. “I’m supposed to just forget this?”
Tricia shrugged. “If you want,” she said. She started for the door. Brushed by him, close. “We can pretend this never happened, if that’s what you want. I won’t say a damn thing if you don’t try and fire me.”
She could ruin everything, Tomlin thought. He suddenly felt light-headed. Then Tricia stopped in the doorway. “But pretend is so boring.” She looked back at him again with that same funny smile. “Maybe we can have fun instead.”
18
DOUGHTY WASN’T AROUND when Windermere arrived in CID the next morning. She wasn’t surprised; it was early, not even eight, and the office was skeleton-crew barren. Besides, Doughty never showed up before nine.
Windermere kept her coat on as she booted up her computer. She printed off every security cam still she could of the Midway suspect, the Prospect Park suspect, Robbinsdale, and Lowry Hill, and then she turned off her computer again and rode the elevator back down to the garage.
