Frawley opened his credentials holder, pressing his FBI ID card and his small gold badge against the window near the FDIC sticker that was his ticket inside. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation guaranteed all deposit accounts up to $100,000, making any bank crime committed on U.S. soil a federal offense. A Boston cop holding a handkerchief to his mouth stepped into the ATM vestibule and switched off the big fan in order to let Frawley inside.
"Here he is," said Dino, greeting him beside the check-writing counter, clipboard in hand. The smell of violation was not so strong there as at the door.
Frawley said, "I was fine until I hit the expressway coming back."
The Boston Bank Robbery Task Force operated not out of the field office downtown but out of a resident agency in Lakeville, a small bedroom community thirty miles south of the city. Frawley had been pulling into the industrial park there when he got this call.
Dino had a pair of paper bootees for him. Dean Drysler was Boston Police, twenty-seven years, a lieutenant detective on permanent assignment to the task force. He was local product, tall, long-boned, sure. Boston saw more per capita bank jobs and armored-car heists than anywhere else in the country, and Dino was indispensable to Frawley as someone who knew the terrain.
Frawley was thirty-three, compact, laser-sighted, a runner. He had less than two years with the Boston office, eight overall with the FBI following rapid-fire assignments in Miami, Seattle, and New York. He was the youngest bank robbery agent in the country, one of a platoon of five Boston agents assigned to the BRTF, investigating bank crimes throughout Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, and Maine. The working partnership he and Dino had formed was of the teacher-student variety, though the roles of teacher and student flip-flopped day to day, sometimes hour to hour.
Frawley pulled the bootees on over his size-eight-and-a-halfs and organized his rape kit: paperwork folder, notebook, tape recorder. He scanned the various uniforms and acronym-proud windbreakers. "Where is she now?"
"Break room in back. They let her go at Orient Heights, north of the airport. She walked to a corner market, they called it in. We already had a cruiser here on the silent bell."
"From?"
"Teller cage number two." They walked through the security door behind the counter, where the vapors were stronger, the industrial carpeting already blanching in spots. Dino pointed his clipboard at a floor button. "Panic bell. The assistant manager is down the street at Beth Israel, he caught a pretty good beating."
"Beat him, then took her for a ride, let her go?"
Dino's eyebrows arched satanically. "Unharmed."
Frawley set his suspicion aside, trying to go in order. "Anything on the vehicle?"
"Van, seems like. I put a BOLO out for car fires."
"You talk to her?"
"I set her up with a female officer first."
Frawley looked at the open vault door behind Dino, its round piston locks disengaged. Two techs in jumpsuits and bootees were going over the inside walls with blue lasers. Print dust on the outer door showed a beautiful handprint over the dial, but small, likely the manager's. "Morning Glory?"
"Morning Glory and a Jack-in-the-Box. Worked a bypass and busted in overnight. Phones here are all dead. BayBanks central security tried a callback on the silent and got no answer, dispatched the patrolman. Security chief's on his way over with the codes and specs, but I'm figuring two hard lines and a cellular backup. They tricked out the cell and one of the Nynex lines."
"Only one?"
"Waiting on a Nynex truck to confirm. I'm guessing the vault is hardwired, bank-to-station, same as the teller panics. Our guys let the time lock expire and had the manager open sesame."
"Under duress."
"That is my understanding."
Frawley jotted this down. "Easier than humping in SLICE packs and oxy tanks and burning through the vault walls."
Dino shrugged his pointy shoulders. "Whether they could have jumped the vault bell or not."
Frawley considered that. "Neutralizing the vault might have tipped their hand too much."
"Though with some of these guys-- you know it-- burglary is pussy."
Frawley nodded. "It's not a payday unless they're robbing someone face-to-face."
"Bottom line is, they know phone lines and Baby Bell tech."
Frawley nodded, surveying the fouled bank from the perspective of teller station number two, his cop eyes starting to sting. "These are the same guys, Dino."
"Throwing us curveballs now. Look at this."
* * *
THE TREND IN "COMMUNITY BANKING" was to feature the branch manager's office up front, prominent behind glass walls, playing up accessibility and putting a friendly, local face on a corporation that charges you fees for the privilege of handing you back your own money. Kenmore Square was a prime location-- high foot traffic with the student population, the nightclubs, the nearby ballpark-- but the space itself was an odd fit for a bank, deeper than it was wide, owing to the ending curve of the road. The manager's office was tucked away behind the tellers, along the back hallway near the break room and bathrooms.
A police photographer was inside, his flash throwing shadows off the chunk of ceiling concrete atop the desk. It had crushed a telephone and a computer monitor, cords and keyboard dangling to the floor like entrails. Neatly sheared rebar and steel mesh lay among rubble of plaster, ceiling corkboard, concrete dust, and mottled gray chips.
Frawley looked up at the layers of flooring visible in the square ceiling hole, seeing an eye chart above an examining-room sink. The robbers had broken into the second-floor optometry shop and cut through overnight. This was the hidden cost of doing business in an older city like Boston, and why banks preferred to open branches in freestanding buildings.
A red helmet appeared in the hole, a fireman doing a pretend startle. "Thought you guys were bank robbers!"
Dino nodded upward with a smile. "Off your break already, Spack?"
He said it old-city style,
Spack
instead of
Spark
. Dino could turn the hometown accent on and off like charm.
"Just getting my eyes checked. This your whiz kid?"
"Special Agent Frawley, meet Captain Jimmy here."
Frawley waved at the ceiling with his free hand.
"A perfect square, two by two," said Captain Jimmy. "Nice work."
Dino nodded. "If you can get it."
"Hope you two catch these geniuses before the cancer does." He pointed down through the hole. "Those gray chips there, that's asbestos."
Frawley said, "Any tools up top?"
"Nope. Nothing."
Frawley eyed the smooth cut, turned to Dino. "Industrial concrete saw."
"Yeah, and a torch for the rebar. Nothing very fancy. Our boys are blue-collar bandits. Real salt-of-the-earth numskulls."
Frawley said, "Numskulls who can bypass alarms."
"Spack's gonna cut out this hole for us," said Dino, turning to leave. "Hey, careful up there, Spacky, you don't pull any muscles, have to take a year's disability vacation on my account."
Chuckles from firemen above, and Captain Jimmy saying, "Dean, you know there's only one muscle I'd pull for you."
* * *
OUTSIDE THE BACK DOOR Frawley heard the cars on the nearby turnpike, speeding into and out of the city. The small parking spaces and chained Dumpsters sat lower than the street, a culvert gathering sand, grit, and trash.
A Morning Glory score was typically the most successful and lucrative type of bank robbery. Ambushing employees before the bank opened meant fewer people to control. The branch's cash stores were still centralized in the vault, not yet disbursed to tellers or spread around in secondary safes or backup drawers, and therefore easy to find and carry with speed. The typical Morning Glory involved a distracted branch opener getting waylaid in the parking lot at gunpoint. Breaking in overnight and lying in wait for the manager to arrive-- the Jack-in-the-Box-- showed a deeper level of preparation and, among notoriously lazy bank robbers, an aberrant affinity for hard work.
Frawley saw a photographer laying a ruler next to the tire treads in the road sand. He almost told her not to bother. The stolen getaway van would turn up in a few hours, in a vacant lot somewhere, torched.
He envisioned them loading the van, hustling but not panicked, the silent alarm ringing only in their heads. Why take the time to beat the assistant manager? The vault was empty, and they were already on their way out. Taking the manager was schizo. It was a piece that didn't fit, and as such, something for Frawley to key on.
* * *
THE SHAPE OF THE bloodstain soaked into the carpet behind the tellers' cages resembled the continent of Africa. A lab technician was sampling it and depositing fibers into a brown, coin-sized envelope.
"He was cuffed to the chair." Dino held up an evidence bag containing a snipped plastic bundling tie, the kind with locking teeth. "Cracked his jaw, maybe his cheekbone, the bones around the eye."
Frawley nodded, the odor at its most pungent there. Bleach effectively fragged DNA. Criminalists at the FBI lab used it to blitz their work surfaces clean, to avoid any evidentiary cross-contamination. Pouring bleach was something he had heard of rapists doing, fouling genetic matter left on the victim, but never bank robbers. "Bleach, huh?"
"A little extreme. But camping out here overnight, you can never be too careful."
"They sure don't want to get caught. These guys must be facing a long fall." Frawley slid his beeper to his hip and crouched behind the third teller's cage, noticing blond crumbs on the paling carpet, partially melted by the bleach. "They sat here and had a picnic."
Dino crouched with him, his mechanical pencil tucked behind a hairy ear. "Gets hungry on a job, Frawl. I told you, these are blue-collar bandits. Boiled eggs and thermos coffee. The Brown Bag Bandits."
Dino stood again while Frawley remained on his haunches, imagining the bandits hanging out there as the sun came up, the bank theirs. He rose and looked through the teller's cage to the windows along the front of the building, the square outside. He had a vague memory of passing through it the day before-- a sense of entering the home stretch, his legs burning, the crowd cheering him on. "Marathon runs right by here?"
"Holy shit, Frawl, I forgot. Look at you. Twenty-six point two miles and you're up and around like nothing happened."
Frawley returned his beeper to the front of his belt. "Broke three and a half hours," he said. "I'm happy with that."
"Well, congratulations, you loose screw. That is one lonely sport you got there. What is it you think about the whole time?"
"Finishing," Frawley said, now looking at the lockbox open on the back counter. "So the eye doctor was closed all day."
"Top-floor gym was too, but some employees got together to watch the race-- picture windows, good view up there. They were out by six. Traffic control ends around eight at night outside, even with runners still stumbling in. Our guys didn't need more than a few hours to load in, punch their hole, and drop down."
"Young guys. Lowering themselves through a two-by-two hole in the ceiling."
"Not the old masters, no. The older generation-- lockpicks, plumbers-- they'd need a bed to land on."
"How'd they access the building?"
"Another rear door. Separate entrance for the shops upstairs."
"Exterior security cameras?"
"Not for the bank. But we'll check. Though if it's our guys-- "
"Yeah, they'll already have been busted." Frawley put his hands on his hips, his thighs and calves still stinging. "So what's your call?"
"Early call?" Dino sucked in a breath and joined Frawley in looking around. "It's a good pick here. The holiday, the hundredth running of the marathon. Nice weather, a square full of hungry race fans. The bookstore, clothing stores across the street-- though they're mostly credit-card transactions. But the convenience store, the McDonald's, that Espresso Royale coffee thing. Plus the Sox are in town, that ups the neighborhood restaurant and bar cash big time, over three days. Plus-- Jesus-- the nightclubs on Landsdowne Street. Their combined Saturday-Sunday takes?" Dino worked his tongue around the inside of his cheek. "I'm gonna go large here. With the vault, the night deposits, the ATM? Put me down for three and a quarter. Plus or minus ten percent, yeah, I'd say a good three and a quarter."
"I'm going three-five," said Frawley, turning toward the open vault. "
Fuck,
I want these guys."
* * *
FRAWLEY NEEDED THE VAULT. The vault was his vic. Not the corporation that owned the bank, not the federal government that insured it and employed him. The vault: emptied and plaintive and violated. He needed the vault in the same way that homicide detectives generate sympathy for the corpse to fuel their hunt.
