The Town: A Novel (4 page)

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.”

O
UTSIDE 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.

T
HE 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.”

F
RAWLEY 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.

The safe-deposit room had not been touched. Drilling each individual box demanded a blind man’s patience and a lottery player’s devotion, a hundred-to-one gamble on finding anything of value that wasn’t insured and traceable.

He moved through the open interior door into a well-maintained cash hold. Frawley sometimes found tellers’ jackets and umbrellas hanging inside vaults. He had seen vaults used as break rooms.

Fingerprint dust coated the cabinets and doors. Only traveler’s checks, scores of torn, color-coded paper straps, and the manager’s tally sheets remained inside the forced cabinet. Frawley tried to shut the bent door with his elbow, the hinges whining as it crept open again.

Six rigid bundles of cash had been set aside, left behind in a small, neat pile over the cash drawers. Frawley cracked open one of the short stacks of retired bills, finding a dye pack nestled in the hollow. He recognized the SecurityPac brand. Dye packs worked when removed from the bank’s premises, triggered by electronic transmitters hidden near the doors. The device was timed to delay detonation for twenty or more seconds, the pack burning at 400º Fahrenheit, too hot for the thief to grab and throw. It released an aerosol cloud of indelible red dye powder that turned note-passers into human smoke bombs, voiding currency and staining human skin for days. Less well-known was that many dye packs also emitted a small burst of incapacitating tear gas.

He examined the drawers without touching them, empty but for the bait bills clipped together in the bottom of each slot. Bait bills were $10 or $20 notes whose denominations, series years, and serial numbers were recorded and kept on file by the bank, per federal deposit insurance regulations. This established a paper trail linking a suspect and the cash in his pocket to the crime scene.

Many bait bills also contained a tracer in the form of a thin magnetic strip that, once removed from the drawer, triggered a silent alarm signal to police dispatch. Known as B-packs, these particular bait bills acted like tracking bugs, the same way a LoJack device works in a stolen automobile. Many counterjumpers, arrested at their home hours after what seemed to be a successful $1,200 job, never learned until their court date how it was that the FBI fingered them.

With no carpet to absorb it, the bleach odor was dizzyingly potent, but Frawley remained inside as long as he could. He wished that the vault could beg him for justice. That it was someone whose hand he could take in a gesture of reassurance, offering a covenant, cop to vic. Then he wouldn’t have to bring so much to these empty repositories himself.

*   *   *

T
HE TECHNICIAN SWABBED THE
insides of the branch manager’s cheeks, collecting elimination DNA along with her fingerprints while Frawley made a copy of the manager’s contact sheet on the bank’s Xerox machine.

Claire G. Keesey. DOB 4/16/66. Frawley looked again and realized that today was her thirtieth birthday.

Dino wanted a look upstairs, leaving Frawley to do the interview solo. She was wiping ink from her fingers as Frawley introduced himself, making their perfunctory handshake awkward. He had snagged her a Poland Spring, which she thanked him for, uncapping it and sipping a little before setting the bottle down on the table beside them, next to an empty Diet Coke.

Frawley sat in the corner with her facing him, so that the police passing outside the door would not distract her. The bleach odor was only mild here. She shifted in her seat, making herself ready for the interview, smiling a little, uncertain. She rubbed her stained hands together in her lap as though chilled. Her arms were long and bare.

“No jacket today?” said Frawley.

“Someone took it,” she said, looking back at the door. “For evidence. They… they cut my blindfold out of it.”

“Would you like… ?” He opened his own jacket, and she nodded. He stood and draped it over her shoulders, though as he sat back down, she slipped her arms into the sleeves. The cuffs hung just an inch too long. If he had known a woman would be wearing his jacket that day, he would have chosen a newer one. “And you’re sure you’re okay, you don’t want to go get checked out?”

“Just stiff,” she said.

“No bumps, bruises?”

“No,” she said, realizing only then how odd that was.

Frawley showed her his microcassette recorder, then turned it on and set it on the table. “Ms. Keesey, I want to start with your abduction, then take you back through the robbery itself.”

The word
abduction
brought a blink and a deep swallow. This trauma had many layers and she was in only two or three deep.

“It’s unusual to see a bank employee kidnapped during an otherwise successful robbery. But it means you spent a fair amount of time in the company of the bandits and perhaps possess some information that can benefit our investigation. I am the local bank robbery coordinator for the FBI, and this is all I do, work bank crimes, so nothing you can tell me is too trivial. Let me also say that if I don’t ask a question you want asked, go right ahead and answer it anyway.”

“Then, if I could… no one’s been able to tell me about Davis.”

“The assistant manager?” said Frawley. “He’s being checked out at the hospital,
but he’s going to be okay. He’s hurt, but he’s going to make it. That’s what you wanted to know?”

She nodded and rubbed her cheek with her hand, the dried stain leaving no exchange.

“You saw them beat him?” said Frawley.

She looked down and nodded.

“It was brutal,” he said.

“I didn’t… I looked away.”

“Now I’m assuming these bandits threatened you upon your release. Told you not to cooperate in any way with the police, the FBI, correct?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. And could you detail the exact nature of that threat for me?”

“It was after they stopped. One of the ones in front—he was the same one with me at the vault—he had my handbag.”

“Okay, hold on. Now, you were blindfolded for the entire ride, no?”

“Oh—yes, he shook it. My big Coach bag—I know the sound of my things. He unsnapped my purse, told me he was pulling out my driver’s license. He read it to me. Said he was keeping it.”

“In his words, if you can remember them?”

She crooked her head, looking down, repeating them quietly. “‘If you tell the FBI anything about us, we will come back for you and fuck you and kill you.’”

“Okay,” said Frawley, pretending to write that down, coming back up with a neutral smile. “Of course, intimidation is a bank bandit’s stock-in-trade. What I can tell you is, they have their money, they think they have gotten away, and I can assure you they want no more involvement in this investigation. No way they would risk exposing themselves now.”