No Witnesses

fees, no service fee for the first six months. Our competitors take several weeks to issue the cards, and most charge a variety of fees.”

“Two days?” Daphne questioned.

“Two days if you pick it up at a branch office. That is part of the marketing, you see. It provides our customer service representatives an opportunity to cross-sell. It has been an enormously successful campaign.”

Boldt knew that unlike retail outlets, bank video surveillance systems worked on continuous twenty-four-hour loops, erasing the last twenty-four hours as they went-stopped and reviewed only in the event of a security problem. The timing of the application, the pickup of the ATM card, and the threat sent to Adler all ensured the establishment of an anonymous bank account, and a way to get at the funds that seemed to the layman nearly impossible to stop. “There have to be thousands of ATMs,” Boldt let slip.

“What is it?” Guillard asked.

Boldt rushed his words. “We’ll need a full accounting of the ATM card activity and the card’s personal identification number.” He added quickly, “Do we know if the PIN was generated by your computers or selected by the customer?”

She referenced her computer terminal, typing the request.

An ATM card seemed to Boldt an ingenious method of collecting the ransom, because they would have so little time to locate and prevent the withdrawals. And with this thought came a sickening feeling in his stomach that boiled up into his throat and forced him to excuse himself and seek out the bathroom.

When he returned to Guillard’s office, he felt no better and he knew by Daphne’s troubled expression that he must have been very pale. He lost more of his color when Guillard informed him that she did not have the PIN information immediately available.

“It’s time,” Boldt said.

Daphne understood immediately. She said to the woman, “Ms. Guillard, we need to tell you something in the strictest of confidence. When we asked to see an account executive, that eventuality was made perfectly clear, so obviously you are a person to be trusted or your name would not have come up. Before we go any further, however, you should know that by coming into our confidence you are, by default, committing to what may be a long-term assignment, possibly with a great deal of hours involved. Long days. Long hours. There’s no way to know-”

“But that’s how it looks,” Boldt said. “If you would prefer-for any reason-for us to work with someone else at the bank, now is the time to say so. You should think about this carefully.”

“You’re with Homicide,” she directed to Boldt. He nodded. “And you’re a psychologist dealing with the criminal mind.”

“That’s one aspect of my work, yes,” Daphne conceded. She felt like telling her, I try to keep the burnouts from eating their barrels, I try to keep the marriages from falling apart, and I try to help the junkies and alcoholics to save their badges. She continued: “Right now I’m trying to piece together a possible profile of whom we are after.”

“I will help you,” said the French woman. West Indies perhaps, Boldt thought.

“You’re sure?” he checked one last time. “This isn’t ‘Murder, She Wrote.’ This can get ugly.” Daphne nodded. Briefly, it seemed to him that none of them was breathing.

“I want to help. It is either a ransom or an embezzlement or a suicide. Am I correct?”

“Or maybe all three,” Daphne said.

“May I?” he asked, indicating the door. He didn’t want anyone to overhear what it was he had to say.

Lucille Guillard’s face registered shock, concern, and terror. She hung her head and then looked at him with impassioned eyes and said, “She’s going to get her ransom through the ATMs.”

“Unless we use the ATMs to catch her,” Boldt proposed.

The woman’s eyes began to track behind her thinking. She did not look too convinced.

“Can we do that?” he asked.

Daphne asked, “Can she withdraw enough money for this to make sense?”

“She has one thousand dollars in her opening balance. That does not qualify her as a Personal Banking Customer. Mind you, with this ransom demand of one hundred thousand dollars on deposit, she will qualify for Personal Banking. PBCs have a user-defined daily ATM ceiling. The card is really a debit card. Withdrawals are made against the account balance.”

“Withdrawn from the same machine?” Boldt asked.

“The same machine, yes. The same transaction, no. Do you see the difference? The physical limit of any one transaction at an ATM is four hundred dollars. That’s all, four hundred. That is not something we can override, but is imposed by the manufacturer of the machine for a variety of security reasons. So: per transaction, a total of four hundred. But the number of concurrent transactions is dependent entirely on the imposed ceiling, or the account balance, depending on the type of account.”

“So it is possible-technically possible-to get at the ransom through the ATMs,” Boldt verified.

“If the account is structured properly, quite possible. Yes. Thousands a day, I suppose, if the customer set it up that way. The highest daily ceiling that I’m aware of is ten thousand dollars. That was requested by a rug merchant who uses the card for international buying. In his case, however, he uses the machines infrequently. It’s used more as a cash advance card.”

“And tracking the individual. Is that possible?”

“It is quite complicated, the ATM network. Do you know anything about it?”

“I’m afraid not,” Boldt said. Daphne shook her head.

“We can tell you where withdrawals have been made. Yes? But real-time tracking poses significantly greater problems. If she stays within the Pac-West ATM network, perhaps we can identify fixed locations. But if she accesses our network from another network’s machines, then the request is handled by the regional switching station here in Seattle-NetLinQ. By the time we see the request, you would have no more than a few seconds in which to react.”

“A few seconds,” Boldt echoed, crushed by the news. “Sounds like we’d have to have a person watching every ATM. How many are there?”

“Pac-West operates three hundred and seventy in the state. Roughly half of those are concentrated in an area within an hour’s drive of the city, including downtown. The number of machines handled by NetLinQ?” she asked, opening a drawer and referencing a file. She frowned, and Boldt felt it coming. “NetLinQ handles over twelve hundred machines between Seattle and Everett. Roughly five new locations are being added every two weeks.”

An army, Boldt was thinking. Twelve hundred surveillance operatives? At the peak of the Green River Killer investigation, one hundred and forty law enforcement personnel had been involved. It made his team of four look pretty damn small. It made his stomach burn.

He popped two Maalox.

“Some of our ATMs are equipped with cameras. Maybe that would help you. Still cameras and video. It depends.”

“How many?” Boldt asked hopefully.

“More than half, I believe. And more in the metropolitan areas than in the country. And we are installing cameras at more than three a week. It is a top priority for us.”

Half? It wasn’t enough.

Daphne, sensing his despondency, suggested a meeting with whoever was in charge of NetLinQ.

“That would be Ted Perch,” Guillard said. “He is not the easiest man to deal with. Especially for a woman. You understand?”

“Then I think I’ll pass,” Daphne said. She told Boldt, “I’ll be at the office, then home.”

Guillard said delicately, “I will call and see if he will see us.”

“Let me explain something, Sergeant. It was sergeant, wasn’t it?” Perch delivered Boldt’s rank as if it were one of the lower life forms, as if he deserved much better. “We have always cooperated with law enforcement in the past, and we’re happy to be of whatever assistance we can be. But”-and Boldt had heard the word coming-“if we interrupted the network for every extortion, for every threat, for every counterfeit