Boldt’s pen wrote down: Ex-con? Escapee?
“Are we done here?” Boldt asked, anxious to work the evidence.
“What do you think?” It was Lofgrin’s way to hold some cherry for the end of such prelims. The hair coloring and doxycycline had seemed the punctuation mark to Boldt-the exclamation point-but the lack of Lofgrin’s proud- as-a-peacock, I’m-smarter-than-you superior attitude had left him thinking there might be more.
“Out in the hallways as we were looking for his escape route we came across some recent bus ticket stubs.”
“I entered through the bus tunnel emergency route, Bernie.
We already know he had access.” Boldt added, “And you knew that, too, because it’s how your guys got in there, so what’s going on?” Lofgrin appreciated being challenged, or Boldt wouldn’t have been so aggressive. Friendships within the department were both a curse and a blessing.
Lofgrin dug around on the lab bench and produced an evidence bag that contained a rectangular piece of paper-a receipt, or stub. “ATM receipt. SeaTel.” Boldt knew that SeaTel was the bank on the corner, the basement of which he’d toured with the maintenance man. “You’re interested in the date.”
Boldt snatched the bag from Lofgrin, his chest tight. He pressed the plastic of the bag against the receipt, trying to read the date. He fumbled and dropped the bag. Lofgrin spoke as Boldt collected the bag off the floor. “One of my guys-Michael Yei-his sister’s a teller at SeaTel over in Capitol Hill. The account comes back a sixty-year-old woman named Veronica Shepherd. I doubt seriously Ms. Shepherd is living below Third Avenue.”
Boldt had the bag in hand again. He pressed, and the date printed on the receipt came into focus. It was a date emblazoned in Boldt’s memory, the date Susan Hebringer had gone missing.
Boldt experienced both a pang of hurt and one of exhilaration simultaneously.
“Cash machines,” Boldt said hoarsely, his voice choked with emotion. He’d found the connection between the tourists who’d been peeped and the two missing women. “The common de-nominator is cash machines.”
He was out the door before he had a chance to witness Lofgrin’s self-satisfied grin.
Boldt double-parked the department-issue Crown Vic, its emergency flashers going, on the steep incline outside SeaTel. He approached the corner entrance to the bank at a run, but stopped abruptly at sight of the small lighted sign: ATM. Any investigator worth his salt questioned himself when the facts became known. You wondered why and how something so obvious now had seemed so insignificant then, how the brain could overlook something so important, so glaring.
It was a small glassed-in room-a glorified booth-that fronted Columbia Street and contained two ATM machines side by side, a wall clock, and a small blue shelf with pens attached to chains. Mounted to the doorjamb, an electronic credit card reader provided restricted access for the sake of security, admitting only legitimate cardholders.
Boldt pressed his face to the glass, cupping his eyes. Littered across the floor at the foot of both machines he saw several paper receipts, their size and shape now familiar to him.
Of all things, he didn’t own an ATM card-he still cashed checks at the teller window-and therefore couldn’t gain access.
He caused a brief moment of alarm inside the bank as he pushed to the front of a small line, polite but determined to gain admittance to that room. Now that he’d seen the room, he could also picture Susan Hebringer inside it, her purse slung over her arm, her bank card slipping into a slot on one of the two machines.
Already planning his next move, Boldt intended to pull whatever favors necessary to gain immediate access to Hebringer’s and Randolf’s bank records. It seemed inconceivable to him that both women might have used their ATM cards on the dates they disappeared without him knowing about it. He felt like a burst dam, unable to contain himself, spilling out a flood of anger and confusion. His people had run the financials on both victims-he knew this absolutely. So where had the mistake been? How could they have missed this?
A nervous bank officer swiped a card through the outdoor reader. Boldt entered a warm room that smelled bitter. Initially he dismissed the bank officer but then quickly changed his mind and asked him to stand outside and prevent anyone from coming in and disturbing him.
Boldt then studied the room, including the two wall-mounted cash machines, their small screens glowing with a welcome message. He noted the alarmed exit door in the corner, leading into the building-a fire code requirement. He collected himself, slowing his breathing, trying to get beyond the emotion of the moment. He focused on those two machines and tried to put Susan Hebringer into this room. The imagined scene then played before his eyes, black-and-white and jittery. He saw her from the back, dressed in the clothes that she’d been described wearing by both her husband and coworkers on the day of her disappearance. He saw her remove her ATM card from her purse, look up as she heard a man come through that door through which she herself had just entered. Would she have said hello?
He thought not. She’d gone about her business.
But who? A street punk wanting the cash? A well-dressed man in a suit-someone she’d never suspect of the foul play that was to come? A bank officer? A deputy sheriff?
He took a step closer to the machines but stopped as he felt something stuck to the bottom of his shoe. He picked the receipt off his shoe sole, knowing then how one could find its way into the Underground, and immediately lifted his eyes to the alarmed exit door.
He recalled the steel exit door in the hallway on his earlier tour. “It sounds an alarm,” the maintenance man had warned.
He got the bank officer to open it for him.
“Let me guess,” Boldt said as the man searched a cluttered key ring for the proper key, “you-bank officers, that is-and your security guards both have keys to these alarmed doors.
Who else? Housecleaning?”
“No.” The man cowered slightly, swinging the door open for Boldt. It led to the hallway, as expected.
“Maintenance?” Boldt asked. Another logic jump struck him that should have come earlier: the oxygen tanks, the maintenance man’s horrible wheezing. Boldt remembered the name because Sarah had a friend with a similar last name: Vanderhorst. His own internal alarm was going now. He saw a listless Hebringer being dragged through this same door. Leaning over her, Vanderhorst wore a set of coveralls, soon to be bloodied.
“Yes, maintenance too,” the man confirmed.
Boldt entered the hallway and looked right, recalling the stairs that led down into the bank’s basement. The maintenance man, Vanderhorst, had told him the exit door went out to the street; he had failed to mention the ATM machines on the way out. Vanderhorst had played dumb about the existence of access to the Underground.
Dyed hair? A doxycycline prescription for his clogged lungs.
“I’m declaring this a crime scene,” Boldt informed a surprised bank officer. “Stand back, and keep your hands in your pockets.”
“Lieu, shouldn’t we be watching the Greyhound station or something?” Bobbie Gaynes occupied the Crown Vic’s passenger seat.
Boldt said, “We are watching the bus, and the ferries, and the trains, and the northern border crossing with Canada. Rental car agencies clear down to Tacoma have a fax of his bank ID.”
The last few hours had been his busiest in recent memory. He felt incredibly good. “What’s the problem, Bobbie?”
“But why here?” she asked, still frustrated with him. “Vanderhorst called in sick today. That should tell us something, right? He split. We’re wasting time here.”
The Crown Vic pointed downhill and away from the corner office building occupied by the SeaTel Bank. Boldt had both the rearview and driver door mirrors aimed with a view of the corner-one set for his sitting height, the other for slouching.
Boldt’s silence bothered her. “So explain to me what good it is watching the bank?”
“It closes for the weekend in ten minutes.”
“And by my figuring that means he’s another ten minutes farther away.”
“Why do people kill, Bobbie?”
She sighed, letting him know she wasn’t up to his quizzes, his schooling her. It grew old after awhile. “For love and money.” She made her voice sound like a schoolkid reciting her math tables. “For country and revenge,” she added into the mix.
Outright annoyed now, she added, “For the smell of blood, or the scent of a perfume, or because God or their
