The branch was a two-story art deco job with a curving facade with large round windows along its second level. Inside, the tellers’ counter and new-accounts desks were on the first floor and the executive offices upstairs. I found Jones up there in an office with a porthole that looked over the sheriff’s compound to the Pacific Design Center, known locally as the Blue Whale because from some angles its blue-sheathed facade looked like the tail of a humpback protruding from the ocean.
Jones smiled and invited me to sit down.
“Mr. Scaggs told me you would be coming by and that it was all right to talk to you. He said you were working on the robbery.”
“That’s right.”
“I’m glad it hasn’t been forgotten about.”
“Well, I’m glad to hear you say that.”
“What can I do for you?”
“I’m not sure. I’m sort of retracing a lot of steps that were taken before. So it might be repetitive but I’d just like to hear you talk about your part in it. I’ll ask questions if I come up with any.”
“Well, there isn’t a whole lot for me to tell. I mean, I wasn’t there like Linus and poor Mr. Vaughn were. I was mostly around the money before it was transported. I was an assistant at that time to Mr. Scaggs. He’s been my mentor with the company.”
I nodded and smiled like I thought it was all nice. I was moving slowly, the plan being to gradually steer her in the direction I wanted to go.
“So you worked on the money. You counted it, packaged it, got it ready. Where was that?”
“At the downtown center. We were in a vault the whole time. The money came in to us from the branches and we did everything right there without ever leaving. Except, you know, at the end of the day. It took about three, three and a half days to get everything ready. Mostly waiting for it to come in from the branches.”
“When you say ‘us,’ you mean Linus…”
I opened the murder book on my lap as if to check a name I didn’t recall.
“Simonson,” she said for me.
“Right, Linus Simonson. You worked on this together, correct?”
“That’s right.”
“Was Mr. Scaggs his mentor, too?”
She shook her head and slightly blushed, I think, but it was hard to tell because she was very dark- skinned.
“No, the mentoring program is a minority program. I should say ‘was.’ They suspended it a year ago. Anyway, Linus is white. He grew up in Beverly Hills. His father owned a bunch of restaurants and I don’t think he needed a mentor.”
I nodded.
“Okay, so you and Linus were in there for three days putting all of this money together. You also had to record serial numbers off the bills, right?”
“Yes, we did that, too.”
“How was that done?”
She didn’t answer for a moment as she tried to remember. She swiveled slowly back and forth in her chair. I watched a sheriff’s helicopter land on the roof of the station across Santa Monica.
“What I remember is that it was supposed to be random,” she said. “So we just took bills out of the bricks at random. I think we had to get about a thousand numbers and record them. That took a long time, too.”
I leafed through the murder book until I found a copy of the currency report she and Simonson had put together. I unsnapped the binder’s rings and removed the report.
“According to this you recorded eight hundred of the bills.”
“Oh, okay. Eight hundred, then.”
“Is this the report?”
I handed it to her and she studied it, looking at each page and her signature at the bottom of the last page.
“It looks like it but it’s been four years.”
“Yes, I know. That was the last time you saw it-when you signed it?”
“No, after the robbery I saw it. When I was questioned by the detectives. They asked if that was the report.”
“And you said it was?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, going back to when you and Linus made this report, how did that go?”
She shrugged.
“Linus and I just took turns typing the numbers into his laptop.”
“Isn’t there some sort of computer scanner or copier that could have recorded the serial numbers much more easily?”
“There is but it wouldn’t work for what we had to do. We had to randomly select and record bills from every pack but keep each recorded bill in its original pack. That way if the money was stolen and split up, there would be a chance of tracing every pack.”
I nodded.
“Who told you to do it that way?”
“Well, I guess it came down from Mr. Skaggs or maybe Mr. Vaughn. Mr. Vaughn was the one who dealt with security and the instructions from the insurance company.”
“Okay, so you are in the vault with Linus. How exactly did you record the money?”
“Oh, Linus thought it would take forever if we wrote down the numbers and then had to type them into a computer. So he brought his laptop in and we entered them directly. One of us would read off the number while the other typed.”
“Which one of you did which?”
“We both did. We switched. You might think sitting at a table with two million dollars in cash on it is a real thrill but it actually was boring. So we switched around. Sometimes I read and he typed, and then I’d type while he read out the numbers.”
I thought about this, trying to see how it could have worked. It might appear that having two employees put the list together would provide a double-checking system, but it didn’t. Whether Simonson was reading off numbers or entering them on the laptop computer, he was controlling the data. He could have made up numbers in either position and Jones would not have known it unless she looked at either the bill or the computer screen.
“Okay,” I said. “Then when you were finished you printed out the computer file and signed the report, right?”
“Right. I mean, I think so. It was a while back.”
“Is that your signature on there?”
She flipped to the last page of the document and checked. She nodded.
“That’s it.”
I held out my hand and she gave me the document back.
“Who took the report to Mr. Scaggs?”
“Probably Linus. He printed it out. Why are all of these details so important?”
Her first suspicion of where I was going. I didn’t answer. I flipped the report she had been studying to the back page and looked at the signatures myself. Her signature was below Simonson’s and above Scaggs’s scrawl. It had been the order of signing. Simonson, then her, then it was taken to Scaggs for final sign-off.
As I held the report up to the light from the porthole, I thought I saw something I hadn’t noticed before. It was only a photocopy of the original or maybe even a copy of a copy, but even still, there were gradations in the ink in Jocelyn Jones’s signature. It was something I had seen before on another case.
“What is it?” Jones asked.
I looked at her while putting the document back into the murder book.
“Excuse me?”
