T
WO HOURS
AFTER
Carter Tomlin and his gang walked out of the First Minnesota branch in Stevens Square, Carla Windermere stood in the middle of the bank’s tiny lobby, surveying the now-chaotic crime scene. The thirty-two-year-old FBI Special Agent cut an unusual figure amid the confusion: tall and slender, dressed smartly in a white blouse and razor-crisp pantsuit, Windermere looked more like a TV news anchor than a successful investigator.
Her eyes, however, were a cop’s eyes. They were drawn tight and narrowed, calculating as she looked over the bank lobby.
The place was a mess. The whole building was packed full of law enforcement—mostly Minneapolis city cops, first responders—standing in corners and doorways, drinking coffee and bumming cigarettes, shooting the shit and getting in her way. Here and there, a plainclothes cop poked his nose into something—the fingerprints on the tellers’ counter, the bank manager’s office—steadfastly ignoring Windermere and the rest of the FBI investigators who’d taken over the scene.
Windermere looked around the bank, then out into the street. “Eat Street,” they called this place. A couple of miles of trendy restaurants a few minutes south of downtown Minneapolis and conveniently located near Interstates 94 and 35, two quick getaways for bank robbers with wheels.
Windermere caught the eye of a technician kneeling on the floor over a bunch of shell casings nearby.
“What’s up, Laurie?” she said, her voice still betraying the last vestiges of a southern accent. The accent had accompanied her from Mississippi to her first FBI posting in Miami; despite her best efforts, it had followed her north to Minnesota five years later. Along with her cool demeanor, and, she sometimes suspected, the color of her skin, it served only to reinforce her position as an outsider within the Bureau.
The tech didn’t look up. “Two-twenty-three Remingtons,” she said. “Probably an assault rifle. His partner had a sawed-off shotgun.”
Windermere ran her hand through her hair. “An assault rifle,” she said. “Shit.”
“Probably an AR-15.” Laurie looked up at Windermere, caught her blank expression. “It’s like an army M-16, but for personal use. Hunting, home defense.”
“Bank robberies.”
Laurie shrugged. “Hubby keeps one around. Says it’s for deer season. I figure he just likes to play army with the boys. Men and their guns, right?”
Windermere studied the shells and didn’t like what they told her. Most bank robbers were amateurs, impulsive degenerates, for the most part unarmed. The Bureau tended to catch up with their lot pretty quickly. Kept a high clearance rate. Today’s contestants, though, didn’t look quite so primitive. Assault rifles and sawed-off shotguns hardly ever meant amateur hour.
Windermere straightened again, and looked across the lobby to where the bank tellers stood huddled in the corner. She locked eyes with the youngest of the bunch, a pretty little twentysomething who kept looking at Windermere like she wanted to talk.
Your witness,
Windermere thought, and she started over.
The teller shrank like a scared kitten as Windermere approached. Not uncommon. Witnesses, suspects, cops, hardened criminals, male and female alike: They all tended to take a step backward when Windermere turned her gaze on them. Most of the time, she didn’t mind it. Most of the time, she let someone else coddle the wallflower witnesses. Focused her efforts on breaking down suspects.
No such luck today, though. Windermere forced a sympathetic smile and tried to look warm and fuzzy. “What’s your name, hon?”
The teller looked away. “Nicole.”
“Nicole,” said Windermere. “Okay. So what happened, Nicole?”
Nicole took a deep breath and wiped her eyes. “I don’t know,” she said. “They came in, the two of them. You probably know this stuff already.”
Windermere shook her head. “Tell me.”
“It was a man and a woman,” Nicole told her. “They came in with guns. He told everyone get down on the floor and Cindy and I didn’t, so he hit Cindy with his gun.”
Windermere glanced around the group of tellers and found Cindy, a middle-aged redhead with a black eye and an ice pack pressed to her forehead. Cindy gave her a weak smile.
“I thought he would hit me, but I couldn’t move,” said Nicole. “But he didn’t hit me. He just looked at me with these intense blue eyes. He said he could kill me and it would be easy.”
The teller exhaled. “I told him don’t hurt me,” she said. “Then he made me empty the tills into a big duffel bag. When I was done, he made like to shoot me.”
Windermere frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Aimed his gun at me and smiled, really creepy.
‘Pow,’
he said.”
“Pow.”
“Pow.”
Nicole nodded. “Like he wanted me to know he could do it.”
“Probably just keeping you in line.” Windermere glanced at the front door, the street outside. “You see where they went when they walked out of here?”
The teller shook her head. “I was scared. I didn’t want to know.”
Windermere studied her.
Okay,
she thought.
Good enough.
Some creep with blue eyes and an AR-15 assault rifle. A woman with a sawed-off shotgun. A duffel bag full of money, and a power fetish. Windermere thanked the teller and turned back into the chaos.
Someone,
she thought,
must have seen these guys leave.
I
N CARTER
T
OMLIN
’
S
WORLD
,
a man provided for his family.
He’d never considered himself a violent person. He wasn’t a drug addict or a gambler, didn’t cheat on his wife or his taxes. Until the layoff, he was a respectable man. A husband and a father and a decision-maker at the firm, a corner-office man on the executive track.
In Tomlin’s mind, real men dealt with adversity. They didn’t complain or talk about fairness. They didn’t take handouts; they solved their own problems. They provided.
He’d robbed his first bank a few months after the layoff. A Bank of America branch in Midway. He’d been waiting to talk to a loan officer. Hating himself, but needing something to help him keep up with the mortgage, the car payments. The groceries and the phone.
He left the bank without ever meeting the loan officer. Hurried into the Walmart next door and bought a clumsy disguise, then came back and shoved a hastily scribbled note into the teller’s hands, wondering what the hell he was doing as she emptied the till. Bugged out like a scared rabbit and walked with an envelope full of cash.
—
I
T WAS HIS OWN FAULT,
most of it. The mortgage, for sure. Tomlin had known deep inside that they couldn’t afford half of what the broker promised to lend him. The accountant in him had screamed when he’d signed the papers.
But how could he say no? The way Becca smiled when she talked about a Summit Avenue address, a beautiful Victorian dream home surrounded by trees and green space, away from the crush of the city. The way Heather and Maddy laughed as they chased each other around the picture-perfect front lawn. Bill Carver and Chuck Lawson had both taken the plunge, purchased homes for their families nearby. Now they came to work talking about riding lawn mowers and neighborhood cookouts, family trips out to the lakes.
This was what a man was supposed to do for his family. This was how life was supposed to turn out. A big house on a tree-lined street, happy kids and good neighbors, and hell, even a puppy. So what if it meant taking on a little debt? A mortgage was a fact of life. Home ownership was the American Dream. Of course, this was before the whole economy imploded. Before housing prices collapsed. Before the firm decided to downsize.
“I’ve given this company twenty good years,” he told Carver and Lawson on the day the guillotine dropped its blade. “Now you’re just going to kick me to the curb?”
“We’ve got a great package for you, Carter,” Lawson told him. “Very generous. A golden-parachute deal.”
“And we’re happy to provide a reference,” said Carver. “You’ve been a great employee here. This wasn’t an easy decision.”
He’d called the recruiter the next day. Met her in a swanky suburban office. She was about twenty-five, he figured. Her haircut looked like it cost more than his watch. She’d looked over his CV and then studied his face. “No offense,” she said, frowning. “My clients are paying me to cherry-pick the best.”
“Twenty years at one of the best firms in the state,” Tomlin said. “You don’t think I can cut it?”
The recruiter shrugged. “My clients make the rules. And they’re not looking to hire from the unemployment lines.”
“You think I’m not worth your time,” he said. “Because I’m laid off. So what the hell am I supposed to do?”
She shrugged again, and handed back his CV. “Maybe take a class?”
He’d forced himself to thank her and drove home, where he sat in his car in the driveway so long that Becca came out to see what was the matter. She sat in the passenger seat and held his hand. “We’ll sell the house,” she said. “The cars. Whatever it takes. We’ll get through this.”
He stared through the front windshield up at the house. It stared back as though mocking him. He counted six rooms with lights on, probably more in the back. All that wasted electricity. Money frittered away. “We’re underwater,” he told her. “We can’t sell.”
“The cars, anyway.”
“Resale on these things is criminal,” he said, shaking his head. “We’d be lucky to get pennies on the dollar.”
Becca squeezed his hand. “What about bankruptcy?”
She might as well have said suicide. “We’re not declaring bankruptcy,” Tomlin told her. “I’m solving this thing on my own.”
—
B
ECCA TOOK
a maternity-leave position at the local middle school. “Just until you find work,” she told Tomlin. “Let me do my part.”
Tomlin fought her as long as he could. He’d sworn when they’d married she would never work again. But the firm’s severance money dwindled. Every month another chunk disappeared, to the mortgage and car payments and the rest. They switched to basic cable and canceled their cell phones. Didn’t eat out anymore, or go to the movies. Becca started to shop at the discount grocery store.
Finally, Tomlin gave in. “Just for the short term,” he told her. “Not forever.”
She came home after the first week exhausted. “Those kids are a handful,” she told him, her jaw set. “I forgot how awful they could be.”
The next weeks were worse. Tomlin felt like he was watching her age in front of his eyes. Her beautiful blond hair now hung unkempt and stringy; her blue eyes were perennially shadowed and dark.
Then they stopped making love. Becca swore nothing was wrong, but she stiffened when he touched her, turned away in the night. Sometimes she relented, but even then Tomlin was distracted, unable to focus. He lay awake while Becca slept fitfully beside him, and in the morning he would try not to notice the rings under her eyes. They spent long hours in silence, and when they did talk, they fought. Even the kids could sense something was wrong.
Finally, Becca sat him down. “We should think about bankruptcy,” she said.
He felt choked, suffocated. He didn’t say anything.
“We’re dying here,” she said. “We need a lifeline.”
“It’s not bankruptcy,” he told her. “I’ll find another way.”
“There’s no other way, Carter.” Her face was stony, and her eyes hard. “We can’t live like this anymore.”
—
T
OMLIN WENT TO
the bank the next day. He wasn’t sure what he was doing, but he knew he needed help. Christmas was coming. The car loans. The mortgage. A mountain of unpaid bills and unrealistic demands.
He looked around the bank as he waited to talk to the loan officer. The tellers, the customers, all of them living their lives while he watched from the margins, an invalid. An impotent man, a failure.
He could already predict the loan officer’s response.
He glanced at the bank tellers again, at the customers cashing their paychecks. The robbery idea seemed to worm its way into his brain.
You could do it,
he thought, searching almost reflexively for the security cameras. Four of them, no, five. The bank didn’t even have a security guard.
You could rob this bank,
he thought.
Easy.
Tomlin thought about Carver and Lawson, both of them buying up Xboxes and diamond earrings for Christmas. He saw Becca’s face on Christmas morning, Heather’s and Madeleine’s. He saw the house up for sale, the cars repossessed. He thought about walking into that loan officer’s little room and begging for more money he couldn’t afford.
Forget that,
he thought.
He looked in once more at the loan officer in his office—a skinny, balding man with thin glasses and an ill-fitting shirt. Then he turned and walked out to the parking lot. Twenty-five minutes later, he walked back through the bank doors, wearing a clumsy Walmart disguise and clutching his note.
This time, he walked out with cash.
W
INDERMERE INTERVIEWED
the bank manager, a middle-aged mouse who’d been out on his lunch break when the robbers came in. He was sweating, kept pushing his glasses up his nose, and, for a moment, Windermere thought maybe he was involved. Then she chased the thought from her mind. The guy was about five-five. Had a half-eaten Subway sandwich on his desk. Besides, he looked almost as terrified as Nicole, the poor teller.
Windermere threw a couple curveball questions at the guy, just to keep him honest. Then she thanked him and walked from his office, locking eyes with a plainclothes cop skulking toward the coffee machine. “You city?” she asked him.
The guy looked longingly toward the coffee. “Yeah,” he said, sighing. “Fifth Precinct.”
“FBI’s got this place covered,” she told him. “You want to help out, get some patrol cars and some uniforms knocking on doors. Maybe we get lucky and this crew is local.”
The cop made one last play for the coffee. “Go,” Windermere told him. “I’ll buy you all Frappuccinos when you bring me a suspect.”
The cop glared at her and slunk off toward a bunch of uniforms at the exit. He said something and they all looked her way, then turned like a troop of sullen tenth-graders and made for the sidewalk. Windermere held her gaze on them until they’d all disappeared.
“Carla.” Bob Doughty, her latest partner, coming her way. A plastic smile and a size-forty-eight suit. “You figure this thing out yet?”
Windermere shrugged. “Some goofs get a bright idea they’re going to rob the neighborhood bank, easy money. Sooner or later, someone rats them out for two hundred dollars in a Crime Stoppers payoff. The end.”
Doughty frowned and pretended to think about it. “That’s how it plays, huh?”
“In general, yeah.”
“Well, fingers crossed,” Doughty said. “Want to watch some tape while we wait for that call? I just hooked up the security footage.”
Windermere looked around the bank. No city cops to chase out, no more tellers to scare. Even Laurie looked about ready to go. “Why not?” she said. “Let’s see how these guys operate.”
She followed Doughty into the bank’s small back room. There was a desk and a chair and a monitor showing split-screen security cam footage. Doughty gestured to the chair. “Have a seat.”
Windermere sat and leaned toward the monitor. The footage showed four camera angles: three from the lobby and one from the vault. The time stamp read a quarter past one.
Doughty dragged another chair into the room and sat down, pressed close to Windermere in the cramped little room. Windermere felt the big man shift beside her, and for a second, she felt déjà vu, remembering another bank of security monitors and another tiny back room, a grocery store in Seattle and an unlikely partner.
Stevens.
She felt something twinge inside her, nostalgia or something, and then she felt Doughty shift and she realized he was looking at her. “You okay?”
Windermere shook her head and the grocery store vanished. “I’m cool,” she said. “Roll the tape.”
Doughty fiddled with the mouse, and the screens came to life. A series of customers filed through the front doors, past the big security guard, and lined up, bored, before the bank teller’s window. A couple minutes passed. More customers walked in. More walked out. Business was steady for a Tuesday afternoon. The bank manager emerged from his office and walked out to lunch. Then Doughty pointed. “There.”
Moments after the manager disappeared, the stickup crew came through the front doors. Windermere watched as they walked past the guard, the big rent-a-cop barely registering their presence.
Come on, Larry,
she thought.
Hone those crime-fighter instincts.
The man on the screen held an assault rifle, just like Laurie said. The gun looked big enough to mow down a platoon, forget the deer. Windermere watched as the man fired a burst into the ceiling, sparking chaos.
The hit played like the tellers described it. The female robber filled the duffel bag while the man focused on Cindy first, then Nicole.
Typical,
Windermere thought.
Guy’s flirting with
the bank tellers, making his woman do the work.
She watched as the man leveled his gun at Nicole. Watched her stiffen as she stared down the barrel. Then she emptied her till, and her partner’s beside her, and the man pointed the gun at her once more and was gone. Windermere stopped the tape.
“You talked to the teller,” Doughty said. “What was that guy doing?”
“Creep stuff,” she told him. “Some power game. Who knows?”
Someone knocked on the door behind them, and Windermere turned around. Laurie. She smiled at Windermere and then spoke to Doughty. “Got someone outside wants to speak to you guys.”
“Who?” Windermere said.
“Some kind of witness,” she said, shrugging. “Said he saw the getaway car drive off. Should I bring him back here?”
Doughty shook his head. “We’ll come out.”
Laurie had the kid waiting in the lobby. He wore a fitted Twins cap and saggy jeans. Looked about twenty. He glanced at Doughty as they approached and then fixed his eyes on Windermere. “Damn, sister,” he said. “You’re a cop, huh? Maybe you want to put the cuffs on me?”
Windermere shook her head. “I think I’d rather use a Taser,” she said. “You see something out there or what?”
“Yeah, I saw something.” The kid let his eyes roam her body. “Saw the getaway car. Didn’t that other girl tell you?”
“Agent Tremain told us, yeah. Describe the car.”
The kid grinned at Doughty. “She always this pissy?”
Doughty played along. Shrugged and smiled.
Shit,
Windermere thought. “The car, man. Come on.”
“All right, chill,” he said. “It was a Toyota Camry. Gold. I saw those armed motherfuckers run out the bank and jump in the backseat.”
A gold Camry. Had to be thousands of those cars in the Twin Cities. Blending right into the background. “Where were you?” she said.
“Down the block, waiting on a delivery.” The kid suddenly looked sheepish. “I’m a pizza guy.”
“Good for you,” she said. “So you watched them run out to this gold Camry. Then you saw them drive away.”
“Like it was nothing. Real slow.”
Windermere looked at Doughty. “Everyone and their sister has a Camry.”
Doughty nodded. “Good cars.”
“So how do we go about finding this particular vehicle?”
The kid shifted his weight again. “You guys want the plate number?” He dug in his pocket and handed over a notepad. Flipped it open to a couple drawings of muscle cars and half a naked woman. And at the bottom of the page, scrawled real quick, three digits, three letters.
Windermere looked at the notepad. Then she looked at the kid. The kid shrugged. “I was bored.”
“Yeah, I guess so.” Windermere tore the page from the notepad. “You can’t draw for shit,” she said. “You get sick of pizza, think law enforcement, not art.” She turned back to Doughty. “Let’s dig up that car.”