Madman on a Drum (12 page)

“No, let me,” I said.

Lauren was still smiling when I leaned across the desk. I slowly and carefully explained the situation to her, making sure to emphasize exactly how old Victoria was and exactly how long she had been missing. I did not raise my voice; I did not threaten her. Yet when I was finished, the smile had left her face and she was on her phone.

“Mr. Starr, this is Lauren. I need your help.” She paused for the reply and said, “Yes, sir, it's an emergency.”

 

Neil Edward Starr was smiling when he entered Lauren's office, and he kept smiling while Lauren introduced Harry and me and he shook our hands. I wondered if everyone smiled who worked in a bank and why they would—was it really that much fun? Starr said, “What's the emergency?” Although it faded somewhat while we explained the situation, the smile was still there when we finished.

“Well, gentlemen, Lauren was correct,” he said. “It's doubtful that we have that much cash on-site, especially in the denominations you require. As for the Federal Reserve Bank, those guys are fanatics. Worse than fanatics. They're bureaucrats who rely on technology. If we placed your order right now, you still wouldn't receive delivery of the bills until late tomorrow afternoon at the earliest. There is simply no way to expedite it.”

“So you see,” Lauren said from the chair behind her desk, “there's nothing we can do to help you.”

For the first and only time, Neil Edward Starr stopped smiling. He turned slowly and glared down at Lauren. His eyes were as hard as agates and so was his voice. “What did you say?” The color in Lauren's face drained away until it resembled her cottonlike hair. “Do you have a daughter, Lauren?” Starr tapped his chest. “I have a daughter.” Starr turned away from his vice president and faced me. His smile returned to his face.

“We have a remote vault where we process our largest transactions with our most cash-intensive customers—casinos, grocery chains, check-cashing stores, other banks,” he said. “Our armored trucks will collect their cash deposits and begin rolling to the vault as early as two thirty this afternoon and continue through the evening. What we'll do, we'll camp out, and when the deposits start coming in we will retain the twenties and fifties that we require.”

I liked the way Starr kept saying “we.”

“I don't know how long it will take to collect twenty-five thousand twenties and ten thousand fifties,” he said, “but the process will certainly be a lot quicker than waiting on the Federal Reserve. At any rate, it's the best I can do for you.”

“Your best is pretty damn good,” I said and shook Starr's hand.

“Yes, well.” Starr seemed embarrassed. “We have a reputation here for being very customer friendly. You are a customer, right?”

I assured him that I was.

“We'll have to shuffle a lot of money around to make this work,” Lauren said.

“We're bankers. That's what we do,” Starr said. “All right, I have to take off for a second. McKenzie, give Lauren your account number. I'll be right back.”

While Starr was absent, Lauren ran my account number on her desktop PC to make sure I actually had one million dollars in checking. She then called the bank's wire transfer department to verify that the number was correct. A moment later, Starr returned.

“Are we good?” he asked.

“Yes, sir,” Lauren said.

“Okay.” Starr was smiling when he handed me a small sheet of paper. “Here. Fill this out.”

“What is it?”

“Why, McKenzie, it's a withdrawal slip.”

 

While I filled out the slip, Harry called Honsa on his cell phone. According to the surveillance teams, Scottie Thomforde had walked to the fast-food joint just a few doors down and ordered lunch. He bought a couple of burgers, fries, and a fountain drink and sat at a table next to the front window. He ate alone. The phone at the Dunston house did not ring.

 

Harry and I followed Starr to a small, unobtrusive business park located in a residential neighborhood not too far from the main branch where we found a large, white, windowless, one-story cinder-block building that reminded me of a ware house. There were no signs identifying it. To get inside, we had to pass through a series of rooms known as bandit traps—it was impossible to open a door to one room without first locking the door from the other. Digital cameras covered each of the traps. If a door was left open for more than twenty seconds, ear-splitting alarms would be activated.

Once inside, we were greeted by a security team that did an excellent job of searching us without actually searching us. Even Starr was put through the drill. No purses or briefcases were allowed. They even asked Harry to place his SIG Sauer into a locker. There was a number of security guards—it was hard to count them. They weren't stationed in any one place, but rather moved seemingly at random through the vault so you couldn't pin them down. None of the guards was smiling. Nor were any other employees, for that matter. It might have been fun and games at the bank; this was different.

The main processing room was huge. It contained about a dozen rows of five-foot-wide, twenty-foot-long tables. They had metal legs and smooth, easy-to-clean Formica tops and reminded me of fifties-style kitchen tables. Only about a third of them were active when we arrived. Three employees stood at each table busily stuffing currency into cassettes that would later be installed into ATMs.

Starr studied his watch. “The first trucks won't start rolling in for about an hour yet,” he said.

He gave us coffee. We didn't drink much. It was just something to hold in our hands. The three of us soon ran out of conversation, and I began to meander through the room, pacing between the tables with my hands in my pockets. I let my mind wander—always a bad thing to do. I wondered why we hadn't heard from the kidnappers, if Scottie knew we were on to him, if I had blown it by scouring the neighborhood for him with Karen Studder, if I had endangered Victoria's life. I wondered if Shelby had been right, if somehow the situation was entirely my fault, and if it was, what I could possibly do to make it good. I wondered about Bobby and Shelby, about the pain they were enduring, about how all this would affect their marriage.
Who knows? They may even grow stronger. I've seen it before.
That's what Honsa had said. God, how I hoped he was right. I wondered about Victoria, what she must be going through, if she was chained to a radiator as Honsa had suggested, what she must have been thinking. Did she still have hope, or was she filled with despair? I wondered if she had been beaten, if she had been abused. I wondered if she was still alive. All the while my heart felt like it was being twisted into the shape of various balloon animals.

Where are those goddamn trucks?
my inner voice wanted to know.

 

This time Honsa called Harry. Harry made no attempt to hide his frustration at whatever Honsa was telling him. “No, I don't know when we'll be finished,” he growled into his cell phone. “We haven't actually started yet.”

Harry listened for a few moments. He said, “No, we don't need more agents. We're being well taken care of here… We're waiting for the trucks… Look, it's too complicated to explain right now… Damian, you're starting to piss me off… I do understand… Yes, of course. Of course… What's happening on your end?” After a long pause, Harry said, “I agree with you. We need to wait… That's the father speaking, not the cop… I'll report in as soon as I have something to report… You, too.”

Harry returned the cell to his pocket. He answered my questions without waiting for me to ask them. “We haven't heard from the kidnappers, and everyone is starting to get anxious. Meanwhile, Thomforde is taking a cigarette break. Bobby Dunston is lobbying hard to arrest him. Honsa wants to wait, and I agree. Honsa is afraid that Bobby will pull an end-around, get his detectives to make an arrest.”

“He won't do that,” I said.

“Can you guarantee it?”

I shook my head.

“I didn't think so.”

 

The first armored truck backed into a bandit trap. After it was secured, canvas bags of currency were hefted from the rear of the truck onto large carts. The carts were rolled through the remaining traps one at a time and finally wheeled into the main processing room. Bank employees began to appear as if by magic. They were all wearing old shirts and jeans, dressed as if they were cleaning out a garage. There were several containers of baby wipes on each table so they could clean off the black, waxy film that soon covered their fingers.

“It's dirty work handling money,” Starr said. He was smiling when he said it, but then Starr was always smiling. I began to think that he was one of those rare people who never forget just how good they have it.

The bags were emptied; currency spilled out on the tables in front of the employees. Tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands of dollars. Harry had been correct. It was a sight to behold.

 

According to Special Agent Damian Honsa, Scottie left his job at five thirty and walked to the bus stop on the corner of University and Dale. He waited seven minutes before an MTC bus picked him up. The surveillance team followed the bus to his stop near the state capitol building. From there he walked to the halfway house. He did nothing suspicious. Nor did his brother, Tommy, who was now eating dinner at his mother's house. There were no phone calls to or from either man.

“How are Bobby and Shelby taking it?” I asked.

“About what you'd expect,” Harry said.

“That bad, huh?”

 

The money was starting to pile up. Deposits from a couple of casinos nearly took care of our need for twenties by themselves. Gathering ten thousand fifties was taking more time, but Starr assured me that it wouldn't be a problem. “A couple of out-state bank branches have yet to make their nightly deposits,” he said. “That'll put us over the top.” Of course, he was smiling when he said it.

My cell phone rang. I read the name off of the digital display. Karen Studder.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hi, McKenzie. I'm not interrupting, am I?”

“No. We're just sitting around counting money.”

“The ransom money?”

“Yes. It'll be ready soon.”

“So the girl, Victoria, she's… she hasn't come home yet.”

“Not yet.”

“I was hoping.”

“So was I.”

“I don't want to bother you. I just called—”

“I understand.”

“—to find out if there was any news.”

“Sure.”

“I'll just hang up, then, and—”

“Karen?”

“—call some other time.”

“Karen? We haven't heard from the kidnappers today.”

“Not at all?”

“Meanwhile, Scottie Thomforde is going about his life as if nothing has happened.”

There was a long pause on the other end, and for a moment I thought she might have hung up. Finally Karen said, “If you want to ask me, go 'head.”

“When we went to the halfway house last night, I stayed in the car so Scottie wouldn't freak out. I wasn't there to hear your conversation. I don't know what was said.”

“You can ask. I won't mind.”

“Did you tip Scottie off?”

“No, McKenzie. I didn't.”

I believed her. I needed to.

 

The twenties and fifties that we culled from the night deposits were funneled through two Canon CR-180 scanners featuring optical character recognition software. When the process was complete, Harry would have two DVDs containing the images—front and back—and serial numbers of thirty-five thousand bills. This, I was told, is what they mean by “marking money.”

“What?” Harry told me. “Did you think we put a little blue dot on the top right-hand corner of each bill?”

I wondered aloud how the banks would be able to read the serial numbers off the bills when the kidnappers started to spend them. Harry rolled his eyes at me.

“They can't,” he said. “Tracking actual bills is nearly impossible. Remember the Piper kidnapping in '72?”

I told Harry that I was still eating Crayons in 1972.

“Virginia Piper was kidnapped from her stately manor in Orono,” Harry said. “When her husband came home, he found a tied-up house -keeper and a note demanding one million dollars.”

“It's nice to see inflation hasn't hit the kidnapping industry,” I said.

“Her husband was a retired investment banker. He dropped the ransom—all in twenties—behind a North Minneapolis bar. Those bills were marked, too. The next day they found Virginia Piper chained to a tree in Jay Cooke State Park up north.”

“Alive?”

“Yes, alive. But in all the years since the kidnapping, we've been able to recover only four thousand dollars of the ransom.”

I gestured at the machines. “What's the point of all this, then?”

“The point is, when we do catch the kidnappers and find the ransom money on them, we can point and go, ‘Ahh-haa!' ”

Which seemed like a reasonable plan to me. Except the scanners could only record 180 bills per minute. Our progress slowed to a crawl.

 

Neil Edward Starr read the time aloud. “Ten twenty-two
P.M.
You might not believe this,” he said, “but putting all this together in less than eight hours is kind of amazing.”

The currency had been divided among three Star Case 306 aluminum cases with combination locks. The cases were about eighteen inches long, twelve inches high, and six inches deep and were just big enough to contain all the bills: ten thousand fifties in one case and twelve thousand five hundred twenties in each of the other two. I figured the cases must have retailed for about a hundred bucks each, and I offered to pay for them. Starr wouldn't think of it.