Criminal Enterprise (3 page)

T
OMLIN’S FIRST SCORE
wasn’t exactly textbook.

He parked the Jaguar in the Walmart lot across from the bank and bought a cheap disguise inside, a pair of winter gloves and aviator sunglasses. Found a scrap of paper in his glove box and scrawled out a note. “I have a gun. Empty the till.”

Keep it simple, he figured.

He stared at the note for a few long minutes. Almost tore it up. Then he thought about Becca again, about the way she looked at him lately. Weary, disappointed. Like he wasn’t the man she’d once thought he was.

Just do it,
he thought.
Your kids need to eat.

He left the Jaguar in the Walmart lot and crossed back to the bank on foot, his whole body shaking. Every step seemed surreal, like a bad dream. He paused at the front doors and then urged himself inside. Walked straight to the short line of customers and looked around at the security cameras and back to the front door as he waited. He couldn’t stop shaking. The line took forever.

Then he was next. A young brunette teller waved at him from the end of the row. She smiled as he approached. “Can I help you?”

Tomlin stared at her, unable to move. Steadied himself on the counter and reached into his jacket and fumbled out the note. Slammed it down on the counter, too hard. The teller picked up the note, read it. Her eyes went wide.

“Don’t say a word,” Tomlin told her. Even his voice sounded alien. “Don’t say a word, or I’ll hurt you.”

The teller stared down at the note. She was a pretty girl. Big eyes and a kind face. Innocent. He felt like a monster. She swallowed and reached beneath the counter. “Wait,” he said. “What the hell are you doing?”

“I’m opening the till.” She couldn’t hide the shake in her voice. “Isn’t that what you wanted?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Yes. Hurry up.”

She opened the till and took out a stack of money and dropped it into an envelope. All twenties, and lots of them. “Hurry up,” he said. “Faster.”

She stuffed another stack of twenties in the envelope. Was that a siren outside? Tomlin spun and stared out at the street. Felt like the whole bank was watching. He turned back to the teller. “You pushed the alarm.”

She shook her head. “No.”

“I said, hurry up.” Tomlin’s pulse pounded. He snatched for the envelope. “Just give me the money.” He turned for the door. Started to run and couldn’t make himself stop. Burst out of the bank and into the parking lot, slipped in a slush pile but stayed up and kept going. Cut across the lot toward Walmart, dodging a minivan and a Lexus as horns blared. He didn’t hear any sirens, not yet.

He reached the Jag. Unlocked the doors and pulled off his jacket and shades. Stuffed the cash in the glove box and climbed behind the wheel. The bank was a red-and-blue light show behind him, two Saint Paul city cruisers angled outside the front doors. Tomlin forced himself to drive away slow.
You’re in a ninety-thousand-dollar car
.
Bank robbers don’t drive Jaguars.

He did the speed limit for three or four miles. Then he pulled into a Burger King lot and parked. Opened his door and puked onto the pavement.

T
HAT FIRST
FUMBLED
score netted eighteen hundred dollars. A pittance. Tomlin drove home and didn’t sleep and searched for his face in the newspaper the next morning. The
Star Tribune
did a story, four paragraphs. A blurry security camera shot. Tomlin stared at it a long time and could barely tell the subject was human, let alone a white male.

The heist money didn’t go far. Didn’t even cover the mortgage. Tomlin saw Christmas coming like a shark in the water. He waited a few weeks, and then he robbed again. Had to do it. No choice.

He was calmer this time. Walked into the bank and showed the teller the note. Walked out with three grand and drove away in the Jaguar. Stashed the money in the basement and still didn’t get caught. Even three grand, though, just wasn’t enough.

Tomlin did some research. The FBI’s clearance rate on bank robberies hovered around sixty percent, mostly from dumb-schmuck, single-shot impulse robberies. The guys with the machine guns, the action-movie crews, those guys could skate with a hundred grand in one pull, a million or more if they hit an armored car. And if the stats were any indication, they hardly ever got caught.

Two scores, he’d pulled. Scared the shit out of himself and hadn’t even made five grand. The risks just weren’t worth the rewards, not at these stakes. He kept looking for work. Called old friends, shared his story. Whatever you have, he told them. Pay me what you can. I need something right now, anything.

His friends shook their heads. Couldn’t meet his eyes. Picked up the lunch tab and disappeared to their offices. Finally, someone took him aside. Dan Rydin, at North Star Investors. They’d played hockey together in college. “Carter,” Rydin said. “You’re just—you look desperate, man.”

“I am desperate,” Tomlin told him. “I have a family to feed.”

Rydin looked him up and down. “I mean your suit, your shoes. Your whole personality. You look like you’re a bounced check away from giving hand jobs for cab fare.”

“Fuck you,” said Tomlin. “You think this is funny?”

Rydin held up his hands. “No offense, man. I really wish I could help.”

Rydin promised to try and send some freelance work Tomlin’s way. No guarantees, though. In the meantime, Becca’s teaching gig was about to expire. The kids wanted Santa Claus to bring them a Wii.

Short of packing up his balls and declaring bankruptcy, Tomlin only had one real choice if he wanted his family to survive.

Bank robbery, and no more petty shit this time. It was time to get his hands on a gun.

T
HE PIZZA
BOY
’
S
license number was a dead end, literally.

Doughty and Windermere traced the plates through the DMV system to an address in Merriam Park. They trekked out with a tactical team in tow, swept down a quiet residential street to a little bungalow a couple blocks from the river, where they scared the shit out of a middle-aged woman shoveling snow off her front steps.

“The Toyota,” the woman said, when the tactical guys had backed off and everyone had calmed down. “My mother’s.”

She was a tired-looking woman with tangled gray hair bursting out of the bandanna she wore. She leaned on the porch railing and squinted at Windermere and Doughty. “This was her house,” she told them. “My mother’s. Died a couple months back and left it to me and my sister. Course, we can’t afford it, but with the housing market how it is . . .” She sighed. “I don’t know.”

Windermere looked around the neighborhood. It was a pretty place, quiet. Not exactly bank robber territory. “The Toyota,” she said, turning back to the woman. “You said it was also your mother’s.”

“Was, yeah. That’s the operative word.”

“Because she died.”

“Because she sold it. A couple months before she died.”

Windermere frowned. “She didn’t file any papers. Neither did the purchaser.”

The woman sighed again. “This is an eighty-year-old woman we’re talking about. She could barely remember whether she’d eaten breakfast, much less figure out how to process a used-car sale.”

“Still,” Doughty said. “There’s no record of a sale.”

“You see a Toyota?” The woman gestured around the yard. “There’s your record of sale.”

Doughty glanced at Windermere. Windermere shrugged. “No,” the woman continued, “she sold it. We told her she could have given it to us, something useful, but she said she needed the money.” A rueful laugh. “Not that it was much of a payday. Guy gave her a thousand bucks, cash.”

“Guy ripped her off.”

“Bet your ass he did. My dad bought the thing for twenty-five grand. Barely drove it.”

“The buyer,” said Windermere. “You know him? He a neighbor or something?”

“No,” the woman replied. “She put an ad in the paper. Kind of wish I did know him, though. It’s practically robbery.”

“Robbery.” Windermere smiled, small. “That’s our guy.”

“Well, he’s a lowlife, whoever he is.” The woman stood up and leaned on her shovel. “Is that it?”

Windermere gave her a business card. “Call us,” she said, “if you remember anything else.”

—

T
HE BULL PEN
was chaos when Windermere returned to the Criminal Investigative Division (CID), all clamoring phones and rattling keyboards, a couple of junior agents playing catch with a Nerf football. Windermere waded through the mess to her tiny cubicle, sat and stared at her computer, wondering where to look next.

These Eat Street guys were pros, she figured. People didn’t just walk into a bank with assault rifles and shotguns and that kind of poise. From the bank tellers’ statements, the guy with the rifle was dead calm, almost playful. He’d taken the time to play his cruel prank on Nicole, scared the wits out of her. He was comfortable with what he was doing. Meant he’d probably done it before.

Statewide, Minnesota averaged between fifty and seventy-five bank robberies every year. Most of the heists took place in Minneapolis or Saint Paul; in the last eighteen months, there had been sixty-six robberies in the Twin Cities region. Twenty had been solved, and eighteen people arrested. Somewhere in those unsolved forty-six, Windermere figured, the Eat Street crew had pulled another job. The trick would be finding the thing.

But if they had, in fact, pulled jobs in the past—and if they weren’t, say, a traveling road show like the Pender gang last year—they hadn’t been so ambitious the first time around. Windermere’s first glance through the unsolved case files bore no similar jobs, no male/female assault-rifle/shotgun combinations, no really professional hits. Didn’t mean they weren’t in there, just meant Windermere would have to do some real looking.

The football whizzed by her ear and landed a few feet away. Windermere straightened and looked around, frowning. “Sorry, Supercop.” Derek Mathers jogged past and retrieved the football. “The balls are bigger in college.”

Windermere rolled her eyes. “Cute,” she said. “Screw off with that Supercop crap, would you?”

Mathers flashed her a goofy grin and ran a post route through the maze of cubicles. Windermere watched him, resisting the urge to nail him with an open-field tackle. Maybe shut him up about Supercop once and for all.

It had started a year ago, after she’d closed down Arthur Pender’s gang of professional kidnappers in Detroit. Someone saw her picture in the paper, taped it to her cubicle with
Supercop
scrawled across, highlighted in pink. Soon every G-man and -woman in the Minneapolis office had picked up the nickname. Whether it was meant to be praise or an insult, Windermere wasn’t sure, and after two years in Minnesota she still didn’t know anyone well enough to find out.

She turned back to her computer, paged through more open-case files.
This would be easier,
she thought,
if I’d
worked any of these cases before.
She hadn’t. Rachel Hill, the Minneapolis office’s bank robbery whiz, was off on some vacation cruise on the Mayan Riviera, and Drew Harris, Special Agent in Charge of Criminal Investigations, had dumped Windermere in bank robberies until Hill returned. “Or,” Harris had said, winking, “another Supercop case emerges.”

Windermere sighed and looked up from her computer again. For all of the Supercop bullshit, the Pender case remained her proudest achievement as an FBI agent. For weeks straight, almost a month, she’d tracked Arthur Pender and his roving group of kidnappers, teaming up with a Minnesota state cop named Kirk Stevens as she followed Pender and his gang from Minneapolis through Seattle and Florida toward a bloody shoot-out in Detroit. It had been a blockbuster case, a career-maker, and working thirty-five-thousand-dollar bank scores seemed a tedious anticlimax, even with assault rifles and ski masks thrown into the mix.

And she still missed Kirk Stevens. The security office in the Bank of America had triggered a memory that Windermere had since been unable to shake. She’d grown fond of her colleague, though he was more than a decade her senior and happily married, and kind of corny besides. He was a hell of a cop when it mattered, insightful and decisive and brave, the rare kind of partner Windermere could trust. They had promised to keep in touch after the Pender case ended, but they’d broken that promise quickly; apart from a quick, awkward cup of coffee a month or so later, they’d fallen out of contact.

Of course they had. Stevens was married and had his family to take care of. And Windermere, face it, had dedicated her life to the Bureau in the year since Mark, her last boyfriend, had finally walked out the door. She’d kept herself busy, took on as many cases as possible, and worked hard to keep the past from her mind. Now, though, holed up in her tiny cubicle and enduring Mathers’s FBI Super Bowl while she paged through a seemingly endless string of wanted-bank-robber pictures, Windermere let her mind wander to Stevens again and wondered if he ever longed for another shot at the glamorous life.

K
IRK STEVENS
SAT
at his desk in the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension headquarters in Saint Paul, staring at the stack of cold homicide files on his desk and trying to dredge up some enthusiasm.

It wasn’t that he didn’t like working cold cases. In his fifteen years as a BCA agent, Stevens had learned to enjoy the challenges they presented. They were puzzles, all of them, old and dusty, invariably missing a couple key pieces. If you had the time and a little bit of luck, you could sometimes put something together that looked right. And when you did manage to solve a cold homicide, well, the feeling of accomplishment almost matched the satisfaction of taking down an Arthur Pender. Almost.

These files, though, these ones on his desk, were the oldest, dustiest cases on the shelf, the puzzles missing half of their pieces. The unidentified, buckshot-filled bodies pulled from some godforsaken northern lake. The severed hand in a mailbox in Monticello. These were the puzzles nobody could solve.

Stevens paged through another cold file, a fifteen-year-old homicide. A drifter with his throat cut behind a liquor store outside Detroit Lakes. No witnesses. No murder weapon. No suspects. Stevens flipped through the slim file. Then he closed it and threw it on his desk with the others.

So you’re a little bored,
he thought.
It’s your own damn fault.

The Arthur Pender case, with its sensational premise and its bloody, made-for-TV finale, had made Kirk Stevens something of a minor celebrity. His face—alongside Carla Windermere’s—had appeared on news broadcasts across the country. His name was in newspapers for weeks as the full scope of Pender’s audacious scheme gradually was revealed, and then again as the ringleader’s accomplices stood trial. There were interviews, and award ceremonies.

And there were job offers.

There were job offers from police departments all over the map, many of them quite generous. A few of them really tempting. The BCA, anxious to protect its star agent, had offered Stevens a plum position at the head of a newly founded Major Crimes task force. It was a compelling offer, a career-making promotion, and Stevens turned it down. He turned them all down.

That final Detroit shoot-out with Pender had been an incredible thrill. It had also been incredibly stupid. He’d risked his life like a cowboy, and Carla Windermere’s, too. Put his life in the hands of a madman when he could have stepped back and let the FBI’s hostage team do their job.

“If you died,” his wife had told him. “If you died, Agent Stevens, this whole family would be ruined.”

He’d shaken his head, played it tough. “I wasn’t going to die, Nancy.”

“That man had a machine gun pointed at your head,” Nancy Stevens retorted. “You and your little friend Windermere both could have been shot. And where would that have left me?”

Newly minted hero he might have been, but Kirk Stevens’s tough act played only so far where his wife was involved. And Nancy had a point. She’d struggled to manage the family alone while he chased Arthur Pender—wrangling the children to doctors’ appointments and volleyball games while keeping up with her own responsibilities at the Legal Aid office, all so her husband could get his rocks off playing action-movie hero.

“I married a cop,” Nancy told him. “I knew what I was getting into. But this hero stuff doesn’t work. Not for me, Kirk. I need you.”

He’d thought about it for a long time. Had weighed the Pender-fueled adrenaline rush against the tedious, day-to-day work inside the BCA, and he’d known which lifestyle he preferred. A part of him longed for that excitement again.

In the end, though, he was a family man first, and his wife and kids needed him more than the BCA did. So he’d sighed and looked Nancy in the eye and told her he was sorry, had turned down the bureau’s promotion, and let the phone ring unanswered when the job offers came through. Soon enough, the calls slowed, and then they stopped altogether, and Stevens had settled into a quiet existence working cold cases and coming home nights. It was a good life, and satisfying, most of the time.

Except now, one year after Arthur Pender, Stevens could feel that old restlessness returning. It was the same itch he’d felt as a Duluth city cop, looking for something more than convenience-store burglaries and domestic disputes. It was the same itch he’d felt after ten years with the bureau, the itch that the Pender case had satisfied—briefly.

Stevens leaned back in his chair and stared across the BCA office, letting his thoughts settle on Carla Windermere. He’d seen her picture in the
Star Tribune
a few days back; she was working some bank robbery in Minneapolis, glamorous stuff.

Windermere looked the same in the picture as she had the last time he’d seen her, a beautiful woman and a competent, kick-ass cop. Sent a little jolt through his body, seeing her like that, along with the same vague sense of guilt. The guilt didn’t make any sense—Stevens’s relationship with his young colleague had never been anything but professional—but then again, neither did the thrill.

Stevens wondered what Windermere was up to right now, whether that boyfriend of hers—Mark—had stuck around. Wondered about her bank robbery case and if she ever got bored working the high-octane stuff. If she ever longed for something slow-moving, low-pressure. Knowing Windermere, the answer was no. The woman ate, slept, and breathed in the fast lane.

Stevens picked up another cold case file and flipped it open. Chased Windermere from his mind and started to read.

This one was a middle-aged couple out of Saint Cloud, the Danzers. Vanished around Christmas a couple years back. Stevens remembered the case from the newspapers. They’d been driving to Duluth to visit relatives for the holidays. The man’s body turned up behind a rest stop in Moose Lake; he’d been stabbed. The papers figured the wife did it, had murdered hubby and disappeared. But officially, the investigation had produced nothing. A statewide manhunt hadn’t found the missing wife or the beat-up Thunderbird she’d been driving.

Stevens studied the pictures in the file, the dead husband and his missing wife. Elliott Danzer had a mess of gray hair and a wide smile. Sylvia Danzer was regal, an arched eyebrow and a twinkle in her eye. They were in their mid-fifties, had been married thirty years.

Just a few years older than me and Nancy,
Stevens thought.
Not even a decade.
He looked at the pictures some more, flipped through the file. Then he turned back to his computer and typed in the case code.

Let Windermere have her fast lane,
he thought, settling in.
I can do slow and steady just fine.