Andrew Price - Without A Hitch

“Do you still want me to run the credit scores? Collette’s out of the office this week, and I know where she keeps her password.”

“Are you sure this won’t stand out on their credit reports?” Corbin asked.

“It shows up like a generic request for a total score, not a full credit check. You get three or four of these on your credit report every month. There’s nothing suspicious about it. You know those credit card offers you get in the mail? They run one of these before sending you the offer. Our office does it all the time.”

“Can they trace it to your office?”

“I’ll do it from our Baltimore office. I work up there once in a while.”

“What do we get out of this?”

“We get a credit score. It’s not the most precise information, but it’s good enough. It’ll tell us if there are any red flags on the credit or if they’ve blocked access to their credit. Also, combined with the salary information we have, the score should let us estimate, roughly at least, how much credit they have available. The higher the credit score, the higher the credit limit.”

“All right, do it.”

“Your wish is my command. Have you thought about the route we’re going to take for day two?”

Knowing the amount of cash they could withdraw from each account at any one time was limited, Corbin and Alvarez planned to return the following week and open additional bank accounts to increase the size of the take. This trip would be undertaken by car and would stretch far beyond Philadelphia.

“I’m thinking we just blast up I-95. We can hit Delaware, Newark, even the New York suburbs, before we turn around.”

“It’s your gas. What about withdrawal day?”

“We start up north and work our way south, just in case they match up the receipts to try to figure out where we came from. I don’t want it to look like we started in Baltimore both times.”

“Fine by me. Any more thoughts on alibis for the later days?”

“Yeah. Keep in mind though, our alibis from the first day are enough to protect us completely. That’s why Beckett’s so important. He helps us establish unbreakable alibis which will protect us throughout the project.”

“I’m not a lawyer, so I’ll have to trust you on that one.”

“It’s simple. If the prosecutor claims you or I did this crime, then he has to show how we opened the accounts on June 14th. Since we have unbreakable alibis, he can’t do that.”

“What if he just doesn’t mention the 14th?”

“Then we introduce the evidence of June 14th to show he’s trying to set us up.”

“How would we know about the 14th? Wouldn’t we incriminate ourselves by bringing it up?”

“No. We would ask for information like complete credit reports on the victims. Then we would ‘discover’ the crime actually began on June 14th, a day we couldn’t possibly have been involved.”

“What if this clever prosecutor decides we got someone else to open the accounts on the 14th?”

“Then he has to prove who it was and connect us to that person. If he can’t do that, which he can’t, the jury will see this as nothing more than a prosecutor trying to hang his case on us when he should be after the mystery guy he can’t produce.”

“Ok, so we’re not even going to set up alibis for the later days?”

“No, no, of course we are. I’m just saying, we don’t need to. But since I’m a lawyer, I like to be ultra cautious — belt and suspenders, my friend, belt and suspenders,” Corbin said, repeating an expression used by several of his law school professors.

“So what do we do?”

“I’ve got this modem I can program to make phone calls. Actually, I’ve got two of them. I’ll hook one up at my place and one at your place. They can call each other throughout the day. I’m also thinking of loaning my credit card to a friend who goes to a farmers market in Manassas each week and asking him to pick something up for me. That puts me in Manassas and Arlington throughout the day and you in Arlington. With both of us here, we couldn’t have been flying up 95 touring banks.”

“You know, I do have one concern.”

“What?”

“When we go pick up the money, how do we know some Sherlock Holmes banker hasn’t figured us out and flagged the account?”

“We can’t be absolutely sure, so you should be ready to make a break for it if necessary.”

“That’s comforting,” Alvarez said sarcastically.

“What? Not givin’ you a warm fuzzy?”

“Can’t say that it is.”

“Don’t worry, I’ve got a plan to reduce the chances of that happening. Before you go into a bank, we’ll find an ATM. If the ATM allows us to withdraw money from the account, we can take that as a sign everything’s cool, and you can go inside the bank and withdraw more. If the ATM gives us grief, then we walk away and consider the account spoiled.”

“Makes sense.”

“Can’t guarantee the plan is perfect, but we’ve done our best.”

“I’m not complaining.”

“All right, give me a call tomorrow when you get the credit scores. I’ll bring over the salary sheets, and we can decide whose credit to tap.”

The following day would find Corbin and Alvarez staring in stunned silence at the results of their credit calculations. Neither expected numbers on the order of magnitude as those revealed by the credit check.

“We’re gonna need a bigger bag,” Alvarez said.

“Bag?” Corbin laughed. “We’re gonna need a bigger car .”

Alvarez shot a glance at Corbin. “There’s an old joke about lawyers. It involves a client who goes to a lawyer’s office to pay his bill. He owes the lawyer one hundred dollars. In his haste, he mistakenly hands the lawyer two one hundred dollar bills. The lawyer, realizing the mistake, is confronted with an ethical question: does he tell his partner?”

“You and your lawyer jokes. If I ever find out what you do for a living. . let’s just say, you’ll rue the day.”

“What do you mean ‘if you ever find out.’ I’m an associate supervisor. What more do you need to know?”

Corbin laughed. Then his tone became serious. “And I get the meaning of your joke. We’re not cheating Beckett.”

Now Alvarez laughed. “What kind of lawyer are you?”

“The honest kind.”

“There’s one thing we haven’t thought about?” Beckett said as he walked into the office and closed the door.

“What’s that?” Corbin peered over the top of his book.

“How do we launder the money?”

Corbin stared blankly at Beckett. In all of his careful planning, Corbin never once stopped to consider what to do with the money after they stole it. He stalled for time. “Pardon?”

“How do we launder the money?” Beckett repeated. “I think we need to agree not to spend any of it for at least six months.”

“Six months,” Corbin repeated, letting Beckett lead the conversation.

“Yeah, at least. Were you thinking longer?”

“No, six months sounds about right. Don’t want to do it too soon, do we?”

“Exactly. When I was a public defender, I saw it over and over: the guys who got impatient got busted. Juries connect the dots really quickly.”

“That is what they’re asked to do. So tell me more. What else does your public defender experience tell you? What’s tipped the cops off and what hasn’t?”

Beckett folded his arms and leaned back in his chair. “If the cops think there’s been a crime involving a lot of cash, they subpoena bank records and credit card records. In the bank records, they look for large deposits around the time of the crime or a series of smaller deposits adding up to something close to the amount of cash taken. In the credit card records, they look to see if the suspect changed their spending patterns by, say, suddenly charging only half of what they used to charge. Basically, they’re looking to see if the guy starts living off cash.”