Ridley Pearson - The Art of Deception

Boldt pressed his face to the glass, cupping his eyes. Littered across the floor at the foot of both machines he saw several paper receipts, their size and shape now familiar to him.

Of all things, he didn’t own an ATM card-he still cashed checks at the teller window-and therefore couldn’t gain access.

He caused a brief moment of alarm inside the bank as he pushed to the front of a small line, polite but determined to gain admittance to that room. Now that he’d seen the room, he could also picture Susan Hebringer inside it, her purse slung over her arm, her bank card slipping into a slot on one of the two machines.

Already planning his next move, Boldt intended to pull whatever favors necessary to gain immediate access to Hebringer’s and Randolf’s bank records. It seemed inconceivable to him that both women might have used their ATM cards on the dates they disappeared without him knowing about it. He felt like a burst dam, unable to contain himself, spilling out a flood of anger and confusion. His people had run the financials on both victims-he knew this absolutely. So where had the mistake been? How could they have missed this?

A nervous bank officer swiped a card through the outdoor reader. Boldt entered a warm room that smelled bitter. Initially he dismissed the bank officer but then quickly changed his mind and asked him to stand outside and prevent anyone from coming in and disturbing him.

Boldt then studied the room, including the two wall-mounted cash machines, their small screens glowing with a welcome message. He noted the alarmed exit door in the corner, leading into the building-a fire code requirement. He collected himself, slowing his breathing, trying to get beyond the emotion of the moment. He focused on those two machines and tried to put Susan Hebringer into this room. The imagined scene then played before his eyes, black-and-white and jittery. He saw her from the back, dressed in the clothes that she’d been described wearing by both her husband and coworkers on the day of her disappearance. He saw her remove her ATM card from her purse, look up as she heard a man come through that door through which she herself had just entered. Would she have said hello?

He thought not. She’d gone about her business.

But who? A street punk wanting the cash? A well-dressed man in a suit-someone she’d never suspect of the foul play that was to come? A bank officer? A deputy sheriff?

He took a step closer to the machines but stopped as he felt something stuck to the bottom of his shoe. He picked the receipt off his shoe sole, knowing then how one could find its way into the Underground, and immediately lifted his eyes to the alarmed exit door.

He recalled the steel exit door in the hallway on his earlier tour. “It sounds an alarm,” the maintenance man had warned.

He got the bank officer to open it for him.

“Let me guess,” Boldt said as the man searched a cluttered key ring for the proper key, “you-bank officers, that is-and your security guards both have keys to these alarmed doors.

Who else? Housecleaning?”

“No.” The man cowered slightly, swinging the door open for Boldt. It led to the hallway, as expected.

“Maintenance?” Boldt asked. Another logic jump struck him that should have come earlier: the oxygen tanks, the maintenance man’s horrible wheezing. Boldt remembered the name because Sarah had a friend with a similar last name: Vanderhorst. His own internal alarm was going now. He saw a listless Hebringer being dragged through this same door. Leaning over her, Vanderhorst wore a set of coveralls, soon to be bloodied.

“Yes, maintenance too,” the man confirmed.

Boldt entered the hallway and looked right, recalling the stairs that led down into the bank’s basement. The maintenance man, Vanderhorst, had told him the exit door went out to the street; he had failed to mention the ATM machines on the way out. Vanderhorst had played dumb about the existence of access to the Underground.

Dyed hair? A doxycycline prescription for his clogged lungs.

“I’m declaring this a crime scene,” Boldt informed a surprised bank officer. “Stand back, and keep your hands in your pockets.”

“Lieu, shouldn’t we be watching the Greyhound station or something?” Bobbie Gaynes occupied the Crown Vic’s passenger seat.

Boldt said, “We are watching the bus, and the ferries, and the trains, and the northern border crossing with Canada. Rental car agencies clear down to Tacoma have a fax of his bank ID.”

The last few hours had been his busiest in recent memory. He felt incredibly good. “What’s the problem, Bobbie?”

“But why here?” she asked, still frustrated with him. “Vanderhorst called in sick today. That should tell us something, right? He split. We’re wasting time here.”

The Crown Vic pointed downhill and away from the corner office building occupied by the SeaTel Bank. Boldt had both the rearview and driver door mirrors aimed with a view of the corner-one set for his sitting height, the other for slouching.

Boldt’s silence bothered her. “So explain to me what good it is watching the bank?”

“It closes for the weekend in ten minutes.”

“And by my figuring that means he’s another ten minutes farther away.”

“Why do people kill, Bobbie?”

She sighed, letting him know she wasn’t up to his quizzes, his schooling her. It grew old after awhile. “For love and money.” She made her voice sound like a schoolkid reciting her math tables. “For country and revenge,” she added into the mix.

Outright annoyed now, she added, “For the smell of blood, or the scent of a perfume, or because God or their dog told them to and they forgot to take their pill that day.”

“We got lucky is all,” Boldt said. “Sometimes you get lucky.”

“Lucky?” she asked, exasperated. “He’s halfway to Miami, or Vegas, or Tijuana by now. How is that lucky?”

A crackle came over both Boldt’s dash-mounted police radio and the handheld resting in his lap. A male voice said calmly, “We have joy. Wildhorse is headed out the north stairs of the bus station.”

“No fucking way,” Gaynes mumbled. “Wildhorse is …?”

“I only had a minute to come up with a handle.”

“Vanderhorst is Wildhorse,” she said.

“Too obvious?” he asked, peering intently out the windshield now.

She said, “You’re telling me you put six cruisers and, including us, ten plainclothes dicks out on the streets, and you were counting on luck?”

“The first part of that luck is that we discovered that lair yesterday, on a Thursday. The second, and much more important half, is that today, Friday, happens to be SeaTel’s biweekly pay-day.”

“Payday,” she whispered, almost worshiping him now.

“Who’s going to pass up a two-week paycheck? He wasn’t about to quit. I knew he’d be back when they told me he’d called in sick this morning. I mean, why bother otherwise?”

“His four-one-one?”

“All invented. No such address. No such phone. The security firm is going to fry: If they ran a background check, it was pitiful.”

“Typical,” she said. “Big Mac’s inside?”

“Mackenzie’s posing as a customer. We had to play it that way. Vanderhorst knows the layout, knows the normal personnel, including security and the tellers. We add someone to that mix and he’ll sniff it out.”

“So-”

But Boldt interrupted. “Heads up!”

Boldt had his own image of Per Vanderhorst, both from the tour of the bank basement and from the man’s security ID photo.

Neither matched up perfectly well with the lean, lanky, un-healthy silhouette of the man reflected in the mirror.

Gaynes asked, “Do we have the confirm yet on the cash cards?”