James Patterson - Roses Are Red

He found himself smiling at the thought of the phone call to the police: The tip that a robbery was in progress. He'd made the call. He'd wanted the First Union employees killed. That was the whole goddamn point. Didn't anybody see that yet?

He had another team to recruit now, the most important one, and the hardest to find. The final crew had to be extremely capable and self-sufficient, and, because of that self-sufficiency, they would pose a danger to him. He understood very well that clever people often had large and uncontrollable egos. He certainly did.

He brought up the names of potential candidates on his computer screen. He read lengthy profiles, and even criminal records, which he thought of as their resumes. Then suddenly that dreary, rainy afternoon, he came across a crew that was as different from the others as he was from the rest of humanity.

The proof? They had no criminal record. They had never been caught, never even been suspected. It was why they'd been so hard for him to find. They seemed perfect for his perfect job for his masterpiece.

No one could figure out what was about to happen.

At 9:00 a.m. I met with a neurologist named Thomas Petito who patiently explained the tests Jannie would go through. He wanted first to eliminate some possible causes of the seizures. He told me that worrying would do no good, that Jannie was in excellent hands his -and that for the moment the best thing I could do was to go to work," I don't want you worrying needlessly," Petito said. "And I don't want you in my way."

I drove 1-95 South to Quantico that afternoon after I had lunch with Jannie. I needed to visit with the FBI's best technicians and profilers, and they were at Quantico. I didn't like leaving Jannie at St. Anthony's, but Nana was with her and there weren't any major tests scheduled until the following morning.

Kyle Craig had called me at the hospital and asked about Jannie. He was genuinely concerned. Kyle then told me that the Justice Department, the banking industry, and the media were all over him like a cheap suit. The FBI dragnet now covered most of the East Coast, but it wasn't delivering results. He'd even flown in one of the agents from the team that had tracked down master bank-robber Joseph Dougherty in the mid-eighties.

Kyle also said that Senior Agent Cavalierre was running the task force. I wasn't too surprised. She had struck me as one of the brightest and most energetic of the Bureau agents I'd met, other than Kyle himself.

The agent from the original Dougherty team was named Sam Withers. Kyle, Agent Cavalierre, and I met with him in Kyle's conference room at Quantico. Withers was in his mid-sixties now; he was retired and told us he played a lot of golf in the Scottsdale area. He admitted he hadn't given much thought to bank robbers in several years, but the horror of these robberies had caught his attention.

Betsey Cavalierre got right down to business. "Sam, did you get a chance to read our write-ups of the Citibank and First Union robberies?"

"Sure did. I read them a couple of times on my way here," Withers said, running the palm of his hand over his buzz cut. He was a beefy man, probably two hundred forty pounds or more, and reminded me of retired baseball sluggers like Ted Klusewski and Ralph Kiner.

"First impressions?" she asked the former agent. "What do you think, Sam? Is there any connection to the current mess?"

"Big, big differences between these jobs and the ones I worked on. Neither Dougherty nor Connor was violent by nature. Those guys were basically small-town, small-time criminal minds. "Old school," like those commercials you see on ESPN. Even the hostages spoke of them as "congenial" and "pleasant." Connor always carefully explained that he didn't want to steal anything in the hostages' homes Said he didn't want to harm anyone. He and Dougherty both despised banks, and they despised insurance companies. That might be the hook-up with your perps."

Withers continued to reminisce and conjecture in a soft, sleepy Midwestern drawl. I sat back and thought about what he had just said. Maybe somebody else out there despised banks and insurance companies too. Or possibly they hated bankers and their families for some reason. Someone with a deep enough grudge could be behind the robberies and murders. It made some sense, as much as anything else we had.

After Sam Withers left the conference room we talked about other cases that might relate to this one. One in particular caught my attention. A major robbery had occurred outside Philadelphia in January. Two men had kidnapped a bank executive's husband and infant son. They said they had a bomb and threatened to blow up their hostages unless the bank vault was opened.

"They kept in touch with walkie-talkies. Used police scanners too. Kind of like the First Union job," Betsey reported from her extensive notes," It might be the same people who did the First Union."

"Any violence in the job outside Philly?" I asked her.

She shook her head and her shiny black hair flipped to one side," No, none."

With all the resources of the FBI and hundreds of local police departments, we were still nowhere on the robbery-murders. Something was very wrong with this picture. We still weren't thinking like the killers.

I got back to St. Anthony's around four-thirty in the afternoon. Jannie wasn't in her room, which surprised me. Nana and Damon were sitting reading. Nana said she had been taken for tests ordered by her neurologist, Dr. Petito.

Jannie returned at a quarter to five. She looked tired. She was so young to be going through this kind of ordeal. She and Damon had always been healthy, even as babies, which made this even more of a shock.

When Jannie rolled into the room in a wheelchair, Damon suddenly choked up. So did I. "Give us a big bear hug, Daddy," Jannie looked at us and said, 'like you used to when we were little."

The vivid image came flooding back to me. I remembered the feeling of holding them both in my arms when they were much smaller. I did what Jannie asked: I bear-hugged my two babies.

As the three of us embraced, Nana came back from a walk down the hall. She had someone tagging along.

Christine entered the room behind Nana. She wore a silver-gray blouse with a dark blue skirt and matching shoes. She must have come to the hospital from school. She seemed a little distant to me, but at least she was there for Jannie.

"Here's everybody," Christine said. She never made eye contact with me," I wish I had my camera."

"Oh, we're always like this," Jannie said to her," This is just our family."

We talked some, but mostly we listened to Jannie describe her long, scary day. She seemed so vulnerable suddenly, so small. She was brought dinner at five. Rather than complain about the bland hospital food, she compared it favorably to her favorite dishes prepared by Nana.

That got a laugh out of everybody, except Nana, who pretended to be miffed. "Well, we can just order out from the hospital when you get home," Nana said as she gave Jannie the evil eye. "Save me a lot of aggravation and work."

"Oh, you like to work," Jannie told Nana. "And you love aggravation,"

"Almost as much as you love to tease me," Nana countered.

As Christine was getting up to leave, the nurse brought a phone from the nurses' station. She announced that there was an important call for Detective Cross. I groaned and shook my head. Everybody stared at me as I took the phone.

"It's okay, Daddy," Jannie said.

Kyle Craig was on the line. He had bad news," I'm on my way to the First Virginia branch in Rosslyn. They hit another bank, Alex."

Nana shot poisoned darts at me with her eyes. Christine wouldn't look at me. I felt guilty and ashamed, and I hadn't done anything wrong.