Robert Crais - The Two Minute Rule

Pollard seemed afraid. The young agent who arrested him ten years ago had been fearless, but now she had changed. Thinking these things made him wonder how much he had changed, too, and whether or not he still had what it took to see this thing through.

Holman got up and stepped out into the bright Westwood sun, thinking it felt good to no longer be alone. He liked Pollard even if she seemed hesitant. He hoped she wouldn’t get hurt.

POLLARD WASN’T sure why she agreed to help Holman, but she was in no hurry to drive back to Simi Valley. Westwood was twenty degrees cooler and her mother would take care of the boys when they got home from camp, so it was like having a day off from the rest of her life. Pollard felt as if she had been paroled.

She walked to Stan’s Donuts and ordered one plain all-American round-with-a-hole glazed donut-no sprinkles, jelly, candy, or chocolate; nothing that would cut into the silky taste of melted sugar and warm grease. Pollard’s ass needed a donut like a goldfish needed a bowling ball, but she hadn’t been to Stan’s since she left the Bureau. When Pollard was working out of the Westwood office, she and another agent named April Sanders had snuck away to Stan’s at least twice a week. Taking their donut break, they called it.

The woman behind the counter offered a donut off the rack, but a fresh batch was coming out of the fryer, so Pollard opted to wait. She brought Holman’s file to one of the outside tables to read while she waited, but found herself thinking about Holman. Holman had always been a big guy, but the Holman she arrested had been thirty pounds thinner with shaggy hair, a deep tan, and the bad skin of a serious tweaker. He didn’t look like a criminal anymore. Now, he looked like a forty-something man who was down on his luck.

Pollard suspected the police had answered Holman’s questions as best they could, but he was reluctant to accept the facts. She had worked with grieving families during her time with the Feeb, and all of them had seen only questions in that terrible place of loss where no good answers exist. The working truth of every criminal investigation was that not all the questions could be answered; the most any cop hoped for was just enough answers to build a case.

Pollard finally turned to Holman’s envelope and read through the articles. Anton Marchenko and Jonathan Parsons, both thirty-two years old, were unemployed loners who met at a fitness center in West Hollywood. Neither was married nor had a significant other. Parsons was a Texan who had drifted to Los Angeles as a teenage runaway. Marchenko was survived by his widowed mother, a Ukrainian immigrant who, according to the paper, was both cooperating with the police and threatening to sue the city. At the time of their deaths, Marchenko and Parsons shared a small bungalow apartment in Hollywood’s Beachwood Canyon where police discovered twelve pistols, a cache of ammunition in excess of six thousand rounds, an extensive collection of martial arts videos, and nine hundred ten thousand dollars in cash.

Pollard had no longer been on the job when Marchenko and Parsons blazed their way through thirteen banks, but she had followed the news about them and grew jazzed reading about them now. Reading about their bank hits filled Pollard with the same edgy juice she had known on the job. Pollard felt real for the first time in years, and found herself thinking about Marty. Her life since his death had been a nonstop struggle between mounting bills and her desire to single-handedly raise her boys. Having lost their father, Pollard had promised herself they would not also lose their mother to day care and nannies. It was a commitment that had left her feeling powerless and vague, especially as the boys grew older and their expenses mounted, but just reading about Marchenko and Parsons revived her.

Marchenko and Parsons had committed thirteen robberies over a nine-month period, all with the same method of operation: They stormed into banks like an invading army, forced everyone onto the floor, then dumped the cash drawers from the teller stations. While one of them worked the tellers, the other forced the branch manager to open the vault.

The articles Holman had copied included blurry security stills of black-clad figures waving rifles, but witness descriptions of the two men had been sketchy and neither was identified until their deaths. It wasn’t until the eighth robbery that a witness described their getaway vehicle, a light blue foreign compact car. The car wasn’t described again until the tenth robbery, when it was confirmed as being a light blue Toyota Corolla. Pollard smiled when she saw this, knowing the Bank Squad would have been high-fiving each other in celebration. Professionals would have used a different car for each robbery; use of the same car indicated that these guys were lucky amateurs. Once you knew they were riding on luck, you knew their luck would run out.

“Donuts ready. Miss? Your donuts are ready.”

Pollard glanced up.

“What?”

“The hot donuts are ready.”

Pollard had been so involved in the articles she lost track of time. She went inside, collected her donut with a cup of black coffee, then went back to her table to resume reading.

Marchenko and Parsons ran out of luck on their thirteenth robbery.

When they entered the California Central Bank in Culver City to commit their thirteenth armed robbery, they did not know that LAPD Robbery Special detectives, Special Investigations officers, and patrol officers were surveilling a three-mile corridor stretching from downtown L.A. to the eastern edge of Santa Monica. When Marchenko and Parsons entered the bank, all five tellers tripped silent alarms. Though the news story did not contain the specifics, Pollard knew what happened from that point: The bank’s security contractor notified the LAPD, who in turn alerted the surveillance team. The team converged on the bank to take positions in the parking lot. Marchenko exited the bank first. In most such cases, the robber had three typical moves: He surrendered, he tried to escape, or he retreated into the bank, whereupon a negotiation ensued. Marchenko chose none of the above. He opened fire. The surveillance teams-armed with 5.56mm rifles-returned fire, killing Marchenko and Parsons at the scene.

Pollard finished the last article and realized her donut had grown cold. She took a bite. It was delicious even cold, but she paid little attention.

Pollard skimmed through the articles covering the murders of the four officers, then found what appeared to be several cover sheets from LAPD reports about Marchenko and Parsons. Pollard found this curious. Such reports were from the Detective Bureau, but Richard Holman had been a uniformed patrol officer. LAPD detectives used patrol officers to assist in searches and one-on-one street interviews after a robbery, but those jobs didn’t require access to reports or witness statements, and patrol officers rarely stayed involved after the first day or two following a robbery. Marchenko and Parsons had been dead for three months and their loot had been recovered. She wondered why LAPD was maintaining an investigation three months after the fact and why it included patrol officers, but she felt she could learn the answer easily enough. Pollard had gotten to know several LAPD Robbery detectives during her time on the squad. She decided to ask them.

Pollard spent a few minutes recalling their names, then phoned the LAPD’s information office for their current duty assignments. The first two detectives she asked for had retired, but the third, Bill Fitch, was currently assigned to Robbery Special, the elite robbery unit operating out of Parker Center.

When she got Fitch on the phone, he said, “Who is this?”

Fitch didn’t remember her.