In the Line of Fire

  IN THE LINE OF FIRE

  A Laura Mori Mystery

  R. J. Noonan

  For Helyn Trickey Bradley

  With heartfelt thanks for her insightful, steadfast assistance in preparing this manuscript

  PROLOGUE

  If he was stupid enough to make one, he’d call his YouTube video “How to make one hell of a payday in one easy evening.”

  He parked his car a block from the main drag of Bonita Street in the shadows of a tree-lined residential street. Getaway was key. Park close to the bank but away from the laser eye of security cameras. Far enough away so that no one from the bank can see you get into the vehicle.

  Time of day could be a bonus. Some guys liked the three-o’clock hour when most cops were changing shifts, but he understood the benefits of a winter evening after sundown when the cover of darkness slid over their eyes like a velvet blanket. No one was sure of what they saw in the dark. On a cold winter night, by five o’clock, workers yawned and set their sights on getting home to dinner.

  He was a fan of the partial disguise. Nothing like the ski mask or stocking over the face. That would draw immediate attention, set off all the alarms. He pulled on a wig and baseball cap, adjusted them in his visor mirror. Good enough.

  He stepped out of the car, plucked the black backpack from the seat, and left the car unlocked. Nothing of value in there. Not yet.

  The streetlamps overhead illuminated the bones of the trees and cast odd shadows on the lawns he passed. He slipped on his winter gloves. Under the wig and baseball hat his head itched like crazy, and he rubbed the tops of his ears one last time before crossing the street to the bank sidewalk.

  It was so easy.

  Someone, probably the manager, had sprinkled rock salt on the icy path, so the frozen slick was breaking up and his boots sank into the ice melt. The glasses steamed up a bit as he walked through the glass doors, but he ignored it.

  He couldn’t stop now.

  He sidled up to a counter, slipped off his gloves, stuffed them in his pockets, and wrote a simple note in block print, the same handwriting he’d practiced over and over again at the kitchen table. Easy to read. No mistakes. Nothing too hard for the tellers to decipher.

  He got in line like a regular customer and stood behind a lady with a little kid who wanted to roam the bank like a drone at a concert. The kid bumped into his leg and looked up at him like it was his fault. He leaned down and put out a hand for a high five. The kid just scowled up at him.

  “Sorry,” the mom said. “He’s full of energy. Jeffie, come here.” And she picked Jeffie up and took him over to a heavyset teller with glitter eyeshadow.

  At last, it was his turn. The ponytail teller with the big Bambi eyes. Poor ponytail girl; sure didn’t see these headlights coming right for her.

  Her smile drained from her face as she read the note. She was freaking a little. He could see it in her skin, splotches of red creeping up her neck to her cheeks.

  Don’t panic, Ponytail. Just do as I say and you’ll be fine.

  He worried that she might freeze for too long, attracting attention. But she snapped out of it, pulled out all the big bills from her till, tucked them neatly in the backpack he gave her, and pushed it toward him.

  He didn’t move to take it.

  For a second they locked eyes, and a lump the size of a fist formed in his stomach.

  Come on, Ponytail.

  He cocked his head to the side just a little, then glanced down at the small hammer he was holding in the deep pocket of his sweatshirt, the one that looked just like a gun when he held it at a certain angle. Her eyes followed his gaze. She stiffened her spine, inhaled, and slid off her stool to open the safe under the counter.

  That’s right, Ponytail.

  He leaned toward the counter for a better look, knowing she was unlocking a small safe. In a few seconds she straightened and put a pack of hundred-dollar bills with a mustard-colored band on the counter.

  Jackpot.

  He nodded. That was ten grand right there.

  He felt a surge of energy, like he could run three marathons in a row without getting winded.

  They didn’t tell you that part.

  When your bank robbery kicked ass, you felt electric.

  He watched that fat bundle slide into the backpack, then took it from her and turned to leave. Do not linger. No whoop of celebration. Get the hell out of there.

  The getaway was where most robbers screwed up.

  Walk briskly. Don’t run. Get in the car. Take off the hat and wig, and drive the car toward the interstate and freedom. Don’t speed, just blend your vehicle, your invisibility cloak, in with the other cars. Don’t stop for a cheeseburger at McDonald’s, no matter how much your stomach grumbles.

  And the most important rule of all? Never tell anyone. Not your best friend, not your own family. Most people get caught because they don’t go solo; you need to stick to a conspiracy of one.

  Don’t trust anyone, and you won’t get caught.

  1

  I reached out to the terrified bank teller sitting beside me and took her hand. “You’re okay now,” I told her. “You did the right thing, and no one got hurt.”

  “I was so scared, Laura! I couldn’t breathe. I thought he was going to hurt me.” Her voice cracked, and her brown eyes filled with tears.

  “It’s very traumatic, what you just went through.” I gave her hand a squeeze, then moved the box of tissues closer to her. We sat in visitor chairs at a desk in the cubicled section of the First Sunrise Bank where people discussed loans and mortgages with a false suggestion of privacy. Across from us in the main desk chair sat my partner Zion Frazier; eyes wild, dark skin clammy, he looked more like the victim than Ashley Earnhart.

  Outside the glass doors of the entrance, the darkness was punctuated by a few streetlights in the parking lot. It wasn’t even six yet, but December days were short and night had come. Until we’d gotten the call, it had been a typical Tuesday evening marked by freezing rain, strings of diamond-white lights, and holiday shoppers.

  Behind us, a forensic technician in booties moved through the area we’d taped off, combing the counter and tile floor of the center of the bank in search of hair or fabric or even skin cells the robber might have left behind. Although this was the first bank robbery of my six-month career with the Sunrise Lake Police Department, my partner Z had suffered through a deadly bank hit years ago. Hence his near panic attack.

  “Nobody tells you how scary it is to be one-on-one with an armed robber,” Ashley continued. “I wish I could stop thinking about him, but when I close my eyes, he’s there. He’s the only thing I see. It’s like we were the only two people in the bank.” She scraped a few stray hairs back toward her ponytail, but it didn’t alter her frazzled appearance. “His image is burned in my brain.”

  “It will fade, eventually,” I reassured her, “but it takes time. Can you tell us what he looked like while he’s fresh in your memory?”

  “Some old guy with big googly glasses, not the kind of person you’d normally be afraid of. But I could see his eyes shifting back and forth. That made him even more intimidating. I couldn’t tell what he was thinking, except once, when he showed me he had a gun. A gun!” Terror added a squeak to her voice. “I was so afraid of being shot.”

  I nodded sympathetically. “Can you describe the gun?”

  Ashley shook her head. “I didn’t see it. Just the outline of it underneath his sweatshirt.”

  Z shifted uncomfortably as he listened to Ashley recount the robbery. Usually cool and stoic, my partner was a ball of nerves. His jaw was tight as he wiped perspiration from his forehead, even though it was cold enough in the First Sunrise Bank for me to wear my fleece-lined winter
coat.

  “So the robber told you he had a gun?” Z asked.

  “No.” Ashley’s eyes grew glossy with more tears as she thought for a moment, then added, “He just kind of motioned with his head for me to look down, and that’s when I saw the outline of it in the pocket of his dark sweatshirt.”

  “I see. You’re doing great, Ashley,” I said. “Good recall.”

  I remembered Ashley from Mr. Goodman’s chemistry class at Sunrise Lake High, the school we’d both graduated from six years ago. She’d been a decent student—better than me, that’s for sure. We’d sat several rows apart in chemistry class, but everyone always mistook us for sisters, which was ridiculous considering I’m first-generation Japanese-American and Ashley’s mom is a Pacific Islander. “Hey, sis!” Ashley would call to me in the halls between classes. “Wanna coordinate outfits tomorrow?” We’d laugh it off together, but I was stung by our classmates’ inability to see me as an individual. Sure, I was shy, but I’d been a student in Sunrise Lake schools for nearly my whole life and still felt like I could’ve gone missing and no one would have noticed.

  We don’t all look alike! I remembered wanting to scream at Rodney Blumenthal after he came up to me at my locker and told me he liked my singing in the school play, Bye Bye Birdie. I couldn’t carry a tune, but Ashley was a really gifted singer and had a great part in the play. After such a nice compliment, I couldn’t bring myself to tell him I was not the girl he so clearly had a crush on.

  Now Ashley sat in front of me, shaking with fear and recounting a terrifying robbery. And Z was looking worse by the moment, too. He’d eased out of his jacket but was still sweating and shifting nervously from one foot to the next. No stranger to panic attacks myself, I saw Z was about to spiral. And no wonder. Although it had been just a few years since he’d seen an officer gunned down at another bank robbery, trauma had a way of sparking back to life with certain memories.

  “Hang on, you two, I’m going to grab us all some water.” Passing the reception area of the bank, where customers sat waiting to give their statements, I went through the door behind the tellers’ stations to the hidden rooms of the bank. Inside the break room, two other bank employees were being interviewed by my colleagues Cranston and Rivers. Moving silently, I grabbed a few cold bottles from the refrigerator and ducked out. The whole bank was crawling with forensic technicians and cops, and nearly a dozen staff and customers remained. At a computer terminal in the corner cubicle, my boss, Lieutenant Charles Omak, was working with the head teller to capture images from the bank cameras.

  It was a fairly comprehensive response for a town the size of Sunrise Lake, but that was no wonder after the string of bank robberies several years ago that had gone unsolved and resulted in the murder of one officer—Franny Landon. The whole town of Sunrise Lake had been stunned by the robberies but nearly undone by Franny’s murder. Dark things like that just didn’t seem possible in this sweet bedroom community of Portland, Oregon, where one of the biggest debates the city council had every year was what kinds of flowers to plant in the hanging baskets that lined the main streets from April through October. I’d been away at college back then, but I’d gotten updates from my mom, who had insisted that everyone in our family keep away from Sunrise Lake banks until they caught the bandit. Her warning had faded a few months after the robberies mysteriously stopped.

  As I squeezed past two uniformed officers taking statements from customers, I noticed the trembling fingers of one thirtyish woman who struggled to tap a message into her phone. Dressed in tie-dyed tights, a raspberry scarf, and a puffy black jacket, her blonde hair pulled back off her face, she looked as if she’d been on her way to the gym when she stopped into the bank. I kneeled beside her and offered a bottle of water. “How’s it going?” I said. “Sorry you have to wait a bit.”

  “It’s not the wait.” She took the bottle of water but didn’t crack it open. “It’s the horrible feeling of coming face-to-face with him and wondering what might have happened if I got in his way. I’m shaking to the core.”

  “Wrong place, wrong time.” I patted the sleeve of her puffy jacket. “It’s scary, I know. I’ll interview you next, okay? Just give me a few minutes.”

  She thanked me, and I rose, assessing the others in the waiting area. Before we wrapped things up here, everyone in the building would be interviewed. One man paced, and a white-haired man patted the hand of the woman seated next to him as she leaned close and whispered something. They seemed to be watching a woman with an antsy toddler, who was already being interviewed by Jeremy Ramirez, who seemed mildly amused as the mom kept chasing the boy after he broke free and ran across the bank.

  Another cop was talking with a woman with dark dense curls and large, moonlike eyes, who seemed to have more questions than answers. How much had been taken? Was the robber going to hit again? “Is my life in danger?” she asked. “I think he got a good look at me. What if he finds out where I live?”

  “That’s usually not how these things work,” the officer answered as I made my way back to Ashley.

  “Here you go. Take some deep breaths and drink this.” I handed them each a bottle of water, then took a seat. Patience. Kindness. Those were my trademarks, something special that I believed I brought to police work. I removed the small notebook from my bulky uniform jacket and turned to a clean page as Ashley took a sip and let out a sigh. With the tension somewhat eased, I went back to the narrative. “Why don’t you walk me through what happened again.”

  “Okay.” She capped the bottle and, squinting to concentrate, provided the same details as before: older man with long white hair, baseball cap with UNCLE KOMBUCHA logo advertising a local brand of the popular new drink. Black-framed glasses and dark sweatshirt. Slight limp.

  “Did you get a sense of his attitude?” I asked. “Did he seem mean or rushed? I know it’s hard to tell, but did he smile at all, or were his hands shaking or did he seem steady and calm?”

  Ashley paused, mulling it over as she smoothed one side of her hair back over her ear.

  “His hands. Or at least the one hand I saw.” Her forehead wrinkled as she strained to remember. “His hands weren’t shaking, but I noticed the one hand without the glove looked so pink and plump. Not wrinkled like you’d expect for an old man. No lines or calluses. It kind of struck me because my boyfriend works in a shipyard, and his hands are so rough. ‘Man hands,’ he calls them. But the robber’s hands looked young and smooth. And he’s definitely not doing rough manual labor.”

  Young hands. Ashley hadn’t mentioned this the first time. “This is great information, Ashley.” I wrote the details in my notebook, wondering if anyone else had noticed his hands. Was he a younger man wearing a wig and faking a limp to appear older? Possible.

  “And he didn’t seem too nervous. He didn’t run out or push anyone aside when he left the bank. He just walked, as if he were doing a normal errand.” One corner of her lips hardened in a frown. “That makes it seem even colder, him waltzing out of here.”

  “Let’s talk about the note,” I said. “Were his gloves still off when he slid it over to you?”

  “Yeah, his glove was on the counter, and he slid the note over to me and I couldn’t believe it. I mean, we’re trained for this and all, but I never thought it would happen to me. Not here in Sunrise Lake.”

  I nodded. I’d already seen the note with its blocky, handwritten print: GIVE ME YOUR FIFTIES AND HUNDREDS. Straightforward, no nonsense. Forensics had collected it for prints, and the fact that he’d handled the note without a glove made me hopeful. But we wouldn’t have results for a day or two. “Then what happened?” I gently prodded.

  “He didn’t say anything, so I started filling his backpack with higher-denomination bills from my drawer, just like the note said. I was still holding my breath when I pushed the bag over to him, but he didn’t take it. He just gave me a stern look, like a disappointed teacher. Then he cocked his head sideways. That’s when I saw that he had a gun in the
pocket of his sweatshirt. Pointed right at me the whole time. I hadn’t noticed it until then, but it …” Her voice broke. “It freaked me out.”

  “You did great,” Z said to Ashley. “You stayed calm.” I could see him trying to get back into police mode after his panic at being called to this crime scene. I hoped he’d find his usual swaggering, sarcastic voice soon.

  “I wonder why he showed you the gun,” I said.

  “I know why,” Ashley said. “When he cocked his head and nodded, I knew exactly what he wanted. The money in the safe below the counter. And he waited for me to unlock it with my code.” She hesitated. “I added a strap of hundreds to his bag and pushed it back to him. I feel really bad about that part. The strap is ten thousand dollars. So much money!”

  Z held up a hand to Ashley. “It’s only money, and the bank is insured. Your actions might have saved lives today.”

  “That’s right,” I said. “You did the right thing, my friend. But I wonder how he knew about the safe under the counter.”

  Ashley took a sip of water, glancing over to the tellers’ stations. “Maybe he’s been watching us. Which is creepy.”

  “But a real possibility,” I said. “Many bank robbers research the banks they rob, visiting a few times to observe the daily routines. Do most banks have teller safes?”

  “I don’t know about other banks, but for us it’s not a big secret. Many of our regular customers know about our teller safes. Business owners like that feature. It saves us trips into the vault, and it’s a way to keep a smaller amount of money in our cash drawer. Fewer mistakes that way.”

  We went over the story again and covered a few more questions, but no new details emerged, and I could see that Ashley was beginning to get shaky now. Sometimes when adrenaline receded, exhaustion and shock set in.

  I thanked Ashley and released her. “I see your mom over there by the door.” I waved at Mrs. Earnhart, who approached us with Ashley’s purse and jacket. “You’ve been a huge help. Why don’t you take my card and head out. We’re going to be processing this scene for a few more hours at least, but you should go home and try to relax. We can touch base again tomorrow.”