“May I?” he asked, indicating the door. He didn’t want anyone to overhear what it was he had to say.
Lucille Guillard’s face registered shock, concern, and terror. She hung her head and then looked at him with impassioned eyes and said, “She’s going to get her ransom through the ATMs.”
“Unless we use the ATMs to catch her,” Boldt proposed.
The woman’s eyes began to track behind her thinking. She did not look too convinced.
“Can we do that?” he asked.
Daphne asked, “Can she withdraw enough money for this to make sense?”
“She has one thousand dollars in her opening balance. That does not qualify her as a Personal Banking Customer. Mind you, with this ransom demand of one hundred thousand dollars on deposit, she will qualify for Personal Banking. PBCs have a user-defined daily ATM ceiling. The card is really a debit card. Withdrawals are made against the account balance.”
“Withdrawn from the same machine?” Boldt asked.
“The same machine, yes. The same transaction, no. Do you see the difference? The physical limit of any one transaction at an ATM is four hundred dollars. That’s all, four hundred. That is not something we can override, but is imposed by the manufacturer of the machine for a variety of security reasons. So: per transaction, a total of four hundred. But the number of concurrent transactions is dependent entirely on the imposed ceiling, or the account balance, depending on the type of account.”
“So it is possible—technically possible—to get at the ransom through the ATMs,” Boldt verified.
“If the account is structured properly, quite possible. Yes. Thousands a day, I suppose, if the customer set it up that way. The highest daily ceiling that I’m aware of is ten thousand dollars. That was requested by a rug merchant who uses the card for international buying. In his case, however, he uses the machines infrequently. It’s used more as a cash advance card.”
“And tracking the individual. Is that possible?”
“It is quite complicated, the ATM network. Do you know anything about it?”
“I’m afraid not,” Boldt said. Daphne shook her head.
“We can tell you where withdrawals have been made. Yes? But real-time tracking poses significantly greater problems. If she stays within the Pac-West ATM network, perhaps we can identify fixed locations. But if she accesses our network from another network’s machines, then the request is handled by the regional switching station here in Seattle—NetLinQ. By the time we see the request, you would have no more than a few seconds in which to react.”
“A few seconds,” Boldt echoed, crushed by the news. “Sounds like we’d have to have a person watching every ATM. How many are there?”
“Pac-West operates three hundred and seventy in the state. Roughly half of those are concentrated in an area within an hour’s drive of the city, including downtown. The number of machines handled by NetLinQ?” she asked, opening a drawer and referencing a file. She frowned, and Boldt felt it coming. “NetLinQ handles over twelve hundred machines between Seattle and Everett. Roughly five new locations are being added every two weeks.”
An army, Boldt was thinking. Twelve hundred surveillance operatives? At the peak of the Green River Killer investigation, one hundred and forty law enforcement personnel had been involved. It made his team of four look pretty damn small. It made his stomach burn.
He popped two Maalox.
“Some of our ATMs are equipped with cameras. Maybe that would help you. Still cameras and video. It depends.”
“How many?” Boldt asked hopefully.
“More than half, I believe. And more in the metropolitan areas than in the country. And we are installing cameras at more than three a week. It is a top priority for us.”
Half? It wasn’t enough.
Daphne, sensing his despondency, suggested a meeting with whoever was in charge of NetLinQ.
“That would be Ted Perch,” Guillard said. “He is not the easiest man to deal with. Especially for a woman. You understand?”
“Then I think I’ll pass,” Daphne said. She told Boldt, “I’ll be at the office, then home.”
Guillard said delicately, “I will call and see if he will see us.”
“Let me explain something, Sergeant. It was sergeant, wasn’t it?” Perch delivered Boldt’s rank as if it were one of the lower life forms, as if he deserved much better. “We have always cooperated with law enforcement in the past, and we’re happy to be of whatever assistance we can be. But”—and Boldt had heard the word coming—“if we interrupted the network for every extortion, for every threat, for every counterfeit card operation, we might as well go fishing instead. Clear?”
Boldt had said nothing of the case he was on.
Perch reminded him of a man who played racquet sports. He had fast eyes that preferred Lucille Guillard’s hem length to Boldt’s cool exterior, brown hair that was washed too often, and an athletic bag snugged up to his desk where everybody could see it. The office was unexceptional except for a pair of watercolors of the San Juans, and an unspectacular view of I-5 and a marina on Lake Union that almost counted as a water view.
Perch had telephoned Shoswitz in order to verify Boldt’s identity. He called Lucille Guillard “Lucy,” and he said it a little too smugly, as if she considered him an intimate friend, which she clearly did not.
From what Guillard had told him, Boldt’s real-time tracking could only be accomplished through a coordinated effort between Pac-West and NetLinQ.
“This is not your everyday extortion,” Boldt said.
“I’ve worked with Freddie Guccianno a couple times,” Perch admitted.
“Freddie’s not working this case.” Boldt said.
“Freddie’s good people.”
Boldt hated that expression.
“What is important, Ted,” Lucille Guillard said smoothly, “is that the bank and the switching station come up with a real-time environment that makes it possible for Sergeant Boldt to track certain withdrawals.”
“I understand that, Lucy. But what I’m trying to point out—to both of you—is that real-time monitoring just isn’t possible across the entire network. No such software exists—not that I know of. It’s just not something we’re set up to do. What? What, Lucy? Why are you looking that way at me?”
“It is something you must do. At the moment, Sergeant Boldt is asking politely. None of us, the police, the bank, wants to initiate legal steps. The idea is that we cooperate.”
Ted Perch looked a little hurt. She knew more than he did, and he did not like that. And if he tried to look up her skirt one more time, Boldt was going to say something about it.
He nodded slowly at her, made a sucking sound in his teeth, and directed himself to Boldt. “The way the system works is this, Sergeant. The account in question is with Pac-West. Clear? If a Pac-West ATM is used to access this account, as I’m sure Lucy explained to you, then that request goes directly to their server. Several verifications are made almost instantaneously, the server okays the withdrawal and instructs the ATM to dispense the cash. Whambam, thank you, ma’am. But in the case of a Pac-West customer using say a First Interstate ATM, that’s where we come in. First, the PIN—the personal identification number—is encrypted by the machine, so as it travels along these phone lines, no one can grab it. Next, the account number and a BIN number—the bank identification number—are routed directly on to the First Interstate server in California, which recognizes that the BIN number is not theirs, and they then route the request back to us. Our computers reroute the new request according to the BIN number—in this case, to Pac-West. Pac-West confirms the account information and approves the withdrawal, routing the approval and an individual authorization code, through us, back to First Interstate, which then instructs the ATM to dispense the cash. In some cases, the request may pass through a national switch first, and then be routed to us, back to the national switch, back to the bank in question. At any rate, this entire process I’ve just describ
ed takes three-point-two seconds. There are four-point-one million credit and debit cards in use in the Northwest alone—and eighty million in the U.S. And to give you an idea of volume, of usage, of the number of hits we receive: ATMs in Washington and Oregon alone process one billion dollars a month. That works out to somewhere around twenty million dollars a day during the short week—fifty million dollars a day Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. That’s four hundred thousand hits per day! And you want us not only to pull an individual hit on this system, but pull it realtime? Are you beginning to see my problem?”
His intention had been to mow Boldt down with the facts and figures, and he did just that. Four hundred thousand withdrawals a day. The number fifty million rang in his head.
“Have we met before?” Perch asked, as if Boldt had just walked through the door.
“No.”
“You look damn familiar to me. Do you play racquet-ball?”
“Piano. Jazz piano.”
“A club! Am I right?”
“The Big Joke.”
“Exactly. I knew I’d seen you before.” To Lucille Guillard he said, “He’s good.” To Boldt he said, “You’re very good. Happy hour. Right?”
Boldt thanked him and pointed out that he had to drop the piano when a case like this came along.
“A case like what? You’re not Fraud, are you, Sergeant? Not unless you just transferred. I know the guys from Fraud, believe me.”
“Homicide,” Boldt said.
It was a word that hit most people sideways, and Ted Perch was no exception. He actually jerked his head back as if he’d been struck. “The big leagues,” he said.
“Just another division.”
“What is this thing? Blackmail? No, extortion—right?”
“Right.”
“Bet someone’s dead,” Perch guessed, “or what would you be doing here?”
“Someone’s dead,” Boldt confirmed. “Maybe others if we don’t hurry.”
“If people’s lives are at stake, that’s different.”
“We need your help,” Lucille Guillard said earnestly. “The problem is that by the time a real-time system identifies a hit, Sergeant Boldt has about ten seconds—or less—to apprehend this person.”
Boldt added, “And that’s not enough. Not even close.”
“Slow down the entire system?” Perch queried. “(A) It’s not possible—not that I know of, and (B) I would be hanged. If the system goes down for five minutes, it makes the news these days. People have gotten used to ATMs. They expect them to work. Twenty-million a day, don’t forget.”
“Does it have to be the whole system? Couldn’t we isolate just these requests?” Boldt asked.
“It doesn’t work like that. Sometimes there are two, three, even four ATMs installed right alongside one another. What’s this person going to think when his transaction takes forever and the guy next to him receives service as usual? Let me tell you something: People have built-in clocks when it comes to ATMs. They know how long a transaction is supposed to take. The average transaction takes twelve seconds. You stretch it to forty and a guy like this, someone jerking the system around, is going to notice. Plain and simple. He’s gone.”
Boldt was glad that Perch had the gender wrong.
Guillard said, “But if the whole network were to slow down. Or at least every request in the city. What then, Ted? So it makes the papers for a couple of days?”
Boldt agreed. “Oddly enough, that kind of publicity might help us. Might convince him it’s a regional problem.”
“Help you, maybe. It’d get me fired. I can tell you that. But it’s all moot anyway. I’ve never heard of such a thing. You can’t just slow down the network by flipping some switch.”
“That is what I told the sergeant. But I was hoping you might know more than I do.” She hit Perch right where he lived. He wanted to know more than she did, and he didn’t see the trap she had laid for him.
“We have some software techs. I could ask them.”
“Our people are looking into it, too,” she said, adding a sense of competition.
“I’ll need permission from the nationals,” Perch said, already a step ahead. “There would be some serious explaining to do.”
“We’re long on people capable of serious explanations. That shouldn’t be a problem,” Boldt offered.
Perch suggested, “Let me circle the wagons. How soon you need this?”
Lucille Guillard recrossed her legs and Perch didn’t even notice.
That was when Boldt knew he had him.
NINETEEN
Someone was watching her.
Daphne had studied enough paranoids, had worked with some, and knew the symptoms well. Symptoms she now displayed: a heightened nervousness, the constant checking over her shoulder, insomnia, loss of appetite, the suspicious pauses to stop and listen. But it was an energy and she understood energy. An energy focused on her, and if she were imagining this, then she intended to compliment her imagination, because this was like nothing she had ever experienced.
Back there somewhere? Over there? she wasn’t sure. It seemed at times to be all around her. At others to be in a specific place—yet when she checked: no one. It made her skin crawl, this feeling. And it wasn’t just while out on a run, which was where she was at the moment. It was in the bedroom, in the car—she felt it when undressing even in the bathroom, which is where she changed clothes. The rest of her houseboat made her feel naked before she took off a thing. This filled her with a nauseating fear, a sense of violation she had not known.
Was that the same car? she wondered. It looked awfully familiar. Had it been parked across from the dock entrance to the houseboats? What was it, Japanese? Detroit/Japanese? She wished she were better with cars. It was the same color, she thought. Same size. Dark blue. Small. Nondescript. Just the kind of car one would use for surveillance! Just the kind of paranoid thinking that could get you in big trouble. “Conspiracy vision”—there were all sorts of slang terms for it. “Oliver Stone disease,” she had once heard it called; and that one had made her laugh. No longer.
She broke with her regular Tuesday evening running route and turned right up Galer and right again onto Eastlake, a procedure similar to the consecutive four right-hand turns used to spot moving surveillance when in a vehicle. She glanced over her shoulder. Watch it! a voice cried out inside of her. That was symptom number one.
She ran another quarter mile, and literally leapt into the air when a blue car overtook her from behind. A different blue car, she realized quickly enough. Upset with herself, she turned around, cutting short the run. It was dusk. It would be dark by the time she got back, and whereas normally her run would take place after work and therefore under the streetlights, tonight the idea bothered her. It cut her run nearly in half, but she could make up the difference tomorrow.
Daphne ran hard, working up a good sweat, pushing herself to go a little harder today since she had cut it short. Her gymnasium-gray tank top was soaked dark below her breasts and down her back. Her hair stuck to her neck, and her white wristband was damp from sponging her brow.
Typically, she used her runs as meditations—a quiet break devoted to nothingness, to thinking as little as possible. She waved to a walker, thankful for a familiar face, and the woman waved back at her with a broad smile. Although they had never formally met, she knew all about this woman—the houseboat community was like that. The woman was an M.D. who volunteered her time at a local clinic for the poor; her husband was a former minister turned author. They lived in a small houseboat, though it was one of the more charming ones—with very few pretensions. And they waved at you when out for a walk.
A scruffy dog crossed the road lazily, either not seeing or not caring about a sleek black cat that sat atop a shingled mailbox house at the end of pier 11.
She walked the last hundred yards, peeked into her mailbox for the second time today, and headed down the dock.
Halfway down the long dock her skin crawled, and s
he blamed it on a light breeze off the lake and the slight chill it induced.
Whether attributable to caution or paranoia, she took inventory of her houseboat as she approached. It was tiny, less than eight hundred square feet, but with the proportions that created an illusion of a house twice its size. From behind her came the constant drone of traffic from the interstate, distant but intrusive—it seemed so much closer at this moment. Edges and corners seemed sharper. Her motion seemed to slow, despite the quickness of her heartbeat. This increased awareness had come all of its own, and yet Daphne Matthews the psychologist knew better: Something had triggered this—nothing came all of its own. The cop she worked with in a survivors clinic described similar sensations moments before a firefight. But Boldt would talk instinct, Daphne would talk reflex. She had caught something out of place perhaps: a sound, a smell, an image; she fell victim to this stimulus, misinterpreted or not.
The air smelled of charcoal. She heard a seaplane taking off in the distance, and, much closer, the nauseating laugh track of a television show.
Her face felt hot from the run, her skin itched. Her mind worked furiously trying to sort things out.
At the same time, she began an internal dialogue, chastising herself for being such a paranoid. What a baby! She also wrestled with the internal voices of several friends, Lou Boldt among them, who had once attempted to talk her out of buying a houseboat. The investment had silenced her critics—the place was worth a fortune now, and her timing couldn’t have been better. But it was an isolated location, and tonight in particular it felt just a little too removed.
Get in the house! she told herself. She bent to retrieve the key that she had tied to her shoelace. Get in the house, her mind repeated more loudly.
She unlocked the door, leaving it slightly ajar until she got the light on, and hurried to the nearest lamp, on the entrance table along with her purse. Inside the purse was her gun. This thought did not escape her. The light flashed brightly and died—the bulb had blown.
She felt a gust of wind at her back. The front door thumped shut of its own accord. Startled, she leapt over to it, and swiveled the dead bolt, locking it. Issuing darkness. Nothing—not even the pitch black—was going to convince her to open that door again. Safe! She inched carefully forward, the picture of the downstairs emblazoned in her mind: directly ahead, the living room, a center post in the middle of the room, a small sofa and end table, a rocker, the wood stove; to her right, the narrow ladder ascending to the tiny bedroom and its balcony; to her left, the small galley, demarcated by a blue tile countertop with two ash stools looking across the Jenn-Air range; around the galley, the head to the left—and opposite this, a small hall flanked by two closets and the back door directly ahead.
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