Past Perfect

by Richard Stockford

  “Morning, Cameron,” Clipper said. “Sorry to interrupt your breakfast.”

  A small, dapper man nearing retirement age, Shibles smiled. “No problem. I was just chatting with the president about world security strategies.” Both men chuckled. Although Shibles was a good agent with a respectable record, Bangor, Maine was not the F.B.I.’s most critical posting.

  “Looks like two young guys in ski masks with an automatic weapon.” Clipper gestured at the ruined ceiling. “Probably a driver outside. They hit the safe and were gone before we got here, but one of our units apparently got behind them on Ohio Street. They shot up his cruiser, and wounded a passenger, with a machine gun and he lost ‘em. I was just about to go over and take a look, if you’re interested.”

  The two men stepped back outside, nodding to the uniformed officer who dutifully noted their exits in his log, and into Clipper’s unmarked car.

  Three blocks away, they parked in front of a waiting wrecker on Ohio Street. The Bangor cruiser was canted towards the driver’s side in the roadside ditch and a uniformed officer was taking measurements for the accident report while Detective Randy Bissonette took pictures of the damage.

  “I got a couple of slugs,” Bissonette said, handing a clear plastic evidence bag to Clipper.

  Clipper held the bag up. “Could be 7.62 mm,” he said to Shibles. “That’s what the brass in the credit union was. We got an AK-47, or maybe an SKS. Who got hit, and how bad?”

  “It was Jimmy Lindquist,” Bissonette said. “Cory was giving him a ride downtown and he took a couple of rounds to the chest. Ambulance guys said it didn’t look too bad, but he was bleeding like a stuck pig.”

  “This is insane,” Detective Sergeant John Peters glared at the first photos from the credit union. “The bad guys got machine guns now? What’s next? Rocket launchers? Tanks?”

  Clipper grinned, but ignored the griping from his second in command. It was just after noon, and he’d pulled his troops together in the conference room for an update. “How’d we do for descriptions, Al?”

  Allen Oaks opened his notebook. “All three employees agree on two males, probably early twenties. By the wall chart, the one with the rifle was about six foot, slender, wearing jeans and a white U of M sweatshirt; black ski mask. The other one was shorter, maybe five ten, and stocky. He was in jeans, a black nylon jacket and a blue ski mask. He had a large frame automatic pistol, stainless or nickel, which he did not fire. He was the one who scooped the money. They all think the one with the rifle was running the show. He’s the one that yelled ‘Allahu Akbar’ on the way out the door, and they’re pretty sure there was a driver outside in the car which, by the way, nobody can describe. Oh, and both guys were wearing black leather gloves.”

  Randy Bissonette said, “Cory Lindquist thinks the guys that opened up on him were in an older off-white or beige Chevy convertible, but he wasn’t sure, pretty shook up.”

  “Video?”

  “We got a little over two and a half minutes of video from the credit union, but it doesn’t show much more than the tellers remember. The rifle was definitely an AK-47; full auto with a folding stock, but you can’t make out the pistol well enough to tell the make. No video coverage outside the building, and Cory never got a chance to turn on his dash cam.” “Any other wits, Ken?” Clipper asked.

  Ken Thomas stood up and began to pace. “The game shop on the left was closed,” he said, “and the two guys in the hobby shop didn’t see anything. They were in the back room when they heard the shots. One of them jumped on the phone, and the other one ran out front but I don’t think he ran too fast, because he only caught a glimpse of a light-colored convertible turning the corner at the end of the building. He couldn’t even guess about the year or make.” Thomas hesitated. “The only other witness I could find was Buds Moon,” he said. “If there was anyone else in the parking lot, they didn’t stick around.”

  Clipper shook his head again. Amos ‘Buds’ Moon was an aging, personable town drunk, nicknamed for his favorite tipple, which he consumed in prodigious quantities. Although he lived with an elderly sister, Buds could be seen walking the streets of Bangor night and day, smiling gap-toothed at people he met, nodding amiably and politely asking, “Got any Buds?”

  Thomas held up his hands. “He seemed almost sober. Said he saw two young guys get into an older white Chevy convertible that had someone he couldn’t see behind the wheel. He couldn’t give me any descriptions other than to say one of them was an Arab. Said he could tell by the gun he was waving around.”

  Clipper grimaced. “Talk to his sister. Let’s try to figure a way to get him sober and bring him in for another interview, you never know…” He turned to Dave Adams. “Anything at the scene?”

  Adams, the department’s lead crime scene specialist, shook his head. “The gloves eliminated any chance at latents, and the spent brass was clean, too.”

  Clipper looked at Cameron Sibley. “How much did they get?”

  “They did very well,” the agent said, “better than most. The final tally was $7,320. The tellers had just taken their cash drawers out of the safe, and it was still open. No dye packs, but there was some recorded bait money in the drawers and we’ve got a small series of sequential numbers out of the safe to look for. We’ve already got a bulletin out.” He sighed. “They hit like professionals, in and out fast, but so far they don’t match anything in the system. Might be gifted amateurs or just very lucky first timers,” he said with a small shrug.

  “I’d like it better if it was hunting season,” muttered John Peters, referring to his theory that many bank robberies along I-95 in Maine were committed by out-of-state hunters on their way home. “I’d hate to think we got a nut hanging around with a machine gun.”

  Clipper got to his feet. “Well, the SP pretty well covered the interstate, and deputies have been set up on the secondary roads around us all day. I think our guys are either local or laying low for the time being. Fan out and hit your snitches, and make sure you get the serial number lists out wherever you can. Don’t forget the mom and pop places.” Clipper went back to his office and called Evan Paul, who was at the hospital checking on Jimmy Lindquist.

  “I haven’t talked to him yet,” Paul said. They were taking him into surgery when I got here, but they said he’d probably be ok once they get the bleeding stopped.”

  “Well, stick with him,” Clipper said, “and keep me up on how he’s doing.”

  By four o’clock, Clipper and his crew had talked to every snitch and rumor-monger they could find, without result. The only break came with the discovery of the Chevy convertible parked in another small strip mall on the east side of the City. Once Clipper became aware that the vehicle had stolen plates from a 2009 Passat, he did not even bother to respond, ordering the vehicle to be towed to the station for processing, and trusting John Peters to begin the hopeless search for anyone who might have seen the suspects change vehicles seven hours earlier. He returned, instead, to his office and wrote a short, carefully-worded press release and delivered it along with a stack of pictures of the two robbers taken from the surveillance video, to Lieutenant Josh Preston, the department’s public information officer.

  “I’d like to keep ‘em at arm’s-length for a while,” he said, referring to the press. “At least ‘til we get an idea whether or not we’re dealing with locals.” Clipper had no problems dealing with the press, but preferred to remain in the background on major cases whenever he could.

  Clipper started assembling a casebook from the reports that had collected on his desk, but he worked half-heartedly, keenly aware that the early hours, usually vital to single event solutions, were rapidly slipping away. At six o’clock, he assigned two detectives to work overnight with John Peters and sent everyone else home. Most of his people would happily work themselves to exhaustion on a case like this, and he knew he’d need some fresh troops in the morning. At seven o’clock, following his own orders, he headed home, stopping briefly at dispatch t
o make sure the night crews were alerted to stop and check vehicles with three young occupants.

  Clipper shared his rambling nineteenth-century home with his girlfriend, Janice Owens. She was a slender five foot six brunette, two years Clipper’s junior at thirty-four, whom he had met when her husband was murdered by a psychopath seeking the hidden loot of a gang of robbers his grandfather had been a part of. Initially a suspect in the murder of her husband, Janice had convinced Clipper of her innocence, and they had been the ones to actually find the loot, a fortune in stolen cash and jewelry. Janice had accepted an enormous insurance settlement on behalf of them both. Since then, she had become firmly entrenched in both Clipper’s life and Bangor’s historical community, and had just been elected vice-president of the Historical Society.

  Clipper got home to an empty house and a reminder note that Janice was at the old Gaylord Estate which had recently been left to the City and the Historical Society upon the death of its owner, ex-State Senator Montgomery Gaylord. He made himself a cold meatloaf sandwich and settled down to watch the recorded local news coverage of the credit union robbery.

  Chapter 3

  Kashif Amini pushed the last of his chicken and rice aside. “No,” he said, staring hard across the table at Pauli. “I told you, we cannot spend this money. There are bound to be traceable numbers in here, bait money. We must trade this money for clean money first.”

  Pauli Ennis scowled. Kids of an affluent family, he and Jennifer did not lack for cash, but he was also used to instant gratification. The three of them were sitting at the kitchen table in the house that belonged to Pauli and Jennifer’s parents who were currently touring the western U.S. in a forty-foot motor home. They had met the previous fall in a philosophy elective intriguingly entitled ‘The Philosophy of Crime’ at the University of Maine. While the instructor, a young grad student from Berkley, tried to convince them that crime was entirely the fault of society, they’d passed the time with a series of crime ‘what if’s’ that started innocently enough, but culminated in this morning’s successful foray into the real thing. Pauli and Jennifer, sophomore and junior respectively were fascinated with Kashif’s exotic, mid-eastern persona. Kashif, who was really the son of second-generation Armenian immigrants who ran a successful import business in Cincinnati, fanned their interest with a passable mid-eastern accent and lies about an exciting life on the edge of the Arab terrorism culture.

  Jennifer got up and started clearing the dishes. “You still haven’t told us how we’re going to do that,” she said.

  “I have friends in the City,” Kashif said. “They will trade, take a small percentage and give us clean money in return. Our money will be sent overseas and be used to help the rebels who fight tyranny in my country. It cannot be traced, and even if it were, it could not lead back to us.”

  Jennifer wasn’t stupid. “You mean we’re helping you fund a revolution,” she said.

  Kashif shrugged. “We’re taking money from insured accounts, hurting no one, and if a few hundred dollars winds up buying rice or meat for a starving soldier on the other side of the world, do you really care?” he asked reasonably, conscious that this could be a watershed moment in their relationship.

  Jennifer studied him soberly for a few seconds and then grinned. “Nope,” she said, “just wanted to set the record straight.” Then she sobered. “I’m a lot more worried about that machine gun of yours than about where the money goes. You didn’t have to shoot up the credit union, and shooting the cop car was stupid. It draws too much attention to us.”

  Kashif laughed. “A weapon is no threat if people don’t believe you’ll use it,” he said. “They know we’re serious players now, and if I hadn’t got that cop off our tail, we might be sitting in a jail cell at this moment.”

  Jennifer frowned. “I guess,” she said, “but it just seems so…brutal.”

  Pauli chimed in. “Kashif’s right, Sis. We gotta make ‘em believe we’re real bad-ass criminals.”

  Jennifer gave him a soft look. “Ok, Pauli,” she said. “Make ‘em believe, but just don’t shoot anyone.”

  Kashif snorted and sighed. A potential problem averted, but he knew she would not be so compliant if she learned the real reason for the robberies. “Good,” he said. “Then we should rest for tomorrow’s attack.”

  Janice Owens caressed the velvety leather surface of the eighteenth-century writing desk. She was in a luxurious second floor sitting room in one of the largest mansions in Bangor. Built in 1875 by Bangor’s foremost lumber baron, Robert Gaylord, the Gaylord estate was originally comprised of the sixteen-room main house, a guest cottage, carriage shed and huge barn situated on twelve acres of the highest land on Bangor’s west side. The guest cottage and carriage shed were gone, but the main house remained a shining example of Georgian architecture in native fieldstone, granite and slate, and beautifully crafted stone walls encircled the property and lined its winding drive and walking paths. Traces of once spectacular gardens could still be seen amid the encroaching undergrowth of recent years.

  For all of the Gaylord family’s early financial success, later years had brought downturns and declines, and when Montgomery Smith Gaylord died in January at eighty-three, a nearly defunct paper mill along with the Manor and twelve overgrown acres were the last physical holdings of the once powerful dynasty. His final bequests were simple: His political papers were to be donated to the University of Maine. The house and its contents and immediate grounds were to go to the City of Bangor, to be kept in perpetuity as a public park and museum under the joint management of the City and the Bangor Historical Society. The mill, remaining lands, and financial holdings were to be liquidated, with the proceeds split between Montgomery’s daughter, Pauline Gaylord Ennis and his son, Sebastian, who was the chairman of the board of Gaylord Mills and currently running for his father’s old State Senate seat.

  As one of the Historical Society’s youngest and most active members, Janice had been chosen to chair the management committee, and while the lawyers were finalizing the property transfer, she was working with the family to sort through the estate contents and arranging for an estate sale to raise some operating capital without gutting the historical content of the property. The elder Gaylord and his offspring had not been especially close, and with Sebastian deeply involved in his political campaign, and Pauline currently touring the country in an RV, most of the work was falling to Janice and her volunteer help.

  She had spent most of the day overseeing the collection of Montgomery Gaylord’s political papers and memorabilia from his library and the attic for later removal to the University, and then began tagging items of furniture that she felt might be appropriate to sell. Finally running out of energy, she was treating herself to a few moments of quiet contemplation in the genteel sitting-room she had come to love.

  Chapter 4

  On Thursday, Clipper’s day started as usual with a pile of incident reports to read and evaluate. By eight o’clock, he’d culled out seven cases for assignment and follow-up, ranging from vandalism of a statue in Founder’s Park to four domestic abuse cases and two burglaries, and was on his way to find Dave Adams in the basement crime lab.

  Dressed in his signature white lab coat, Adams was peering into the eye piece of the comparison microscope he’d cadged from the State crime lab when they upgraded. “Real distinctive ejector marks on all this brass,” he said without looking up when Clipper stepped up beside him. “Won’t be a problem matching ‘em to the gun when we find it.”

  “Did you get anything else?” asked Clipper.

  Adams pushed back from the microscope. “Nope,” he said. “I don’t think so. That scene was as clean as they come, and the Chevy was loaded with prints, but a lot of them are smeared. I think the last occupants were all wearing gloves. Plenty of the 7.62 x 39 brass in the back seat and some hair samples, long and blonde on the driver’s headrest, but nothing new so far.”

  An hour later, Clipper was in Chief Norris’s outer of
fice, chatting with Miss Elliot, the all-powerful Chief’s secretary, about his overtime budget when his cell phone chirped.

  “Feel like taking a ride this fine morning?” asked Cameron Shibles when Clipper answered.

  “Sure,” said Clipper. “We’ve got a choke hold on crime in the city, so I’ve been looking for something to do.”

  “Well, you may be choking it here, but it’s alive and well elsewhere. The East Coast Credit Union in Belfast just got hit. Sounds like the same crew. I’ll pick you up in ten.”

  East Coast’s Belfast branch was similar to its Bangor site, except that it occupied a stand-alone building on a small lot at the edge of town and, aside from the three employees, Belfast Police had come up with exactly no witnesses to the robbery. Clipper found Belfast’s investigator, Todd Ackers, an older man he knew well and respected, talking with East Coast’s Regional Manager Darren Barcliff whom he had met the day before in Bangor.

  “Your people ok?” asked Clipper.

  “Just scared,” answered Barcliff. He was a capable-looking man in his mid-thirties with short brown hair and the lean frame and chiseled features of a serious distance runner. “Me too, if you want to know the truth. I was in my office in the back, had the door closed so the first I knew of it was that damn machine gun. Scared the hell out of me.”

  Clipper determined that the MO of the robbery was the same as Bangor’s, right down to the spray of automatic weapons fired across the ceiling and the ‘Allahu Akbar’ proclamation at the end. He signed for an evidence bag containing two pieces of the spent 7.62 x 39 brass, and Akers promised to e-mail him the video clips of the perpetrators as soon as they could be processed. Before they left, Clipper grabbed a Maine highway map out of Shibles’ car and had Barcliff mark all of the East Coast Credit Union’s branch locations. There were six locations circled in red.