Madman on a Drum

by David Housewright

“If it’s no trouble,” I said.

  Shelby began making preparations, pulling out a carton of eggs and a block of cheddar from her refrigerator and the remains of a loaf of bread that she had baked using a machine that I had given her for Christmas. She stopped after she retrieved a skillet from her drying rack and turned toward me. “You’re not just trying to humor me, are you?” she said.

  “I swear I haven’t had a bite to eat all morning. Just coffee.”

  “With a slug of bourbon in it, I bet.”

  “Shelby. We’re going to get Victoria back. I promise.”

  She didn’t say if she believed me or not.

  The Feds were listening in on Scottie’s, Tommy’s, and Joley’s phone conversations. Agents watched Scottie and Tommy from afar. Nothing happened. Bobby and Shelby’s phone didn’t ring.

  “The kidnappers know it’ll take time to assemble the money,” Honsa said. “They’re not going to call every five minutes to check on it. I wouldn’t be surprised if we didn’t hear from them until later this afternoon.”

  “In the meantime,” I said.

  “In the meantime we try to keep the lid on. It seems every cop in the St. Paul PD knows what’s happening. It won’t be long before the media finds out, too. The daughter of a top cop is kidnapped—do you think there’s a TV station in town that wouldn’t broadcast the news, even though we ask them not to, even though it might jeopardize the girl’s life?”

  “I’d like to think so.”

  “So would I. But I don’t. The networks are launching their new fall schedules, and they’ll do anything to attract eyeballs.”

  I studied Honsa over the remains of my egg sandwich. His eyes were heavy, his face unshaven, and his reassuring smile seemed wilted. His clothes were wrinkled—he was wearing the same shirt and slacks as the day before. He reminded me of an unmade bed.

  “Maybe you should take a break,” I said.

  He shot me a look that could have flash-frozen ice cream. “Have you been speaking to Wilson?” he said. “I’m the case agent. I’m in charge here. I’m fine.” The tech agent rose from his chair at the dining room table and excused himself. Honsa called after him as he disappeared into the kitchen. “I’m fine.”

  “Tired people make mistakes,” I said.

  “I’m not tired.”

  “I am.”

  “We’ll have to keep an eye on you, then, won’t we?”

  I was contemplating my reply—it involved several four-letter verbs and an equal number of seven-letter nouns—when my cell finally rang. “Talk to me, H. B.,” I said after reading the name on the display.

  “The money has just now been deposited into your checking account.”

  “You’re early,” I said.

  “So I am.”

  “You really are a heavenly love.”

  “Let’s keep that to ourselves, shall we?”

  “Thank you, H. B.” I folded my phone and dropped it into the pocket of my black sports jacket.

  “And?” Honsa asked.

  “We’re good to go.”

  “Agent Wilson,” he called. A moment later, Harry was standing next to me in the dining room. “You know what to do,” Honsa said. “Use as many people as you need.”

  Harry set a hand on my shoulder. “Have you ever seen a million dollars in cash in one place, McKenzie?”

  “Can’t say that I have.”

  “It’s a sight to behold.”

  “Well, then, let’s go behold it.”

  Harry pulled a nine-millimeter SIG Sauer from the holster on his belt and checked the load. Lately the FBI had been encouraging its personnel to switch over to .40 Glocks. Harry was an old-timer, though, and he preferred to carry the gun he broke in with. He returned the SIG Sauer to his holster and buttoned his jacket over it. “I’ll drive,” he said.

  A young woman with a full chest and a tight shirt staffed the reception desk at the main branch of my bank. Her eyes looked startled behind her glasses and didn’t change during our entire conversation; it was as if life were a continuous surprise to her. Certainly she seemed surprised when Harry flashed his photo ID and announced, “FBI,” like it was the most fun he’d had in days. She stammered and hemmed and hawed and wrung her hands and abruptly stood and said she would fetch help without once asking what we wanted or why we were there. While she scurried away in search of a supervisor, I glanced at Harry.

  “You big bully,” I told him.

  “I pick on hostesses in crowded restaurants, too. ‘FBI. I need a table by the window.’ Never fails.”

  “To serve and to protect.”

  “That’s the cops. I work for the federal government.”

  The senior vice president of branch administration was a tall woman who wore a matching pinstripe jacket and trousers over a body that looked like it spent a great deal of time in a gym. Her cotton-blond hair was artfully disheveled, and her face, although not pretty, was animated with the rosy glow of excitement. She stood in front of the reception desk while her assistant reclaimed the chair.

  “FBI,” she said. “Wow. To what do we owe the pleasure?” She was speaking to me, I presume, because I was better-looking.

  Harry got her attention by flashing his ID again. “Special Agent Brian Wilson,” he said. “This is McKenzie.”

  She shook his hand first and then mine. “Lauren Onberg. Please come with me.”

  Lauren led us to an office with glass walls. There were chairs in front of a large, cluttered desk and a single chair behind it. After everyone was made comfortable, she asked, “How may I help you?”

  “I need a million dollars in cash,” I said. “Five hundred thousand in fifties, the rest in twenties.”

  She smiled the way a woman might smile at another woman’s child that is misbehaving. “You’re kidding, right?” she said.

  “Do we look like we’re kidding?” Harry said.

  “Gentlemen, we don’t have a million dollars on-site. Not in twenties, not in fifties, not in any denominations.”

  “It’s a bank,” I reminded her, and she smiled some more.

  “You guys watch too many movies, too many television shows where characters withdraw huge sums of money from a cashier and then carry it around in a black attaché case. It doesn’t work that way. This is the real world.”

  “Ms. Onberg, this isn’t my first rodeo,” Harry said. “I know how the real world works. Let’s get the process moving.”

  “If you want a million dollars in cash, you’ll need to get it from the Federal Reserve Bank in Minneapolis. Now, I can help you with that, but it’ll take three days—assuming, of course, that one of you has an account with our bank. Otherwise…” She spread her hands wide in a gesture of unconcerned helplessness.

  “Ms. Onberg,” Harry said.

  “No, let me,” I said.

  Lauren was still smiling when I leaned across the desk. I slowly and carefully explained the situation to her, making sure to emphasize exactly how old Victoria was and exactly how long she had been missing. I did not raise my voice; I did not threaten her. Yet when I was finished, the smile had left her face and she was on her phone.

  “Mr. Starr, this is Lauren. I need your help.” She paused for the reply and said, “Yes, sir, it’s an emergency.”

  Neil Edward Starr was smiling when he entered Lauren’s office, and he kept smiling while Lauren introduced Harry and me and he shook our hands. I wondered if everyone smiled who worked in a bank and why they would—was it really that much fun? Starr said, “What’s the emergency?” Although it faded somewhat while we explained the situation, the smile was still there when we finished.

  “Well, gentlemen, Lauren was correct,” he said. “It’s doubtful that we have that much cash on-site, especially in the denominations you require. As for the Federal Reserve Bank, those guys are fanatics. Worse than fanatics. They’re bureaucrats who rely on technology. If we placed your order right now, you still wouldn’t receive delivery of the bills until late tomorrow afternoon at
the earliest. There is simply no way to expedite it.”

  “So you see,” Lauren said from the chair behind her desk, “there’s nothing we can do to help you.”

  For the first and only time, Neil Edward Starr stopped smiling. He turned slowly and glared down at Lauren. His eyes were as hard as agates and so was his voice. “What did you say?” The color in Lauren’s face drained away until it resembled her cottonlike hair. “Do you have a daughter, Lauren?” Starr tapped his chest. “I have a daughter.” Starr turned away from his vice president and faced me. His smile returned to his face.

  “We have a remote vault where we process our largest transactions with our most cash-intensive customers—casinos, grocery chains, check-cashing stores, other banks,” he said. “Our armored trucks will collect their cash deposits and begin rolling to the vault as early as two thirty this afternoon and continue through the evening. What we’ll do, we’ll camp out, and when the deposits start coming in we will retain the twenties and fifties that we require.”

  I liked the way Starr kept saying “we.”

  “I don’t know how long it will take to collect twenty-five thousand twenties and ten thousand fifties,” he said, “but the process will certainly be a lot quicker than waiting on the Federal Reserve. At any rate, it’s the best I can do for you.”

  “Your best is pretty damn good,” I said and shook Starr’s hand.

  “Yes, well.” Starr seemed embarrassed. “We have a reputation here for being very customer friendly. You are a customer, right?”

  I assured him that I was.

  “We’ll have to shuffle a lot of money around to make this work,” Lauren said.

  “We’re bankers. That’s what we do,” Starr said. “All right, I have to take off for a second. McKenzie, give Lauren your account number. I’ll be right back.”

  While Starr was absent, Lauren ran my account number on her desktop PC to make sure I actually had one million dollars in checking. She then called the bank’s wire transfer department to verify that the number was correct. A moment later, Starr returned.

  “Are we good?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir,” Lauren said.

  “Okay.” Starr was smiling when he handed me a small sheet of paper. “Here. Fill this out.”

  “What is it?”

  “Why, McKenzie, it’s a withdrawal slip.”

  While I filled out the slip, Harry called Honsa on his cell phone. According to the surveillance teams, Scottie Thomforde had walked to the fast-food joint just a few doors down and ordered lunch. He bought a couple of burgers, fries, and a fountain drink and sat at a table next to the front window. He ate alone. The phone at the Dunston house did not ring.

  Harry and I followed Starr to a small, unobtrusive business park located in a residential neighborhood not too far from the main branch where we found a large, white, windowless, one-story cinder-block building that reminded me of a ware house. There were no signs identifying it. To get inside, we had to pass through a series of rooms known as bandit traps—it was impossible to open a door to one room without first locking the door from the other. Digital cameras covered each of the traps. If a door was left open for more than twenty seconds, ear-splitting alarms would be activated.

  Once inside, we were greeted by a security team that did an excellent job of searching us without actually searching us. Even Starr was put through the drill. No purses or briefcases were allowed. They even asked Harry to place his SIG Sauer into a locker. There was a number of security guards—it was hard to count them. They weren’t stationed in any one place, but rather moved seemingly at random through the vault so you couldn’t pin them down. None of the guards was smiling. Nor were any other employees, for that matter. It might have been fun and games at the bank; this was different.

  The main processing room was huge. It contained about a dozen rows of five-foot-wide, twenty-foot-long tables. They had metal legs and smooth, easy-to-clean Formica tops and reminded me of fifties-style kitchen tables. Only about a third of them were active when we arrived. Three employees stood at each table busily stuffing currency into cassettes that would later be installed into ATMs.

  Starr studied his watch. “The first trucks won’t start rolling in for about an hour yet,” he said.

  He gave us coffee. We didn’t drink much. It was just something to hold in our hands. The three of us soon ran out of conversation, and I began to meander through the room, pacing between the tables with my hands in my pockets. I let my mind wander—always a bad thing to do. I wondered why we hadn’t heard from the kidnappers, if Scottie knew we were on to him, if I had blown it by scouring the neighborhood for him with Karen Studder, if I had endangered Victoria’s life. I wondered if Shelby had been right, if somehow the situation was entirely my fault, and if it was, what I could possibly do to make it good. I wondered about Bobby and Shelby, about the pain they were enduring, about how all this would affect their marriage. Who knows? They may even grow stronger. I’ve seen it before. That’s what Honsa had said. God, how I hoped he was right. I wondered about Victoria, what she must be going through, if she was chained to a radiator as Honsa had suggested, what she must have been thinking. Did she still have hope, or was she filled with despair? I wondered if she had been beaten, if she had been abused. I wondered if she was still alive. All the while my heart felt like it was being twisted into the shape of various balloon animals.

  Where are those goddamn trucks? my inner voice wanted to know.

  This time Honsa called Harry. Harry made no attempt to hide his frustration at whatever Honsa was telling him. “No, I don’t know when we’ll be finished,” he growled into his cell phone. “We haven’t actually started yet.”

  Harry listened for a few moments. He said, “No, we don’t need more agents. We’re being well taken care of here… We’re waiting for the trucks… Look, it’s too complicated to explain right now… Damian, you’re starting to piss me off… I do understand… Yes, of course. Of course… What’s happening on your end?” After a long pause, Harry said, “I agree with you. We need to wait… That’s the father speaking, not the cop… I’ll report in as soon as I have something to report… You, too.”

  Harry returned the cell to his pocket. He answered my questions without waiting for me to ask them. “We haven’t heard from the kidnappers, and everyone is starting to get anxious. Meanwhile, Thomforde is taking a cigarette break. Bobby Dunston is lobbying hard to arrest him. Honsa wants to wait, and I agree. Honsa is afraid that Bobby will pull an end-around, get his detectives to make an arrest.”

  “He won’t do that,” I said.

  “Can you guarantee it?”

  I shook my head.

  “I didn’t think so.”

  The first armored truck backed into a bandit trap. After it was secured, canvas bags of currency were hefted from the rear of the truck onto large carts. The carts were rolled through the remaining traps one at a time and finally wheeled into the main processing room. Bank employees began to appear as if by magic. They were all wearing old shirts and jeans, dressed as if they were cleaning out a garage. There were several containers of baby wipes on each table so they could clean off the black, waxy film that soon covered their fingers.

  “It’s dirty work handling money,” Starr said. He was smiling when he said it, but then Starr was always smiling. I began to think that he was one of those rare people who never forget just how good they have it.

  The bags were emptied; currency spilled out on the tables in front of the employees. Tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands of dollars. Harry had been correct. It was a sight to behold.

  According to Special Agent Damian Honsa, Scottie left his job at five thirty and walked to the bus stop on the corner of University and Dale. He waited seven minutes before an MTC bus picked him up. The surveillance team followed the bus to his stop near the state capitol building. From there he walked to the halfway house. He did nothing suspicious. Nor did his brother, Tommy, who was now eating dinner a
t his mother’s house. There were no phone calls to or from either man.

  “How are Bobby and Shelby taking it?” I asked.

  “About what you’d expect,” Harry said.

  “That bad, huh?”

  The money was starting to pile up. Deposits from a couple of casinos nearly took care of our need for twenties by themselves. Gathering ten thousand fifties was taking more time, but Starr assured me that it wouldn’t be a problem. “A couple of out-state bank branches have yet to make their nightly deposits,” he said. “That’ll put us over the top.” Of course, he was smiling when he said it.

  My cell phone rang. I read the name off of the digital display. Karen Studder.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Hi, McKenzie. I’m not interrupting, am I?”

  “No. We’re just sitting around counting money.”

  “The ransom money?”

  “Yes. It’ll be ready soon.”

  “So the girl, Victoria, she’s… she hasn’t come home yet.”

  “Not yet.”

  “I was hoping.”

  “So was I.”

  “I don’t want to bother you. I just called—”

  “I understand.”

  “—to find out if there was any news.”

  “Sure.”

  “I’ll just hang up, then, and—”

  “Karen?”

  “—call some other time.”

  “Karen? We haven’t heard from the kidnappers today.”

  “Not at all?”

  “Meanwhile, Scottie Thomforde is going about his life as if nothing has happened.”

  There was a long pause on the other end, and for a moment I thought she might have hung up. Finally Karen said, “If you want to ask me, go ’head.”

  “When we went to the halfway house last night, I stayed in the car so Scottie wouldn’t freak out. I wasn’t there to hear your conversation. I don’t know what was said.”

  “You can ask. I won’t mind.”

  “Did you tip Scottie off?”

  “No, McKenzie. I didn’t.”