Willow Glen Heist

by Alec Peche

  It was finished and he leaned in to review the results.

  Damian stood looking at the names and pictures and it presented an interesting pattern. Arielle or Ashley, he couldn’t make up his mind which name to call the suspected bank robber, entered and exited the United States on a weekly basis. Her favorite points were San Francisco International and Peace Arch between Washington and British Columbia. She has a few visits to Mexico traveling through a variety of immigration points and she hit Saute Saint Marie and Windsor on occasion.

  He debated what to do next. If he studied the data would he notice a pattern that might help them locate her presence at a particular time and place, or did he look for financial transactions looking for the sixty million dollar stash in a number of bank accounts in Canada and Mexico in addition to the United States. He decided that he liked looking for patterns and went after the first question.

  He spent two hours on the detecting of her travel pattern then decided he was dead tired and seeing patterns in more places than he should and he called it a night.

  Chapter 27

  Ashley Carrington silently sighed with relief as she passed through another passport control station. She’d been doing this for more than five years and she continued to marvel that she hadn’t been caught. Each time she passed through the border she feared that someone finally figured out who committed a robbery at a bank in California nine years ago. Her current home was more than a thousand miles away from the robbery location, but she knew she needed to renounce her citizenship and disappear into the world once and for all. One person knew her secret and she wasn’t going to tell on her; but Ashley knew that over the past year her anxiety had been notching up with each weekly border crossing. If her anxiety got much worse, border guards would be pulling her aside for suspicious activity as they would be able to see the sweat on her brow.

  She’d plan the robbery for two years including one year working at the branch to make sure she had the best plan in place. Michelle, her sister, was her partner in crime, creating the florist shop as a cover to what really occurred. At night and weekends they dug the tunnel, while all along developing an elaborate plans to hit the vault.

  After their success in stealing nearly everything in the vault, they’d moved across country in a rented truck containing their haul. It was weird driving the van knowing that if anyone pulled them over and inspected it, they’d be arrested. A ten thousand dollar truck was transporting sixty million dollars’ worth of stolen cash and safe deposit box contents.

  Ashley was convinced that the way to stay hidden from authorities after their robbery was to fade into life in the Midwest. The two sisters worked different minimum wage jobs for the first year. More recently they settled in as waitresses at different diners in a city with a population of 40,000 people. Waitressing didn’t require fingerprints. Ashley and her sister wanted to avoid a job that would entail any kind of background check or fingerprinting. As near as she could tell, she wasn’t on any police short list of who robbed the Willow Glen Bank. They had forgotten her completely; she knew this because she created a fake forwarding address and no one from law enforcement had made any attempt to reach her. She also read the weekly announcements from the FBI. Each week they sent her 40-50 emails detailing the various arrests, convictions, or ongoing searches for federal criminals. The details of her bank robbery had not been cited after the first three years. She spent an entire year being a steady but boring co-worker at the bank and the pay-off now was no-one associated her with being remotely connected to the heist.

  She continued through the inspection area on the American side of the border. She’d been through a variety of passport control ports in the time since the heist with a variety of documents. She had two American names and passports as well as two Canadian. So far, no border guard had been the least bit suspicious with her documents. She had a three hour drive home. This latest trip had been to mail an item she’d sold online from a safe deposit box and to exchange twenty-five thousand in robbery bills into Canadian money and deposit it into a Canadian bank. She had opened bank accounts in many places across the world with the largest dollar amounts in the Cayman Islands and Switzerland. She and her sister had another million to exchange in currency and about fifty items from the boxes. They’d been able to sell the deposit box items much faster than the currency and at the rate they were going, they have another year to go before they had exchanged all of the currency.

  She texted her sister that she was through the border and settled in behind the wheel. After the Saute Saint Marie Border crossing, soon she was in the rural area of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Ashley debated discussing with her sister the possibility of exchanging the final million in five years from now but the slow exchange of currency and safe deposit box contents had put a strain on her relationship with her sister and she suspected that once they fully split the proceeds, they would each go their own way perhaps never to see each other again. She couldn’t pinpoint why they were no longer close other than they each had dreams of what to do with their money and there was little common ground. It was really quite sad.

  Ashley was tired of the travel involved with laundering the proceeds of the heist. She planned to purchase a house somewhere outside of the United States perhaps Australia or an island in the Caribbean and not travel. Australia was at the top of her list as she felt like it was a big enough continent to lose herself in; the Caribbean on the other hand had an illusion of being close to the United States. Once there, she would work on a few pet passions of hers like literacy and animal rescue. Hopefully in time she’d find a man to settle down with and children would come later. She had more money than she thought she could spend in a lifetime. Wasn’t that a good problem to have! Then why was she depressed?

  Growing up in a small town in Washington, Ashley and her sister had sworn that someday they would have it all – enough money to be who they wanted where they wanted. A big house and no more living paycheck to paycheck as her mother had done sweating out each month’s rent. They deserved better than that. She was gone now and couldn’t appreciate what her two daughters had achieved thanks to a well-executed bank robbery.

  “Well mom, would you be proud of us now? Or would you be ashamed?” Ashley said to an empty car.

  Nine years ago and they planned this bank robbery, they were giddy with delight during that drive across the country moving van. The adrenaline high had stayed with them for nearly the first year. Now the stress of time and many trips across the border was weighing Ashley down. They both hated their jobs as waitresses and the strain of living a low income life since the robbery was depressing for the soul. So was the worry about getting caught; she thought that fear would decline over time as they heard nothing from law enforcement. Instead, more and more, she felt a sword over her head was waiting to drop on her at any moment.

  Ashley thought back to when she conceived of the idea of robbing a bank with Michelle. They were sharing an apartment in an area affectionately known by the name ‘silicon valley’. Rent was expensive and the region was still recovering from a technology bubble. Ashley was working at a different bank than the one they eventually robbed, but it was where she got the idea. She noticed the ebb and flow of currency throughout the day and the work week. Those currency swings were due to merchant deposits. She knew if she timed it right, that she could get a lot of money out of the bank. There was a particular time of the calendar year where banks had the most money on their premises - Christmas. Bank customers withdrew more money in the weeks leading up to Christmas for gift buying and banks might increase their cash holdings by up to twenty-five percent to account for that. Additionally, merchants were seeing more cash come in and making bigger bank deposits and since it was difficult to balance the two on a hour to hour basis, the bank simply held more cash.

  After she figured out the best time of year to rob a bank, she went to work evaluating methods to get into the bank without setting off alarms. For another year, she and M
ichelle worked at another four banks to determine security set-ups as intelligence. They decided it was best to go after an old bank by digging into it and set out to find the oldest bank buildings in their area that had a empty retail space in the same block. An old bank often had a structural defect that rendered its security less effective. Their plan was to spend a year digging through to the bank from that retail space. Sleeping in a cheap bed space at a donut shop and plowing all their savings into maintaining the façade of the florist shop as well as for buying tools for digging.

  Ashley thought the strain of their plan would end when they reached their new home in the Midwest, instead they endured another nine years of managing their small budget, neither able to move on with their lives. It was such a big ongoing secret that it had interfered with their relationships with other people. Well she could walk away from the final million and the safe deposit box items. Either her sister could have it, or they could drop the money in charity buckets. She would announce her decision when she got home.

  She felt immediate relief to know she was moving on. So she spent the remainder of the drive deciding where she would move the next day and what she needed to do make a run for it. She could be in Australia in two days starting a new life down under. It was a big country and she would do research on a remote but livable area. Maybe head for Sydney, head north to Thursday Island and see how life close to the equator was or perhaps Kangaroo Island to the south. Both islands had enough tourism that she could fit in.

  Chapter 28

  It had been a late night for everyone Ariana and Hermione groaned at the early wake-up alarm to get her to water polo practice. Likewise Lily was pushing Jacob to get ready for school. Damian didn’t have set hours for his employees, rather he wanted to see progress on his projects and he did that by both formal and informal meetings throughout the week. He therefore didn’t worry about when his employees got to work or when he arrived at the warehouse so he opted for more sleep that morning. He wanted a sharp brain when he tackled the data about his bank robber’s movements.

  Damian awoke anxious to get a swim in before the day took over. He donned his full wetsuit and mask and was soon doing laps around the island. Even at the peak of the summer, the water temperature only reached sixty degrees so the bay was too cold to swim in comfort without a wetsuit. Forty minutes later he’d completed his swim and showered, arriving at his computer with coffee in hand to look at last night’s work.

  So he looked again at what the 3D search had done and it reduced the total to about one-hundred faces from the thousand plus faces of the first search. Last night he sorted by location and found the concentration at the Washington and the San Francisco airport. However he hadn’t looked at the faces yet to assure himself they were all of Ashley. He knew they couldn’t be as the number represented three to four border crossings a day. He started pulling up the faces to see if he thought they matched what they had on Ashley. He studied the first ten, looking for some distinguishing feature that screamed this was or wasn’t Ashley.

  He supposed he could back and log into the video to watch movement of these hundred subjects but he wasn’t an expert on how women moved when walking down the street so it likely wouldn’t give him any additional information. He’d probably drive himself crazy looking for similar gestures on video feed as well. If he wasn’t able to focus their search on the actual entry points where she might be; then this information was almost worthless. After more thought he decided he would analyze the entry points for the three most common border crossing sites in this month’s worth of data. He had Peach Arch, San Francisco, and Brownsville Texas. He created a spreadsheet with the date and time of each entry and then noticed another problem with his analysis - there were two dates and time too close together for one person to have carried them out. So Damian only conclusion was that his 3D software was matching people other than Ashley Carrington. He decided to put this search aside while he went to work on something new. Sometimes if he just walked away from a database search, a thought would come to him that would make it look logical.

  So he did that and went to work on Hermione’s problems instead. He checked on her parents’ finances and the mortgage on their house, utility, and taxes were still being paid on their house. He was amazed that he’d been unable to trace who was filling their account with money so the bills could still get paid. He could see deposits made to their bank account, he just couldn’t source them. Well, he could source them but it didn’t lead him anywhere. Maybe it was time to try doing another mega search for her parents - combine all public cameras in the Bay Area to see if they were sighted on them in the last month. Damian started his computer grinding through that data and left for the warehouse.

  When Damian arrived he sat down to review the strategic plan that Ariana had developed. It gave timelines for project completion, patent application, product sale or production as well as other metrics and recommendations. After living a life of random deadlines, he was surprised to see it all laid out on paper with deadlines driving the company’s behavior. He knew in the back of his mind that this was how a well-managed corporation was run, but it signaled the end of childhood for his inventions. He’d now have to be a responsible adult with employees depending on him and his guidance.

  Oh well, time to get to work and with the strategic plan in mind he went out and discussed the projects and projected deadlines with his employees as a group. He had to give Ariana credit for nailing the timelines. For not having an engineering background she nailed it to perfection. Each project due date was a slight stretch for each of them which was the way it should be. He called her to discuss the plan with her.

  “Hey, how’s it going?” Ariana said once she answered the call.

  “Good. I’m calling you to complement you on your strategic plan. I don’t think if I’d hired a Big Five consulting firm that they would of mailed the projects so accurately. Each one is enough of a stretch to keep people’s noses to the grindstone without working them to death. Kudos to your brilliance.”

  “I told you months ago when I suggested you incorporate that I did this kind of thing for companies.”

  “Yeah but you’re not an engineer, yet you broke down each project’s components and gave them appropriate times to completion; that’s brilliance.”

  “Okay thanks. I spoke with each of your employees on their projects and got a sense what had been done and what was still needed, then I planned it out. Do you have any changes to the plan?”

  “I just want to add Lily’s effort to the company and she’ll be doing the artificial intelligence for my field DNA analyzer as well as the self-protective vest. Add those and we’ll be good to go.”

  “Sounds like a plan. Not to change the subject but have you made any progress finding Hermione’s parents? It’s odd that you’re so talented with computer searches yet can’t find them.”

  “Yeah it is odd and I have no explanation. I have another search going at home. I’m checking every public camera in this region in the last month for their appearance. They’re still paying their bills for the house - mortgage, utilities and taxes. I thought over time that Hermione would learn to trust us more, but she seems determined to keep these secrets to herself.”

  “Yeah I know. I think she visits another place on occasion and thinks about her parents and their conversation and she thinks about telling me something. Then she pauses and seems to remember a different conversation and she bites her tongue. There seems nothing to do but wait her out or hope that we find the parents soon. Meanwhile we make admirable surrogate parents and she’s safe.”

  “Okay.”

  “When are you coming to the warehouse next?”

  “Probably next Monday as soon as I drop Hermione off at school. I want to meet with Lily and go over our pay and other processes and procedures. Then at the end of the day when she’s oriented to everyone’s projects, I’d like to have a conversation with her on the timeline to complete her projects. It’ll be a lon
g day and I’ll probably have you pick Hermione up from school so I can stay longer in Richmond.”

  “I can do that Monday and any other day you need help. She has a game tomorrow, right?”

  “Yeah, I presume I’ll see you there.”

  “Wouldn’t miss it. She’s one of the stars of that team! Do you want to do dinner after?”

  “Yeah, I’ll talk with her and see where she is homework wise. If she has a lot, we’ll do something at my house. If not we can grab a bite to eat out.”

  “Sounds like a plan. Thanks Ariana, and I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  Chapter 29

  Natalie was excited that her police contact, Kevin Shimoda, notified her that he’d be getting the personnel record of Arielle Joseph as well as the data from the auction houses. Now she had to put together a list of the pieces they thought were involved in the bank robbery and those auction houses would have fifteen days to provide names and addresses of the sellers. Damian had earlier supplied her with a list of the item he matched and fortunately, she understood the spreadsheet software well enough to sort by auction house and submit to Detective Shimoda within the hour.

  Detective Shimoda had already contacted the bank and they indicated that Natalie could stop by to pick up the copy of the file. She was on her way there as soon as she hit the send button on the spreadsheet. She was anxious to see what was in the file that might be of use to them in figuring out where their person of interest was now and if she was their suspect.

  While Natalie was embarrassed that several law enforcements agencies hadn’t solved such a large bank robbery in more than nine years, she was pleased that they seem to be homing in on a suspect. With her resources she’d put together a profile on Arielle Joseph. She had her juvenile criminal record, her family tree laid out, and some of her employment history. She hoped that once she got the personnel file that it would fill in the remaining holes.