Willow Glen Heist

by Alec Peche

  Once she collected the personnel file and reviewed the information, she was fairly certain the SJPD would be able to name Arielle as a Material Witness and the local Washington State police would have reason to search the family property in search of Arielle. Hitting the send key on the spreadsheet of auction items for the detective, Natalie had her coat and purse and was out the door five minutes later.

  A short time later she was shown into the bank manager’s office. After verifying her identity and the copy of the warrant from Detective Shimoda, he released a copy of the personnel file to Natalie.

  “Is this everything in her file?”

  “Of course,” said the bank manager.

  “I wouldn’t want you to leave something out that you thought was irrelevant. It might be key to this investigation, so I’ll ask you again, is everything in this file?”

  “Yes,” said the bank manager with obvious affront at Natalie’s question.

  “Good, and thanks for your quick response. Detective Shimoda will be by later today to witness the opening of the five safe deposit boxes whose owners that the bank was unable to make contact with after the robbery.”

  Natalie turned and left the manager’s office and exited through the bank’s lobby to the street. She walked a block to her car, unlocked it and got in. Then she sat with the file braced against the steering wheel looking at the papers inside. She noted the address was different than the donut shop on her initial employment application and she would check that out. Her next of kin was listed as her sister, not a parent. That was curious. She’d have to go research the parents as she didn’t remember that they were dead.

  Then she looked at the references and noted an interesting fact, Arielle had worked at several banks. If she needed more information on the suspect she would have to go research those banks. She would bet that Arielle had been observing practices of the various banks as part of her planning process for the big heist. She skimmed through the remainder of the file and decided she’d go back to her office. She needed her bigger computer to do a little research and she wanted the police to check on Arielle’s sister and parents. They could look them up in the driver registration system faster than she or perhaps even Damian could do.

  She wondered if the sister was involved with the heist? Should they be looking for two suspects - two sisters rather than one? She thought back to her relationship with her sister and it was a love-hate relationship in their teen years that settled into love in their twenties. She could count on her sister for joining her in an adventure and maybe when they were young and foolish, a crime.

  On her short drive to her office, she thought about the sister more and what the experts had said during the initial investigation. They hadn’t thought one person could do this on their own. It was simply too much work - both the dig and the emptying on the safe deposit boxes in the time period in question.

  Back at her office, Natalie called her contact at SJPD to have a look at the driver’s license registries. The sister was listed as Mary Joseph. The name made Natalie search way back in her memory banks to Catholic High School. It would seem that if your last name was Joseph, that you would avoid naming your child Mary. It was just a little weird to name your child after the mother of Jesus and her husband, but if you were not aware of biblical stories she supposed it could happen. As a parent if you gave one child the name of ‘Arielle’, it seems unlikely that you would name another child ‘Mary’. Regardless it sounded to her like a fake name. She would also look under the Carrington name and see what the sister’s name was purported to be. Arielle Joseph would have to have a driver’s license as proof of identification, but the sister’s name wouldn’t be verified on Arielle’s employment application.

  Her contact called her back with Arielle Joseph’s information. There was no driver’s license issued to an Arielle Joseph, there was an old license issued to an Ashley Carrington in the State of Washington which Damian had already found, but it wasn’t renewed after its expiration date four years later. Natalie looked at the picture of a California driver’s license it in the personnel file and decided it must be a good fake. That also meant there were no fingerprints on record that could be matched to other state driver’s licenses, not that Arielle was still in the United States. If she faked a license once, she probably do it again, so this was a dead end. Natalie looked over the file to search for another thread to follow in the investigation.

  She tried another angle that was amazingly accurate and very old-fashion way to track young people; she pulled up their middle school and high school yearbooks. There were websites that contained old yearbooks and while you could change your name throughout your life with both legal efforts or fake names, it was impossible to go back and change your name in a long since printed yearbook.

  Natalie looked up Ashley Carrington and was shocked and excited by what she saw. She picked up the phone to call Damian.

  “Guess what?” she asked when he answered the phone.

  “What?”

  Chapter 30

  “Ashley Carrington has a twin sister. Her name’s Michelle.”

  “Where did you find that?” Damian asked wondering how he missed that fact about the girl.

  “Old fashion detecting. I pulled up Ashley’s high school yearbook and noted the picture next to her; what looks to me to be an identical twin.”

  “A print yearbook that’s been digitalized and put on the web? I’ll have to remember that in the future.”

  “Yeah before we had the internet, you would be amazed at two of our favorite sources - telephone books and yearbooks. Now the telephone books are worthless as so many people no longer have landlines, but yearbooks are still good.”

  “Do identical twins have matching fingerprints?”

  “No they don’t surprisingly.”

  “Do you know the twin’s location?”

  “I haven’t started looking, I just had to call you with that piece of information.”

  “So the twin’s name is Michelle Carrington and you think they might be accomplishes? Or is this just a FYI.”

  “I’m back to that original theory put forth by the FBI that it would take a minimum of two people to carry that robbery and perhaps this gives us a potential second person.”

  “Wouldn’t someone notice twins in the area and mention it like ‘hey is that your twin working at the flower store’ or something?”

  “That’s a good point since we haven’t figured out who leased the flower store. How about if that was Michelle Carrington? If Arielle never told her co-workers she was a twin perhaps no one noticed that they were twins and thought they were seeing Arielle around the neighborhood. Maybe the sister wore enough of a disguise, that people didn’t pick up on the possibility of twins. It’s been tried before successfully in the history of crime. Of course twins on a crime scene were caught in the end so we police know they were twins, but sometimes we don’t realize that initially during an investigation.”

  “Wow that’s a new wrinkle. Did you find anything of interest in the personnel file?”

  “That’s what lead me to the yearbook. She listed her sister as Mary Joseph on the next of kin question on her employment application. The name for many reasons didn’t seem plausible and that’s what urged me to go look at a yearbook.”

  “What’s not plausible about Mary Joseph?” Damian said with puzzlement in his voice.

  “It’s my Catholic school upbringing. Mary was the mother of Jesus and the wife of Joseph. When I looked the name up online, the very few people called Mary Joseph were of a religious order. It’s not a name that you would likely give a child in this day and age and besides we knew that Arielle Joseph was a fake name and Mary Joseph sounded even more fake.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “It’s nice to know I can out think you on rare occasion,” Natalie said with humor in her voice.

  “I’m pretty good with a computer, but I easily miss things like the irony in a name like Mary
Joseph for a potential suspect. I’ll see what I can find on Michelle Carrington.”

  “Thanks. I’m looking through state driver’s license registries and other things like that.”

  Damian had another thought, “How close are they in appearance? Did you say they were identical? Not fraternal? The camera views I have of them crossing the border might be either sister.”

  “If there weren’t different names under each picture I would have thought them the same picture.”

  “I’m going to go back to my data and see if any times of the border crossing are too close for it to be the same person. That should tell us if the sister is currently involved.”

  “Certainly that would explain the secret being kept of the robbery. Nothing like a twin brother or sister to keep secrets,” then Natalie paused as another call came in.

  “Hey Detective Shimoda is calling and he was visiting the bank this morning to open the five unopened safe deposit boxes. I’ll call you back if there’s any news.”

  Natalie ended her call with Damian and switched over to the detective’s call.

  “Hi, it’s Natalie. What did you find in the safe deposit boxes?”

  “The box of Arielle Joseph was empty. She visited the box when she acquired it and then never again, so perhaps it was simply to have a key. Of the other four boxes, there were materials in one of them - paperwork, and the other four were empty. So no new news on the case with this thread. Did the suspect’s personnel file show you anything?”

  “Yes, guess what! She has an identical twin sister. I’m researching her at the moment, but perhaps she’s the partner in this crime that we’ve been looking for.”

  “Identical twin?” Shimoda asked.

  “Yes. My college students are looking at the data they analyzed on border crossings to see if two crossings occurred too close together for one person to have been at both locations. If so, then that confirms that we have a set of twins involved.”

  “Involved? Is that a Private Detective term?”

  “We have a lot of suspicion about this woman as there are just too many quirks with all of the information we’ve located about her not to be guilty of something.”

  “Keep me posted.”

  “Will do.”

  Natalie called Damian back and he laughed when she mentioned that she told the detective that her college students were running the data to see if they were implausible border crossings.

  “Thanks for taking like twenty years off my age.”

  “Is the run done yet?”

  “Yes and no. I have the run done, but I don’t have a computerized method to check how far one border crossing is from another. So it’s a manual process. Fortunately over the month there are just a few dates to review and I’ll have your answer in a few minutes.”

  “Okay, email me your results when they’re available,” Natalie said as they ended the call.

  Chapter 31

  Damian took a look at his spreadsheet and there were only three crossings on the same day in the entire month. He studied them further and decided it was possible that all of the border crossings were done by one person. There simply wasn’t an example of coming through the San Francisco airport and then Peach Arch in Washington an hour later.

  He leaned back and thought about which would be faster; get more footage of the cameras of the border crossings or do a deep dive on Michelle Carrington to see if he could figure out where she might be now. Knowing that it had taken all night for the first analysis he thought it would be faster to query Michelle. Then Damian thought a little longer and decided to start with the parents - Mr. And Mrs. Carrington; it might say something about the daughters.

  A minute later he hit a dead end. The parents were killed twelve years ago in an automobile accident which was apparently when the twin daughters moved to the Bay Area. They would have been about nineteen at the time. There appeared to be no siblings and no mention of an estate. He looked a little farther and found a few aunts and uncles in the northwest, but with no connection to the girls. Women, he corrected himself; they would be approaching thirty years old.

  Okay then where are you Michelle Carrington? First he decided to look at her fake name Mary Joseph. Did she use that name at all or was it simply something that her sister had thrown on an employment application? Arielle had at least some identification with her name as she would have needed that for employment. Granted that identification was fake according to Natalie.

  How about social security numbers? As twins their numbers should be a digit apart. He dropped an email to Natalie asking for the social security number listed in the employment application. Maybe he might trace one or both of the twins that way.

  Natalie replied with the number and he went to work. First thing he checked was the flower shop rental - had a social security number been used for that? Looking through the file he had from Natalie, they had a copy of the lease agreement for the florist shop from the landlord. Surely the landlord did a background check on the person he was planning to lease to? There was a social security number and it was a digit off from the number Natalie just gave him. He had no idea how hard it was to get a fake number but it appeared he had the twins’ real social security numbers as they were a digit apart. He googled buying a fake identification, but wouldn’t an employer run into problems if they tried submitting tax dollars to the federal government with a fake social security number? The answer was yes, the women would be caught with fake ID at the bank and elsewhere. So either they had valid fake numbers or they were using their original numbers.

  So what could he find from the IRS? There were a few systems he’d never attempting hacking but if the Russians could do it, why not him? Of course the key to hacking was not being discovered and really all he wanted was the address listed on the tax return or just even in the IRS records. He’d been lucky so far in his phantom mode of hacking but he worried about pushing the envelope and so decided to try something perhaps easier - look through the top three tax software systems to see if he could find an address. On his third and final try he struck gold with an address for both sisters in Kalkaska, Michigan. It was only a post office box, but it was a starting point for their search.

  He picked up the phone and called Natalie.

  “Hey, I’ve got a mailing address for the twins. It’s a city called Kalkaska, Michigan.”

  “Awesome. Where’s Kalkaska? And how to tell Detective Shimoda that we have an address?”

  “It’s near Traverse City on the upper western side of the state. Why not tell the detective that the social security number was on the employment application that you picked up today and since your college students found one of the twin on their cameras, you thought you’d just check with the Michigan Department of Motor Vehicles.”

  “That will work. I’ll just have to do that before telling the detective. How did you really find the address?” Natalie asked, then paused and added, “Wait don’t tell me how you broke the law. I’d rather remain ignorant.”

  “Okay well see what you can do with the address. I’ll see what I can find about Michelle. By the way, I thought most bank robberies were investigated by the FBI and I haven’t heard you mention them once in the weeks we’ve been on this case.”

  “You’re right that they take the lead usually, but since this is coming out of the cold case division, we don’t feel a need to involve them. I figure we’ll pick up the telephone once we have the suspect or suspects in custody, just before we start our press conference.”

  “Do I detect animosity between your two agencies?”

  “When I spoke with the original detectives on the case they relayed what jerks the FBI guys were. The department doesn’t forget slights like that.”

  “Remind me never to anger you cops,” said Damian and they ended their phone call.

  Damian sat back and thought about the investigation. Various pieces were coming together to build Natalie’s case against Ashley Carrington. He thought they would be done with
this case within the week. He wondered what the twins had spent already and what was available to retrieve from them. Certainly they had nine years to pawn items from the safe deposit boxes. It would be a mess getting back those hundreds of items, but that wasn’t his problem; Natalie’s fake college students had that list for whoever’s job it was to run down the items.

  Damien had another question in his head about the bank robbery. Why did Ashley have a safe deposit box and how did they get the other boxes open? He picked up the file on the case and looked for the answers to his questions. The detectives at the time of the initial investigation said that it appeared the boxes had been opened with keys, but how could that be? Ashley had a key to her own safe deposit box and she likely had at one time or another used the bank’s master key to assist a customer with access to their box. So even if she had a copy of the bank’s master key, that wouldn’t open all the other boxes in the vault.

  The FBI speculated that one of the robbers had locksmith capabilities given the sleekness of the box openings. They initially hadn’t realized that the boxes had been hit during the robbery. A week after the robbery, a customer came in requesting access to their box and discovered it empty of everything but paper. Reading about the locks, it was likely given the age of the bank building that the locks contained a resettable feature; bank employees could then reset the locks themselves when a customer lost a key or closed a box. Locksmiths considered these older locking systems to be temperamental with the average bank employee having difficulty resetting the lock on their own. Most of these lock systems allowed the bank to reset the renters side. Apparently the upside of the system was that older delicate mechanisms slipped and the bank thief could wiggle a change tool back and forth to change the lock or open it up.