Outside the bank, the security guards watched the flow of traffic and the people who wound their way around the bank. They were on their way to the latest reconfigured shopping district in Old Town. It was hard to believe this was once a desolate place where everyone seemingly vanished after six in the evening. The flow of people continued uninterrupted and the bank guards kept watch over the human traffic with security cameras inside and a few out on the street. It wasn’t a very busy day
About five minutes later, a train of dog walkers appeared, each with a separate canine. No one thought this strange as the city had plenty of dog walking and pet sitting services. Each of the men wore a jacket with the logo “Franz Pet Sit” on the back. The dog walkers had three Rottweilers and a German shepherd in their care as they slowly made their way down the street near the bank. Witnesses would later not remember too much about them other than the look of determination each had on their faces. They apologized to a few people who blocked their way and moved on. Each dog was very well behaved and listened to a series of commands given to them by the walkers.
As they approached the vestibule of the old bank, the first dog walker pushed the door open and entered the bank with his animal. The other three did the same thing and went in through both sets of glass doors as each pushed them aside. Once inside the bank, the dog walkers were confronted by two security guards who informed them the animals were not allowed there unless they were service dogs. As it appeared the dog walkers did not need service animals, this did not appear to be an issue. Furthermore, none of the dogs bore a tabard around it, which would have identified the dog as a service animal.
The man in front of the walkers smiled at the security guard and yelled, “Action!”
Suddenly all four dogs went into their roles and either grabbed the arms of the two security guards or ran and growled at the patrons of the bank. Two of the dog walkers produced a piece of metal and secured the door to the bank.
“Everyone listen up,” the man who was at the front of the group announced, “These animals won’t harm you if you cooperate with us. Make any violent moves toward them and they will tear out your throat.”
They had picked their time well. The bank had few patrons and the bank manager was standing in the middle of the floor. Two of the robbers went up to him and produced a set of keys.
“We need to get into two boxes in the vault,” they told him. “Just let us get out of them what we need and you will be safe.”
“You’ll need a master key to get into the boxes,” he told them. “And I don’t have it.”
“You mean this one?” one of the robbers produced another key.
The dog walkers, turned bank robbers, went into the vault and then returned within a few minutes. The bag they had with them was full of the contents from the boxes. They went and stood by the man who spoke to the dogs.
“Return!” he yelled and each dog went back to its walker. They removed the metal from the door of the bank and walked outside. The entire process had taken less than three minutes. The alarm was ringing, but the robbers were inside a waiting van and in traffic by the time the police were on their way.
Meanwhile, over in the ninth district, Mike Williams and Lee Su Yuan were starting their day. Known as the “Odd Couple” by the Philadelphia Police Department, the two were as unlike a pair as could be found in Philadelphia. Mike Williams was a walking pile of confusion who wore a raincoat which had accumulated the results of his dinners. Lee Su Yuan, a first generation Chinese American, was neat and orderly who spent most of his salary on his appearance. He never drove an off model car and wore tailored suits. His partner Williams spent most of his time off at the local bar watching whatever game was on the TV. Yuan maintained a harem of women who waited on his needs and called him “Daddy”. He kept his personal interests out of his day job the best he could.
They were having their daily conference at the local diner both used every morning. They were running down the list of active cases the pair had on their agenda. Lately, the cases were slim. Their area of expertise lay in cases that were not easy for the department to solve. For all his slovenly appearance, Williams was a human crime calculator. He’d solved so many difficult cases the detective had been approached by a reality TV show whose crew wanted to follow him around and see what he did. He turned them down, not wanting the adverse publicity and saw no upside in a show about his life. For Williams, it was just another day on the job, one where he was gifted at the performance.
“Anything new on the menu?” Yuan asked him. “I don’t know if she has any specials today.”
“So what do you think of the food at this place?” Williams asked him. “Wasn’t your family in the restaurant business?”
“Still are,” he told them. “They’ve been approached to sell several times, but I don’t think it will ever happen.”
“Why?”
“What else are my parents going to do? They’ve already moved most of my relatives over here. I doubt dad would consider retiring back to China. The town where he grew up has the worst air pollution in the province.”
They ended up ordering off the main part of the menu, but it was the same thing that each of them usually ordered. The waitress already had their orders ready; all they needed to do was confirm them.
“That was fast,” Yuan said to her when the orders came out. This waitress was cute. She didn’t look to be more than twenty-one. Just around his favorite age. Yuan looked at her again and imagined how nice she might look in a thong. She had the just right build he thought.
“I can be fast when I want to be,” she told him, as the waitress hung back for a few additional seconds. This was a good sign. He’d give her his card when she returned with his personal cell phone number on it. She didn’t seem the type to use the “I’ve got a boyfriend” routine on him.
“Sweet little thing,” Yuan committed to his partner as she walked away.
“Christ, you can’t turn it off, can you?” his partner said. “Dude, give it a rest, it’s not even lunchtime.”
“You can do a lot before lunchtime with the right woman. As a matter of fact, I once had a girl doing some amazing things while I was cooking her breakfast. I was in the kitchen in my bathrobe and she was down on her knees doing….”
“Okay, that’s all I need to know, spare me the details.”
The waitress walked back to see if they needed anything else.
“I could use a whole lot of things,” Yuan told her and handed her his card. She had black hair and eyes to match.
“Why thank you, Detective,” she said to him. “I’m sure I could use the help of our town’s law enforcement from time to time.”
“We still make house calls,” he told her. “Keep it in mind if you suspect foul play anytime in the future. I can solve a lot of crimes against your person.”
“I’ll just bet you can,” she told him with a saucy smile.
“You call me whenever you have the need,” he told her and she walked away with a smile on her face.
The cell phone buzzed at William’s side and he picked it up. “Sorry to interrupt,” he told Yuan, “but this looks like the captain. I’ll have to take it.”
“Williams here,” he told the man on the other end of the phone and listened. Williams nodded a few times and returned the phone to his pocket.
“We have to leave,” he informed Yuan. “Tell your new girlfriend to put it on the tab, I’m good for it.”
“Something up?” he asked Williams.
“The Last National Bank was just hit. Captain wants us over there right now.” He stood up, put on his trench coat, and began to fasten the buttons. “Looks like a bizarre case, which is why they want us. The place was hit by dogs.”
“Dogs?” Yuan asked as he put his designer jacket on. “That’s crazy. I’m going to love hearing how they pulled that one off.” He turned and went to talk to the new waitress.
“Sorry, dear,” he sai
d to her as she approached him with the bill. Yuan took it from her, signed it and returned the paper to her. “I didn’t catch your name?”
“Chastity,” she told him while the waitress continued to smile.
“I like that name,” he told her. “Would your last name be ‘Belt’?” She looked at him with confusion. “Okay, that was a reference you didn’t get, sorry.”
“I’ll be sure and call you. Detective,” she told him.
“I’m sure you will. What shoe size to you wear?”
“Four, why?”
“Oh, just a thought. I might have something that would fit you.” He turned and joined his partner who was already on his way out the door.
As usual, they took Yuan’s SUV. Yuan refused to ride in Williams’ beater, which he called a death trap and couldn’t believe it had made it past the state inspection. “I know some people,” Williams had told him when Yuan asked how in God’s name the thing made it past the examination.
“What is this, the fourth new woman for you this month?” Williams asked his partner as they drove over to the scene of the crime. Yuan had the touch, he had to admit.
“Fifth, actually,” Yuan told him. “Two of them are sleeping over at my place this morning.”
“Two?” Williams asked. “How do you manage two at the same time? Oh, hell, I don’t want to know.”
They continued on until the SUV approached a bunch of police cruisers around the exterior of the bank. They pulled up in Yuan’s SUV after attaching the flashing blue light to the top and stepped outside. At an active crime scene, it wasn’t hard to find a place to park.
Inside the bank was pandemonium. Three officers and two plain-clothes women were interviewing the victims of the bank robbery. They all seemed terrified. Four news trucks were outside trying to get an interview. Yuan and Williams walked up to another detective they knew from the PPD
“What happened?” Yuan asked him.
“Craziest thing I ever heard,” the other detective told them. The place was robbed with trained attack dogs. And the robbers only took the contents of two safety deposit boxes. It seems like a lot of trouble to go to just to grab what was in the boxes.”
“Why this bank?” Williams asked him. “This place has changed hands more often that my friend here changes women.”
“Okay!” Yuan snapped.
“Sorry, had to get that one in.”
“Anyway,” the other detective told him. “They had it planned out. The perpetrators came in with four attack dogs which they use to control the patrons and security. They even had keys to the safety deposit boxes. And they had a copy of the master key to get into the back room. I don’t know why they went to this much trouble if they already had all those things.”
“Has anyone talked to the bank manager?” Yuan asked the other detective.
“We’ve got him in his office right now going over what he saw. Did you want to listen in on the interview?” They told him yes and were walked over to the other side of the bank. Inside the small office, the bank manager was in a meeting with two officers and another detective from downtown. He was a small man with a neat suit and tie. Yuan could tell he had been shaken badly by the incident. He sat in a chair in the middle of the room trying to tell the police just what happened.
“It was terrible,” he told the officers. “One minute I’m walking over to the counter to make sure the cash flow is correct and another I have the Hound of the Baskervilles growling at my throat. Of course I took them into the vault when they asked.”
“They had the master key to the safety deposit boxes?” one detective asked him.
“Yes. I don’t know why they needed to make such a big show of everything if they had that key. We’re an old bank with not too many patrons left. The corporation who bought us was talking about sending all the assets out to the Main Line and combining us with some other bank. All they would have had to do was sign in and use those keys to open the box they wanted. We would’ve caught them on the security feed, but only after the owner of the boxes came to open them.
“It’s hard to say.” one of the detectives said to him. “Did you say they didn’t take any money?”
“Not a dime, detective,” the bank manager responded. “Not one bill. But I don’t think it was ever their intent to take the cash.”
“Why do you feel that way?”
“Because it isn’t like in the old days when a bank robber would slip a note to the teller that told them he had a gun and to empty out the drawer into the bag. These days the cash is automatically dispensed by a machine, just like an ATM. The cash a teller takes in is sent out in the same kind of machine after they make the cash drop. You don’t have much loose cash floating around at a bank anymore. Most of the crooks know this and don’t bother to hit banks. Well, your better class of thief knows the deal; we are still hit by idiots who watch too much TV. They end up doing time. But this dog robbery was unlike anything I’d ever seen or heard about.”
“I agree,” the detective said to him. “I can’t think of another case where someone used a team of attack dogs in a robbery on this scale.”
Yuan and Williams walked around and listened to more interviews as the police tried to piece everything together. What really interested them was the precision of the operation. The men had entered with the dogs and left in a waiting van. The police had spent all day looking for the van until they eventually found it abandoned on the North side of Philly. The bank robbers had switched it out for another one behind an old, abandoned factory. Right now, no one in the neighborhood had seen a thing. It was a problem since now the police no longer had anything to go on.
“What do you think?” Williams said to Yuan. “I’m guessing they had some insider information. The job was carried out too meticulously. They had to know just when the manager was crossing the floor and have the van ready to leave at the exact time they needed it. That, or this bunch is the most professional group of bank thieves I’ve ever encountered.”
“Could be just good timing,” Yuan told him. “I’m more interested in what was in the safety deposit boxes. They went to a lot of trouble to get them. Has anyone checked to find out who owned those boxes?”
“I’m certain they’re working on it as we speak. It would be the sensible thing to do.”
“The sensible thing is not what is often done,” Yuan reminded him. “The bank doesn’t keep record of what is in those boxes. As long as the box holder pays the rent, no one will know.”
“Pretty scary,” Williams noted. “I would think they would do a periodic review. Makes me wonder what’s wrong with this world.”
Yuan’s cell phone went off. He looked at the number and raised the phone to his ear. After a brief chat with whoever was on the other end, he turned to his partner.
“We have to go again,” he told him. “It was the captain. Now he wants us on some murder which just took place at a condominium on the Landing. He just gave me the address, so let’s jet.”
They walked out of the bank and placed the medallions with their badges back into their pockets. It was time to head out to another crime, the second one today for them. As they climbed into the SUV, Yuan told Williams the name of the condominium where the murder had occurred and Williams let out a whistle.
“Expensive place,” he told Yuan. “I remember when it was built last year. They had loads of celebrities lined up just to look at the joint. I was able to get in and see it because I know a guy with the carpenters union who worked on the shelving. They spent a lot of money renovating it after the construction was complete because of all the fancy woodwork that needed to be installed. I wonder who was killed?”
“I’m sure we’ll find out soon enough,” Yuan told him. “From what he had to tell me, it was two women who were killed. Looks to be a real treat.”
They flashed their badges when they arrived and made their way up to the floor where the murders took place. Both of them were in the Ad
miral Billow Condominiums. Named after a famous swindler out West, the hotel and condominium complex took up plenty of room next to the river. It linked the famous Penn’s Landing area with a row of fancy apartment buildings and offices. It was the crowning achievement of a previous mayor until he was found to have profited greatly from the contract kickbacks. These days the former mayor spent most of his time in jail enjoying his infamy.
The doors opened and the first thing they saw was two officers blocking people from going too close to the room where the murders took place. By now, they had their medallions back on and one officer, a rookie just out of the academy, waved them on. Yuan and Williams walked in to the gruesome sight of two elderly women lying dead on the fancy floor of their condominium. Yuan went over and spoke to the senior officer in charge of the investigation.
“So what do we have?” he asked him. The sergeant pulled out his pad and looked at the results.
“Two women in their nineties, can you believe this?” He said to them. “Both came here from Argentina in the 1960’s. Lived off the Main Line, and then moved here after the construction was finished. Not much information on them other than their names, Sigrid Nurnberg and Frieda Schmidt. I can’t figure out why anyone would want to kill them. Doesn’t seem to be anything taken, so robbery wasn’t the motive.”
They looked again and saw Doc Stanford finishing his examination. Doc Stanford was an older black man who’d worked as a medical examiner for the PPD most of his life. He was looking at retirement in a few years and planned to move to Atlanta. Right now, all he could do was shake his head over more senseless killing. Why did these things have to happen on his watch?
“Cause of death?” Williams asked Stanford.
“Broke bones, eyes gouged, lacerations,” Stanford told them. “They were tortured to death. Who would do something like that to a pair of old women? I don’t get it. They were found by a maid who used a key to get in to clean the room. Nobody remembers talking to them, the old women kept to themselves. I can’t figure out a motivation for this one.”
The Untimely Death Box Set Page 29
