There were federal vehicles as well as the local police. Looked like the police were trying to keep the crowd and press back. Maybe customers, too. Was the bank actually open while all this was going on?
“Look, they’re arresting someone!” He heard someone say, and everyone in the crowd swelled a little closer.
He saw Sabina getting into one of the Raging Ford police vehicles. Looked a little like the Sergeant’s SUV, that Sergeant Fitzpatrick. He had a good reputation in the town, but wait, Sabina was getting into the front seat, not the back. She wasn’t being arrested, maybe just escorted somewhere. Wasn’t she engaged to someone who worked at the police station? Yeah, that Army vet who lost a leg. Everybody knew him, had welcomed him back with a homecoming parade.
But wasn’t Sabina the one Jessica thought was watching her? So what could this mean? Maybe she was being brought in for questioning? Would the RFPD do that? Wouldn’t the FBI?
He stopped someone coming back from the bank parking lot into the wooded area.
“Did someone get arrested?”
“No. Not yet. The FBI’s still there.”
Dotson waited a while longer to see if anyone was going to be taken out in handcuffs, but the FBI cordoned off the area, took numerous boxes from bank and loaded them into two vans. They were still there when Dotson decided to leave.
Well, maybe now everyone would find out what really happened, especially since Jessica put the accounts back the way they were supposed to be. They were probably smart enough to track all of that activity which meant they’d be smart enough to find out who did it in the first place.
Just then, Dotson spotted a familiar car pulling into the parking lot. It seemed that Aaron Nilsson was just showing up. He was talking with one of the FBI agents, hands were moving, heads were shaking and nodding. Good thing Nilsson was there, Dotson thought, because now somebody was really in charge and they’d find out for sure what happened two years ago, since then, and right now, with Jessica’s murder.
He took off to pick up his bike and head back to his tent in Eagle Junction for the night. Lying low would have to continue until the FBI discovered who was behind this mess because it wasn’t Dotson, and he knew he was still a suspect.
•••
Sabina looked shell shocked when Connor picked her up at the bank.
He had pulled into the bank parking lot and been stopped immediately by an agent who didn’t know him. A quick call to the special agent in charge got him into the bank and Sabina’s office where his friend Special Agent Nolan Frye was explaining to Sabina that they were going to keep her car and check her apartment.
“You’ll need to find someplace else to stay tonight but don’t leave town. We’ll be finished by morning and you can come back to your apartment. A few things might look out of place, but don’t worry. We won’t leave a mess. And we don’t break things.”
He looked up.
“Hey, Connor. I was just explaining to Ms. Morello the searches we’ll be conducting for every employee. She’s not being singled out. Ms. Morello, did you say your boss should have been back by now?”
She nodded and gave him Nilsson’s cell phone number.
“Can she stay with Jack Flynn?” Connor asked. “Oh, and what can she or can she not discuss with him?”
“No prohibitions. Just don’t leave town.”
“Sabina, I’ll give you a ride back,” Connor said. “Can she call Jack?”
Nolan nodded.
“Ms. Morello, would you mind stepping outside for a moment so I can talk with Sergeant Fitzpatrick?”
As soon as she was outside, Nolan turned to Connor and lowered his voice.
“I’m really interested in this guy Dotson who’s missing. Somebody around here has been logging in remotely for a long time. And what’s up with the absent bank manager that nobody can seem to find?”
Connor shook his head.
“Don’t know him well, just by name and face. I have a friend who’s on a committee with him. She might be able to tell you what he’s like. Give me your card. I’ll have her call you.”
“Will she talk to me?”
“Oh, yeah,” Connor responded, smiling. “Her father was Lieutenant Francis Keene. When it comes to law enforcement, she’s like a mini-him.”
“Sorry we had to keep Sabina so long. It was more so the rest of the staff would stay calm. We’ll know more about whether she’s still on our list after we check her apartment and home computer. The forensics team has all the staff laptops, including hers. It will take a while for them to go over everything completely, but trust me, her apartment and home computer will tell all. If there’s anything suspicious, and I hate to say this, but we may have to look into Jack Flynn.”
Connor did everything to keep his cop face intact.
“I would trust that man with my life.”
“Yes, I know. And I can give you volumes of names of people that others could trust who turned out to be really bad people, but you probably already know that. We may have to check, depending on what we might find at Sabina’s apartment. If we find nothing, that’s the end of that trail.”
“Okay. Need me to do anything?”
“Crowd control. Newspaper control. Geez, I hate small towns.”
Connor’s face cracked.
“That’s why I live in Duluth, Nolan. We have a great little newspaper here, but we don’t really need it. Been able to reach Nilsson yet?”
“Somebody just texted me he’s in the parking lot. Hopefully, he’ll be as helpful as Morello was. I want this wrapped up as much as you do, and quickly.”
Outside, it was a different world than when Connor had arrived just thirty minutes earlier. He hustled Sabina into the front seat of his SUV and turned to the press, namely, Charlie Kovacs and his team, and repeated the statement Nolan had given him to read.
“In light of the recent murder of a Raging Ford Bank and Trust Company employee and the unknown whereabouts of a second bank employee, the FBI has decided to reactivate their investigation into a two-year-old case of alleged bank fraud at the Raging Ford Bank and Trust Company. That’s all we know. No other information has been released.”
“What about Sabina Morello? Are you arresting her?”
“I’m giving her a lift. Nobody’s under arrest.”
“Aw, come on, Sergeant. Give us something!”
“You’ll have to wait for the FBI spokesperson to make an announcement. This is their investigation. That’s all.”
And he drove her back to the station.
•••
Connor gave them his office with the blinds shut. He wandered into the Comm Center and found, to his surprise, Laura Keene sitting next to Corporal Sven Mortensen who was manning some of the screens. Another officer was running fingerprints through the computer.
“Closed a little early today?”
She nodded.
“Sven was just showing me how to operate the voice- and motion-activated cam action when it comes in. It’s trickier than I thought because the cameras keep getting pulled in different directions unless you control them from here. Like manual override on Star Trek.”
“And I will never ask you to do that for us, Laura, but I imagine Corporal Mortensen was just babysitting you, wasn’t he?”
Mortensen was a big football-playing hulk, but he tried to shrink so his boss couldn’t see him. Unfortunately, it didn’t work. Fortunately, he was able to turn his attention to a routine traffic stop that just showed up on one of the screens. He began addressing it, logging it, and all the rest.
Connor motioned for Laura to come to the break room.
“I can’t tell you anything. Sabina’s upset and she can’t go home tonight. She’ll probably stay at Jack’s. As soon as I know something I can share, I will.”
Laura leaned toward him and kept her voic
e low.
“I didn’t come here to pump you for information. I came because I thought of something.”
“Can it wait until they leave?”
She nodded.
“Oh, I talked with Chief Mallory about your being an occasional consultant and he’s fine with that.”
“He was?”
“Yeah, I was as surprised as you are. He told me what paperwork to fill out and get you to sign and he would approve it.”
“Wow. That easy.”
“I know they do contract with private consultants a lot in bigger cities where they sometimes have a shortage of officers, but not so often in small towns like Raging Ford. The money isn’t much.”
“You know I would share any little ideas I had for free. I’m doing that now.”
“Don’t say that. There is a different budget for this and they do pay consultants. Just not a lot.”
“What?” she asked, seeing a change on his face.
“I don’t know. I just think that if you get involved, the Chief might also be more involved to make sure everything’s kosher.”
“Don’t you want him to be?”
“Well—Okay, here they come. We’ll finish later.”
Sabina looked considerably better than she had before seeing Jack.
“Sabina said they were nice to her; she’d just never been through anything like this before. I appreciate any strings you pulled, Connor. Anything you can tell us?”
“Not yet because I don’t really know how their investigation is proceeding. Now, both of you leave. Just stay within the town’s boundaries.”
Connor and Laura watched the two of them go, arms around each other’s backs.
“They make a good pair, a nice couple,” Connor commented.
“I agree,” Laura said, turning toward Connor’s office. Once inside with the door closed behind them, she spoke again. “Okay, so what’s your issue with your boss being more involved?”
“It’s not that I don’t want him to be, it’s that we’re all used to moving like a well-oiled unit, and he might slow things down a bit or throw a monkey wrench in because he’s not used to the details and may want to know them.”
“I don’t have to be a consultant, Connor. I can just keep giving you my uneducated guesses from what it looks like to me.”
He looked her in the eye.
“You need the background facts to be able to help me.”
“Tell me exactly what a consultant does. Can I keep Googling?”
He exhaled.
“Yeah, you can. Just means you’ll be working from actual case facts and not blindly flailing through that crazy Internet jungle.”
She was silent a moment.
“Wasn’t I helping you before?”
“Somewhat.”
“Just ‘somewhat’?”
“More than somewhat, but you can help me a lot more if you work from actual case facts. Like the day your shop was broken into and you noticed that the figurines were organized in a pattern. Wouldn’t have happened if you had only heard about the break-in.”
“Can I sleep on it?”
“Sure. And I almost forgot to tell you,” he continued, pulling Nolan’s business card from his pocket, “please give Special Agent Nolan Frye a call. He’s in charge of the bank investigation. Tell him what you know about Aaron Nilsson.”
“I don’t know that much, just seeing him at the SPDP&G committee meetings.”
“That’s what he’s looking for: your impression of Nilsson. Now what was your new idea about the bank case and the murdered woman and the other missing employee?”
“Blackmail.”
thirty-two
The subject of blackmail was put off until they could speak freely and privately, which turned out to be a pizza dinner in Connor’s office about three hours later after the day shifts switched and the evening patrols left the station. There were two officers in the Comm Center with the door closed.
“I was just thinking…” Laura began.
“Is that going to get us into some kind of trouble?”
She smiled.
“No, I might have to invoke one of the town’s contest ordinances if more than one person guesses the correct number of chocolate coins in the bowl.”
“Do you really think someone will?”
“I’m sure we have a few high-scoring math majors here.”
He took a sip of his root beer.
“Chief Mallory will want to interview you, but he already wants to hire you as a consultant, so it will be a formality.”
Laura swallowed a bite of pizza, chased it with soda.
“Aren’t you the one who told me not to take on so many activities?”
“This is an activity I can’t seem to stop you from doing, so I thought we could make it more productive for everyone involved. I’m just glad the chief is in agreement.”
“I guess we’ll all see how it turns out. I still want to sleep on it. And I had a very interesting experience in the shop this afternoon before I picked up the pizza.”
“You’re closed on Mondays.”
“Jade Wilkin showed up and made a big fuss over the costumes that she assigned me to make for the SPDP&G committee members to wear at the parade. I swear, I don’t know how this committee puts anything together. They’re the most dysfunctional group I’ve ever run into.”
“Rina Holm keeps everything in order.”
“Don’t get me started on her.”
He took another slice of his “six toppings” half of the pizza.
“How can you eat that?” he asked, indicating Laura’s Hawaiian pizza.
“Got used to it in Maryland. Lots of people like it. Want to try a bite?”
“No thanks. Tell me about Jade.”
“She came stomping into the store, after pounding on the door, with her cross and cranky mouth telling me she refused to wear black leggings unless she could wear a cute little frilly black skirt over them.”
“What did you do?”
“Since I don’t really care, as long as she wears the other parts of the costume so she’ll be recognized as a helper, I told her to go for it.”
“Then what happened?”
“She expected an argument, so she didn’t know what to do, but she left after that.”
“She does crave attention and goes wherever she thinks it will be.”
“Then Colin Anderson came by just as I was locking up behind Jade and wanted to purchase one of the new glass serving pieces I got from an estate when Eric Williams stopped in. I told them both to come back tomorrow when the store is open. You know, I can’t figure it all out, but Eric seems to show up almost every time Colin does, and I wish you could have been there to see how annoyed Colin looked this time.”
“I should stop by more.”
“You should. I like your visits. Oh, you mean to see the boys in action. It’s very entertaining when it’s not interfering with my customers. Seriously, it’s happened several times now, and it’s like Eric’s following him on purpose. There’s something going on I haven’t figured out yet.”
Connor was silent a moment then changed the subject.
“Talk to me about your blackmail hypothesis.”
Laura was finishing her last slice of Hawaiian pizza and offered Connor a bite.
“Last chance,” she said, but he shook his head.
“Well, there are two basic ways to get money that doesn’t belong to you and you’re not entitled to have: stealing and blackmail.”
Connor held up a hand, rose to take their pizza trash and napkins to the bin in the break room. When he returned, he sat back in his chair and listened.
“You’ll have to wait until you hear from your friend, Nolan, about the results of their investigation. I hope he tells you what they f
ound. Oh, by the way, I called him this afternoon and talked to him about Nilsson.”
Connor nodded his thanks.
“So once you hear the results of the present-day investigation, and I think they’ll find the same thing as before – no money missing, just money moved around, you have to ask why someone would do that.”
“I did, two years ago.”
“I’m sure you did, and I’m sure the FBI did, too. But if no money was actually taken, that would explain why the FBI put the investigation on hold, and why the bank never put in a claim for lost funds. So we’re back to block one: Why would someone do that?”
Connor reached for his IBC root beer bottle and polished it off.
Laura got up to walk about the little office, physically illustrating the question with motions, hands, facial expressions.
“There could be lots of reasons. Was it for fun? Could be. But that begs a second question immediately. Why would someone find that fun? I think fun falls into the same category as a hacker who hacks to show that they can. Let’s leave the money and identity theft part out of it for now because right now, in our case, no money was taken. At least not two years ago when the FBI first looked into it. I think it’s going to turn out the same now, but we don’t know that for sure yet.
“A second reason could be to cover up mistakes, erroneous postings, some of those other things that can happen when one customer has more than one account. Mind you, I’m just finishing up tax returns for my customers, and one of them had three accounts. She’s been very conscientious for two years with her information, but this year, she sent me information for one of the accounts while I was working on straightening out her second account. I called her when the numbers didn’t add up, and she apologized she’d sent the wrong paperwork. Then I had to spend extra time being careful with her third account. Case closed. Tax return corrected and filed. So, covering up a mistake or fixing a mistake.”
Hanging by a Thread Page 17
