Willow Glen Heist Read online

  He went inside the house and spoke with Ariana about the changes. Both women continued to feel empowered by the vest and while concerned about the intruders, they weren’t fearful for their lives.

  “Do you want to join us for dinner?” Ariana asked.

  “”I’m tempted but I’m anxious to see if I can find an identity to your intruder and it’s going to take me several hours,” Damian said. Then looking at Hermione he asked, “Do you have any scars?”

  The teenager looked at him confused. How had the conversation gone from dinner to scars?

  “Huh?”

  “I just wondered if you have any scars from injuries - you know like falling off your bike or cutting yourself accidentally somewhere?” Thinking about his own daughters he added, “Did you have scars from chicken pox?”

  Hermione still wasn’t following the change in conversation, but she thought about his question and replied, “I have a scar on my knee from a fall and a scratch mark on my arm from a friend’s pet cat that I got in China when I was around six or seven,” Hermione said showing him the two scars.

  “Okay, then your parents would know that if he they ever came across you with your changed appearance, they could verify your identity by the two scars, right?”

  “Right,” Hermione said still puzzled by the conversation.

  Ariana knew why Damian was asking and wanted to turn the conversation to a new topic. Searching her head she said, “Just a reminder that Hermione has a water polo match at four tomorrow and then on Tuesday we’re going to the ballpark to watch the San Francisco Giants. Hermione will have the chance to meet Lily and her son. Everyone else is also booked to attend.”

  Damian knew all this and appreciated Ariana’s effort to change the conversation as he’d gotten the information he wanted from the kid. Maybe he would come up with some answers regarding Hermione and the bank robbery once he got back to the island and spent time on the pictures and fingerprints. He also knew he wanted to bring back a scanner to see if she had something implanted in one of those scars. Was it a tracking device or some kind of memory stick? He hoped to find it was neither, but rather just ordinary scars.

  Damian arrived back on Red Rock Island with a list of things to do. He wanted to find out how good he was at fingerprinting as he now had several samples to run. Thankfully Natalie hasn’t called to ask where her results were since he didn’t want to explain why they hadn’t contacted the police in regards to break-ins at Ariana’s house.

  He grabbed his duffle from earlier and took all his evidence down to his lab for processing. Three hours later he had some answers on both cases. Arielle Joseph was probably also Ashley Carrington, someone with a sealed juvenile record according to the fingerprints that he’d retrieved from the donut shop. Ariana’s thug was John Lee again. On his first visit he was sprayed with pepper juice while on the second visit he ended up in a cargo net; what was making the man try to break into Ariana’s house? He leaned back and thought about Hermione’s mention of the two scars. Could either of them be an implant? What kind of sensor did he need to use to detect if she had some kind of data device on her? He leaned forward and searched for tiny implantable memory devices. It could also be a simple GPS chip so they would always know where she was, but that didn’t explain why someone else wanted the kid.

  He’d leave the Hermione mystery alone and take a look at her scars tomorrow, before giving much more thought to a Hermione scanner. One thing he did know was she wasn’t setting off routine metal scanners that one faced at large events. When he traveled with Hermione, they’d only flown on private charters so she hadn’t had to go through airport screening, but her school had a metal screener that she hadn’t set off. Neither scar sounded like it might be a source for a tracker, but he really didn’t know.

  Focusing on Ashley Carrington, he decided to see what he could find about her juvenile law encounter. He’d never tried to look at a juvenile court record before so first he explored why records were sealed and it actually seemed pretty routine. If a kid did time and followed his or probation requirements and their crime wasn’t horrible, then the record was sealed and the crime erased from the child’s background. The juvenile offense occurred in the State of Washington which had different rules for sealing the record than California. His real question was whether sealed or not, was the record at one time online? Given that the offense was about seven years ago, it was entirely possible that several online logs of the record were accessible to Damian’s inquisitive mind.

  He was yawning as he dug through several Washington databases. It was closing in on midnight and he wasn’t at his sharpest anymore. It had been an intense day and he’d carried an adrenaline rush for a while when Ariana and Hermione were threatened. He’d been doing boring coding work since he got home and both it and the day were wearing on him. It was time to go to sleep and start on the process again when he was refreshed.

  Chapter 24

  John Lee was treating the skin on his arms for an injury from yet another encounter with that Knowles woman. This time it was rope burns from that damn net. He also torqued his neck when the net took hold and flung him upward. He was just grateful that he had a knife on his person that he could use to hack his way out of the net. Thankfully he escaped across to the marina although it had been close for a moment as he sought items to cover the boat’s name and call sign and put the cover on it. He hid behind a dock pillar when the man in the boat came looking for him, or at least he thought he was looking for him based on the way he scanned the boats. He waited until he departed, then added another fifteen minutes and then he hopped in the boat and headed out to the marina across the bay that he rented it from. No one gave him chase.

  He wanted the kid and his employer was upset that he hadn’t captured the girl in four months. The kid’s parents had been taken out of their home tied up and in bags, but had eventually escaped. His employer was now convinced that the only way to bring her parents to heel was to grab the kid. After the parent’s escape, they had been unable to track their present location. The kid he found purely by accident. He’d been at a bar in Oakland contemplating how to find the kid when she walked in for a private party. He followed the woman she came with and was able to identify where the kid was being housed, but despite knowing where she slept, he been unable to steal her.

  Fortunately his employer was patient and only wanted the kid stolen in a manner that the authorities would be unable to detect her abduction. He tried reaching her through Facebook, but that hadn’t worked. The only two things that had made him feel better about this assignment was he hadn’t lost the kid’s parents and the parents were still in hiding and hadn’t contacted the girl. The men charged with the parent’s kidnapping had been abandoned by his employer. They were in America with illegal documents and no funds. Yes, John Lee was glad he wasn’t one of them.

  The girl’s father, Brad Jones, as he called himself at the time, had worked for his employer, Mr. Lin who was the CEO of a pharmaceutical company in Kuala Lumpur for over five years. One day the Jones family left Malaysia on a vacation and they never returned. It seemed that Brad took with them evidence of the chemical compounds used to manufacture some of the drugs that Mr. Lin produced and sold. Mr. Lin was a wholesaler and offered good prices to distributor in China and Africa. His prices were cheap because the medications were sold at a reduced potency since he diluted those chemical compounds. Of course the consumers taking the pills had no idea that their medications were weak.

  Things were quiet for a time after the family left the country and Mr. Lin decided he had nothing to worry about. Perhaps he’d been mistaken that Brad Jones had evidence of his manufacturing process. Then about two years later Mr. Lin received a message that unless he wanted his manufacturing process exposed to the world, he’d pay Brad to keep his mouth shut. The payments had gone on for over three years when John Lee had finally traced the family to the United States and California in particular. He’d been following the money for months
before he found the final resting place of a fifty thousand dollar payment each month; to a bank account that belonged to someone by the name of Sherwood that lived in Shepard Canyon, California. There were a series of bank transfers that bounced around the world and all those decoys had taken him forever to run down. The payments had continued and would continue until the evidence that Brad Jones had walked away with was found and returned to Mr. Lin who’d wanted this matter handled in the quietest manner. John Lee would have handled it differently if he was Mr. Lin. He simply would have killed the entire Jones family when he’d located their address, but Mr. Lin warned him not to do that. He said that Brad had set up a security system that immediately released information about his poor manufacturing if he didn’t log in on a certain website every three days. Should Jones fail to do that than the evidence would be immediately to a certain official in the Chinese Government as well as to the United States’ Food and Drug Administration. It was far cheaper to pay off Mr. Jones than to lose the permanent business of those two countries.

  When the couple were captured Mr. Lin had worried about that issue but the couple escaped before the deadline and he received no bad news from either government so it was either a hoax or Mr. Jones visited the website by the deadline.

  Mr. Lin hated to threaten a child but he’d do that to stop the blackmail from her parents. Thus John’s sole job at the moment was kidnapping the child and taking her back to Malaysia, but there were sort of in a quandary at the moment. John Lee wasn’t sure the parents knew where the child nor she where they were, and Mr. Lin had lost track of the parents once they escaped. So if he kidnapped the child, how would he tell the parents? What a mess of a job! He was tempted to quit and return home, but Mr. Lin would see that he never had another job as a private investigator in Malaysia if he did that, and he had his parents under house arrest somewhere. So he was back to trying to kidnap the kid.

  Where else could he take her from? She was well protected at home and at school. Maybe he’d spend a few more weeks watching her and see if she attended movies or some other social outing with kids her own age. That was when he’d have the most success at taking her. He’d just keep up surveillance of her home and school to figure out where else she might be.

  Chapter 25

  Normally on a Monday morning Damian would be heading into Richmond to the warehouse to work on his projects or see what advancements his employees were making. His business and his life were somewhat freewheeling at the moment as he had no deadlines in either. He’d been at work on the fingerprints since arising that morning and he still needed more time. So he let his crew know he’d be arriving after lunch while he worked on something at home. His butt and his back were beginning to ache from sitting on rather hard seats and he couldn’t believe they hadn’t bothered him before. He’d been so busy in his lab over the last twenty-four hours that his cats had been given dry kibble as he didn’t have time to fish.

  He thought back to six months ago before Ariana, Hermione, and his new company had entered his life. What had he done with his days? What had he done with his life over the past seven years since his family’s murders? He had his Red Rock Island home to build, and he’d helped Natalie with a few cases, he applied for additional patents, but if Jen and the kids were watching from heaven they must have been sadly disappointed in him. Well ok, they would be proud of his efforts to prevent any other murderous felons from being released. They’d be proud of him adopting the cats, they also be proud of him for rescuing Hermione, but that was pure fluke; she hid in his boat, he hadn’t sought her out for saving. It was the second time in as many weeks that he wondered what Jen and the kids would be thinking of his current life. Why was he having these thoughts?

  Okay time to move his morose thought beyond his late family and back to the job at hand which was figuring out who was involved in the robbery in Willow Glen. He stood and stretched; took a few deep breaths then refocused.

  Damian managed to hack into enough files to learn that Ashley was convicted in juvenile court of stealing money from the fast food restaurant that she was employed at in Spokane County in the State of Washington. That gave him a location to look for more information on Ashley. She went on to graduate high school then seemed to walk off the edge of the earth; he could find no further mention of the girl.

  Damian went back to Arielle Joseph to look for information on when she appeared. He would have thought that the bank did a background check on her prior to her employment; they certainly needed enough information to search her background for thievery. He dropped an email to Natalie that she request a subpoena for the woman’s personnel file. It would be full of lies, but he was sure there would be a few truths mixed in. He smiled when Natalie replied to his email that she already had thought to do that and it was pending before a judge that afternoon. He then read the guidelines for hiring employees. Several federal agencies recommend that banks fingerprint employees as a part of the background check. Nine years ago it wouldn’t have been that different, so how did she get past the fingerprint check? He’d wait until Natalie got the personnel file. He then thought of something else to ask Natalie and knew it was just easier to call her.

  “I had another question and decided I would just call you,” he said once she answered. “Can you get a picture of Ashley Carrington? I’d like to run it through software to see if she’s the same person as Arielle Joseph. Ashley did juvenile time in Spokane or she may have a driver’s license.”

  “You really think she’s our bank robber?” Natalie said.

  “I would have made a terrible detective as I have no proof. It’s just my mathematical mind not liking all the strange facts related to her profile.”

  “Where do you think she is now?” Natalie asked.

  “I hadn’t thought that far ahead. We know she sold items from locations all over the United States in years one to five after the robbery and that currency was introduced in heavy amounts in cities around the world. So if you had sixty million dollars to launder, how would you exchange it?”

  “That’s a good question. I’d probably hit casinos and use it to buy chips then cash the chips out. You could also buy cars and then resell them, I suppose. I’m trying to think of what big ticket items you could use cash for and there aren’t many items even eight or nine years ago. I guess the other thing you could do is open a business and run it through as receipts.”

  “Let me do some research on how drug cartels and other groups like that launder cash,” Damian said. “From a brief calculation though, if I spread sixty million dollars over three hundred sixty-five days of five years, I would have to launder about thirty-three thousand each day. Say you walked into a casino with cash of five thousand dollars, you still have to visit between five and six casinos a day to not be noticed by one in particular. It would be an exhausting five years.”

  “Yeah, but what a way to earn thirty-three thousand dollars each day! I’ll ask the guys in our organized crime area what they know about it,” Natalie said, amused that Damian would look for a sociological study of how criminals disposed of money. It was always a revelation as to how a scientist mind works.

  “I would have thought she had to move once about month. She’d have to have a physical address to be listed on most websites I believe. So if you move every two weeks to a new town that would be a lot of hotel stays or one month apartment leases. Maybe you rent a bunch of locations for a month and move around all of them. Apartment rent would be a nice way to place money into circulation but you wouldn’t get anything back. You usually need a physical address to sell stuff on the internet; if you use a post office box to sell, then it limits you to the Postal Service for delivery rather than UPS or Fedex which in the end isn’t a big deal I guess.

  “Remember that some of the cash showed up internationally; you could hide it in a car and drive it across the borders to be exchanged in Mexico or Canada. Border security is generally more worried about what you bring into the United States than what y
ou take out.”

  “Yes, but what would you do with the money with the money once you exchanged it? You’d have to deposit it into a foreign bank or drive back to the United States and re-exchange it back into dollars. It would no longer be marked, but you’d have a hard time accounting for it. I would think that once the bank sent you a tax form for interest on thirty million dollars that you would have to account some day for its origin,” Damian mused and then added, “I guess I make a lousy criminal.”

  Natalie laughed and said, “That you do, you’re talking yourself out of committing a crime before you even try! We don’t have the law enforcement resources to watch you that closely, and every hardened criminal thinks he or she is smarter than us, when actually they are far from it, but you truly are smarter.”

  Damian chuckled and then said, “I’m still stuck on how to launder sixty million dollars. It just seems impossible to me. I’d love to talk to a drug lord to understand how they do it. Though I think I’ve read about the complex empires they manage, so they’ll probably running through legitimate businesses. I guess I don’t see this woman doing that given the map of where we saw her exchanging money and goods.”

  “I agree with you, that the distribution of dollars points to her sitting low for a year and then traveling for the next several years across America and even the rest of the world. I wonder what she did in that year of down time?” Natalie questioned. “Maybe your mega computer could look through all the public cameras of the bay area to see if Arielle Joseph showed up in any of them in that year of waiting out the robbery.”