Willow Glen Heist Read online

  “Where did you hear that from?” Damian asked.

  “One of the other kid’s mothers was in a bookstore next door and heard the commotion.”

  “So who knew that she had a massage?” Ariana asked.

  “The kid’s mother heard Mrs. Abbott telling the salon that they needed to provide her with a free massage since they allowed hoodlums to lurk outside their doors.”

  “Wow, she really is an unpleasant woman,” Ariana agreed. “I wonder if Mr. Lee knows Mrs. Abbott is not me, yet.”

  “I think it probably depends on his ethnicity,” Damian said. “In the passport picture from Malaysia, he marginally appears to be Asian, but that could be enhancements to his face. Studies show that you see facial detail better in the ethnicity you’re surrounded by most. If he really is from an Asian country, than he may not realize you’re different people.”

  “I’ll keep my ears open for word of a second attack,” Hermione said smirking while getting out of the car at the high school.

  The door closed and Damian said, “I hope we’re not setting a bad example for the kid."

  “We might be,” replied Ariana. “Let’s remember to discuss it with her this evening. What are we going to do next week? You can’t continue to escort her to school and back each day.”

  “I could continue to do that, but you need the protection as much as she does and driving her to school is not your only destination each day.”

  “Okay, you have a plan I can tell. Do you want to share it with me?”

  “I’m of two mindsets. One, we hire 24/7 security for the two of you; or two, you go back to your private life with a few more protections?”

  “Like what?”

  I’ve been playing with some additional protection devices. If you don’t mind wearing an ugly vest whenever you’re out in public, I could give you some options.”

  “An ugly vest? Please explain.”

  “You know those vests that photographers or fly fishermen wear?”

  “Yeah and I would call them an ugly vest. What have you invented?”

  “I’ve been working over the summer on a pepper juice water gun 2.0.”

  “A 2.0, huh? What does the ugly vest do?”

  “The material is a lightweight, bullet proof fabric that I’ve used to sneak into Hermione’s house both times. The vest has a variety of pockets all filled with something you could use in your defense. The base of the vest contains an air horn as a personal alarm. Each pocket is capable of spraying something twenty feet.”

  “What are you loading the vest with? Your standard pepper spray, or something else?”

  “Actually, a variety of things. I do have my standard pepper juice, but I’ve also added an exploding net to tangle someone up with, and a purple smoke bomb. The vest shoots from the front or back. Ideally someone will be within ten feet of you for the items to work, although the air horn might cause you to lose your hearing.”

  “How many vests do you have?”

  “Just so happens that I have two. I’m sure Hermione would not be able to wear it to school, but she could leave it in your car and wear it everywhere but school.”

  “Is the vest on your island or at company headquarters?”

  “It’s at home.”

  “How about if we head to your home now? Do you have plastic coveralls and goggles so I can try it out? I wouldn't want to spill any substance in the vest on my clothes or in my eyes.”

  “I do and that sounds like a plan,” Damian said as they headed for her dock.

  An hour later the two of them were heading in separate boats to the Richmond marina. Damian wasn’t sure of his schedule and Ariana felt so comfortable with the vest for protection, she was going to pick Hermione up on her own and bring the kid to his house that night so she could try the gadgets in the vest, then have it available for her protection.

  Damian made arrangements with Lily for the meeting with Natalie in the early afternoon He knew he should work on his inventions, but part of the reason he started the company was to take some of that research off of his shoulders . So he let go and let his employees further his ideas. Instead he had a list of items to research related to Hermione. He suspected he’d have a new assignment from Natalie after their meeting with Lily this afternoon, based on some of the things she’d said in her discussion with Damian.

  Top of his list was discerning if Nico Thomas and John Lee were related or even the same person. Indonesia and Malaysia were geographically so close together he couldn’t help but wonder.

  Next on his list that he’d thought of a few days ago and hadn’t written down and so it escaped the edge of his conscious until this morning was the camera search for Alameda County. He wanted to locate all public cameras around the east bay and then do a facial recognition search for Hermione’s parents starting with her likely route to school.

  Next he wanted to look at all the pictures of cars that followed or were otherwise near Ariana's car the previous day.

  He had four hours before the meeting with Lily and Natalie in which to answer these three questions at the top of his list. The time flew by, but he had his answers.

  He was convinced that Nico and John were the same person and he knew how to verify it; collecting dust at home were some twenty to thirty fingerprints that he pulled out of the Shorewood house including some he had collected expecting them to belong to the thug who had remained in the house trying to capture Hermione.

  Chapter 17

  Natalie spent the first ten minutes of their meeting trying not to like Lily, but it was just impossible. Like Damian had said, she was very smart but he’d fail to mention her charisma. That must have kept her safe in prison which was never an easy place to survive. She had cons try to manipulate her in the past, but that wasn’t Lily’s charm. It was the power of talking to a woman who knew where she was in the world and where she was going. They even shared a story about raising sons. At first she’d been unhappy with Damian for putting her future daughter-in-law near a convicted felon on a day to day basis, but she’d reached the conclusion that there was no danger for Haley and besides Haley could hold her own.

  “Damian mentioned that the tools found at the site were not the tools you would use for such a robbery. Can you expand on that statement?” Natalie requested.

  “There are pluses and big minuses to going after the cash in the vault. On the plus side, you can come away with millions of dollars and goods, and the negative side, it’s very difficult and time consuming; to be successful you need to be patient and take your time along the way. I stayed away because while I understood banking systems, I had no such confidence in the engineering. I debated going after the bank vault in Santa Barbara. I discovered a utility pipe large enough for me to crawl through that ran through a series of business and so I got the plans from the city and studied them.”

  “What stopped you?” Natalie asked, fascinated by the logical method this ex-con had of looking at criminal jobs. So many of the cons she came into contact with had huge problems controlling their impulses which was what got them into trouble.

  “It was a combined sewer and electrical pipe. It was very old and caused frequent power failures to the businesses located over it; that’s what brought it to my notice. What stopped me was the vision of crawling on my knees in sewage and being so disgusted by it that I accidentally raise my head and connect to the electrical wires. The rats down in the sewer would begin gnawing on me as soon as the smoke from my burns cleared. No thanks,” Lily said shuttering at the thought.

  “Got to agree with you there Lily; that’s about the least attractive bank heist I can think of,” Natalie agreed.

  “So the first thing I would do is get a list from the city of everyone who’s ever checked out the plans for that street. I say street, because a smart bank robber wouldn’t check out just plans for the bank; he or she would go after the entire block,” Lily suggested. “Do you know the reason the florist shop space was rented as opposed to any other s
pace on that street? Did you look at credit card payments for that store? Don’t you need some information like social security numbers or business identity numbers for the credit card companies to give you billing rights? I would circle back and interview the employee that witnesses saw in that store.”

  Both Damian and Natalie had been scribbling notes as Lily talked. Natalie couldn’t tell if Lily was speaking from the prospective of having done a similar job in her past, or if it was her logical mind putting pieces of a puzzle together.

  They wrapped up their conversation on the bank heist and Natalie said, “Damian mentioned that you’re going to work for him. My future daughter-in-law works there now and loves her job. I wondered if I might occasionally call on you to discuss a case with you? You have a very interesting mind that helps me see the way out of a dead end.”

  Lily was having a range of emotions sweep her over Natalie’s question ranging from: ‘help a cop?’ to ‘she’d probably already warned her daughter-in-law no to associate with a criminal’ to ‘I can’t believe I’m giving my criminal secrets away to a cop’. It was like smoke or fog swirling in her head; and then all of a sudden it cleared and she thought of her twelve year old boy at home that she wanted to set an example for.

  “Sure I’ll help. Call me when you have questions,” Lily replied.

  They stood up to go their separate ways - Natalie to her car, and Damian and Lily back to the warehouse as Lily left her car there.

  “How did you meet Natalie? It doesn’t feel like your paths would have crossed. Did you meet her through Haley?”

  “No, my wife and two children were murdered by a convict mistakenly released by Soledad prison. She solved the case, killing the guy. She also started this memorial ceremony for me each year on the anniversary of their deaths that has brought be peace a little more with each passing year.”

  “Wow,” was all Lily could think of to say initially. Then she added, “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

  Damian just nodded and then she added, “I’m amazed you can stand to be around me since I’m a convicted criminal. You can take back your employment offer.”

  If was the first time Damian had heard anything less than her high degree of personal confidence and so he added, “You didn’t use a gun or indeed any weapons in your heists. If you had hurt or killed people you wouldn’t be working for me. If you violate my trust, I’ll hunt you down electronically and steal every dollar you’ve ever made in the stock market or anywhere else for a charity of my choosing.”

  Lily felt a frisson of fear at his threat having no doubt he could do it. She tried to lighten the atmosphere in the car and said, “Hey, I’ll confess to you every speeding ticket and library fine I earn.”

  He said, “Good,” and smiled at her to let her know they were back on solid ground.

  After polite comments of departure they went their separate ways in the parking lot; Damian inside to work, Lily home to pick her son up from school. Despite the threats from her new employer, she was very much looking forward to her new job. Perhaps that had been her problem when she graduated from college, she’d been unable at the time to surround herself with very smart people. Damian had asked her to begin work on Artificial Intelligence for a DNA analyzer. She hadn’t a clue where to start and planned to spend the time between now and her first day of work figuring out how to create it. She thought that Damian probably knew she was in over her head, but he suggested that algorithm and if-then sentences were used to write code so she should be able to figure it out. Maybe it would be a something she and Jacob could learn together. He seemed to respond well to competitive challenges so she’d set one up around coding. She had a regular customer as waitress and she knew he did coding for some tech firm. She’d bet he could point her to a website or give her instructions on how to learn coding and setting up a competition for her son and herself.

  Damian was back in his office checking on the run he designed before he left for the meeting with Natalie. He gave a silent cheer as he found his first new evidence of Hermione’s parents’ lives. He managed to locate them on the public cameras on a major Shepard Canyon camera.

  When he pulled up the pictures though the excitement bubble burst. They managed to consistently keep their faces turned away from the camera while driving just like the pictures in the house. He thought that kind of behavior might be taught by a spy organization.

  He sat back staring at the screen of results, then leaned forward and furiously typed away. He wrote a second program to map her parents movements for several months to see if that told him anything, then he walked away letting the computer chips grind away at a huge amount of data. It was one of those programs that he wasn’t sure it would give him anything useful but until he tried it, he wouldn’t know.

  He left his office to walk towards one of the experimental rooms that he set up. He was working on two additional devices for the protective vests - a strobe stun gun, and a pneumatic tranquilizer gun. He put aside the tranquilizer gun and focused on the strobe stun gun. Using an LED flashlight he created a pulsing light that was very hard to look at. Anyone that looked into the light was disoriented, would lose their sense of balance and fall to the ground. He wanted to do a few more tests on it and then it would be ready to be added to the protective vests for Ariana and Hermione.

  An hour later, he was satisfied with his testing and had the two strobe lights ready to go. Ariana was picking Hermione up from school without him and they would journey to his home tonight for Hermione to get her vest. Now it was time to work on the men that seemed to be chasing Ariana. He hadn’t as yet identified the first man that chased her and he hadn’t done anything with the pictures she taken in Silicon Valley when her car tire was stabbed. Another hour of work on locating information on the man and the cars left him with little confidence that he had the right answers. It was time to head home and maybe he would see if he could chat with Natalie along the way. He wondered what her thoughts were about the information Lily had relayed.

  Chapter 18

  “So what did you think of Lily?’ Damian asked when Natalie answered his phone call.

  “As a cop, I don’t have much faith in people changing their lives; in fact I was trying to think of someone I arrested in the last decade that reformed and I was unable to think of a single con that turned their life around. Lily feels like she has, but I assume that you’re not just taking her word for it?”

  “What do you think?” Damian asked.

  “My guess is that you wouldn’t have hired her unless you were convinced that you could access all of her accounts - email and financial to assure yourself that she was on the right path.”

  “You’d be right about that plus I let her know I had the means to steal every last dime from her at the moment. She may overtake me intellectually someday, but not now. I think she’s committed to staying straight due to her child and the fact that she only set out to rob banks on a lark and that song no longer plays for her. I thought she made some salient points on the bank robbery. I think the police and the FBI had it wrong from the start about multiple robbers using the equipment left in the tunnel. How do we move forward? What does your detective think about the sales of the safe deposit box stuff?”

  “As you know he thinks that the University has a smart group of kids assisting me. He used your data to get search warrants for the major auction sites. Obviously we want to trace the stolen goods. Once the judge issues the search warrant, we’ll still be at least thirty and probably sixty days out to get the seller information. This is a cold case, so we can’t light a fire under anyone to get information sooner than that.”

  “Are you willing to reconsider the tools used in the heist?”

  “Yes after talking to Lily. I’m starting to see this as unlikely to be team attack.”

  “Is there an engineer mentioned in any of the documents as being consulted on the case?” Damian asked. He had the full file, but he thought that Natalie might remember some details off th
e top of her head.

  “They didn’t use an engineer at the time. It was too costly. Perhaps if they caught the perpetrator they might have used an engineer to help with their court case, but we local police departments can rarely afford consultants on a case such as this.”

  “How about the bank employees? I know none were suspected at that time, but it wouldn’t hurt to go back and verify that. And one more question, can you give me a run of other things that were happening at the same time? Can you get a copy of whatever was called into local police and fire as needing their assistance?”

  “Yeah I can do that, but I still can’t afford to hire an engineer to render an opinion.”

  “That’s okay, I’m starting to see the viewpoint of your fellow cops, just because it was possible from an engineering point of view, I’m not sure that gets us anywhere. Obviously it was possible or the robbery wouldn’t have occurred.”

  “The bank employee names are in your file on page twenty-three. Why don’t we both work those names?” Natalie suggested.

  Damian moved forward to the page that contained the names. There were fifteen listed.

  It made him think, “Natalie, this list must be the employees that were just at the bank that day. It seems too small to represent everyone needed to operate a bank branch. I would also want to know the cleaning service as well as any building repairs that were made in the year before the robbery.”

  “That’s not in your file. I’ll have to contact the bank tomorrow and they’ll need time to research it. If their corporate offices hire those services out, it may take even longer to get the information.”

  “One final question and I know this one is out there. Could the tunnel and digging be a diversion for another guy simply walking in the bank after hours and opening the vault?”