Every Second

9

Roseoak Park, New York

FBI special agent Nick Varner held out his ID to the NYPD officer whose patrol car blocked the entrance to the bank’s parking lot.

Marked NYPD units from the 111th Precinct dotted the lot and the area surrounding the SkyNational Trust branch. A heavy-duty response, Varner thought, but then this was Roseoak, middle-class neighbor to upper middle-class Douglaston, with its winding hilly streets and waterfront mansions on Little Neck Bay. The entire region was an appealing, sleepy corner of Queens where not much happened, and residents here wanted it that way.

“Yeah, take it over there, pal,” the officer said.

Varner parked his Bureau car, collected his notebook, his recorder and organized his thoughts. He knew the drill. He was thirty-nine and had put in twelve years with the FBI that had included a tour at headquarters in Washington, DC, assignments in Los Angeles, Phoenix and, for the past seven years, the New York Field Office in Manhattan, where he’d been a member of several task forces. Now he was pulling double duty, assigned to Violent Crimes and the Joint Terrorism Task Force.

He sized up the building. Typical suburban detached box. All the blinds had been drawn. A sign had been posted at the front doors. Printed by hand in block letters, it said the branch was closed. It directed customers to the nearest branch and ATMs in the area.

Varner went to the rear entrance and showed his ID to the uniformed officer there. She nodded and handed him some tissue-paper shoe covers. Varner tugged them on and entered.

The lobby was active.

Investigators with the NYPD’s Crime Scene Unit were just setting up to go into the vault and start processing it. Two others were talking to a guy in a suit who Varner took to be a bank security chief.

“Nicholas Alfonso Varner. Well, I’ll be damned.”

Varner found himself shaking hands with a familiar big-chested man in his fifties, a badge hanging from his chain: NYPD detective Marv Tilden. They’d worked together during the final years of the Joint Bank Robbery Task Force before the NYPD pulled out. They’d spent enough long hours as partners for Tilden to know Varner’s middle name was Alfonso, and that a few generations back, Varner’s family had come to America from Italy. Officials at Ellis Island had changed their name from Varnisanino to Varner.

“Morning, Marvin,” Varner said. “You must be close to hanging it up.”

“One more lousy winter, then we move to Nevada. Hey, you’re alone? You feds never come alone-and you got here pretty fast.”

“Traffic was kind to me, and the others are on their way. What do we know?”

“Not a lot. We’ve barely started.”

“What can you tell me?”

Tilden described how Dan Fulton, the branch manager, came to work alone talking up an emergency branch transfer. “Then he violates security procedures, fills a bag with cash and disappears. No GPS, dye packs, transmitters or bait bills.”

“The tally?”

“They’re still calculating, but it looks like two hundred and fifty thousand, which would just about clean them out of cash inventory.”

“What’ve we done so far?”

“Like I said, we’re just getting started. We’ve alerted the Real Time Crime Center, put out a BOLO for Fulton’s car, a 2015 blue Taurus SEL. We’re calling on traffic to put people at toll plazas, but that’s a resource matter-we can’t cover them all. We’re checking to see if the car has anything we can maybe get a signal on, like a GPS. And we’ve got people heading to his house. Whit Tallbreck, SkyNational’s security guy, is just getting his legal department’s blessing to volunteer the cameras, and he’s got people pulling Fulton’s file. We already ran him and nothing lights up.”

“What’d you think, Marv? Duress, drugs, debt-he just flip out?”

“Any of the above. Look-” Tilden nodded to a desk in a far corner “-my partner, Betsy Mendelson, is talking to one of the two tellers who were here when it happened. I’m about to interview the other one. Why don’t you join me, be like old times?”

Annie Trippe sat alone in the lunchroom at the back of the bank.

She was holding a mug of hot tea to keep from shaking. When she wasn’t dabbing her eyes with a tissue, she traced the words World’s Best Mom on her mug between glances at the staff bulletin board next to the fridge. It was feathered with notes, selfies from vacations and a group shot from the tug-of-war for charity.

Dan Fulton was smiling with his arm around her.

Looking at it, Annie’s lower lip started to tremble.

“Hello again,” Tilden said as he entered the room. He held out an arm toward another man Annie hadn’t met yet. “This is Nick Varner with the FBI. We’d like to talk to you about what happened.”

Chairs scraped as the two men sat opposite Annie at the table. They flipped through their notebooks to clear pages, logged the time and copied Annie’s information from her driver’s license before starting their recorders.

“Can you start by giving us a time line and step-by-step account of your actions?”

Annie steeled herself then related details of the morning; how she and Jo Ballinger arrived, followed branch opening procedures and what had transpired when Fulton got in. Varner and Tilden took notes, nodded, asked occasional questions.

“Everything was by the book and routine until Dan arrived.”

“And you say he seemed a little off center?” Tilden asked.

“Anxious, distracted, troubled even.”

They made a note.

“And he insisted you violate policy with the transfer directive that he’d created on his computer and demanded you sign it after reading it carefully?” Varner asked.

Annie nodded.

“Did you read it?” Varner asked.

“No. It was a policy violation and I refused to sign it.”

“Where’s this directive?” Varner asked.

“Still on his desk in his office, I think.”

“Did your people look at it, Marv?” Varner asked.

Tilden’s chair scraped as he stood and left the room. A short time later he returned wearing latex gloves, a file folder in one hand and the transfer directive in the other. He looked grim as he laid the printed form on the table for them. Annie went still as she read the note Dan had scrawled on the signature line: Family held hostage at home! Strapped bombs on us!

She suddenly felt sick, but before she could say anything, Tilden reached for his phone.

“We need ESU on the Fulton house ASAP!”