Roses Are Red

Chapter Twenty-One

At 9:00 a.m. I met with a neurologist named Thomas Petito who patiently explained the tests Jannie would go through. He wanted first to eliminate some possible causes of the seizures. He told me that worrying would do no good, that Jannie was in excellent hands his -and that for the moment the best thing I could do was to go to work," I don't want you worrying needlessly," Petito said. "And I don't want you in my way."

I drove 1-95 South to Quantico that afternoon after I had lunch with Jannie. I needed to visit with the FBI's best technicians and profilers, and they were at Quantico. I didn't like leaving Jannie at St. Anthony's, but Nana was with her and there weren't any major tests scheduled until the following morning.

Kyle Craig had called me at the hospital and asked about Jannie. He was genuinely concerned. Kyle then told me that the Justice Department, the banking industry, and the media were all over him like a cheap suit. The FBI dragnet now covered most of the East Coast, but it wasn't delivering results. He'd even flown in one of the agents from the team that had tracked down master bank-robber Joseph Dougherty in the mid-eighties.

Kyle also said that Senior Agent Cavalierre was running the task force. I wasn't too surprised. She had struck me as one of the brightest and most energetic of the Bureau agents I'd met, other than Kyle himself.

The agent from the original Dougherty team was named Sam Withers. Kyle, Agent Cavalierre, and I met with him in Kyle's conference room at Quantico. Withers was in his mid-sixties now; he was retired and told us he played a lot of golf in the Scottsdale area. He admitted he hadn't given much thought to bank robbers in several years, but the horror of these robberies had caught his attention.

Betsey Cavalierre got right down to business. "Sam, did you get a chance to read our write-ups of the Citibank and First Union robberies?"

"Sure did. I read them a couple of times on my way here," Withers said, running the palm of his hand over his buzz cut. He was a beefy man, probably two hundred forty pounds or more, and reminded me of retired baseball sluggers like Ted Klusewski and Ralph Kiner.

"First impressions?" she asked the former agent. "What do you think, Sam? Is there any connection to the current mess?"

"Big, big differences between these jobs and the ones I worked on. Neither Dougherty nor Connor was violent by nature. Those guys were basically small-town, small-time criminal minds. "Old school," like those commercials you see on ESPN. Even the hostages spoke of them as "congenial" and "pleasant." Connor always carefully explained that he didn't want to steal anything in the hostages' homes Said he didn't want to harm anyone. He and Dougherty both despised banks, and they despised insurance companies. That might be the hook-up with your perps."

Withers continued to reminisce and conjecture in a soft, sleepy Midwestern drawl. I sat back and thought about what he had just said. Maybe somebody else out there despised banks and insurance companies too. Or possibly they hated bankers and their families for some reason. Someone with a deep enough grudge could be behind the robberies and murders. It made some sense, as much as anything else we had.

After Sam Withers left the conference room we talked about other cases that might relate to this one. One in particular caught my attention. A major robbery had occurred outside Philadelphia in January. Two men had kidnapped a bank executive's husband and infant son. They said they had a bomb and threatened to blow up their hostages unless the bank vault was opened.

"They kept in touch with walkie-talkies. Used police scanners too. Kind of like the First Union job," Betsey reported from her extensive notes," It might be the same people who did the First Union."

"Any violence in the job outside Philly?" I asked her.

She shook her head and her shiny black hair flipped to one side," No, none."

With all the resources of the FBI and hundreds of local police departments, we were still nowhere on the robbery-murders. Something was very wrong with this picture. We still weren't thinking like the killers.