Granny always carried a tote deposit bag that she would begin to unzip as she approached a teller. She would reach inside the bag and pull out a weapon that forensic image enhancement indicated was the same type used each time, a nine-millimeter short-barrel pistol, a toy. The orange tip required by federal law on the barrels of realistic play guns had been removed. She would slide a note to the teller, the same type of note every time, that read: Empty the drawers in the bag! No dye packs! Or you’re dead! It was written precisely, boldly, on a small piece of paper from a plain white notepad. She’d hold open the deposit bag, and the teller would stuff it full of cash. Granny would zip it up as she hurried outside and got into a car driven by her accomplice, the man the FBI called Clyde. In each instance, the car had been stolen and was found abandoned a short time later in a shopping mall parking lot.
When Benton had first walked into the conference room several hours earlier, he’d instantly recognized Granny and the notes she passed. The handwriting was so perfect it looked like a font. The FBI said it was virtually identical to a typeface called Gotham, the unassuming basic lettering of urban landscapes, the straightforward design commonly seen in signage, the same writing used by whoever had addressed the FedEx envelope that had contained Dodie Hodge’s singing card, and possibly the same writing on the address of the FedEx package that contained the bomb. It was hard to know with exactitude about the latter. According to the flurry of e-mails from Marino, the airbill on the bomb had not survived the water cannon. But maybe it didn’t matter.
Images of Dodie Hodge in various disguises and her handwriting were all over the SAC conference room’s walls, video stills of her in “Aunt Bee” attire, as innocent as Mayberry, walking in and out of banks. Benton would have recognized her anywhere, regardless of her efforts at disguise. She wasn’t going to get rid of her big jowly face and thin lips and bulbous nose and the way her ears stuck out. There was only so much she could do about her matronly body and disproportionately thin legs. In the majority of the robberies she was white. In a few she was black. In a recent one this past October, she was brown. A harmless neighbor, a grandmother, innocent and sweet-looking. In some of the stills she was smiling as she hurried out with at most ten thousand dollars inside her fire-resistant tote deposit bag, a different-colored one each time: red, blue, green, black, all offering adequate protection if her written instructions were ignored and a dye pack exploded, spraying an aerosol of red smoke and dye and possibly tear gas.
It was possible Dodie Hodge never would have come to the attention of anyone and would be robbing banks again, maybe robbing them for a long time, had her partner in crime, whose real name was Jerome Wild, not decided to get a distinctive tattoo on his neck when he was at Camp Pendleton last May right before he went AWOL. The tattoo was one he never successfully covered, didn’t even make an effort, not with a high collar or a bandana or the professional-quality makeup Dodie used, trace residues of it recovered from the getaway cars. Mineral makeup, Marty Lanier had explained. The FBI labs in Quantico had identified boron nitride, zinc oxide, calcium carbonate, kaolin, magnesium, iron oxides, silica, and mica-the additives and pigments used in technically sophisticated eye shadows, lipsticks, foundations, and powders popular with actors and models.
Jerome Wild’s tattoo was large and elaborate, and began just above his left collarbone and ended behind his left ear, and maybe he didn’t think it was a problem. He was the getaway driver and never stepped inside the banks, and likely assumed he would never be captured on camera. He assumed wrong. In one of the robberies, a security camera at the corner of another bank across the street captured him clearly behind the wheel of a stolen white Ford Taurus, a hand out the window adjusting the side mirror. He was wearing black gloves lined with rabbit fur.
That photo, which was his downfall, was on a video screen inside the SAC conference room, and it was a face Benton had seen before, just last night, in security stills from Benton and Scarpetta’s own building. Jerome Wild in dark glasses and a cap and black-leather rabbit fur-lined gloves. Skeletons climbing out of a coffin covering the left side of his neck. The still from a bank robbery and the still from last night, next to each other in windows on a big flat screen. They were the same man, a pilot fish, a small predator, a recruit who was too unsophisticated and reckless to believe he’d ever get caught or to give it a thought. Wild didn’t know or care about tattoo databases, and Jean-Baptiste didn’t either, it seemed.
Wild was only twenty-three, was bright and craved excitement and loved taking risks, but he had no values or beliefs. He had no conscience. He certainly wasn’t patriotic and didn’t give a damn about his country or those who fought for it. When he’d enlisted in the Marines, it was for money, and when he was sent to Camp Pendleton he hadn’t served in the Corps long enough to suffer the loss of fallen comrades yet. He hadn’t boarded the C-17 yet that was to take him to Kuwait, hadn’t done a damn thing except have a good time in California, all expenses paid. The only inspiration required for what was a deeply symbolic and serious tattoo had been the idea of getting a tattoo, any tattoo, as long as it was “cool,” according to another soldier who had been interviewed several times now by the FBI.
Wild got his cool tattoo and soon after returned to his birthplace of Detroit for a weekend furlough before he was to be deployed. He never went back to the Marine Corps base. The last reported sighting was by someone who’d gone to high school with him and was fairly certain he recognized Wild in the Grand Palais hotel casino playing the slot machines, and hotel security recordings had confirmed it was him. Playing slots, at the roulette table, at one point walking the floor with a well-dressed elderly man the FBI had identified as Freddie Maestro, believed to have ties to organized crime and the owner of, among other establishments, High Roller Lanes here in New York. Two weeks later in early June, a bank branch near Detroit’s Tower Center Mall was robbed by a frumpy white woman in a linen suit who was driven away by a black man in a stolen Chevy Malibu.
Benton was stunned, and he felt foolish. He needed to reexamine his life, and now wasn’t a good time to do it, not during a discussion like this with people like this inside an SAC conference room. For all practical purposes, he had gone from being an enforcement agent of the law, an officer of the court, to becoming a fucking academic. A bank robber had been his goddamn patient, and he’d had no idea because he wasn’t allowed to do a background check on Dodie Hodge, wasn’t allowed to look into anything about who or what she was beyond a loathsome woman with a severe personality disorder who claimed to be the aunt of Hap Judd.
Benton could tell himself all he wanted that even if he’d done a thorough background check on her, what was there to know? Logically, the answer was nothing. He felt angry and humiliated, wishing he was FBI again, wishing he was carrying a gun and a badge and had the imprimatur to find out whatever the hell he wanted. But you wouldn’t have found anything, he kept telling himself as he sat at the conference table inside a room that was, of course, blue, from the carpet to the walls to the upholstery of the chairs. Nobody found out anything until you saw her pictures on the wall, he said to himself. She wasn’t recognized. She wasn’t searchable by computers.
Dodie had no identifying feature, such as a tattoo, that might end up in a database. She’d never been charged with anything more serious than being disorderly on a bus in the Bronx, and shoplifting and disturbing the peace in Detroit last month, and on neither occasion was there any reason under the sun for anyone to link this fifty-six-year-old bombastic and unpleasant woman to a series of cleverly executed heists that not so coincidentally completely stopped while she was a patient at McLean. Benton reminded himself repeatedly he could have checked her all he wanted and never linked her to Jerome Wild or the Chandonnes. The link was dumb luck. Jean-Baptiste’s bad dumb luck, because nothing was ever enough for him. He’d carelessly left his DNA in a stolen Mercedes, had done a number of things of late that went too far. He was decompensating, and now he was before them, before Benton again. Not just a link or a branch but the root.