Boldt And Matthews: No Witnesses Part 15

Daphne said, "Difficult if not impossible to trace. She thought of everything."

"And this number?" Boldt asked, leaning over her desk and pointing it out to Guillard. "A credit card?" If it was a credit card, the charges could be traced-just the kind of paper trail he was hoping for.

"No. It begins with the digit eight. That is an ATM card," she replied.

"She ordered an ATM card?" Boldt said uneasily.

"By now she has it," Guillard informed him. "Our latest marketing campaign. Have you not seen the advertis.e.m.e.nts? We guarantee an ATM debit card within two business days of opening a new account. No usage fees, no service fee for the first six months. Our compet.i.tors take several weeks to issue the cards, and most charge a variety of fees."

"Two days?" Daphne questioned.

"Two days if you pick it up at a branch office. That is part of the marketing, you see. It provides our customer service representatives an opportunity to cross-sell. It has been an enormously successful campaign."

Boldt knew that unlike retail outlets, bank video surveillance systems worked on continuous twenty-four-hour loops, erasing the last twenty-four hours as they went-stopped and reviewed only in the event of a security problem. The timing of the application, the pickup of the ATM card, and the threat sent to Adler all ensured the establishment of an anonymous bank account, and a way to get at the funds that seemed to the layman nearly impossible to stop. "There have to be thousands of ATMs," Boldt let slip.

"What is it?" Guillard asked.

Boldt rushed his words. "We'll need a full accounting of the ATM card activity and the card's personal identification number." He added quickly, "Do we know if the PIN was generated by your computers or selected by the customer?"

She referenced her computer terminal, typing the request.

An ATM card seemed to Boldt an ingenious method of collecting the ransom, because they would have so little time to locate and prevent the withdrawals. And with this thought came a sickening feeling in his stomach that boiled up into his throat and forced him to excuse himself and seek out the bathroom.

When he returned to Guillard's office, he felt no better and he knew by Daphne's troubled expression that he must have been very pale. He lost more of his color when Guillard informed him that she did not have the PIN information immediately available.

"It's time," Boldt said.

Daphne understood immediately. She said to the woman, "Ms. Guillard, we need to tell you something in the strictest of confidence. When we asked to see an account executive, that eventuality was made perfectly clear, so obviously you are a person to be trusted or your name would not have come up. Before we go any further, however, you should know that by coming into our confidence you are, by default, committing to what may be a long-term a.s.signment, possibly with a great deal of hours involved. Long days. Long hours. There's no way to know-"

"But that's how it looks," Boldt said. "If you would prefer-for any reason-for us to work with someone else at the bank, now is the time to say so. You should think about this carefully."

"You're with Homicide," she directed to Boldt. He nodded. "And you're a psychologist dealing with the criminal mind."

"That's one aspect of my work, yes," Daphne conceded. She felt like telling her, I try to keep the burnouts from eating their barrels, I try to keep the marriages from falling apart, and I try to help the junkies and alcoholics to save their badges. She continued: "Right now I'm trying to piece together a possible profile of whom we are after."

"I will help you," said the French woman. West Indies perhaps, Boldt thought.

"You're sure?" he checked one last time. "This isn't 'Murder, She Wrote.' This can get ugly." Daphne nodded. Briefly, it seemed to him that none of them was breathing.

"I want to help. It is either a ransom or an embezzlement or a suicide. Am I correct?"

"Or maybe all three," Daphne said.

"May I?" he asked, indicating the door. He didn't want anyone to overhear what it was he had to say.

Lucille Guillard's face registered shock, concern, and terror. She hung her head and then looked at him with impa.s.sioned eyes and said, "She's going to get her ransom through the ATMs."

"Unless we use the ATMs to catch her," Boldt proposed.

The woman's eyes began to track behind her thinking. She did not look too convinced.

"Can we do that?" he asked.

Daphne asked, "Can she withdraw enough money for this to make sense?"

"She has one thousand dollars in her opening balance. That does not qualify her as a Personal Banking Customer. Mind you, with this ransom demand of one hundred thousand dollars on deposit, she will qualify for Personal Banking. PBCs have a user-defined daily ATM ceiling. The card is really a debit card. Withdrawals are made against the account balance."

"Withdrawn from the same machine?" Boldt asked.

"The same machine, yes. The same transaction, no. Do you see the difference? The physical limit of any one transaction at an ATM is four hundred dollars. That's all, four hundred. That is not something we can override, but is imposed by the manufacturer of the machine for a variety of security reasons. So: per transaction, a total of four hundred. But the number of concurrent transactions is dependent entirely on the imposed ceiling, or the account balance, depending on the type of account."

"So it is possible-technically possible-to get at the ransom through the ATMs," Boldt verified.

"If the account is structured properly, quite possible. Yes. Thousands a day, I suppose, if the customer set it up that way. The highest daily ceiling that I'm aware of is ten thousand dollars. That was requested by a rug merchant who uses the card for international buying. In his case, however, he uses the machines infrequently. It's used more as a cash advance card."

"And tracking the individual. Is that possible?"

"It is quite complicated, the ATM network. Do you know anything about it?"

"I'm afraid not," Boldt said. Daphne shook her head.

"We can tell you where withdrawals have been made. Yes? But real-time tracking poses significantly greater problems. If she stays within the Pac-West ATM network, perhaps we can identify fixed locations. But if she accesses our network from another network's machines, then the request is handled by the regional switching station here in Seattle-NetLinQ. By the time we see the request, you would have no more than a few seconds in which to react."

"A few seconds," Boldt echoed, crushed by the news. "Sounds like we'd have to have a person watching every ATM. How many are there?"

"Pac-West operates three hundred and seventy in the state. Roughly half of those are concentrated in an area within an hour's drive of the city, including downtown. The number of machines handled by NetLinQ?" she asked, opening a drawer and referencing a file. She frowned, and Boldt felt it coming. "NetLinQ handles over twelve hundred machines between Seattle and Everett. Roughly five new locations are being added every two weeks."

An army, Boldt was thinking. Twelve hundred surveillance operatives? At the peak of the Green River Killer investigation, one hundred and forty law enforcement personnel had been involved. It made his team of four look pretty d.a.m.n small. It made his stomach burn.

He popped two Maalox.

"Some of our ATMs are equipped with cameras. Maybe that would help you. Still cameras and video. It depends."

"How many?" Boldt asked hopefully.

"More than half, I believe. And more in the metropolitan areas than in the country. And we are installing cameras at more than three a week. It is a top priority for us."

Half? It wasn't enough.

Daphne, sensing his despondency, suggested a meeting with whoever was in charge of NetLinQ.

"That would be Ted Perch," Guillard said. "He is not the easiest man to deal with. Especially for a woman. You understand?"

"Then I think I'll pa.s.s," Daphne said. She told Boldt, "I'll be at the office, then home."

Guillard said delicately, "I will call and see if he will see us."

"Let me explain something, Sergeant. It was sergeant, wasn't it?" Perch delivered Boldt's rank as if it were one of the lower life forms, as if he deserved much better. "We have always cooperated with law enforcement in the past, and we're happy to be of whatever a.s.sistance we can be. But"-and Boldt had heard the word coming-"if we interrupted the network for every extortion, for every threat, for every counterfeit card operation, we might as well go fishing instead. Clear?"

Boldt had said nothing of the case he was on.

Perch reminded him of a man who played racquet sports. He had fast eyes that preferred Lucille Guillard's hem length to Boldt's cool exterior, brown hair that was washed too often, and an athletic bag snugged up to his desk where everybody could see it. The office was unexceptional except for a pair of watercolors of the San Juans, and an unspectacular view of I-5 and a marina on Lake Union that almost counted as a water view.

Perch had telephoned Shoswitz in order to verify Boldt's ident.i.ty. He called Lucille Guillard "Lucy," and he said it a little too smugly, as if she considered him an intimate friend, which she clearly did not.

From what Guillard had told him, Boldt's real-time tracking could only be accomplished through a coordinated effort between Pac-West and NetLinQ.

"This is not your everyday extortion," Boldt said.

"I've worked with Freddie Guccianno a couple times," Perch admitted.

"Freddie's not working this case." Boldt said.

"Freddie's good people."

Boldt hated that expression.

"What is important, Ted," Lucille Guillard said smoothly, "is that the bank and the switching station come up with a real-time environment that makes it possible for Sergeant Boldt to track certain withdrawals."

"I understand that, Lucy. But what I'm trying to point out-to both of you-is that real-time monitoring just isn't possible across the entire network. No such software exists-not that I know of. It's just not something we're set up to do. What? What, Lucy? Why are you looking that way at me?"

"It is something you must do. At the moment, Sergeant Boldt is asking politely. None of us, the police, the bank, wants to initiate legal steps. The idea is that we cooperate."

Ted Perch looked a little hurt. She knew more than he did, and he did not like that. And if he tried to look up her skirt one more time, Boldt was going to say something about it.

He nodded slowly at her, made a sucking sound in his teeth, and directed himself to Boldt. "The way the system works is this, Sergeant. The account in question is with Pac-West. Clear? If a Pac-West ATM is used to access this account, as I'm sure Lucy explained to you, then that request goes directly to their server. Several verifications are made almost instantaneously, the server okays the withdrawal and instructs the ATM to dispense the cash. Whambam, thank you, ma'am. But in the case of a Pac-West customer using say a First Interstate ATM, that's where we come in. First, the PIN-the personal identification number-is encrypted by the machine, so as it travels along these phone lines, no one can grab it. Next, the account number and a BIN number-the bank identification number-are routed directly on to the First Interstate server in California, which recognizes that the BIN number is not theirs, and they then route the request back to us. Our computers reroute the new request according to the BIN number-in this case, to Pac-West. Pac-West confirms the account information and approves the withdrawal, routing the approval and an individual authorization code, through us, back to First Interstate, which then instructs the ATM to dispense the cash. In some cases, the request may pa.s.s through a national switch first, and then be routed to us, back to the national switch, back to the bank in question. At any rate, this entire process I've just described takes three-point-two seconds. There are four-point-one million credit and debit cards in use in the Northwest alone-and eighty million in the U.S. And to give you an idea of volume, of usage, of the number of hits we receive: ATMs in Washington and Oregon alone process one billion dollars a month. That works out to somewhere around twenty million dollars a day during the short week-fifty million dollars a day Friday, Sat.u.r.day, and Sunday. That's four hundred thousand hits per day! And you want us not only to pull an individual hit on this system, but pull it realtime? Are you beginning to see my problem?"

His intention had been to mow Boldt down with the facts and figures, and he did just that. Four hundred thousand withdrawals a day. The number fifty million rang in his head.

"Have we met before?" Perch asked, as if Boldt had just walked through the door.

"No."

"You look d.a.m.n familiar to me. Do you play racquet-ball?"

"Piano. Jazz piano."

"A club! Am I right?"

"The Big Joke."

"Exactly. I knew I'd seen you before." To Lucille Guillard he said, "He's good." To Boldt he said, "You're very good. Happy hour. Right?"

Boldt thanked him and pointed out that he had to drop the piano when a case like this came along.

"A case like what? You're not Fraud, are you, Sergeant? Not unless you just transferred. I know the guys from Fraud, believe me."

"Homicide," Boldt said.

It was a word that hit most people sideways, and Ted Perch was no exception. He actually jerked his head back as if he'd been struck. "The big leagues," he said.

"Just another division."

"What is this thing? Blackmail? No, extortion-right?"

"Right."

"Bet someone's dead," Perch guessed, "or what would you be doing here?"

"Someone's dead," Boldt confirmed. "Maybe others if we don't hurry."

"If people's lives are at stake, that's different."

"We need your help," Lucille Guillard said earnestly. "The problem is that by the time a real-time system identifies a hit, Sergeant Boldt has about ten seconds-or less-to apprehend this person."

Boldt added, "And that's not enough. Not even close."

"Slow down the entire system?" Perch queried. "(A) It's not possible-not that I know of, and (B) I would be hanged. If the system goes down for five minutes, it makes the news these days. People have gotten used to ATMs. They expect them to work. Twenty-million a day, don't forget."

"Does it have to be the whole system? Couldn't we isolate just these requests?" Boldt asked.

"It doesn't work like that. Sometimes there are two, three, even four ATMs installed right alongside one another. What's this person going to think when his transaction takes forever and the guy next to him receives service as usual? Let me tell you something: People have built-in clocks when it comes to ATMs. They know how long a transaction is supposed to take. The average transaction takes twelve seconds. You stretch it to forty and a guy like this, someone jerking the system around, is going to notice. Plain and simple. He's gone."

Boldt was glad that Perch had the gender wrong.

Guillard said, "But if the whole network were to slow down. Or at least every request in the city. What then, Ted? So it makes the papers for a couple of days?"

Boldt agreed. "Oddly enough, that kind of publicity might help us. Might convince him it's a regional problem."

"Help you, maybe. It'd get me fired. I can tell you that. But it's all moot anyway. I've never heard of such a thing. You can't just slow down the network by flipping some switch."

"That is what I told the sergeant. But I was hoping you might know more than I do." She hit Perch right where he lived. He wanted to know more than she did, and he didn't see the trap she had laid for him.

"We have some software techs. I could ask them."

"Our people are looking into it, too," she said, adding a sense of compet.i.tion.

"I'll need permission from the nationals," Perch said, already a step ahead. "There would be some serious explaining to do."

"We're long on people capable of serious explanations. That shouldn't be a problem," Boldt offered.

Perch suggested, "Let me circle the wagons. How soon you need this?"

Lucille Guillard recrossed her legs and Perch didn't even notice.

That was when Boldt knew he had him.