Hearts of Sand(8)

Gregor tried to process this. “Accident,” he said. “I did hear something about an accident.”

“Of course you did,” Patrick said. “When a bunch of rich Fairfield County teenagers smash up a car and one of them is killed, it’s going to be bigger news in the New York ADI than the bank robberies were, even with two people dead. There were six people in the car. Martin Veer was driving. Chapin Waring was in the backseat. Then there were four more, don’t remember the names off the top of my head. Martin Veer was killed. Two of the others were treated for injuries. There was a big, enormous explosion, and four days later there was a funeral. It was a big funeral. It made all the local news stations and it made CBS in New York. There was this one clip they kept running over and over again, of Chapin Waring putting a rose into the ground where the casket was. And that’s what did it.”

“Did what?”

“We had a special agent then—she died a few years ago, unfortunately, breast cancer—her name was Sarah Havermack. She was watching one of those clips when she realized that the Waring girl looked familiar. She checked it out, and sure enough, there was no mistaking it. Chapin Waring was one of the two people in the bank surveillance footage. It wasn’t even hard to tell.”

“You say one of them,” Gregor said. “The other was Martin Veer?”

Patrick hesitated. “Martin Veer is very definitely the other one in the fifth robbery film.”

“You think he wasn’t the one in the other robberies? It was her every single time, but not the same second person every single time?”

Patrick shrugged. “I don’t know. I wish I did. Look at the video yourself and see what you think. But we never found any evidence that any of the other kids in that car, or any of the kids Waring and Veer hung around with, had anything to do with any of it, so the official explanation has always been that it was just those two.”

“Did you go after Waring right away?”

“As soon as Sarah figured it out,” Patrick said. “We just weren’t fast enough. We got there two days after the funeral, and by then Chapin Waring had disappeared into thin air. She was gone. Completely gone. And so was all the money.”

Gregor considered this. “It’s not that easy to drop out of sight carrying—what? A couple of hundred thousand in cash?”

“Two and a half,” Patrick said.

“Okay, two and a half,” Gregor said. “People are suspicious when you show up with wads of bills, and they were just as suspicious thirty years ago. She couldn’t have just waltzed off and thrown the money around. She had to have help.”

“I know.”

“But?”

“We never found any trace of it,” Patrick said. “And we’ve been looking. We’ve been looking for years. We’ve never caught any communication between her and her family. We’ve never caught any communication between her and the other kids who were in the car that night. And that’s not all.”

“Could this actually get worse?”

“Indeed it could,” Patrick said. “We’ve had her featured a total of five times on America’s Most Wanted. We came up absolutely blank. We didn’t even get any false reports.”

“Seriously.”

“Absolutely. And you’ve seen pictures of her, Gregor. She’s a striking-looking woman. It’s not like she looks like everybody else on the planet, or has the kind of face you wouldn’t notice. She was just gone, vanished, transported to another dimension. That’s the joke we used to make about it. I always thought she was dead.”

“But here she is,” Gregor said.

“Right,” Patrick said. “With a knife in her back.”

“Do you think the Bureau knows where she’s been?”

“If they did, they would have announced it,” Patrick said. “I’ve still got contacts where it matters. I’ll guarantee you there’s been nothing to find. She disappeared. She stayed disappeared. She showed up one day in June and ended up dead in her own family’s living room. And nobody has any idea where she’s been or what she’s been doing, and when she finally did show up, she was armed.”

“We’re sure it was her gun she had on her when she died?”

“Well,” Patrick said. “It wasn’t registered to anybody, if that’s what you mean. I’ve heard it had her fingerprints on it. Like I said, I’ve still got contacts where it matters.”

“What’s that over on the chair?” Gregor asked.

“Those are my notes,” Patrick said. “Including the diary I kept at the time. I’ve got copies of all of them, don’t worry, and I’ve scanned them into the computer. I was thinking I might write a book on the case. It would be a good case to write a book on, don’t you think?”