The Heist

  “I’m serious about arresting you for identity theft if you sign me up for another online dating service,” Kate said.

  “I’ve been going to the gym twice a week, and as it happens I’ve met a terrific guy there. He’s a pilot for one of the big airlines, flying international routes.”

  “You can stop right there.”

  “He’s perfect for you. A man in uniform, only without a gun or a mailbag.”

  “I don’t need you setting me up on blind dates.”

  “It’s not blind, I’ve had a very good look at him. He’s in his early thirties, has a fantastic body and a killer smile. He’s so sexy and charming, I’m half tempted to leave Roger for him.”

  “Fine, you take him,” Kate said.

  They heard the clang of the wrought-iron gate closing on the side yard, and a moment later Jake O’Hare, their father, strode into the backyard. He was dressed in a golf shirt and slacks, and still wearing his cleats. He was square-jawed, square-shouldered, barrel-chested, and big-boned. His gray hair was buzzed to military specifications. He moved with a slight limp, the result of an injury he’d sustained on a mission that he still insisted was classified. It was his limp that Kate imitated when she used the disabled elevator at the San Francisco Federal Building.

  “Dad, what have I told you about wearing your golf shoes around the house?” Megan said as Kate rose up to greet her father.

  “I’m aerating the grass,” Jake said, giving Kate a hug. “What brings you out here?”

  “I brought the kids their Christmas presents,” Kate said.

  “Guns, of course,” Megan said.

  “Water cannons,” Kate said.

  “It’s June,” Jake said. “You’re a little early.”

  “These were the gifts I was going to bring last Christmas, but then things got crazy at work,” Kate said. “I had a strong lead on a case that I had to chase down. That’s over now, so I’m catching up on some things that kind of fell through cracks during the investigation.”

  “That’s right, you finally caught Nick Fox. Congratulations.”

  “Thanks,” Kate said.

  Jake gestured to her glass. “You feel like having something stronger than that Hawaiian Punch?”

  “That’d be nice,” Kate said.

  “We’re making my famous hamburgers in a half hour,” Roger yelled from the pool.

  “Wouldn’t miss it,” Kate said, and followed her father around the side yard to the front of the house, where there were two matching detached garages, one on either side of the driveway. Both had red-tiled roofs, of course. She’d parked her white Ford Crown Victoria, the police interceptor model, between the two garages. “Thank you for rescuing me.”

  “From what?” Jake said.

  “From that,” Kate said. “I don’t know how you can take it here.”

  “It’s a good life,” Jake said.

  “You live in the garage.”

  “It’s a casita.”

  “It’s a detached garage that they put a bathroom and kitchenette in,” Kate said. “It still has the garage doors.”

  “They’re nonworking. It’s a garage door façade. We had to keep it to maintain conformity,” Jake said. “The architectural committee in this neighborhood is stricter than the Taliban. But I still like it here.”

  “How can you?”

  “It’s sunny all the time. The streets are cleaner than Disneyland. We’re right above the golf course and I get to be with my family. I get to tickle the grandkids and read ’em bedtime stories.”

  “Yeah, but there’s Roger.”

  “He’s a good man,” Jake said.

  “He’s unbelievably dull.”

  “Nobody’s asking him to open for Tony Bennett, just to be there for his wife and kids, and he is, more than I ever was for you and Megan.”

  “You don’t have to be there to be there,” Kate said.

  “Yes, honey, you do.” Jake went into his casita and came out a moment later with two cold Buds. Kate leaned against her car.

  “So you’re paying penance,” Kate said. “That’s why you’re here.”

  “I told you, I like it here.”

  “You spent decades traveling to exotic locales, fighting wars. How can you like this?”

  “I’m still fighting wars. We’ve got a real problem here with morning glories invading the common areas. I’m leading the landscaping committee’s offensive to repel the invasion.”

  “You’re depressing me, Dad.”

  He laughed and took a drink. “A new assignment will come along for you soon.”

  “I got one. It sucks.”

  “Not all of them can be Nick Fox.”

  “So everyone keeps telling me. To which I say, why not?”

  They were quiet for a moment, looking at the view of the smog-covered valley and the community’s front gate. There was a tiny guardhouse that looked like a miniature golf version of Megan’s McMansion. The guard always greeted Kate when she arrived like they were colleagues, both servants of justice wearing badges, except hers wasn’t a patch.

  Her father took another drink of his beer. “I led a covert mission once to assist a ragtag group of rebels in liberating their country from a crazy, crack-addicted dictator and his corrupt army. I spent months in that jungle, fighting soldiers and mosquitos the size of Corollas. But we did it. Twenty years later, I was sent on another covert mission to help rebels liberate their country. Turned out to be the same damn country, same damn jungle. Different dictator.”

  Kate finished her beer and thought about what he said. “What’s your point?”

  “I have absolutely no idea,” he said. “I just felt like telling the story. Maybe you’ll find some deeper meaning in it later. If you do, give me a call and let me know what it was.”

  “How many ways could you kill a man with an eyebrow tweezer?”

  “Sixteen,” Jake said.

  Kate looked at him in surprise. She’d thought her sister was just being a smart-ass, a quality they both shared. “Really?”

  “Yeah,” he said.

  “Will you teach me?”

  “Wouldn’t be much of a father if I didn’t,” he said.

  In the course of his fifteen-year career, U.S. Marshal Odell Morris had escorted all kinds of violent killers from their jail cells to the courtroom without any trouble, including a male model who’d strangled ten men, decapitated them, had sex with their corpses, then chopped them up and served them to the homeless in tuna casseroles. So Odell didn’t get why his bosses insisted that he bring not one but two other marshals along to safely deliver Nick Fox to court. It made no sense at all.

  Nick Fox wasn’t some stone killer. He was a pretty-boy candy-ass con man who’d be in handcuffs and ankle chains the whole time. And even if Nick could do a Houdini with the chains, so what? Odell had a gun, a Taser, a baton, a can of Mace, a black belt in tae kwon do, and a very short fuse. Nick’s only weapon was his mouth, something Odell could neutralize with one pop of his mighty fist. Not that he’d have to, because Nick was a total pussy, already teary-eyed and shaking when Odell and the two other marshals picked him up in his cell. By the time they drove up to the U.S. District Courthouse, Nick was so scared that he looked like he might soil his bright orange jailbird scrubs.

  The four of them headed down the long corridor toward the courtroom. Odell walked beside Nick, gripping his arm so the scary criminal mastermind would move along and not trip over his ankle chain. One marshal walked ahead of them and the other trailed behind, just in case Nick hulked out, broke his chains, and flung Odell through a wall.

  Yes, it was that stupid. In Odell’s estimation, three guys on Nick Fox was overkill. So was wasting a man of Odell’s skills on this. An elderly librarian could’ve guarded Nick, who was crumbling more and more with each step they took toward the courtroom. He was hunched over now, clutching his stomach and mewling like a baby, and this was just his preliminary hearing. By the time the trial started, Odell figured, he??
?d probably be catatonic.

  “I’m going to be sick,” Nick said.

  Odell wasn’t surprised by the news, just relieved that Nick had managed to hold it in until they got out of the car.

  “There’s a trash can over there.” Odell started to lead him to it.

  “Not that kind of sick,” Nick said.

  Odell spotted the men’s room and, irritated, dragged Nick over and shoved him against the wall beside the door, pinning him in place with a hand to the chest.

  “Watch him while I check the room out,” Odell said to his fellow marshals.

  This was not Odell’s first dance, and he was savvy to the fact that Nick might be faking just to get into the restroom.

  “Hurry,” Nick whined.

  Odell went inside and looked around. The restroom was windowless and empty. Only one way out. Odell was happy with that. There were urinals and sinks on one wall and three toilet stalls on the other. One stall, the farthest from the door and set against the back wall, had an “Out of Service” sign taped to its door. No surprise there. This wasn’t exactly a restroom at the Ritz.

  Odell went to the first stall and opened the door. There was a toilet paper holder and a toilet seat cover dispenser mounted on the partition between the stalls. He checked out the toilet, looking inside the tank and peering behind it, to make sure there wasn’t a gun or a knife hidden there for Nick by some confederate. He did the same check in the center stall, then went to the third, the one that was out of service. There was no toilet inside the third stall, just a hole in the floor where it was supposed to go. Satisfied that the restroom was safe, Odell went back to the door, grabbed Nick by the shoulders, and yanked him inside.

  “You two stay here,” Odell said to the other marshals. “Nobody comes in. Even if the governor himself drops by to take a whiz. You got it?”

  They nodded. Odell closed the door, dragged Nick to the center stall, and shoved him in.

  “Make it quick,” Odell said.

  Nick held out his wrists. “Aren’t you going to uncuff me?”

  “Nope,” Odell said.

  “So how am I supposed to clean myself?”

  “Should’ve thought of that before you broke the law,” Odell said, and closed the door.

  Technically, Odell probably should have left the door open, but the last thing he wanted was to watch Nick do his business. Turned out he’d made a wise decision, because barely an instant after the door closed, Odell heard a gastrointestinal explosion that sounded like it could kill a man.

  Odell turned away and quickly put as much distance as he could between himself and the stall, which took him over to the urinals. Since he was there anyway, he decided to relieve himself. The “Theme from Shaft” played in his head as it always did whenever his zipper was opened. But the song wasn’t loud enough to save Odell, no matter how high he cranked up his mental volume control. The noise coming from Nick’s stall was epic. Odell wished he could walk out and wait with the other two marshals in the hall, but he knew he couldn’t. He wasn’t worried about Nick escaping from a windowless room with only one door, but what if he offed himself somehow?

  Odell went to the sink, glancing at the stalls on his way. He could see Nick’s feet, the orange scrub pants bunched around the chain on his ankles. The orchestra of intestinal distress continued, with special emphasis on the horns and percussion. It was sickening. Odell held his breath and washed his hands, then dried them with a paper towel and glanced at his watch. They were five minutes late for court already. But what could he do about it? Worse came to worst, he’d have one of the marshals go and notify the court. Maybe he should tell them to alert a HazMat team, too.

  There was a new surge of digestive distress, as if Nick had found a second stomach within himself to disgorge. To Odell’s horror, the disgusting melody was repeating itself all over again, from the top.

  That last thought nagged at him. It did sound the same. Then again, he figured, it’s not like there was a lot of variation to butt music. Even so, there was a disturbing familiarity to it. Like it was a loop. Odell risked a breath through his nose. There was no smell. How could that be? Odell glanced over at the stall and saw Nick’s feet. He marched over and hammered his fist on the door.

  “Open up,” Odell said.

  When Nick didn’t respond, Odell took a deep breath and kicked the door open. Nick’s shoes, chain, and pants were there, but Nick was gone. An ultrathin MP3 player rested on the toilet tank and played the intestinal soundtrack. Right beside the player was a pair of handcuffs. The MP3 player and the cuff keys must have been hidden in the toilet seat cover dispenser.

  Odell pushed against the partition between the second and third stall, the partition pivoted on a support pole, and the opening allowed access to the third stall, the one without a toilet. There was a hole torn in the wall, revealing a closet that had been hidden by a layer of paper made to look like painted stucco. The sounds of gastrointestinal distress had covered the noise Nick made tearing open the sealed doorway.

  Odell climbed through the center divider into the third stall, drew his gun, and went into the closet, which was full of mops, brooms, and cleaning supplies. He groaned at the sight of a second door, yanked it open, and found himself standing in the women’s restroom. The two restrooms shared the same utility closet. He ran through the restroom and burst out the door into the courthouse hallway, much to the astonishment of the two other marshals, who were still standing guard outside the men’s room.

  “Hey, Odell, how’d you get over there?” one of them asked.

  In that split second, Odell Morris saw his entire career pass before his eyes and even glimpsed his future working in mall security.

  “Why me?” Odell asked, and grabbed his radio to raise the alarm.

  There wasn’t anything sexy, or even remotely interesting, to Kate about chasing down guys who copy movies and make them available for free on the Internet. Sure, the stakes were high. The studios were losing millions of dollars in revenue from movies and TV shows that wouldn’t be purchased or rented because they were available for free. They’d probably cover those losses by cutting jobs, so it wouldn’t just be people with fat stock portfolios who’d feel the pain, but average middle-class families struggling to pay their mortgages.

  Kate understood all that, in an abstract way. Maybe if the pirate looked like Johnny Depp, or maybe if the guy they were chasing was actually stuffing those millions of dollars in cold hard cash into his pockets, then she could get into it. But this guy wasn’t making a buck off his thievery or doing it for some greater evil purpose, like delivering a crippling blow to the American economy by making it possible to download every episode of Will & Grace for free. He was doing it because … well … Kate didn’t know and didn’t give a hoot. She just wanted this incredibly dull investigation to end before she put a gun into her mouth and pulled the trigger.

  It wasn’t hard for Sharon Cargill, the investigator from the Motion Picture Association of America, to pick up on Kate’s discontent, mainly because Kate kept expressing it. The bulk of their investigation over the last five days had consisted of sitting together in the basement of the Federal Building on Wilshire, looking over the shoulder of a computer tech as he followed the cyber clues and devoured Hot Pockets.

  The pirate was copying screeners—DVDs supplied to entertainment industry professionals for Oscar and Emmy award voting—and uploading them under the name Nanatastic74 to a file-sharing site. Digital watermarks in the files and Nanatastic74’s IP address led them to Pete Debney, a forty-eight-year-old struggling screenwriter living in an apartment in Castaic.

  Debney was a member of the Writers Guild of America, which explained how he got access to the screeners, but he didn’t have any of them in his house, and there were no digital movie files on his computer. That’s because he’d given all of his screeners to his mother, Janice, who lived in a retirement home in Ventura. He’d opened the broadband account for her and paid her bill.


  So that’s what brought Kate and Sharon to Sunny Vistas Active Senior Living Center. The lobby was like a hotel’s, with a reception desk to the right and an open dining area to the left, a row of walkers parked like cars along the low wall. There were a dozen old folks sitting at tables, picking at plates of meat loaf and peas. A few of them were sleeping in their seats, their heads slumped onto their chests. Or maybe they were dead, Kate thought with a shudder.

  Sharon went to the receptionist and asked where they could find Janice Debney.

  “Down the hall in the community computer room,” the receptionist said. “She’s almost always there.”

  The computer room turned out to be a bank of four desktops in a room with shelves lined with DVDs. There were four seniors hunched over the computers, two men and two women, one of whom had an oxygen tank. Movies were playing silently on two of the flat screens as they were being encoded and converted from DVDs into digital files. Sharon went straight to the shelves of DVDs and started sorting through them.

  “Excuse me,” Kate said to the computer users, “I’m looking for Janice Debney.”

  The woman with the oxygen tank turned around. She was wearing a bad wig and fake eyelashes. Her skin looked like parchment paper. “That’s me.”

  “FBI. We’re here about the movies,” Kate told her.

  “What movies?”

  “These,” Sharon said, holding out a DVD. “They’re all Academy screeners.”

  “They’re mine,” Janice said.

  “Actually, they belong to the studios and are loaned to Academy members for screening purposes only. You are not an Academy member.”

  “My son gave them to me. He’s so sweet. We show them here on Saturday nights.”

  “And you copy them and post them on the Internet,” Sharon said.

  “So other people our age can see them without having to go to a movie theater,” Janice said.

  “It’s a crime,” Sharon said.

  “It certainly is,” Janice said. “Movie theaters are horrible. The ticket prices are outrageous and the movies are way too loud.”