Chapter Sixteen
Schooled
Megan
As we climbed into my cruiser, Jackson’s cell phone rang with a call from the investigator from the fire department. She tapped the screen to accept the call and put the phone to her ear. “Whatcha got for us?”
Us, huh? I was flattered she was treating me as an important part of the investigation team rather than merely a chauffer, bodyguard, and dog handler.
She turned the mouthpiece upward so she could relay the information to me without speaking into the mic. “The video showed a guy in a frog hat setting the fire,” she whispered.
The unusual hat confirmed my suspicions. The men who’d held up the bank were, in fact, the same ones who’d set the fire.
Jackson swiveled the phone so that she could speak again with the investigator. “Can you send me the video clip?” She paused a moment. “Thanks.”
We waited a few seconds until—ping!—the clip finished its voyage through cyberspace and arrived at her phone. We watched on the small screen as a small man in a dark hooded sweatshirt, sunglasses, and a knit hat with bulbous eyes on top trotted up to the Dumpster. He placed an old-fashioned metal gasoline can on the ground at his feet and proceeded to wad up page after page of newspaper and toss them into the bin. When he ran out of paper, he picked up the gas can, unscrewed the top, and sloshed the petroleum over the side of the Dumpster, tossing the can in after it.
Darn. Any prints he’d left on the can would have been destroyed in the fire.
Turning his back, he pulled down his jeans, mooned the camera with his pasty ass, and crooked his head to eye the lens while he flipped us the bird.
Lovely.
Thrown off kilter by the awkward stance, the idiot wobbled for a moment and attempted to spread his legs to regain his balance. With his pants around his knees, he had no luck. He fell to his side on the asphalt.
Detective Jackson chuffed. “This doofus is the criminal mastermind who pulled off a bank heist?”
We continued to watch as the man extracted a joint from a zipper pocket of his loose-fitting windbreaker and lit it with a plastic lighter. He smiled at the camera and took a long, deep puff, burning the joint down to a nub in a matter of seconds.
“Chris Vogel might be a Boy Scout,” Jackson said, “but this moron sure isn’t.”
“He does have an impressive lung capacity, though,” I noted.
His toke complete, the guy tossed the smoking nub over his shoulder and into the open Dumpster. As a wall of flame shot up behind him, he dove to the trash-strewn asphalt. Evidently he hadn’t expected such an instant inferno. We watched as he pushed himself up on all fours and scuttled out of camera range.
Although the video gave us a look at the guy and his chubby butt cheeks, it offered nothing to help us identify him. Was it too much to ask that his name and home address be tattooed on his ass?
“Who do you want to visit first?” I asked the detective.
“Scheck,” she replied.
Had I been in charge, I would’ve made the same call. If Vogel was the nice guy everyone claimed he was, it was unlikely he’d team up with a pot-smoking, ass-waggling arsonist. Then again, people could be unpredictable. Especially people who’d suffered recent emotional trauma.
We set off again, guided by the robotic female voice of my GPS system. Unfortunately, that voice was quickly drowned out by Brigit’s insistent woof-woof-woofs! The only way to shut the dog up would be to fill her mouth with food.
Making a quick detour through a fast-food drive-thru, I bought Brigit two orders of chicken nuggets for lunch. Jackson ordered a burger, fries, and a soda. I’d make do with the tomato, avocado, and sprouts sandwich I’d packed this morning. It was hard enough maintaining a healthy weight when I spent most of the day sitting on my rear end in my cruiser. No sense exacerbating the problem with a poor diet.
As I drove on, Jackson dropped the nuggets over the top rail of Brigit’s enclosure. “Here you go, doggie.”
My partner greedily wolfed the nuggets down, smacking loudly behind us.
A male dispatcher’s voice came over my shoulder-mounted radio. “Officer Luz?”
I pushed the button. “Yes?”
“Got some news for you and Detective Jackson. The chopper located the stolen bus.”
I pressed the mic button again. “Where?”
“Here.”
Here? “What do you mean ‘here?’”
The dispatcher came back. “Here here. At the W1 Division. The thing’s sitting out there in broad daylight in the parking lot.”
Ditching a stolen vehicle at a police station? That takes some nerve.
Jackson grabbed the mic from my dash and spoke into it. “Call crime scene and get a team of techs on it,” she instructed the dispatcher. “We’ll be right there.”
She returned the mic to the dash. “Let’s see if that bus will tell us anything.”
I drove to the station and pulled up next to the bus, which had been left right next to my blue Smart Car. The door had been left open. The driver would have had to touch the lever to open the door. Chances were he’d left no prints, though. They robbers had been smart enough to wear gloves to the bank and it was likely they’d been smart enough to keep them on.
Detective Jackson made a quick trip into the station for latex gloves and paper booties. After we were properly attired so as not to contaminate the crime scene, we boarded the bus. In the first row of seats we found the thieves’ discarded hats and a rumpled navy blue hoodie, as well as two windbreakers, one medium size and one large. The medium-size jacket was black with a small San Antonio Spurs emblem on the front breast pocket and a bigger team logo on the back. The sports motif explained why one of the witnesses had thought the men were wearing jerseys.
Jackson held the blue hoodie out to me. “Take a whiff of this.”
I leaned in and sniffed. Sure enough, the jacket smelled like smoke, with undertones of gasoline and weed. “I can see how Serena picked up on the smell.”
“Odd that Grant didn’t mention it,” Jackson said, arching a brow.
“Maybe he couldn’t detect the scent over all that cologne he was wearing.”
“Or maybe the three robbers were friends of his and he didn’t want to offer us any information that might help us identify them.”
It was possible. With any luck, we’d soon find some clues that would point clearly to one suspect or another.
We searched through the pockets of the jackets and checked the tags on the jackets and hats for any names or initials that might have been written on them. Unfortunately, we found nothing that would lead us immediately to the men. I did, however, find something interesting in the right pocket of the hoodie. A funnel-shape piece of black plastic. My first thought was that it was some type of eyepiece, like one that might belong on a telescope, but on closer examination I saw no lens in either end. I held it out to the detective. “What’s this? A mouthpiece for a crack pipe?”
Jackson took the unidentified object and held it in front of her face, turning it this way and that as she squinted at it. “Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t see any drug residue on it. Could it be part of a toy gun?”
“I suppose it’s possible.” After all, robbers were sometimes known to use toy guns in holdups. Panicked victims didn’t generally take a close look at the weapons.
“Whatever it is,” Jackson concluded, “I bet it’s what the robber used to make Dawson and Serena think he had a handgun in his pocket.” She placed it in her palm and held it out. “Snap a photo. This could be a clue.”
I pulled out my cell phone and took an up-close snapshot of the plastic funnel thingy.
We searched the rest of the bus, but found no sunglasses. No mittens or gloves, either. Looked like our targets still had those items in their possession.
As we exited the bus, a crime scene van pulled up next to it. Two male techs emerged.