The Collectors by David Baldacci
make off this one.”
“Hey,” Tony said in an offended tone, pushing a hand through his styled hair. “This is fun stuff.”
“It’s only fun if you don’t get caught,” Annabelle pointed out.
“So have you ever been caught?” Tony asked again.
In response, Annabelle said to Tony, “Why don’t you read over your binder? That way you make no mistakes.”
“It’s just ATM stuff. I’ll be okay.”
“It wasn’t a request,” she said stiffly, and then walked out of the room.
“You heard her, kid,” Leo said, not trying very hard to hide his grin.
Tony muttered something under his breath and stalked out of the room.
“She keeps things close to the vest, doesn’t she?” Freddy remarked.
“Would you want to work with a con who didn’t?” Leo countered.
“Who is she?”
“Annabelle,” Leo answered.
“I know that, but what’s her last name? I’m surprised I haven’t crossed her path before. The high-stakes con world is pretty small.”
“If she’d wanted you to know, she would’ve told you herself.”
Freddy said, “Come on, Leo, you know all about us. And I’ve been around the block. It goes no further.”
Leo considered this and then in a low voice said, “Okay, you gotta swear to take it to your grave. And if you tell her I told, I’ll deny it and then I’ll kill you. I mean it.” He paused as Freddy promised.
“Her name’s Annabelle Conroy,” Leo said.
“Paddy Conroy?” Freddy said at once. “Now, him I’ve heard of. I assume they’re related.”
Leo nodded, keeping his voice low. “His daughter. But that was a well-kept secret. Most people never knew Paddy even had a kid. He passed Annabelle off as his wife sometimes. Pretty weird, but that was Paddy for you.”
“I never had the pleasure of working with the man,” Freddy added.
“Yeah, well, I had the pleasure of working with ol’ Paddy Conroy. He was one of the best cons of his generation. And also one of the biggest assholes.” Leo glanced in the direction that Annabelle and Tony had left the room, and his voice sank even lower. “You saw that scar under her right eye? Well, her old man did that. She got that for blowing a claim con when they were cheating the Vegas casinos at roulette. She was all of fifteen but looked twenty-one. Cost the old man three grand, and she got a hell of a beating for it. And it wasn’t the only time, I can tell you that.”
“Damn,” Freddy said. “His own daughter?”
Leo nodded. “Annabelle never talks about any of it. I heard from another source.”
“So you were working with them back then?”
“Oh, yeah, Paddy and his wife, Tammy. They had some good stuff going on back then. Paddy taught me the three-card monte routine. Only Annabelle’s a better con than her old man ever thought of being.”
“How come?” Freddy asked.
“Because she has the one quality Paddy never had. Fairness. She got it from her mother. Tammy Conroy was a straight-up piece of work, at least for a con.”
“Fairness? Strange quality for people like us,” Freddy remarked.
Leo said, “Paddy always led his teams with fear. His daughter does it with prep and competence. And she’ll never ever screw you. I can’t count the times Paddy blew town with the entire haul. That’s why he ended up working alone. Nobody would touch his action anymore. Hell, even Tammy finally ditched him, so I heard.”
Freddy remained silent for a bit, apparently letting all this sink in. “Any word on the long con?”
Leo shook his head. “It’s her game to call. I just work here.”
As Freddy and Leo headed into the kitchen to get some coffee, Tony peered around the other doorway. He’d left his notebook in the room and had come back in time to hear the entire conversation. He smiled. Tony loved knowing things people didn’t think he knew.
CHAPTER 9
THE SCAM NETTED $910,000 because Tony had gotten greedy at one of the ATMs.
“What’s the poor schmuck gonna have to do, trade in his Pagani?” he said snidely.
“Don’t ever do that again,” Annabelle said firmly as they sat over breakfast in a new rental house five miles from the first one, which had been thoroughly cleaned in case the police paid it a visit. All the Hertz cars used to steal from the thirty accounts had been turned back in. The disguises that had been worn were in several Dumpsters scattered around town. The money was in four different safe-deposit boxes that Annabelle had leased. The film footage and computer files had been erased and the notebooks destroyed.
“What’s an extra ten grand?” Tony complained. “Hell, we could’ve taken ’em for a lot more than what we did.”
Annabelle pushed a finger hard against his chest. “It’s not about the money. When I lay out a plan, you follow it. Otherwise, you can’t be trusted. And if you can’t be trusted, you can’t be on my team. Don’t make me sorry I picked you, Tony.” She stared the young man down and then turned to the others.
“Okay, let’s go over the second short.” Then she eyed Tony again. “And this one is a face-to-face con. If you don’t follow instructions and play the mark just right, your ass is going to the can, because the margin of error is zero.”
Tony sat back, not looking nearly as enthusiastic.
She said, “You know, Tony, there’s nothing better than seeing a mark eye-to-eye and taking a measure of him and yourself.”
“I’m cool.”
“Are you sure? Because if it’s a problem, I need to know right now.”
He glanced nervously at the others. “I got no problems.”
“Good. We’re heading to San Fran.”
“What’s there?” Freddy asked.
“The mailman,” Annabelle replied.
They made the six-hour drive to San Francisco in two cars, Leo and Annabelle in one, Tony and Freddy in the other. They cut a two-week lease on a corporate condo on the outskirts of the city with a partial view of the Golden Gate. For the next four days they took turns pulling surveillance on an office complex in a posh suburb of the city. They were watching the pickups from the outdoor mailboxes that were filled to overflowing on most days, with packs of mail stacked next to the stuffed container. On each of those four days the mail carrier arrived within a quarter-hour window, between five and five-fifteen.
On the fifth day, at precisely four-thirty, Leo, dressed as a mail carrier, drove up to the box in a postal truck that Annabelle had gotten from a contact of hers an hour’s drive south. This gent specialized in providing everything from armored cars to ambulances for less-than-honest purposes. From a car she was parked in across from the mailbox Annabelle watched Leo approach in the truck. Tony and Freddy were posted at the entrance to the complex. They’d alert Leo through his ear fob in case the real mailman showed up early. Leo would only be taking the mail stacked outside the box, since he didn’t have a key to unlock the box. He could’ve picked the lock quite easily, but Annabelle had vetoed that as unnecessary and potentially dangerous in case anyone saw him do it.
She’d said, “What’s lying on the ground or sticking out of the box will be plenty.”
As Leo stacked the mail inside his truck, Annabelle’s voice came through his earpiece.
“You’ve got what looks to be a secretary running at you with some mail.”
“Roger that,” Leo said quietly. He turned and faced the woman, who looked disappointed.
“Oh, where’s Charlie?” she said.
Charlie, the regular mailman, was tall and good-looking.
“I’m just helping Charlie out because there’s so much mail,” Leo said politely. “That’s why I’m here a little early.” He looked at the stack of letters in her hands, and he held out his mail sack. “You can just dump that right in here.”
“Thanks. Payroll’s gotta go out tonight. That’s what’s in the letters.”
“Really? Well, I’ll take super
Back at the condo they searched through the haul quickly, dividing up the usable from the irrelevant. The letters that were of no use Annabelle had Tony take down to the corner mailbox and post. The others were pored over by Annabelle and Freddy.
When Tony came back, he said, “You guys cut loose a bunch of payroll checks. What’s that about?”
“Payroll and accounts receivable checks are useless to us,” Freddy said with the confidence of the expert he was. “They have laser locks binding the toner ink to the paper and secure number fonts so you can’t alter the dollar amounts.”
“That never made any sense to me,” Leo said. “Those are checks going out to people they know.”
Freddy held up a check. “This is what we want: a refund check.”
Tony said, “But they’re being sent to complete strangers.”
“That’s what doesn’t make sense, kid,” Leo said. “You put security stuff on checks sent out to people who work for you or you do business with. And you got zilch on checks going out to who the hell knows.”
Annabelle added, “I picked that office complex because it houses regional offices for a number of Fortune 100 companies. Thousands of checks flow out of those places every day, and those accounts are loaded with money.”
Five hours later Freddy had assembled eighty checks. “These are pretty clean. No artificial watermarks, warning bands or detection boxes.” He carried the checks over to a small workshop he had set up in one room of the house. With the others’ help he placed Scotch tape over the signature line, front and back of each check, placed them in a large baking pan and poured nail polish remover over the paper. The acetone in the polish remover quickly dissolved everything on the checks that wasn’t written in base ink. After they’d taken the tape off the signature lines, all that was left were essentially eighty blank checks signed by the company’s CEO or CFO.
“Somebody ran a bad check on my account once,” Leo said.
“What’d you do?” Tony asked.
“Tracked the bastard down. He was an amateur, doing it more for kicks, but it still pissed me off. So I did a change of address on him, diverted all his bills, and the guy ended up being dunned by creditors for a couple of years. I mean, you got to leave this stuff to the professionals.” Leo shrugged. “Hell, I could’ve ripped him off big-time, assumed his ID, the whole nine yards.”
“So why didn’t you?” Tony asked.
“I’ve got a heart!” Leo growled.
Freddy said, “After we dry out the checks, I’ll redo the Federal Reserve routing numbers.”
“What’s that?” Tony asked.
“Are you sure you’re a con?” Leo asked in a bemused tone.
Tony exclaimed, “My tools are computers and the Internet, not nail polish. I’m a twenty-first-century con. I’m paperless.”
“Whoopee for you!” Leo shot back.
Annabelle held up one of the checks. “This is the Federal Reserve routing number,” she said, pointing to the first two digits in a string of numbers on the bottom of the check. “That tells the bank the check was deposited at the clearinghouse the check’s supposed to go to. The New York clearinghouse number is zero-two. San Fran’s is twelve. A New York-based company using checks issued by a New York bank usually has New York’s routing number on its checks, for example. Since we’ll be passing the checks here, Freddy will switch the routing numbers on all the checks to New York. That way it takes longer for the company to get the paper back and realize it’s a bad check.”
Annabelle added, “And more importantly, these are all big companies that keep their accounts payable books by zero cash management methods. So the odds are very good that even with a bad check in the mix they won’t turn up a relatively insignificant transaction until they get their end-of-the-month statements. Today’s the fifth; that means we have about a month before they discover anything wrong. By then we’re long gone.”
“But what if the bank teller looks at the check and sees that the routing number is wrong?” Tony asked.
“I guess you never saw that TV program, did you?” Leo asked. “The one where investigative reporters zip into a bank with a check that had written across it, ‘Don’t cash me, I’m a forged check, you effing moron.’ And the effing moron still cashed it.”
Annabelle added, “I’ve never heard of a clerk spotting the wrong routing number on a check. Unless you give the teller a reason to suspect you, they won’t spot it.”
After the checks had dried out, Freddy scanned them onto his laptop. Six hours later he stacked eighty checks on the table totaling $2.1 million.
Annabelle ran her finger down the perforated edge of one of the checks, a usual indicator that the check itself was legit, even if the amounts and payee on it weren’t. She glanced at the others. “Now comes the human side of the con. Passing the bad paper.”
“My favorite part,” Leo said eagerly as he finished a ham sandwich and washed it down with a large swallow of beer.
CHAPTER 10
THEY’D DECIDED THAT ANNA-belle and Leo would pass the first series of altered checks while Tony watched Leo to see how it was done for real. Annabelle, Leo and Tony each had a series of complete ID packs that Freddy had made for them. These packs either matched the individual payee on the check or contained credentials showing they worked for the company the check was made out to. Annabelle had instructed Leo and Tony to only carry one set of ID at a time. In case they were stopped, it would be difficult to talk their way out of a jam if they had eight aliases in their pockets.
A number of the checks were made out to individuals, none for over $10,000, since that would require IRS notification. Because of that limit, they would have to move far too many personal checks to reach the $2.1 million mark to be practicable. Thus, the rest of the payees on the checks were businesses that Annabelle had set up accounts for at various banks. Company checks could be made out for over $10,000 without triggering interest from the IRS. But the hitch was no bank will cash a company check. The full amount has to be deposited. For that reason, over a period of months Annabelle had been depositing funds into and out of these accounts, to establish a track record. She well knew that banks tended to get antsy when freshly minted accounts all of a sudden started to throw off lots of cash—that just screamed money laundering.
Over a two-day period Annabelle and Leo had grilled Tony on every conceivable obstacle he would face when passing the bad checks. They took turns playing the roles of tellers, managers, security guards and bank customers. Tony was a fast learner, and at the end of the two days they pronounced him ready to take his baby steps as a bad-check passer after he had watched Leo perform a few times for real.
The first ten passes went very smoothly. Annabelle was a redhead at one, a blonde at another and a brunet at a third. The back of the van had been set up as a changing area with a small makeup table and mirror. After several passes she and Leo would hop in the van and alter their look on the way to the next bank. At some places she wore glasses, at another a scarf around her head, at another pants, sweatshirt and a ball cap. With the right makeup, clothing, padding and hair she could significantly change her appearance and age. She wore only flats, since her five-foot-nine-inch height was less noteworthy than one of six feet with heels on. And while she never looked at it, Annabelle was always conscious of the bank surveillance camera taking her glossy.
Leo was, in turn, a businessman, a company gofer, a retiree and a lawyer, among others.
Annabelle’s practiced delivery with the tellers was smooth, without a trace of apprehension. She immediately put the clerk at ease, talking about the person’s clothes or hair or how much she loved the beautiful city by the Bay, even with the gloomy weather.
With the eleventh teller she confided, “I’ve had this consulting business for four years, and this is the biggest payment I’ve ever gotten. I worked my butt off for it
“Congratulations,” the female clerk said as she worked on the transaction. “Forty thousand dollars is a big payment.” The woman seemed to be scrutinizing the check and Annabelle’s perfectly forged identification and corporate papers a bit too much.
Annabelle noted the woman wasn’t wearing a wedding band but had worn one recently, because the skin was lighter where the ring would’ve been.
“My ex left me for a younger woman and cleaned out our accounts,” Annabelle said bitterly. “I’ve had to build my whole life back. It hasn’t been easy. But I wasn’t going to let him have the satisfaction, you know? I’ll take the damn alimony because I earned that. But he’s not controlling my life.”
The woman’s demeanor changed, and she said in a low whisper, “I know exactly what you mean,” she said as she completed the deposit. “Twelve years of marriage, and my ex decides to trade me in for a new model too.”
“I wish we could just give them a pill that would train them right, you know?”
“Oh, I want to give my ex a pill, all right. A cyanide pill,” the clerk said.
Annabelle glanced at the docs on the counter and said casually, “I suppose there’ll be a hold on the funds, won’t there? It’s just that I have some vendors to pay. I wish I could get to keep the whole amount, but my profit margins are only about ten percent, if I’m lucky.”
The clerk hesitated. “Well, normally, there would be with a check this size.” She looked at Annabelle, smiled and eyed her computer. “But the account the check’s drawn on has plenty of money to cover it. And there have been no problems in your company account. So I’ll make the funds immediately available.”
“That’s great, I really appreciate it.”