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My words to Kirby came back to me. “My brother wouldn’t approve.” Dad had disliked Adam’s family forever, and my brothers would take Dad’s side on something like this without a doubt.Disdain, disgust, hostility, andloathingwere all too mild.Hatredwas the closest word to describe Daddy’s feelings about the Cartwrights, and even that wasn’t strong enough.
I tried to imagine the conversation. “Daddy, I have some good news and some bad news. The good news is that I finally found someone in DC I like. The bad news is he’s a Cartwright.”
The Daddy explosion following that would rival Mt. Vesuvius.
I for sure wanted to be judged by who I was and what I’d done, not by the actions of a previous generation. I was my own woman. Shouldn’t that translate to Adam being his own man, and not a carbon copy of his father?
* * *
Adam
“Boxer and Cartwright,”Dempsey yelled.
Pausing the sleep-inducing video, I happily followed Neil to the ASAC’s office.
He handed Neil a piece of paper. “Looks like the same crew you two are after. Just hit a bank in Bethesda. This time we have a casualty. Take Gleason and Sams with you.”
My gut tightened, hoping we didn’t have a DB.
“How serious?” Neil asked.
“Paramedics are on scene is all I know.”
A few minutes later, we were in the car on the ramp up from the underground garage, waiting for the barrier to lower. Gleason and Sams were in the second car, and forensics was getting a team together.
With lights and siren, Neil quickly navigated the traffic toward the bank. “This was bound to happen,” he said as he steered around stopped cars. “Hopefully it’s not fatal.”
“Yeah,” I agreed.
We’d been on this case for a while now, and if we lost a victim to a shooting, we’d be second guessing whether we could have caught the guys sooner and prevented it.
I checked the traffic on my phone. “Connecticut is faster than Wisconsin for the first mile or two.” Time was always critical in these situations.
Most people had no concept of how quickly memories of the little things could evaporate if we didn’t interview the victims soon after the event.
We pulled up to find five local units on the scene and checked in with Captain Ellis from the Bethesda Division of the Montgomery County Police.
“The victim?” Neil asked.
“Just transported. Conscious, and it doesn’t look life threatening to me.” He opened a notepad. “She was just standing there when he turned toward her and fired. According to her and the closest person to her, a teller by the name of…” He checked his notes. “Skates, the lady didn’t do anything to provoke it. They’d all been following orders, and the cash had been collected by the woman. It happened just before they left.”
“A woman?” I asked.
“Yeah. Two inside. One woman with no mask, one man. The male wore a Guy Fawkes mask—you know the hacker, Anonymous type. He’s the one who opened fire, and there was a driver outside by the door. Three in all.”
This was a change from before. The masks were the same, but they’d added someone to the crew.
Neil looked up from his notepad. “Dye packs?”
“The manager said they stopped using them a year ago after a rookie teller set one off by mistake.”
This was another similarity. They were always lucky enough to hit banks that didn’t have exploding dye packs hidden in the cash.
“We’ll start inside,” I told Gleason. “You guys start interviews.”
I pulled booties from my pocket, and Neil followed me inside after donning his.
The scene didn’t tell us much. We found the normal disarray of a shooting—blood on the floor, two cartridge casings for forensics, and two smeared puddles of urine where scared customers had been lying on the floor. The debris from the paramedics treating the victim had been shoved to the side.
