Cassie slowed to listen. “Don’t tell us he was skimming at the same ATMs he used to pull money out for Sandoval.”
Richie nodded, smiling. “I took a field trip to his three favorite banks.”
“You contacted the managers at Twenty-First Street, Forktree, and Seventh?” I asked.
These were the ATMs the gang preferred because the machines were older and the equipment in them suffered from ailments that befell all ATMs of that generation: color cameras that lacked dynamicrange or failed to operate well in high or low light, resulting in backlit silhouettes or overexposed images.
“I did,” Richie said. “Checked out the security feed. And I watched Freddie make withdrawals, card by card. He turned to leave, but something happened. He started talking to some guy.”
I had been building my mental to-do list for tomorrow, but now I stopped.
“What guy?” I said.
“Which ATM?” Cassie asked at the same time.
“Seventh Street,” Richie said. “And I know what you’re thinking. It’s a solid neighborhood. No one should be around at 2:39 a.m. on a Sunday. Let alone Freddie and some other dude at the same time.”
I slowed as we approached the elevator. “You have a picture?”
Richie had been carrying a manila folder, and now he pulled a photo from it. It was overexposed, but we could see Freddie in the center. A few feet away stood a slender man with a baseball hat pulled low over his forehead. Richie took a second photo from the folder, this one a close-up of the man in Freddie’s peripheral.
“Not much to see,” Richie said. “But it’s no one I recognized from the Sandoval crew.”
Cassie took the printout and scanned it. Handed it to Shooter.
“That’s not the end of it,” Richie said. “I rewound the tape. This mystery guy backs his sedan in. No plates on the rear. He pulls down the bill of his hat as he walks over. He purposely avoids any ATM cameras.”
“What makes you think this is our big break?” I asked. The photo could be of anyone.
“This ATM, Gardner,” Richie said. “It’s one of two we placed anextracamera on for our debit card case. A secret camera on a pole in the parking lot.”
He pulled another photo from the file. From the direction of this shot, we could make out more of the man’s face. The night was dark, and the photo was black and white. But we could see that he was either white or a light-skinned Latino, with some sort of Band-Aid on his chin.
“I didn’t recognize him, so I fed the picture into the system,” Richie said.
“You got a match?” Cassie asked.
“Not at first,” Richie said. “But Lanie in Quantico told me about this new beta software they’re testing out. Combines facial recognition with AI.”
The elevator doors opened, and we stepped inside.
“It matched,” Richie said. “But not to any photo in the system. It matched a facial composite.”
A facial composite wasn’t a photo. It was a graphic representation based on multiple witnesses’ descriptions of someone’s face— essentially a combination of several sketches into near photographic form. It was usually developed by law enforcement to get an image out to the public. Which meant the composite was a person of interest in some other case.
“Where’s mystery guy’s close-up?” I asked. “If he was there to use the ATM, he should have his own photo from—”
“That’s the other weird thing,” Richie interrupted. “Once he spots Freddie, our mystery guy decidesnotto use the ATM.”
That wasn’t just weird. It was the behavior of someone avoiding being seen in a close-up. I stared at the grainy photo from the parking lot. Then at the composite and the ATM photo. In theupper-right-hand corner of the bank picture was the timestamp Richie had mentioned.
2:39 a.m. Sunday.
Shooter and I had arrived at 3:36 a.m. on Monday morning. When she’d performed her mini autopsy in the mobile home, she’d estimated Freddie had been dead for one day.
I looked at Richie. “Twenty-four hours before our arrival was 3:36 a.m. Sunday,” I said. “That’s less than an hour after this photo was taken.”
“I know,” Richie said, beaming. “I did good, right?”
