And since Terence hadn’t let anything slip during their card game chitchat, she decided to try a more direct approach.
“Has the bank bandit struck again yet?” she asked, stuffing her winnings into her pocket.
Terence looked scandalized. He lowered his voice, glancing over his shoulder even though it was twoA.M. and they were the only two people in the bank. “How do you know about that?”
“I overheard you and Mr. Singh talking about it the day I got hired. Any idea who the sticky-fingered thief might be?”
Terence blew out a sigh. “Not a clue. I’ve been going back through the security footage every night, watching the feed from the cameras behind the teller stationsandthe ones in the vault room, looking for anything out of the ordinary. But the cash drawers are never left unlocked while they’re unattended, no one’s gone into the vault room who shouldn’t, and there’s nothing unusual going on behind the counter as far as I can tell.” He shook his head. “I can’t figure it out.”
Vero tapped her chin as she thought about that. Maybe that was precisely Terence’s problem. He was looking for the wrong behaviors—the new ordifferentbehaviors, somethingunusualorout of the ordinary.But when someone’s hiding something in their hand, it’s their reoccurring behaviors that give them away. Terence shouldn’t have been looking for a break in the pattern. He should have been studying the routines, the behaviors people repeated over and over so often that their coworkers weren’t likely to pay attention to them. Like Helen concealing her weed habit under the guise of a daily meditation break. Or Darren hiding his ignorance at work by pretending to readThe Wall Street Journalevery morning. Or Terence keeping his junk food habit from his wife by bringing salads every day. Or even cranky old Philip locking his drawer every afternoon between two and threeP.M. to handle his personal business in the…Oh!
Of courseTerence hadn’t seen the crime happening on his video surveillance. For the same reason Vero had been using the ladies’ room to Google herself. Because the only parts of the building that didn’t have cameras were the restrooms.
Vero rose from her chair so abruptly she nearly toppled it over. “Is that the time? I’d better get those bathrooms cleaned and get home!” She grabbed her mop bucket from the corner where she’d left it and hustled from the break room. The wheels squeaked, water sloshing over the sides as she rolled it to the men’s lavatory and flung open the door to the last stall. It was the same one Philip had been using when she’d accidentally walked in to clean it at three in the afternoon on her first day here—before she’d known the unwritten rule of the bank, that Philip used the men’s room at the same time every day and he preferred to do it alone. But was there another reason Philip had needed his privacy?
Vero pulled on her latex gloves and opened the lid of the trash can. She rummaged inside, digging through used paper towels until she found a handful of crumpled deposit slips.
Bingo!
She unrolled each one and spread them across the vanity. They all denoted large cash deposits, big enough that someone might not have noticed a few dollars missing here or there.
This was it, the clue she’d been searching for.
She was certain she had found her thief. But she’d seen enough police dramas to know her evidence was circumstantial. How could she prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Philip had been falsifying deposit slips in the toilet stall?
Unless…
Vero rushed from the bathroom, nearly slipping on the wet floor. Terence looked up from his game of solitaire when Vero burst into the break room and tore the lid off the trash can. She picked through it, fishing out Philip’s barely started crossword puzzle from earlier that afternoon. She spread it on the table and laid the discarded deposit slips beside it.
“What’s all this?” Terence asked, looking over her shoulder as she plucked a pencil from a cup on the counter. She laid it on its side, her heart racing as she gently rubbed the graphite tip over the surface of the crossword puzzle, revealing impressions in the newsprint.
“Why would Philip throw away a puzzle he’d hardly filled in?” she asked.
Terence chuckled. “Probably because he’s not very good at them.”
“And yet, he takes one with him to the bathroom every day.”
“You would, too, if you spent as much time in there as poor Philip does.”
“But why a crossword puzzle? Why not one of his fancy travel magazines? I’ll tell you why,” she said, shading faster. “Because Philip needs a reason to be in the bathroom with apen.”
Terence frowned, leaning in for a closer look as numbers began to appear on the page.
“Philip takes a ballpoint pen to the bathroom with him every afternoon,” she explained. “But he hasn’t actually been doing the crossword puzzles. He’s been forging deposit slips.” The folded newspaper was thick enough to serve as a writing surface, but also soft enough to absorb the impressions made by his ballpoint pen. And as Vero continued shading the newsprint, strings of numbers began to materialize. She found the clearest one she could decipher and compared it to the deposit slips she’d found in the trash—the account numbers were the same, but the balances of the otherwise matching forms were off by several dollars.
She blew the graphite dust from the crossword and dropped her pencil with a flourish.
“Well, I’ll be,” Terence said, gawking at the page.
“Philip’s been using his crossword puzzles to smuggle deposit slips and cash into the men’s room. Once he’s alone, he transfers the cash to his own pockets, writes a few phony deposit slips, and disposes of the real ones in the bathroom, using his crossword puzzle to conceal his sleight of hand when he returns the forgeries to his drawer. At the end of his shift, the totals on the slips match the amount of cash he sends to the vault.”
Terence blew out a low whistle. “This all looks pretty convincing, but how am I going to prove it to Mr. Singh?”
Vero stripped off her gloves. “Leave that part to me.”
Chapter 10
The next afternoon passed slowly. Too slowly. Much the same as every other afternoon at the bank, except today Vero was fidgety as the clock on the wall ticked steadily toward the afternoon lull. Today, the lull wouldn’t last long.
