She nodded and took out her phone. “I’ll want Sean to take charge of tracking this hack. Give me a second to give him a heads-up that I might need him so we don’t waste any valuable time.”
Sean answered, and she made her request as succinctly as she could so she could get to questioning Pilcher. When she disconnected, she glanced at Evan. “Ready?”
He nodded and pushed the door open, then stepped back, giving her first access.
Pilcher jumped to his feet. The trim young guy with close-cut auburn hair and dressed in his uniform held out his hand. “Officer Dan Pilcher.”
She took his firm grip, and while she would normally smile to relax an interview subject, she had little time to waste andwanted to impress a sense of urgency in him. She made introductions and gestured for him to sit back down.
She sat and crossed her legs, working hard not to swing her foot to release mounting tension. “Tell us what happened with the two suspects you talked with on Thursday night.”
Pilcher took a small notepad from his vest pocket and rested it on his knee but didn’t look at it. “I was on patrol around eleven-thirty—usually pretty dead at that time of night—when I see these two guys hurrying down the sidewalk. They had their heads down, and when I rolled up on them, they stepped into the shadows close to a building like they were trying to hide.”
“And so you stopped,” Evan said, dropping into a chair.
Pilcher shook his head. “I didn’t have a reason to. Just a gut feeling that something was off. So I circled the block and found them at the bank ATM.”
Kiley made a mental note to request the video footage and banking information from the machine.
“One of the guys points at my car, and they hurry off. So now Idostop them.” He ran a hand over his military haircut. “They kept looking down, so I made them both take off their caps and hoods and look at me. I wanted to take a long look at them and get their faces on my body-cam.”
Footage that they might or might not recover, and at this point, Kiley couldn’t count on it. “Did you get a good enough look for a sketch?”
“Yeah, but my cam captured them, so that shouldn’t be needed.”
“You’re sure about the footage?” she clarified.
His eyes narrowed. “Not positive, I suppose. I mean I didn’t review the file, but it was definitely recording. I uploaded everything to the server at the end of my shift.”
“Tell us more about the stop.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said.
Kiley had to swallow a snort. No matter how old she got, she would never be ama’am.
“One of them spoke pretty good English,” Pilcher went on. “The other’s was broken. A hint of Arabic, I think. I asked them what they were doing out so late at the bank. The older guy said they were waiting for their ride home from visiting friends in the area.”
“Did you ask for the friends’ address?”
He nodded. “They rattled off an address for an apartment complex in the area.”
Kiley wanted to race out to visit the apartment but forced herself to remain seated. “Write down the address for me, please.”
Pilcher scribbled on his notepad, ripped off the paper, and handed it to her. “Still, I asked for ID, and they forked over Washington State driver’s licenses. I made sure to get a good shot of both IDs with my body-cam. You can get the details there.”
Kiley was now frantic to see the footage and prayed a backup existed with an intact file. “Did you run them through DMV?”
He shook his head. “Had no reason to do that.”
“Do you remember the names?”
“Sorry,” Pilcher said. “Once I determined they had a debit card for said bank, I didn’t think much about them again.”
“How were they dressed?”
“Typical attire for their age. Jeans. T-shirts. Sneakers and Mariners ball caps. And they each had a huge backpack, totally full. Can’t tell you how much I wanted to get a look inside them, but I had no cause.”
“Anything else you can tell us about them?” Evan asked.
