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More typing, and an image appeared on the laptop on a split screen with the Intelligence Unit. It only showed the person’s eyes, but they were too narrow, and both eyes had a mix of blue and brown, rather than just the one. “No. That doesn’t look right,” Camila said. Capelli flipped to another, but that one wasn’t right, either. Then another, and ugh, maybe they weren’t going to be able to—
“That one!” Camila cried. Her pulse pressed rapidly at her throat, but that didn’t stop her from saying, “That’s the robber from the vault. Number Four.”
“Are you sure?” Tara asked.
But Camila didn’t need to think twice. “Yes. I’m one hundred percent sure. That’s definitely the one.”
Tara looked at Sinclair. “It’s a perfect match to the drawing. In conjunction with what you uncovered, that’s enough for an arrest warrant.”
The words weren’t lost on Roman. “With what you uncovered? Who is she?” he asked, and the photo array disappeared in favor of a driver’s license image of a white woman with dirty blond hair in her late twenties, maybe early thirties.
“This is Portia Whitlock, twenty-eight. She lives about thirty minutes outside of Hot Springs, Arkansas. Her name popped up in a nationwide search of all women with registered driver’s licenses who have blue/brown heterochromia. That’s where the images in the array came from. You can thank your boss for the access to those databases, although we still had to comb through the matches.”
Roman didn’t look the least bit surprised, and Camila got the distinct feeling he was biting back an ‘I told you so’. “She’s pretty far from home,” he said, and the sergeant nodded.
“She has been for some time. Local authorities did a few knock and talks, trying to pin her down, and she hasn’t been seen at her last known address for over eight months. No current employment records turned up, either. She quit her job at a local mini-mart around that same time. No forwarding address.”
“How about family?” Roman asked, and here, Matteo chimed in.
“Ex-husband, Trent Hewitt. Lives in Little Rock and hasn’t seen her for over a year. We did some digging on the guy. He’s not exactly a paragon of virtue. Couple of minor busts for drug possession, all pled out with time served and fines. But we didn’t find anything to suggest he’s not telling the truth about Portia. Mother, Victoria Reyes, is deceased. Meth overdose. And step-father, Decker Reyes was stabbed to death in a bar fight nearly a decade ago. However”—more typing, and an image of a white man in his early thirties appeared next to Portia’s DMV photo—“she has an older brother, Archer Whitlock, thirty-four. LKA also outside of Hot Springs, although he seems to have disappeared right alongside his sister.”
Camila examined both faces carefully, but the man, Archer, didn’t look familiar at all. “He looks like a pretty average guy.”
Sergeant Sinclair made a noise of agreement. “Six feet. One eighty-five. Entirely average height and build, actually.”
Roman’s chin lifted in recognition. “So, you think he might be the leader?”
“That’s kind of a stretch, right?” Camila asked. Sure, he fit the general description and he hadn’t been around for the local police to talk to, but didn’t they need a whole lot more to go on?
“It would be,” Matteo said. “Except for this.”
Both images disappeared, replaced by one that made Camila’s blood freeze and the hair on the back of her neck stand at immediate attention.
The man who had tried to shoot her was staring her directly in the face.
“Oh, my God,” Camila whispered at the same time Roman went completely still beside her. “That’s him. That’s the man who tried to kill us.”
“That’s the bastard who shot at us a couple of days ago,” Roman confirmed. “Definitely.”
Sinclair nodded as Capelli made the image of the man smaller, then lined it up beside the photos of Portia and Archer. “Thorn St. James, thirty-four. Priors for assault, battery, destruction of property, drug possession…the list is impressive. Not in the good way. He did a nickel for the A and B in an Arkansas prison and was released last year. He and Archer Whitlock are known associates, although Whitlock’s never been charged with anything. Archer is the only link between Portia and St. James that we can see.”
“Facial recognition software matched Thorn’s mug shot for the partial we pulled from the surveillance footage from your apartment building. He’s also a dead ringer for the drawings you did, and his height and build are a match for the third robber,” Matteo said to Camila, whose brain was tumbling with so many questions, she had no hope of keeping them all straight.
“So, you can get a warrant for him, too, then, right? I mean, he matches the facial recognition and Roman and I just ID’d him.”
Every single detective froze, all of them exchanging glances in some type of weird, non-verbal code that made Camila’s hackles rise. “What?” she asked. “What’s the matter?”
“Please tell me you have a line on how to find this asshole,” Roman said, and Sinclair shook his head.
“Firefighters at Station Seventeen were called to a car fire down by an abandoned industrial park in North Point. By the time they arrived, the car had been burning long enough that not much was left.”
Roman let out a hard exhale. “Let me guess. The car they used to rob the bank?”
“St. James’s body was found in the trunk,” Matteo added quietly, and Camila’s breath jammed to a halt in her lungs.
“He’sdead?”
Roman looked as shocked as she felt. “How?”
