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have something very special waiting for him.”
    Barbara smiles. Small-boned, with curly reddish hair down to her shoulders, a pert nose, and wide-set blue eyes, she has an advanced degree in biology and looks about as much like an FBI agent as I do, especially with a Mickey Mouse napkin tucked into the neck of her yellow wool suit.
    She places one of the surveillance photographs in front of me.
    “Here’s your guy.”
    There’s my guy in the baseball hat and two shirts standing in front of a teller’s window in California First Bank. He isn’t pointing a gun or doing anything even slightly dramatic. The photo is stamped UNSUB . Unknown Subject.
    “And here’s your guy again.”
    In a second photograph he is wearing different shirts, a different baseball hat, with the same puffy face and sagging eyes.
    “Same M.O.,” Barbara continues, pointing with her fork. “The gun, the baseball hat, same instructions: ‘Give me your hundreds and no dye packs.’ ”
    The second photo is stamped UNSUB , Bank of the West, Culver City Branch, 1984. I am astonished.
    “How do you do that?”
    Vitamin A.”
    “How do you remember? Is there some kind of trick?”
    “Sure there’s a trick.”
    She stands abruptly, dumps our plates in the trash, and turns to me, arms folded.
    “When I was a new agent, Duane Carter used to routinely get me up against a filing cabinet and suggest how we might spend the rest of the afternoon. I would laugh him off, being cute and ‘not wanting to hurt his feelings’—then one day he pulled me down on his lap on top of his hard-on and slipped his hand under my skirt.”
    “Barbara!”
    “Yeah, well, I should have shot the sucker between the eyes but instead … I didn’t handle it very well. I cried. Told him I had a boyfriend. Some damn lie or other. This was before sexual harassment cases.”
    She whips the pearl back and forth.
    “He would take me to lunch when we were supposed to be discussing a case and talk about how we should get the penthouse suite at the Beverlywood Hotel, how Mormon males are great in bed, they have some super sexual secret, that’s why they have so many wives and children … when the truth is, he hates women.”
    I look again at the little Catholic schoolgirl from Chicago in the yellow suit and pearl necklace, still so ladylike in her obsessive rage. “I am so sorry you had to put up with that shit.”
    “After I got married I deliberately transferred back to Duane Carter’s squad. For years he thought he had this dirty little secret on me. But times have changed and I’ve got it on him.”
    “How? It’s too late for legal action.”
    “I’m watching him and he knows it. Why do you think I’ve hung in as robbery coordinator so long? It’s the perfect position to keep sticking it to him. Like right now—you’re going to bust this guy for two robberies and get your transfer to C-1 and it will drive Duane Carter absolutely nuts because you’re a woman and you did it, and he ain’t getting transferred nowhere.”
    I put my arm around her shoulder. She is my friend. “Don’t spend your life on Duane Carter.”
    “It makes me happy.” Her thin rosy lips compress into a tight smile.
    “Someday,” I tell her, “you’re coming with me over the wall.”
    “Go with God.”

    •  •  •

    Three hours later I am in a stuffy interrogation room at the Metropolitan Detention Center with my guy, whose name is Dennis Hill. I had interviewed him when I gave him his rights and had him sign the FD395 form, but he had refused to talk. He’s wearing orange overalls with MDC on the back and looks just as sullen as he did yesterday, when I busted him—a jowly unshaven face and unkempt gray hair matting and merging with curls growing up the back of the neck.
    “You’re a pretty good bank robber, Dennis.”
    His eyes watch me. I see intelligence there.
    “This is not your first job. You’ve just never been caught before. Am I right?”
    He doesn’t