Mothers and fathers and grandparents and friends were now traders, one and all, talking a mile a minute and with passionate conviction to whomever was on the other line of their phone call, and the subject was money. Wire transfers, credit limits, PayPal, Visa. Escrow. Second mortgages. Sometimes the phone calls became threatening and nasty, and it took everything in Del Purrich’s willpower not to intervene. These were empty threats born of frustration and desperation. Hopeless men and women were always full of empty threats. Del had seen it before. One of his first major cases had been the robbery of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. Well, the attempted robbery. The perpetrators had done almost everything right. They had chosen nighttime over day. They had managed to kill both the building alarms and the vault alarms and they had managed to do so without tripping any of the built-in alerts to law enforcement. They knew which vaults to attack and which to avoid. They had done almost everything right.
