High Water
Chapter 1: Give or Take $153,000
Everything is a mirror. Sitting across from a suspect, watching and waiting for their pulse to confess the truth. Stranger still, knowing the condition of my own heart within the first ten seconds of talking to my wife when I get home from work. All things tell a story: the amount of lichen on gnarled branches reflects elevation. The speed of a stream tells you what lies ahead. Nothing happens in isolation.
During April in the high country, the weather has a mind of its own. Sometimes you can’t tell whether you’re in a cloud or if it’s raining. You only know that things aren’t clear. My partner, Danny, hated that kind of spitting rain, the kind that put you in windshield-wiper purgatory, clicking them on and off all night. I didn’t mind it. I came from the flat prairies of the Midwest. I didn’t grow up around that kind of fog. To me, the grit in the mist felt like a prelude to something happening.
Danny said it just left you feeling dirty. This was one of those days.
I had just gotten back to the PD after working a wreck and was sitting in the break room with Danny, eating a lukewarm breakfast burrito when dispatch interrupted: “Unit needed en route to High Country Bank for a suspicious person.” Sometimes a call comes over the radio and, before you even hear the details, your gut tells you it’s going to be strange.
I looked over at Danny, “Perfect timing.”
Then I answered—”ten four, one twelve en route.”
I took another bite.
As we listened, more details came in. The caller reported an Asian woman refusing to leave, behaving erratically, and unable to speak English. I looked at Danny and shrugged. He was already on his feet.
“Weird. Let’s go,” he said. “I’ll meet you there.”
We drove separately and arrived at the same time. The bank was only a few minutes away. From the outside, everything looked normal.
Inside, on a plaid-printed cloth couch near the entrance, sat a small Asian woman clutching a folder. When we walked in, she immediately stood and moved toward the teller counter. The teller locked eyes with us—not frightened, exactly, but wide-eyed, as if to say, I don’t know what to do. Please handle this.
I gave her a small nod to indicate we’re on it.
Danny approached the woman. “Will you come with me,” he said calmly. “They want you to leave.”
Reading his body language, I moved around the other side of the couch so we could gently corral her toward the door.
“Are you okay?” I asked. “What’s your name?”
She shook her head and, in a thick accent that sounded Chinese to me, repeated, “No. No.”
As Danny guided her closer to the exit, I stepped back to the teller.
“What’s going on?”
She explained that the woman had just received a cashier’s check for $153,000—and was closing out her account. She had provided identification and used Google Translate to request the check. No explanation beyond that. And now she wouldn’t leave.
“Is she waiting for a ride?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” the teller said. “She’s just pacing and acting strange. We want her to leave.”
I walked back to Danny. “I don’t know what the hell is going on,” I said, “but they want her gone. She has a $153,000 cashier’s check. Let’s get her outside and figure it out there.”
“Wait, what? 150K?”
I laughed, “yup.”
We moved her toward the door again. Up close, she was wearing a white T-shirt and khakis—clothes that looked more like something worn under a uniform than a casual outfit. The shirt was dirty. She didn’t look like someone with $153,000 in liquid cash.
As soon as the door opened, she lunged back into the bank. Danny grabbed her arm, but she moved so fast she sent him stumbling into the doorframe. Danny was a big guy, and watching a hundred-pound woman nearly knock him over almost made me laugh—but I kept my face straight and blocked the second set of doors. Danny somehow slammed his finger in the door. “Dammit!”
I looked at Danny. “Are we going to have to arrest this chick?”
He shook his head, annoyed. I knew what he was thinking. Here we go again. A very public place. A woman who barely weighed a quarter of either of us. A situation nobody trains you for.
The public asks police to solve problems they should be able to handle themselves, then second-guesses how it gets done.
I turned back to the teller. “Do you really want us to force her to leave and trespass her?”
She nodded—eagerly, but without indicating enthusiasm. She wanted the problem gone, preferably by magic and without conflict. Everyone wants peace and safety, but they don’t want it to cost them anything.
Welcome to policing.
Before we moved her again, I asked the teller for whatever information she had. She slid a photocopy across the counter which contained her name, date of birth, address. Lin Mei, born April 17, 1982, listed at a house on Winter Drive. I folded the paper and tucked it into my pocket.
Eventually, Danny and I managed to muscle her outside without hurting her. She pinballed between us until she was finally clear of the door. As she waved her arms and muttered, the cashier’s check slipped from her hand and fluttered to the ground.
Danny picked it up and raised an eyebrow at me like, Should I keep this?
I laughed and nodded, knowing he was joking. He immediately handed it back. She snatched it and kept repeating, “No, no,” followed by something that might have been Mandarin—I honestly don’t know.
I chimed in, “Better keep that thing dry. I don’t know what you’re doing, but you can’t stay here. Do you have a ride?” I mimed steering a car.
“No,” she said again.
We stepped back in front of the doors so she couldn’t reenter and took a moment to talk. I looked at my partner, smirked and shook my head.
“It’s not illegal for her to have her own money,” Danny said. “And she doesn’t seem suicidal or completely out of her mind.”
“That’s true,” I said. “Not normal, but true. She looks like an absconder from the nail salon.”
To cover ourselves, we radioed dispatch and asked for a Mandarin interpreter. After a long pause, dispatch came back with a “10-10… yeah, negative.” Then we ran her name and date of birth. “Name and DOB are not on file. Negative for twenty-nines.”
Figures.
We asked one more time if she needed a ride. She shook her head and marched away. We watched her go, neither of us wanting to detain her without cause. Something was clearly wrong—but we didn’t have anything to go on.
Once she was a block away, we turned off our body cameras.
“Bro,” I said, “we should’ve kept that money.”
Danny laughed. “Absolutely.”
“Let’s go finish breakfast.”
Back at the station, the burritos were still lukewarm. I couldn’t shake the thought of someone in that mental state having access to that much cash. Danny and I joked, as we always did, and floated theories and possible charges: mail-order bride, human trafficking, labor exploitation, scams, cat-hunting out of season. We joked about it, then talked seriously. That was how we worked things out.
Then it clicked.
We had gotten her name, date of birth, and address from the bank. The address was familiar—Winter Drive.
It was a four-bedroom house at the end of a winding road, well off the beaten path. At any given time, eight to twelve adults seemed to live there. Over the years, I’d responded to more than a few strange calls at that address: a drunk man whose car rolled into a ravine; a domestic involving non-English speakers where, after twenty minutes of Google Translate bouncing between Spanish and English, no one wanted charges.
There were consistent low-level disturbances that never quite crossed the criminal threshold—enough odd activity that I kept it on my radar.
“That house,” I told Danny. “There’s something going on there. It’s our town’s Model U.N. den of iniquity.”
Danny quipped, “Sounds exotic and fun.”
And then we did what cops usually do with thoughts like that—we set them aside. The job is full of small irregularities that would sit with a normal person for days, maybe longer. For us, they blended into the background noise. You acknowledge them, file them away, and move on to the next call. If you didn’t, the weight of it all would follow you home.
Great post. Frustrating they didn't follow up.
Interesting.