No Regrets

ammunition—both regular and hollow-point. With Halley riding along, Sam had then driven to the forests along Snoqualmie Pass to try out the gun by shooting at trees.
    Sam’s plan for robbing banks had been very intricate, according to Mark. He would use several vehicles, some stolen. Sam said he planned to steal the vehicles by knocking their locks out, and then getting new locks. He intended to use a stolen van or truck as he drove to the banks, and after the robberies, to use yet another stolen vehicle to leave the immediate area. He would eventually end up in his own car.
    “When did you have these conversations with Sam— about the bank robbery plans?” Marberg asked.
    “Almost every day. I’d just get bits and pieces from him. I’d tell him about my job and he’d tell me about what he was doing. Like he was going to set off the bomb and then get in and out of the bank in ninety seconds while the police were sucked away taking care of the bomb. That was the only way they could do it and get away.”
    Halley said that despite all the detailed planning, he hadn’t really believed that Sam was serious. Over the many years that he had known him, Sam had
always
been full of fantasy. That was his place in the group of guys who had grown up together in Laurelhurst and Windermere (an even more posh neighborhood). Sam was the chance-taker, the jokester, the one full of tall tales. He didn’t seem much different at twenty-two than he had been at fourteenor fifteen. The rest of his peers matured and moved into adulthood; Sam still clung to make-believe.
    Or so it seemed.
    As Mark Halley spun out his reasons for suspecting that Sam Jesse was the bank killer they sought, Al Gerdes and George Marberg took page after page of notes. Too much was clicking neatly into place for Sam not to be a prime suspect. They looked at Mark and saw that he had only recently come to terms with his suspicions about the Prudential robbery. He had clearly tried to ignore what he didn’t really want to believe and somehow managed to treat Sam’s escalating “stories” as only that. Sam’s imagination had amused his friends for years and it was easier to believe his activities were still fictional than to face the darkness creeping in. It must have been hard for Halley to go to his father with his suspicions.
    The detectives noted that Mark glanced up at the clock in the Homicide Unit from time to time. When it was almost two, he looked nervous. Suddenly, Gerdes had a thought. “Where is Sam now?” he asked.
    “He might be gone—”
    “What do you mean?”
    “I think he might be on his way to Hawaii.”
    Halley hadn’t wanted to rat on Sam—not until he had reason to believe that the detectives agreed with his concern about his old friend. And the time had slipped by. It was ten minutes to two, and Sam Jesse had told him that he was going to board a plane for Hawaii at two. It could be another one of Sam’s big stories, but if it wasn’t it was too late to stop him now.
    Marberg and Gerdes were a little chagrinned, but if Sam Jesse was sitting in an airplane high over the Pacific Ocean, he wasn’t going anywhere until he landed inHawaii. If Halley’s information was good, Sam could be stopped at the gate in Honolulu and held by police there. The Seattle detectives didn’t feel that they had a solid enough basis yet to evaluate Halley’s story and call for an emergency stop of a plane already taxiing out on the runway at SeaTac Airport.
    They could, however, call Honolulu police and ask them to stand by for the next six hours. “We may need you to detain a suspect for us,” George Marberg said. “We’ll be in touch as soon as we have more information.”
    “OK,” Al Gerdes said to Mark Halley. “Let’s focus in on why you feel so strongly about Jesse’s connection to bank robberies. Tell us specifically what changed your mind from thinking he was making things up to believing he was serious.”
    “OK,” Halley said, drawing a deep breath. “Sam told me about a bank robbery that was going to take place on a Friday. I looked in the paper the next day and I saw an article about a bank that got robbed on that Friday. I asked Sam if it was him and he said, ‘Yeah, but we hardly got anything.’ I became convinced that Sam had robbed that first bank. Even though we were such close friends, it seemed like maybe Sam had crossed the line. I didn’t see him very much after I went over there the day after the first