No Regrets

cheap because he was poor, and hadn’t gotten enough money in the last thing. He went out of his way to deny that he’d had anything to do with the Prudential Bank.”
    Al Gerdes held out an enlargement of the photos taken by the bank’s hidden camera, and Mark Halley nodded. Even though the photo showed very little of the bank robber, Mark said he recognized the stance. “Those frozen shoulders,” he said. “That’s Sam. That’s how he stands. I’ve seen him wear a down hood like that, and he’s got brown work gloves, too, but I guess a lot of people do.”
    “So when you called Sam at noon on the twenty-fifth, did he sound like he’d just woken up?” Marberg asked, going back to the hours right after the bank robbery.
    “No... just flat. It goes back to New Year’s Eve. He was acting spooky then, and I remember his saying, ‘Sometimes I feel like the devil is overtaking me.’ I said, ‘How can you do that? How can you endanger other people’s lives?’ and he said, ‘It’s just like I’m not even there; something else takes over.’ But he also told me it was all like a big ‘rush’ to him.”
    Mark Halley admitted that he himself was no angel, and he and Sam had participated in some forbidden activities over the years. He was frank in admitting that the twoof them had indulged in psychedelic mushrooms a few years earlier. At that time, Sam had claimed to see “spirits” floating around during the mushroom episodes.
    “But he’s let up on the mushrooms recently,” Mark Halley pointed out. “Sam thinks that the world is going to end next year—with a big atomic war, and a worldwide depression. He thinks it’s survival of the fittest and the world is just going to go crazy, so he’s just starting a little early.”
    Halley’s recitation was one of the most startling Mar-berg and Gerdes had heard in their long careers as detectives, but he was telling them things about Sam Jesse that seemed to make some kind of sense in the crazy pattern of the events at the Prudential Bank. Sam Jesse, a brilliant son of an Episcopal minister, had seemingly been obsessed with a fantasy world in which he could rob and even kill with impunity, utterly consumed with the plotting and planning that appeared—at least to Sam him-self—to be foolproof. If he really believed the world was coming to an end, he had apparently decided to arm himself with enough money and supplies to be a survivor.
    Mark Halley told the two detectives that he had become more and more disturbed as he realized that Sam was probably responsible for William Heggie’s death. It all added up. In the past, he and Sam had consulted a hypnotist, a kind of guru, after Sam asked Mark what he should do to find answers to his “spiritual questions.”
    “This guy is pretty spiritually aware,” Mark explained, “and he’s the one that Sam kept talking to and he was always asking him was it OK if you kill somebody? What happens to you spiritually? Is there a debt against you? This guy says, ‘Only if you let it be a debt—then it’s a debt.’
    “That was something I just couldn’t agree with.”
    Halley’s conscience ate at him as he had wavered between going to the police and sticking by his old friend. He had clearly had his own philosophical questions about good and evil and accountability. While he tried to decide what to do, he said he had picked up a hitch-hiker—a complete stranger—and run his worries about Sam by him.
    “He told me the decision had to be mine, and all of a sudden, I knew what I would do. So I called my father and told him to contact you guys—to call the police.”
    Gerdes and Marberg believed Halley. They did a preliminary background check, and found that Sam Jesse was, indeed, the son of a minister. Until recently, he had been employed as a janitor at the Federal Office Building, a job far beneath his abilities and education. It was too late to stop him from fleeing to Hawaii. But he wouldn’t get beyond the gate when he landed in Honolulu.
    They asked Mark Halley to give them the most detailed description of Sam that he could.
    “He’s six feet, three inches tall, 180 pounds, and he has very straight blond hair, blue eyes. Sometimes he looks like he’s crying because he’s got this problem with his tear ducts. He wears wire-rimmed glasses.”
    “Any accent or speech impediment?” Marberg asked.
    “No.”
    “Scars?”
    “No.”
    “Mustache?”
    “Not now.”
    Detective Sergeant Jerry