Stolen Prey (11 page)

“So the merchant gets a mil,” Turicek said.

“Correct. We take out twenty million, and nineteen million shows up in our bank accounts, which have no connection whatever to the accounts used to take the original money.”

“But we have to live in Nigeria?” Kline asked. He was stuck on the idea.

“No. No. Listen to me. You can live anywhere you want. Look: we won’t even have to get the gold to Lagos. My guy has contacts here in the U.S. We drop the coins with them, the dollars pop up in the Lagos account.”

“Why couldn’t we do that with cash?” Sanderson asked.

Albitis looked at her as though she were retarded. “We could,
if we had the cash. But I keep telling you, it’s
getting
the cash that’s impossible. It’s getting from a bank account to dollar bills that we can’t do. But we can get from a bank account to gold. A gold dealer is a store. Buying gold is like buying a toaster. There’s no trail. That’s all we’re talking about: killing the trail.”

“Okay,” Sanderson said. It’d take a while. “I guess.”

“Anyway, when we’ve moved the gold, you hire some legitimate accountants to repatriate your money,” Albitis said. “In the end, you have several million apparently legitimate dollars in your bank account. You pay whatever taxes you need to pay. The gold disappears into the souks. Nobody ever sees it again, except in rings and bracelets and so on.”

“What soup?” Sanderson asked.

“Soup?” Albitis frowned.

“You said the gold would disappear into the soup.”

“Souk,” Albitis said. “Souk. A market.” She looked at Turicek. “What kind of people are these two? Have they ever been out of Minneapolis?”

Turicek nodded at Kline and said, “Sleepy,” and then at Sanderson and said, “Dopey,” and tapped his own chest. “Grumpy.”

“And I’m Greedy,” Albitis said. “Okay. Now all we need is Snow White.”

A
LBITIS AND
T
URICEK
were solid with the deal. Sanderson and Kline were a little shaky. Kline had been somewhat satisfied by simply knowing that he
could
do it; he didn’t necessarily
need
to do it. The money was attractive, not mandatory. But they were not particularly strong people, and in the end, despite misgivings, they went along.

Now, with that family dead out in Wayzata, things looked a little bleaker. Before, Sanderson had mostly thought of ways they could do it; now she began to think of ways they could get caught. Turicek and Albitis could disappear into the former Soviet Union and probably be safe enough. But where would she go? Duluth?

Kline was another problem, she thought. He was erratic, and it was hard to tell what he might do, if the cops came around to talk to him. He had a weird sense of humor, a grotesque sense of humor. If he started trying to play games with the cops … And who knew, maybe he’d find prison
comforting
. He always said he never had a real home.

She had to think about all of that.

L
UCAS COPIED
David Rivera’s LCN files and photos to his computer, then gave the thumb drive to Shaffer to read. Shaffer said he’d put the six LCN mug shots on television that night and ask people to keep an eye out. When Lucas was done with that, he made a few more calls on the case, learned nothing useful, then went home early and collected Letty and a couple of pistols.

Lucas was an excellent shot. Part of that came from being a good athlete, with the kind of long-term training in hockey and basketball that allowed him to quickly grasp the essentials of accurate rifle and pistol work. Just as, in basketball, there had to be an instant of focus before the ball was released, a focus that excluded almost everything but the basket itself, good shooting required that same moment of mental exclusion, that moment when you saw nothing but the target. The athletic background also taught him that patience was needed to get good in any difficult endeavor. He developed the patience.

He wasn’t particularly fond of guns, but he was effective, and he believed that since guns were one of the ubiquitous tools of violence in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, it behooved one to know how to use them.

Weather disagreed; Letty did not.

Letty, in her previous life, had been severely neglected. She’d grown up in an isolated house, far out in the countryside in northwestern Minnesota. She had, at times, literally been required to hunt for her dinner. She also had been a fur trapper, a preteen wandering in rubber boots and a Goodwill parka around the muskrat swamps of northwest Minnesota, trying to make a buck. Then her mother was murdered, and she met Lucas, who eventually adopted her; in the course of that case, Letty had shot a cop. On two different occasions—the same crooked cop. She had no regrets or second thoughts whatsoever.

O
N THIS AFTERNOON
, they got Lucas’s Colt .45 Gold Cup and Beretta 92F, and drove up to the St. Paul police pistol range in Maplewood, where a half dozen guys were going through annual testing. Lucas had a standing arrangement with the department to use the range, and had gotten a quiet okay to bring Letty along.

On the way up, they talked about her school, and about the Wayzata case, and Lucas gave her the details that he had.

“Nothing there for me,” she said, thinking about the possibilities for her television job. “The cop reporters got all that stuff.”

“I talked to Jen, and she said you were working on some Apple computer thing.”

“Yeah, boring, boring,” she said. “I’m doing a review of favorite laptops of the rich and fashionable kids, for the next school year.” She pitched up her voice, “Oh, my God, she’s got only four gigs of RAM.”

“Girls don’t talk like that,” Lucas ventured.

“They do now. Everybody’s got a Mac, an iPhone, and maybe an iPad, and God help you if you show up with a Dell,” Letty said. “Then you’re really socially f-worded.”

“Really.”

A
T THE RANGE
, they put on ear and eye protection, got the okay from the range officer, and began working with the .45, and then the Beretta. The Beretta offered more firepower, in terms of sheer number of rounds, but Lucas had sent the .45 to a Kansas gunsmith to be tuned, and it was more accurate. Because of the relatively mild recoil, and smaller grip, Letty had no problem handling it.

“If you’re shooting for real, shoot at the smallest spot you can see clearly,” Lucas said, as he was looking at one of her targets. The bullet holes were scattered in a loose group around the center of the target. “A button is good. The smaller the aiming point, the tighter your group will be, but you still want a substantial target behind the aim point. Like the chest triangle: nipples and navel. An eye is small, and you naturally look at an eye, but the overall target, the head, is small, and it’s always moving. The nipple-navel triangle doesn’t move so much. Whatever you do, you don’t want to just start whaling away, because if you do, you’ll have a whaled-away group.”

“I knew that,” she said. “When I’d kill a rat, I’d always aim at that little white spot in their eye. ’Course, I was using a twenty-two, from two inches. Still like that gun.”

“Lot to like about it,” Lucas agreed. “Saved your life.”

He got into his gun bag and brought out a round red sticker about the size of a dime and stuck it to the center of the target. “Shoot at that. Focus on it. Even try to focus on the middle of the spot, if you can.”

She did, and her group tightened up dramatically. “Interesting,” she said.

“Let’s do it again,” Lucas said. “Then we’ll run through the slap, rack, and fire.”

“Always hurts my hand.”

“You need the training,” he said. “And what’s a little pain?”

L
ucas again arrived late for the morning briefing, and found a tense tableau: Shaffer was standing behind his chair, his arms braced on the top bar, his body rigid. Rivera sat across the table from him, half-turned away, but his face was red and he was shaking a chubby finger at Shaffer’s face.

The three DEA guys sat at the far end of the table, looking back and forth between the two as though they were at a tennis match. Four additional BCA agents, part of Shaffer’s team, were scattered around the room, two of them standing with their arms crossed defensively, looking down at Rivera.

Lucas came in behind Rivera, in time to hear him say, “… so I don’t want to hear about Mexicans this and Mexicans that. These people are criminals and they are rats and the United States of America created them with this drug market, and with these guns that you ship across the border to the narcos. Thousands of guns, black rifles that they change one part, and they have machine guns. Huh?” He patted his chest and said, “It’s my people who are dying in hundreds and thousands so your rich people can put this cocaine up their noses and smoke their Colombians, so don’t tell me about Mexicans this and Mexicans that.”

He was shaking with anger. Behind him, Martínez was standing
with her back to the wall, holding a briefcase. She glanced at Lucas and tipped her head, as if to apologize.

Shaffer, as angry as Rivera, said, “I wasn’t trying to lecture you. I was trying to point out the obvious. You’ve apparently shipped a batch of insane killers up here from Mexico and they’re butchering children and women.”

“
I
didn’t ship them.
Mexico
didn’t ship them. They came here because this is where the money is. Because of
your
market. Because you do the money laundry, huh? Why do you think we are here? This Sunnie Software was the Criminales’ bank, huh? It’s a
bank
. So you provide the market, you provide the bank, you provide the distribution, but it’s the Mexicanos who are at fault for all this? Bullshit.”

Shaffer stuttered, “I—I—I just don’t want to have this debate. We’re all on the same side here. We’re just trying to clear up this murder. At least I am.”

L
UCAS CLEARED
his throat and said, “Sorry I’m late. Any returns from the TV photos last night?”

Shaffer nodded, grateful for the interruption. He said, “Not yet. Nothing so far.”

Lucas, looking over at the DEA agents, asked, “What about Sunnie’s accountants? What about the bank? Anything there?”

“We’re looking at eight years’ worth of paper, trying to spot where the leak is,” said O’Brien. “Haven’t found it so far. Still interviewing the employees. Whatever Brooks was doing, it was complicated. But that … maybe that’s what we should have expected. It wouldn’t be right out there in the open.”

Another one of the DEA agents, whose name Lucas didn’t remember, said, “Our thinking now is, he was running a computer program that diverts incoming payments, depending on where they’re coming from, to some other place. An automatic diversion. In other words, he’s not actually collecting the money, he’s simply set up a mechanism for collecting it. When it comes through, it carries a … signal of some sort … that simply moves the money elsewhere. If that’s the way it works, and that’s what we’re starting to think, then we won’t find it with an audit. We need a software guy to look at their programming.”

Shaffer asked, “You got one of those?”

“We could probably find one,” O’Brien said.

Lucas said to Shaffer, “We could bring in ICE. We really need to get on top of this. We don’t need to wait a week for somebody to show up.”

Shaffer: “She’s pretty expensive.”

“But she’d find it,” Lucas said.

O’Brien asked, “Who’s this ICE?”

Lucas: “Ingrid Caroline Eccols. She was one of the people who worked with me when I was running a software company, back in the nineties. Programmer, hacker, gamer, really smart. If she’s not doing much, we could probably get her for two hundred.”

“If you guys say she’s good, I think the federal government could come up with a couple hundred bucks,” O’Brien said.

Lucas said, “Ah, that’d be two hundred bucks
an hour
. Sometimes she works sixteen or eighteen hours straight … so it could be like three grand a day. Or four. If she’s available and if she likes the idea.”

O’Brien’s eyebrows went up: “That, I’d have to get approved,”
he said. “I can probably do it, for a couple days, anyway, if you guys say she’s really good.”

“She’s really good,” Shaffer said, and Lucas added, “She’s as good as they get.”

“So I’ll make a call,” O’Brien said. “Why don’t you guys line her up?”

T
HE REST
of the meeting was a review of crime-scene evidence; one of the BCA cops passed Lucas a file of printouts of all the reports made so far. “We’ve got some prints, and we’ve got DNA, so … if we can find them, we’ve got them,” Shaffer said, summing up.

“But, you don’t really have them,” Rivera said. “You have the instruments, but you don’t have the men who ordered this done.”

“Just for the time being, I’ll take the instruments,” Shaffer snapped. “I’ll worry about the big chief after I get the guys I know about.”

Rivera shrugged and muttered something to Martínez in Spanish. Whatever it was, it made a couple of the DEA guys swallow smiles.

O
UT IN THE HALLWAY
, after the meeting, Rivera caught up with Lucas, who’d been the first man out the door. He said, quietly, “This Shaffer. He’s not so smart. I was hoping for somebody smarter.”

“He’s … effective,” Lucas said. “When he gets done, there’ll be no stone unturned.”

“Do you think he’ll catch these killers, or the people who ordered this done?”

“I don’t know,” Lucas said. He added, “The meeting seemed a little tense. What happened?”

Rivera stopped in the hallway and did some straightening-out motions, shooting out his shirtsleeves, pulling his suit together. “When I came up here, I was told by your Justice Department that I could be involved in the investigation. Otherwise, what’s the point for me to come? But Shaffer will not give me copies of your reports. He says it’s for your agency only, that he has no authority to give them to me. So we sit here and tickle our thumbs. Is that right? Tickle? It makes no sense.”

“Twiddle your thumbs,” Lucas said. “That makes no sense either, but it means this.” He put the report file under one arm and twiddled his thumbs for a few seconds; the cast made it difficult, since his left thumb was immobilized, but he got the idea across.