Stolen Prey (25 page)

He didn’t know how gold was normally delivered, though he’d been told once that the post office would handle it via registered mail. The problem with the post office, from the police point of view, was that you had to jump through your ass to get any information about deliveries—they seemed to delight in making sure every legal technicality was observed before they’d cooperate with the cops.

But once a package was delivered, all he’d need was a search warrant. If Kline was taking deliveries…

He thought about that, looked at his watch again. Getting late, but fuck it, people were being killed. He went to his black book, got the number of Martin Clark, the head of Minneapolis Homicide—Homicide would have covered the Kline shooting—and called him.

When Clark came up, Lucas asked, “Are you done with the crime scene at the Kline shooting?”

“Pretty much,” Clark said. “Kline told us the story, and everything we saw jibed with what he said.”

“Get anything I need to know about?”

“Wasn’t much to get, other than a bunch of used-up slugs and brass,” Clark said. “From talking to Kline, we know the shooters
weren’t in the apartment for more than a minute or two, and he thinks they were wearing gloves. So…”

“Could I get in there? Tonight?” Lucas asked.

“Ah, man…”

“Look, you don’t have to have anything to do with it,” Lucas said. “Get the watch guy downtown to get me the key. You got the key in an evidence locker?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll go on down and get it, and you can have a squad meet me at the door,” Lucas said. “The thing is, I talked to Kline, and I don’t like his story. I think he’s involved in the theft of this money from Polaris…. I just want to see the scene.”

After a moment, Clark said, “I’ll get you the key—but don’t get me in trouble.”

“I won’t,” Lucas promised. “I’ll be over at Homicide in twenty minutes, and over at Kline’s in forty-five. You get a squad down there, I’ll go in for ten minutes, and I’ll drop the key off when I get finished walking through.”

“Just leave the key with the uniform,” Clark said.

“Good with me,” Lucas said.

L
UCAS WAS
at Homicide in fifteen minutes and signed for the key. Back on the street, he drove as quickly as he could to an all-night convenience store in North Minneapolis, known for its burglary support services, walked through to the back and got a once-and-future convict named Kevin to make a duplicate key for him.

“I keep losing mine,” he said.

“They all say that,” Kevin said.

By the time Lucas got to Kline’s apartment building, it was after eleven o’clock, and the building was mostly dark, and quiet. A cop was sitting out front, in his squad, the engine running and the internal light on, reading a hard-cover comic.

“Nice night,” he said, as Lucas walked up, after parking the Porsche.

“Not bad,” Lucas agreed.

Kline’s apartment was the first one at the top of the landing. Lucas pulled off a piece of crime-scene tape, let himself in, turned on the lights, put his hands in his pockets, and walked through the place.

The uniform said, “Stinks.”

L
UCAS SPENT
fifteen minutes inside, looking at bullet holes, looking at angles. Finally he said, “Maybe.”

“Maybe?”

“Maybe he’s telling the truth. It sort of looks like he’s telling the truth. Problem is, nobody saw the supposed Mexicans.”

The cop shrugged. “He got shot, and they don’t have a gun, right? Seems pretty straightforward.”

“Nothing is straightforward in this,” Lucas said. He took a last look around. “Okay. I’m done.”

O
UTSIDE
, he passed the key to the cop and said, “I’d appreciate it if you’d sign it back in as quick as you could. Your boss didn’t like the whole idea.”

“I’ll do that,” the cop said.

Lucas sat in his car, his cell phone up to his face, faking a conversation, until the cop pulled away and a half dozen cars were between them. Then Lucas did a U-turn and followed, until he was sure the cop was headed downtown.

Five minutes later, he was back at Kline’s door. He used the new key to unlock it, pulled on a pair of latex gloves, and began searching the place.

He needed, specifically, a stash of coins, or a discarded envelope or package wrapping that would connect him to a gold dealer, or anything that could suggest a conspiracy with Turicek and Sanderson.

The apartment was small and shabby, smelling of spaghetti sauce overlain with the scent of human waste and blood; there was minimal cooking gear, three large bookcases full of paperback books and DVDs, an oversized TV with a game console hooked to it. The floor was littered with medical detritus, the paper and plastic packaging for bandages and syringes and whatever. Though he went through each cupboard and drawer, rolled and poked the mattress, looked in the toilet tank, and even removed every electric-outlet cover plate—took his time—he came up empty.

Then, in a military-styled shirt-jac, the kind with zippers on the sleeve, he found a cheap cell phone. He brought it up, looked at the call log, found dozens of incoming and outgoing calls, but only to three numbers. He took the numbers down and put the phone back.

W
HEN HE
finished the general search, he sat at Kline’s desk, going through the paper around the Mac Tower, and found a lot
of litter and cryptic notes of the same kind Lucas had on his own desk. He turned on the computer and was asked for a password. He took out his notebook and looked up the password he’d found on the back of the Sirius Satellite Radio card, and typed it in: 6rattata6.

The computer shook him off, and he closed it down and turned away from the desk for a last look around the place.

There were two big framed posters on the wall opposite the desk, each showing multiple images of Japanese cartoon characters. He hadn’t looked behind them, so he looked behind them and found the back side of posters. When he was straightening the second one, his eye caught a caption with the word
Rattata
.

He looked closer. The posters were composites of favorite cartoon characters, if
anime
meant “cartoon.” There were a couple dozen of them, and if Kline was taking his passwords from anime characters…

He went back to the computer and brought it up and it occurred to him that most people didn’t have large numbers of different passwords, but just a couple of passwords, with perhaps variations.

So instead of plugging in all the anime characters, he started with plain “rattata,” and worked from 0rattata0 through 9rattata9, and was shaken off with each of them.

“Goddamnit.”

He looked at the pictures again, then pulled the closest one off the wall. Forty minutes later, working from the names on the picture, he typed in “5pikachu5”—and he was in.

“Excellent,” he said to himself.

He went to the Spotlight feature and typed in “Gold,” and got
dozens of hits. He said, “Gotcha,” and then, a minute later, “Don’t gotcha.”

As he started working through the hits, he found that most of them were document and online files that included the word
Gold
, as in one place, Golden Artist Colors, and in another, WhatsUp Gold, some kind of network monitoring software. Then, as he was growing discouraged, he found Donleavy Precious Metals, and a website for a Chicago dealer in gold, silver, and platinum. A few minutes more got him a link to Las Vegas Numismatics, and he said, “Now I’ve gotcha.”

When he shut down the computer an hour later, he had a list of twelve dealers on the west and east coasts.

Too late to do anything about it, he thought.

Somewhere along the line, it occurred to him that he hadn’t spoken to Virgil Flowers. He’d probably taken the day off, and knowing Flowers, he’d done it in a boat. The thing about Flowers was, in Lucas’s humble opinion, you could send him out for a loaf of bread and he’d find an illegal bread cartel smuggling in heroin-saturated wheat from Afghanistan. Either that, or he’d be fishing in a muskie tournament, on government time. You had to keep an eye on him.

In bed that night, he spent little time thinking about the tweekers—Flowers would get them—and more time thinking about the gold. The gold was interesting because it tied everything together. He also thought about Shaffer: the problem with Shaffer was that he was straight. Very straight. He had little sense of humor when it came to things like illegal searches, using unknowing innocent people as decoys, and so on.

He would have to use some finesse, he decided.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, before he left for work, he called Sandy, the researcher, and said, “I need to find the biggest gold dealers in the country. Maybe, like, the top one hundred.”

“Do you have any idea how I’m supposed to figure that out?” she asked.

“No, I don’t,” he said. “I need the list this morning. Also, I have three phone numbers. I’d like to know who the subscribers are.”

“Well, that part’ll be easy enough,” she said.

O
UTSIDE
, he found that Letty had parked the Lexus behind the Porsche, and instead of shuffling cars, he took the truck and headed downtown. They met at nine o’clock, the whole murder crew, and Shaffer reported that they had enough evidence to convict anybody they managed to arrest, with fingerprints and DNA from three suspects. “We’ve got everybody in the metro area on board, every single cop has the photos and the Identi-Kits, and we think we may have a line on the car they’re driving. It’s a green Subaru Forester owned by a pretzel seller named Ferat Chakkour, who disappeared after he left his job at the Rosedale mall an hour or so after the shoot-out in St. Paul. He usually parked in the same lot where we found the Texas truck. We think they picked him up, probably killed him, dumped him somewhere, and are driving his car. This is confidential information—we’ve asked everybody to hold it close, make sure it doesn’t get out to the media. We’ve talked to all the highway patrols all the way to the Mexican border.”

“Gonna leak pretty quick,” Lucas said. “This guy got any family?”

“He’s got a housemate, another student, we’ve asked him to keep his mouth shut, but he’s already been talking to Chakkour’s parents in Cairo. Chakkour’s from Egypt. The roommate’s already talked to some classmates … but we’re hoping to keep it close for a day or two, maybe pick up the car before it breaks out.”

They’d already had four separate alerts, from cops who thought they might have spotted the suspects, but nothing had panned out; still, it kept them jumping.

The DEA, O’Brien said, was working the offshore banks but hadn’t gotten anything yet. “Probably get it later today—we’re talking to the state department and our own people, squeezing as hard as we can. It’s not usually as hard to get it if we say it’s drug money. The problem is, every time the IRS goes after some corporation for tax evasion, they start out by saying it’s drug money, so the banks don’t always believe us anymore.”

Shaffer wrote a note and pushed it to another BCA agent while O’Brien was talking; Shaffer didn’t care about the banks.

Lucas told them about his conversations with Kline and Bone, and his conclusions from those conversations: that the thieves who’d hijacked the bank account were probably buying gold, and that there were probably several of them. He mentioned that he was having a researcher get together a list of gold dealers who could be checked for suspicious gold sales. He also suggested that the Criminales must have had a contact at the bank who tipped them to the suspicions about Kline.

“So you keep doing that, working on the thieves, and we’ll
keep pushing people on the shooters,” Shaffer said. “If anything comes up, for anybody, call us.”

“The thing is, Kline’s the best lead we’ve got for the thieves, and the Criminales apparently think the same thing. I’d love to find something we could use to serve a search warrant on his young ass,” Lucas said. “If anybody thinks of anything…”

O’Brien asked, “Say, anybody seen Ana Martínez?”

Shaffer shrugged. “I know she was making arrangements to take Rivera’s body back to Mexico. I talked to her last night. I thought she’d be here. I called her, but she didn’t answer her phone.”

Lucas said, “That’s a little worrisome. I’ll check on her.”

As they were breaking up, O’Brien took a call, listened for a minute, then said, “We’ll be right over. We’re just leaving here, about twenty minutes.”

He hung up and said, “That was ICE. She found the shadow books at Sunnie. She said they’ve been there right from the start, when the system was first put together.”

“Bingo,” Shaffer said. “That’s large. I’m coming with you. Lucas?”

“I’ll be around.”

L
ucas was sitting at his desk when Martin Clark, the Minneapolis homicide detective, called and demanded, “What the hell did you do in Kline’s apartment last night?”

Lucas, confused, said, “What?”

“What’d you do to the computer?”

“I didn’t do anything to the computer,” Lucas said. “Your guy was there the whole time. What happened to it?”

“Somebody cracked it open and took the disk drive.”

“Ah, shit … Marty, I didn’t touch the goddamn computer. I was just sitting here trying to think of a way to get a search warrant…. Wait a minute, could I put you on hold for a minute? Or call you right back?”

Martínez stepped to the doorway, looked in; her face was drawn, her eyes puffy. Lucas held up a finger. Clark said, “Yeah, okay. What’s going on?”

“Tell you in one minute,” Lucas said. Then, “Wait, wait, was the door forced? It wasn’t, was it?”

“No, the door’s fine.”

“I’ll get right back to you,” Lucas said.

He hung up and pointed Martínez at a chair, said, “Ana, glad to see you. I was a little worried. I’ve been trying to get in touch.”

“My phone was off,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“Gotta make a call.” Lucas called Hennepin Medical Center, was put through to the surgical intensive care ward, identified himself, and asked the nurse, “I really need to know if Mr. Kline had any visitors this morning…. Yeah, I’ll hold.”

When he was on hold, he said to Martínez, “Trying to get a line on the thieves…”