Stolen Prey (7 page)

“It’s gotta be money,” O’Brien said. “Maybe they’re killing two birds with one stone—looking for their money and making a point.”

“What are the chances that it’s a rogue element?” Shaffer asked.
“Some smaller group inside the Criminales knew about Brooks, and they came up to hijack the money stream?”

O’Brien shrugged. “Dunno,” he said. “I guess it’s possible.” His voice said that it wasn’t possible, and that Shaffer should hang his head in shame for having suggested it.

Shaffer, his face slightly red, began to tap-dance. “Or maybe the Brookses just really pissed them off, or threatened them somehow, and they came up, you know, to shut them down.”

“But then, why the whole torture scene?” O’Brien asked. “These guys are brutal, but they’re not stupid. They really don’t do crimes of passion. They kill for business reasons. If they just wanted to shut Brooks down, they could have come up here, shot Brooks on the street, and gone back home. You guys would be scratching your heads. Nobody would even suspect anything other than a robbery…. Now, you’re gonna be chasing Mexicans all over town. The DEA gets involved, the Justice Department calls up the Mexican government, and they get more pressure put on them…. They’re not impervious to pressure, you know. They don’t want a battalion of Federales up their ass that might have gone up somebody else’s ass.”

T
HEY ALL
thought about that for a minute, then Lucas asked O’Brien, “You’re not really here to catch the killers, are you?”

“We’d certainly like to,” O’Brien said. There was a tentative note in his voice.

“But basically, you’re here to see if you can find a way to mess with the business,” Lucas said. “From that perspective, the guys who did the actual killing are probably small potatoes. You’re
here to look at the books, not to track somebody down in Minneapolis.”

O’Brien nodded. “Yeah. That’s pretty much the case. We’re not equipped to go chasing after individual murderers. We want to bust up their
system
. We’d like to find the cash that Brooks stole, and take it away from them. That’ll amount to a bunch of legal writs, freezing bank accounts somewhere. The street stuff—that’s you guys.”

T
HE
BCA guys all glanced at each other, and Shaffer said, “Well, that’s clear enough. We’ll be glad to cooperate on that.”

Lucas asked a few more questions, the most critical one, for his immediate future, being “Can these guys pass as Americans?”

O’Brien said, “Probably not. In the border states, their retailers are mostly Hispanic, recruited out of the prison system in California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. Some of them are native English speakers, grew up in Los Angeles or Phoenix. Some of them hardly speak a word of English, and settle down in the barrios in LA. Up north, here, they use a lot of Anglo prison gangs—just a straight money deal. But their gunmen, their hit men, they almost all come from Mexico. They grow up with the gangs.”

“So the guys we’re looking for, they’re probably Mexican.”

O’Brien nodded. “Yeah. If we’ve got this right. If it’s not some kind of … French connection.”

They talked around for a while, and then Shaffer said he’d put all the accountants together after the DEA agents walked through the murder scene.

L
UCAS WENT
back to his office and found a call from Billy Andrews, the St. Paul cop, who said they’d located the guy who knew about bad Mexicans in town. Lucas called Del, who was still in the building, and recruited him to go along for the ride.

Before he left, he called Virgil Flowers, an agent who worked southern Minnesota, and told him about the horse shit clue to the ATM robbers.

“Sounds like it’s right up my alley,” Flowers said. “Horseshit.”

“I’ve been told that we could call around to county agents to see if they might know about riding stables, and who’d have hired hands as cleanup people … or some such. I’d do it myself, but now I’m all tangled up in this Wayzata murder. We’re talking Mexican drug killers.”

“Lot more eye-catching than horse shit,” Flowers observed.

“Well, I’m a lot more important than you are,” Lucas said. “So…”

“I’ll do it, but I’m working on the Partridge Plastics thing, so there’ll be extra hours involved,” Flowers said. “If I get them, I’ll want to work a little undertime in the next couple of weeks.”

“Just locate them,” Lucas said. “You don’t have to
get
them. I want to be there for the
get
. We can talk about the undertime … if you find them.”

“Oh, I’ll find them,” Flowers said.

A
NDREWS WAS
a detective with St. Paul narcotics/vice. He was so large that he was hard to miss: six seven or six eight, maybe
240 pounds, with over-the-ears blond hair and gold-rimmed glasses. He looked like a tight end with a PhD in European literature. He dressed in dark sport coats over black golf shirts because, he thought, they made him look smaller. They didn’t; they made him look like a hole in space. His nose had been broken a couple of times, and maybe his teeth: he had an improbably even white smile.

They picked him up at the St. Paul police headquarters. He got in the backseat of the Lexus and said, “Okay, this guy’s name is Daniel Castells.”

“Dope dealer?” Del asked.

“Don’t think so. He just sort of hangs out,” Andrews said. “It’s not real clear where his money comes from. He buys and sells, we hear … maybe, like stuff that’s fallen off a truck. Maybe. If a pound of coke came along, with no strings attached, he might find a place to put it. Or he might put that guy who had the coke with a guy who wanted it. Or maybe he’d run like hell. I dunno. People say he’s a smart guy.”

“Where is he?”

“He’s got a booth at McDonald’s, over at Snelling and University,” Andrews said. “Drinks a lot of coffee. Eats French fries. Talks to people on a cell phone. He’s there now. Dan Walker is keeping an eye on him.”

“Does he know we’re coming?” Lucas asked.

“We haven’t mentioned it,” Andrews said.

“Sounds like the guy to know,” Lucas said. “I’m surprised I haven’t heard of him.”

“Showed up here a couple of years ago, keeps his head down,” Andrews said. “I’ve thought about watching him, to see what he’s
got going. I’d like to get some prints, or even some DNA, maybe track him down somewhere else.”

“Not a bad idea,” Lucas said.

T
HEY TOOK
ten minutes getting to the McDonald’s, and Andrews called his watchman, Walker, on a handset and confirmed that Castells was still in his booth.

“He is,” he told Lucas, after he’d rung off. “He’s been talking on his cell phone for the last hour.”

University and Snelling was a mess because of construction for a light-rail right-of-way, and Lucas had to dodge around traffic barriers to get into the parking lot. When they were parked, they walked across the blacktop to the McDonald’s, past the window where Castells was sitting. He saw them coming, making eye contact with all three of them, one after the other. He looked at his phone and pushed a button, and Lucas nodded to him.

Inside, they walked over to his booth, and Castells said, “Officers,” and Lucas gestured at the other seats in the booth and asked, “Do you mind?”

Castells had sun-bleached eyebrows and sandy hair, over a well-tanned face. His face was thin, like a runner’s, his eyes pale gray. He was wearing a lavender short-sleeved shirt with a collar, and narrow jeans, with black running shoes. “Would it make any difference if I did?”

Lucas said, “Sure. Then we’d all stand up and talk to you, and pretty soon everybody in the place would be looking at us.”

“So sit down,” Castells said, waving at the booth.

A
LTHOUGH
he was the only one in it, he’d taken the biggest booth in the place, and had his phone charger plugged into a wall outlet below the table. A dealer of some kind, Lucas thought, with his own table at McDonald’s.

Andrews fitted in next to Castells, with Lucas and Del sitting across the table. Lucas said, “So, a couple cops from St. Paul were talking to some dope dealers, and one of them said you told him to look out because there were some bad Mexican people in town. Is that right?”

Castells didn’t answer immediately. Instead, he seemed to think for a moment, and then showed a thin flicker of a smile. He’d just figured out who’d talked to the cops, Lucas realized. Castells asked, “Does this have anything to do with those people who got killed on the other side of town?”

Del said, “Maybe.”

Castells said, “I gotta change my name. People keep thinking I’m a Mexicano.”

Lucas asked, “What kind of name is Castells?”

“Catalan,” Castells said. The three cops looked at one another, and Andrews shrugged, and Castells said, “Catalonia is a country currently occupied by Spain.”

“You some kind of radical?” Del asked.

Castells laughed and said, “No. I’m an antiquities dealer. You know—statues and stuff.”

“Who talks to dope dealers,” Andrews said.

“I talk to everybody,” Castells said. “I’m a friendly guy.”

“You never know who might need a statue,” Del offered.

“That’s right,” Castells said, smiling at Del. “You just put your finger on the core of the business, Officer Capslock.”

Del leaned back: “Where do you know me from?”

“You were pointed out to me once,” Castells said. “I was told that I shouldn’t be misled by the fact that you were wearing a trucker’s hat backwards.”

“Mmm,” Del said. Castells had pushed him off-balance. He asked, pushing back, “You haven’t seen a big bronze statue, have you? Some women dancing on some fish?”

“The
Naiads
,” Castells said. “No, I haven’t, and neither has anybody else in the statue business. There wouldn’t be any way to sell it. Your statue is now a bunch of little bronze pieces, if it’s not already been turned into ingots.”

“I hate it when people say things like that,” Del said.

Lucas jumped in: “So what about these bad Mexicans?”

“The thing about cops is, cops blab,” Castells said to Lucas. “They bullshit with everybody. If somebody’s talking about a particular group of bad Mexicans, well … you could get your head cut off on television.”

“Not us,” Lucas said. “We’ve all worked in intelligence. We keep our mouths shut.”

Castells made an open-hand gesture, as if to say, “Whatever,” and asked, “Which one of you is the boss?”

“We don’t actually have bosses,” Lucas said, but Andrews pointed a finger at Lucas and said, “He is.”

C
ASTELLS LOOKED
at Lucas and said, “I don’t know very much, but I was talking to a couple of Mexicanos over in West St. Paul
and one of them said to the other that it’d be best to stay away from the Wee Blue Inn, because there were some heavy hitters going through, supposedly from Dallas, but actually, he said, from Mexico. That is the sum total of what I know. I passed it on to another guy I know, because he is also a Mexicano. I didn’t know he was a drug dealer.”

“Why’d you think about the killings on the other side of town?” Andrews asked.

“’Cause I watched the TV news last night. Sounded like Mexican dopers to me.”

They talked for a couple more minutes, and when asked where he’d come from, Castells said, “Washington, D.C.”

“You were a congressman, or something?” Del asked.

Castells said, “Something like that.”

“You speak Spanish?” Del asked.

“Yes.”

Lucas asked, “French?”

“Mm-hmm. You looking for a language teacher?”

“No. German?” Lucas asked.

“Maybe a little. I travel on business.”

“Antiquities.”

“Yes. And high-end furniture.”

He did not, he said, have any more relevant information, but he’d keep his ear to the ground, his nose to the grindstone, and his feet on the fence. If he heard anything more, he’d call Lucas. Lucas gave him a card and stood up. “Stay in touch. We could be a valuable contact for a hardworking antique dealer.”

“Antiquities, not antiques. Antiques were made in Queen Victoria’s time. Antiquities were made by the Greeks and Romans
and Egyptians. Entirely different market,” Castells said, as he put the card in his pocket. He was, Lucas thought, exactly the kind of guy who would keep it.

Outside, Lucas said to Andrews, “Interesting guy.”

Del said, “Yeah. So are we going down to the Wee Blue Inn?”

“Thought we might,” Lucas said.

T
HE
W
EE
B
LUE
I
NN
was a hole-in-the-wall motel and bar on Robert Street in West St. Paul. All three of them knew it, and Del and Andrews had been inside. “The owner is a guy named John Poe, like in Edgar Allan, but he doesn’t write poetry,” Del said. “He sells the occasional gun, and he’ll rent you a room for an hour at a time.”

“He sweats a lot,” Andrews said. “He usually smells like onion sweat. I think he eats those ‘everything’ bagels.”

“Can we jack him up without anybody looking in a window at us?” Lucas asked. “I’d rather talk to Poe straight up, see what he has to say, than go in with the whole SWAT squad.”

“I could go in and look around,” Del said. He looked nothing like a cop, a major asset in his job.

“Except that Poe knows you,” Lucas said.

“He won’t tell anybody,” Del said. “He doesn’t want his clientele knowing that cops are hanging around.”

“Let’s do that,” Lucas said. “If there are three bad Mexicans in there, we’ll call up the SWAT.”

T
HEY TALKED ABOUT
Poe on the way over, and Andrews called headquarters and got them to put a couple squads in a dry cleaner’s
lot two blocks away, no stoplights between them and the Wee Blue Inn. “Just in case,” he said.

At the Wee Blue Inn, they dropped Del and went on their way, around the block. Del called one minute later and said, “I talked to Poe. He says the Mexicans were here, but they’re gone. Checked out yesterday morning. They said they were going back to Dallas.”

“Did he
ask
them where they were going, or did they volunteer it?”

Del went away for a moment, then came back: “They volunteered it.”

“So they’re not going back to Dallas,” Lucas said.