Stolen Prey (13 page)

“Neither do I,” Del said. “That thing scared the shit out of me.”

A
T THE TOP OF
the levee, Lucas could see what Del called a junkyard, but was really a long raw-dirt clearing with five chunks of wrecked, rusting machinery of uncertain purpose, and a couple of abandoned cars and trucks, some of which looked like they’d been submerged by past floods. The shed sat in the middle of it: dull-silver corrugated steel, the same thing farmers once used to build silos, but this structure was probably a hundred and fifty feet long and sixty feet wide, in the domed shape of a Quonset hut.

There were two sliding doors, closed tight, but big enough to accommodate a light airplane; Lucas thought the building might have been designed as a hangar. Although the big doors were closed, tracks in the dirt outside suggested that trucks had been coming and going. A black Cadillac sedan and an older twin-cab Chevy pickup sat outside the only human-scale door on the building. There were four windows down the length of the building, but all looked dark and dirty.

“Now what?” Jenkins asked.

“We watch for a couple minutes, then we run like hell down there and find a window clean enough to see inside.”

“We’re not going to get shot, are we?” Jenkins asked.

“I don’t think so,” Del said. “You ready?”

The three of them ran like hell down the levee and across a hundred feet of open dirt driveway, trying to be quiet about it, past the doorway, to the side of the building and the first of the windows. Del peeked and whispered, “I can’t see a thing.”

“Next window.”

They couldn’t see anything in the other windows, either. All were encrusted with what looked like several decades of dirt. Around in the back, they found a rotten door, and when Jenkins gently tried the rusty knob, the knob pulled out in his hand. He knelt and looked in the knob hole, shook his head, and said, “Nothing.”

On the far side, they found a cracked window. “Don’t tell the court I did this,” Del said, and using a pocketknife, pried out a shard of dirty glass. He dropped it under the window and pressed his eyes to the hole, looked for a moment, then turned to Lucas and whispered, “Got them. I can see the truck. There’s a pile of stuff off to the side. It could be a cut-up statue. It’s too dark to see.”

Lucas looked, and saw the truck first, then close to the entrance door, a pile of what might have been junk, except that it looked too manufactured, somehow. Too regular for junk. He pulled back and turned his ear to the door and could hear distant voices.

“Still in there,” he whispered.

“We could wait at the front door, get them when they come out, see if they say enough that we can go in,” Del whispered back. “I’m not sure about crashing in without a warrant.”

“
What if somebody comes?” Jenkins asked.

“Then we tap-dance,” Lucas said.

They walked quietly around to the front and waited, and six or seven minutes later, sure as God made little green apples, they heard a truck coming down the road. There was no time to run and hide, so Del and Jenkins propped their butts against the Cadillac’s bumper, and Lucas faced them, gesturing with one hand, as though they were arguing. Del said, “Don’t wave your hand around so much … it looks fake.”

“What the fuck am I supposed to do with it?” Lucas asked.

“Just cross your arms and take a step back and then turn around and look at the truck coming in,” Jenkins said. “You’re supposed to be curious.”

Lucas did that, and the truck pulled up. Del muttered, “Check the bumper sticker.” The bumper sticker said: “My other auto is a .45.” A middle-aged man, balding with gray hair pulled back in a stubby ponytail, got out of the truck and asked, “You the guys with Middleton?”

“Who’re you?” Del asked.

“I’m the guy with the copper,” the man said.

“Anderson’s the guy with the copper,” Del said. “We’ve been sitting here arguing … never mind. Whose copper is it?”

“Mine. C’mon, we’ll get it straight,” the guy said.

Jenkins nodded: “Thanks for the invite.”

An invitation was all they needed.

T
HEY FOLLOWED
ponytail inside. The sculpture was right there, on the floor, but in a thousand pieces: the first thing Lucas saw was a streamlined hand at the top of the pile. Anderson was talking
to a guy in jeans and jean jacket, with dirty blond hair and black plastic-rimmed glasses like people wore in Europe. They walked up and Anderson looked at the ponytail guy, and then at the three cops, and asked, “Who’re these guys?”

Del held up a badge in one hand, a gun in the other, and said, “The BCA. You’re under arrest.”

“Shit,” said the guy with the glasses, and with no further ado, he began running, three feet, four feet, and then, as he would have passed Lucas, Lucas reached out with his fiberglass cast and swatted the guy on the nose, and he went down, his glasses, still intact, spinning away.

“Don’t do that,” Del said. “Next guy who runs, I’m gonna shoot him.”

“I gotta get a cast,” Jenkins said, impressed by the impact.

“I didn’t do nothing,” said the guy who’d led them inside. He looked at Anderson and said, “Tell them—I didn’t do nothing.”

Anderson shrugged and said, “It’s your copper.”

Del said, “Bronze.”

The guy on the floor moaned, “Man, that smarts. That really fuckin’ hurts.”

They sat all three of them down and read them their rights, and gave the glasses guy a bunch of paper shop towels to squeeze against his bloody nose. Jenkins wandered over to the pile of metal, peered at it for a moment, then pulled out a semi-sphere the size of a soccer ball and said, “Look, a tit.” To Anderson, “How could you do that?”

Anderson said, “With a Sawzall.”

Del called for help from South St. Paul, and five minutes later two squads were parked outside. The three would be booked into the Ramsey County Jail.

“Four million bucks,” Del said, looking at the scrap. “State Farm is gonna be really unhappy. They’re holding the policy on it.”

T
HEY WERE
going through the rigmarole of handing the guys off to South St. Paul when Lucas’s phone rang, and he looked at the screen and saw that it was from an old friend, James T. Bone.

Bone was president of the third-largest bank in Minneapolis, after Wells Fargo and U.S. Bank. Lucas touched the answer button and said, “Hey, T-Bone. What’s up?”

“I’ve got a problem, and it could be serious,” Bone said. “Are you at your office?”

“No, I’m down in South St. Paul, arresting some guys,” Lucas said.

“Damnit. Well, this is the thing. I saw on television that you’re involved in this murder out in Wayzata,” Bone said.

“Some,” Lucas said. “I’m not running it.”

“That’s good enough,” Bone said. “I’ve got a vice president named Richard Pruess. He’s about six tiers down and he’s involved in a bunch of investment funds. Basically, he’s a salesman. If a customer is big enough, and wants an investment adviser, Richard sets that up.”

“What does that have to do with Wayzata?” Lucas asked.

“Pruess is missing,” Bone said. “He didn’t come to work today. He’s been sick some, I guess—I don’t see him much, myself. Anyway, he’s been under the weather for a few days, but still working. Today he didn’t show up at all, and he didn’t call in. He had a couple of meetings scheduled and hung up some customers. His supervisor tried to contact him, but couldn’t. His cell phone
keeps kicking us over to the answering service. He’s gay, somebody in the office knew his partner, and his partner said Pruess was getting ready for work this morning, he was fine, when the partner left. The partner went back to their apartment and Pruess isn’t there.”

“You call the cops? I mean, other cops?” Lucas asked.

“No, I decided to come straight to you. The reason is, you know … Pruess used to work with Candace Brooks. She was his assistant.”

“What?”
Lucas had been watching the copper thieves being put into the back of the squads, but now he walked away, across the oily dirt outside the shed.

“That’s why I decided to call you,” Bone said. “Candace Brooks worked here until a year ago, or fifteen months. Something like that—I don’t have her file yet. She had an assistant VP job in Pruess’s office. I didn’t know that myself—I just heard it from Sandy Bernstein, who runs that end of things. Anyway, I’m wondering if there might be something going on.”

“Jesus, Jim, I hope not, but there might be,” Lucas said. “Listen, we’re going to a full-court press on this. If you hear from this guy, call me right away. I’ll be there quick as I can. Another guy’s actually running the investigation, his name is Bob Shaffer. I’m gonna call him, I’m sure he’ll want to be there. And some DEA guys, and even a Mexican Federale.”

“You think it’s dope?” Bone asked.

“I’m afraid it could be. I don’t want to get ahead of ourselves, here, maybe your guy’s just out getting a haircut, but this business out in Wayzata … it’s bad as it can get,” Lucas said. “We can’t let this go, we can’t wait. We’ve got to find out if it’s related.”

“I really don’t need any of this money-laundering bullshit dropped on us,” Bone said.

“I can’t help what falls on you, if it’s anything,” Lucas said. “But this Pruess guy could be in the worst kind of trouble. The worst kind. I can’t even begin to tell you…. Listen, I’ll see you in an hour or so.”

“See you then,” Bone said. “I’ll do some poking around, maybe I’ll turn something up.”

Lucas got off the phone and told Del, “I gotta go, man, I gotta run.”

“Bad?”

“Yeah. Feels bad. Like, really bad.”

L
ucas called everybody on the way back to the office, and once there, got a quick rinse in the men’s room, dried off with paper towels, and changed back into his suit. As he went out the door, Weather phoned and asked if he was interested in going to dinner.

“Probably, if it’s like routine. I don’t want to do a big deal.”

“I’ll call the Lex.”

“Fine. I’ve gotta go over and talk to T-Bone. I’ll probably be six o’clock.” He told her, briefly, what had happened.

“I hope Jim doesn’t get hurt,” Weather said.

“If his bank’s been laundering, he’s probably gonna get hurt,” Lucas said.

“I can’t believe that he’d know about it.”

“Neither can I,” Lucas said. “But it’s open season on bankers right now. Maybe … He’s a smart guy. He’ll figure a way to handle it.”

O
N THE WAY
over to the bank, Bone called again and asked how long he’d be.

“Ten more minutes,” Lucas said. “Something happen?”

“Yeah. Your guy Shaffer is here and he’s pissed because I won’t talk until you get here. And ’cause I got a lawyer to sit in.”

“Nine minutes,” Lucas said.

P
OLARIS
N
ATIONAL
B
ANK
was in downtown Minneapolis, a skyscraper of pale yellow stone and blue glass. Bone’s corner office was on the fiftieth floor, from where he could look crosstown at the slightly higher IDS Center. Lucas had been in Bone’s office probably fifty times, after men’s league basketball games, to drink a glass of bourbon or a G&T, if it was hot, and talk about money.

Lucas pushed through the revolving door into the lobby a little after five o’clock and found Rivera and Martínez talking to the security guards. Lucas walked over, showed his BCA identification, and they went up together.

In the privacy of the elevator, Rivera said, a question in his voice,
“Mrs. Brooks?”

“Could be a false alarm,” Lucas said.

“Do you
think
it’s a false alarm?” Martínez asked.

“No, I don’t,” Lucas said. “But I’ve been wrong before.”

“She was the first to die.”

Lucas said, “We assumed they’d torture the main target last—let him see the others suffer. They didn’t. They went right after her, and when she died, they tried to get what they wanted out of the husband, by torturing the daughter, and then the husband himself. He had nothing to give them.”

“Again, this is a guess,” Rivera said.

“Yes. Absolutely. A guess,” Lucas said. “Except that we haven’t found anything at Sunnie so far. We’re really having some
problems nailing down anything that looks like a laundry. So maybe it isn’t.”

“You know the president of this bank?” Martínez asked.

“Yeah. Good guy. I really believe that,” Lucas said. “If there’s a money laundry here, he didn’t know about it.”

“We’ll see,” Martínez said. “If this vice president is missing, and if he worked with Mrs. Brooks, there must be a connection.”

“Or the Criminales think there is,” said Rivera.

“There must be,” Martínez said to her boss. “For somebody so high up to be involved.”

Lucas said, “He wasn’t that high up. Americans … banks especially … sometimes give titles instead of money. You could ask Bone, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were dozens of vice presidents. It impresses the clients, to be dealing with somebody … so high up.”

S
HAFFER AND
O’B
RIEN
, the DEA agent, were sitting on a narrow red designer couch in Bone’s office. Bone and a tough-looking woman, who Lucas thought must be the lawyer, were facing each other across a cocktail table, on separate red chairs that matched the couch.

Two other men, who Lucas didn’t know, one short and bald, the other tall and long-haired, both in good suits and ties, sat on the third side of the table, while three empty non-matching chairs were at the fourth side. Lucas, Rivera, and Martínez took the empty chairs and Lucas said, “Thanks for waiting.”

Shaffer, who already looked unhappy, registered another few
degrees of unhappiness when he saw Rivera and Martínez, but he didn’t say anything.

Bone, a thin athletic man with a strong nose and thick black hair, introduced the unknowns—the woman was the lawyer, the two men worked as an account manager and a systems director—and then said to Lucas, “We’ve already been over a few of the ground rules here. Kate will jump in if you ask any questions that would suggest that I, or the bank as an institution, were knowingly involved in any kind of illegal activity. Other than that, I need to get this figured out as badly as you do.”