Stolen Prey (26 page)

A woman came on the phone and identified herself as the charge nurse. Lucas told her that they were worried about possible interference with Kline, and asked if he’d had any visitors. She said that he had, apparently a coworker, a tall thin man with a sandy beard and a foreign accent—she thought he might be Russian. He’d visited very early, before seven o’clock, saying he was on his way to work.

Lucas thought: Ivan Turicek.

“Did you get a name?”

“No, I didn’t ask. Mr. Kline knew him,” the nurse said. “They were friendly. At least, when I was there.”

“Is Mr. Kline awake?”

“Yes, for the time being. They’ll be taking some drains out of his legs this morning, and he’ll go to the OR for that. He’ll be sleepy for a while.” That, she said, would happen whenever the doc was ready for him—there were three patients in front of Kline, all getting minor procedures.

Lucas said, “If that man shows up again, could you not allow
him into Mr. Kline’s space by himself? It might be important to our investigation.”

She said she would keep an eye on him.

L
UCAS GOT
back on the phone to Clark.

“You know why these shooters hit Kline? Because we, and they, think Kline had something to do with hijacking the drug money account.”

“I know that,” Clark said.

“I don’t know this for sure, but I think one of his accomplices is a coworker named Ivan Turicek. They work together at Hennepin National. Anyway, if they’re the ones who did it, they got in through a computer … and Turicek visited Kline at the hospital, early this morning.”

“Ah, man.”

“Yeah. I talked to Kline yesterday, and the drawer was open on his bedside table. His keys were in there. Kline’s going into the OR this morning. If you could have somebody go over and maybe just peek in that drawer while he’s in the OR…”

“That would be legally questionable,” Clark said.

“But morally correct,” Lucas said. “Besides, maybe the drawer is still open … like it was yesterday.”

“All right, you talked me into it,” Clark said. “I’ll send Potach over. He’s a moral guy.”

“Sneaky, too,” Lucas said. “Good choice.”

“If we dust the keyboard, we won’t find any Davenport prints?”

“You will not,” Lucas said, happy about the fact that he’d worn gloves the night before. “You might find some from Ivan
Turicek. That would be useful. And he’s an immigrant, so the feds will have his prints.”

“Talk to you,” Clark said.

L
UCAS TURNED
to Martínez, who said, “It will be another two days before I can send David’s ashes home. Your medical examiner has to complete some forms that I do not understand, and then we will cremate. In the meantime, my superiors wish to have reports on the progress of the investigation.”

“As for the progress, we have every cop in the Twin Cities looking for the shooters, and there is reason to believe we know what kind of a car they’re driving,” Lucas said.

He told her about the disappearance of Ferat Chakkour, and about the interview with Kline, and about Bone’s belief that the money was being converted to gold coin, about ICE’s discovery of the shadow books at Sunnie, about the DEA’s tracing of the Criminales’ bank accounts through the Cayman Islands. He told her about everything except his search of Kline’s apartment and the phone numbers from Kline’s phone.

“So, you are questioning these people? These computer thieves?”

“Not yet—everything I’ve told you is conjecture … guesswork. Right now, we’re trying to find out who’s buying the gold, and where they’re putting it.”

“So somewhere, there is a thief with a large pile of gold.”

“That’s what I think. And the shooters are somewhere. And the drug money is somewhere, but we don’t know where any of those things are.”

“Very complicated,” she said. She stood and said, “I am no David Rivera, I cannot help you with this investigation as he did. But if you can keep me, mmm, informed, this will be much appreciated by my superiors.”

“I will keep you informed,” Lucas promised.

L
UCAS CALLED
for Shrake and Jenkins, and got them pulled off some bullshit that involved the theft of ATM machines from convenience stores. They showed up together, Jenkins wearing a straw cowboy hat and western boots, which made him about six-eight.

Lucas explained Kline and Turicek, and said, “If Turicek’s getting gold from somewhere, it would be nice to know where he’s putting it, and where it’s coming from.”

When they were gone, he got his jacket, planning to head for Minneapolis: he wanted to talk to Kline again, and then to Bone. He opened his office door and saw Sandy, the researcher, coming down the hall. She was a tall woman, thin, introverted, bespectacled, a latter-day hippie in paisley dresses with an improbable talent for tracking crooks through her computer systems. Everybody in the BCA abused her talent, when they could, and Lucas and Virgil Flowers led the pack. She said, “I’ve got your list. I can’t guarantee that they’re exactly the top one hundred, but they’re big.”

Lucas said, “All right. Sit in Cheryl’s chair.” He pointed her to a chair where his secretary normally worked. “I’ll be back in a minute.”

“Wait,” she said. “I also checked those three phone numbers—they’re all to prepaid cell phones. No credit cards attached to
them. Sold through Walmart. So you’re outa luck, unless you actually find one of the phones.”

He went back in his office, closed the door, got out the list of gold dealers he’d found in Kline’s computer, and compared his list to Sandy’s. All twelve of Kline’s shops were on the list.

He made check marks next to the dealers he’d found in Kline’s computer, put his list away, and carried Sandy’s back to her.

“I want you to call the top twenty-five, plus the ones I’ve checked. Everybody should know about these killings, what’s going on here. You can imply that we’re calling because of that investigation.”

“Are we?”

“Yeah—but we’re chasing the people who took the money, not the killers,” Lucas said.

“I’d like to get the killers,” she said.

“So would I, but we do what we can.”

“So what are we looking for?”

“We want physical descriptions of people who are making big buys, of gold coins, not bars with serial numbers. We only want people who started last month and have come back repeatedly. They want physical delivery of the coins, and they want fast delivery. We’re talking buys in the hundreds of thousands of dollars…. Tell the dealers we don’t necessarily need names, but we need the physical descriptions. If you find somebody making really big buys, at a lot of shops, somebody who sounds like the same guy, then call all one hundred dealers and see if you can figure out how much gold the guy is taking and anything else you can get—name, bank, whatever.”

“That’ll take me all day,” she said.

“Probably.” He put his jacket on. “Better get to work.”

M
ARTÍNEZ DID NOT
call the Big Voice immediately. Instead, she drove back to the St. Paul Hotel, lay on her bed, and thought about her next move. Twenty-two million dollars, or a large part of that, was sitting out there in gold. She was paid quite well by the Criminales, but the compensation was nothing like a million a year. Not even a tenth of that. Twenty-two million…

She considered several possibilities:

She might try to go for the gold herself. If Davenport would keep filling her in on the investigation, and if she could get to one of the thieves first, with Uno under control, she
would
find out where the gold was: Uno was the designated torturer. Then, if something happened to Uno, she would be there with the gold. If she weren’t greedy, and took only part of it—say, five million—and let the police find the remainder, who would know, or be able to figure out, what happened to the rest?

Or, she could recover all the gold for the Criminales and suggest to the powers that she deserved a cut for her actions. They’d probably give her something—not five million, but something. Five percent? One million? Maybe. It wouldn’t cost them much, compared to what they got back, and would demonstrate their generosity toward loyal employees.

Or, she could recommend that they cut the cord, with everybody pulling back to Mexico. That, she thought, was a problem for one big reason: she, Uno, and Tres weren’t important enough to save, compared to the value of the gold. They’d want her to risk everything in going for it—and if she lost, and was killed or imprisoned … well, she just wasn’t that big a deal, to them.

She considered the possibilities and decided that whatever she eventually did, she didn’t have to make a decision immediately.

So she called the Big Voice and filled him in: told him about the discovery of the shadow books at Sunnie, about Lucas’s focus on Kline and Turicek, about the DEA: “I hope you have all the money out of the pipeline. The DEA is now in the Caymans and they have the account numbers.”

“Don’t be concerned about that—all the proper people know,” the Big Voice said. “We are now more interested in the possibilities with this gold. Do you need help there? Is there anything to be done?”

“Mmm, the police have now put surveillance on this Turicek, and Kline is protected by more policemen at the hospital. Davenport believes there is at least one more accomplice, the person who does the buying. I cannot think of how to find that person. Turicek and Kline work in the computer department of another bank. If we could find a friend of theirs at the bank … we might learn something from the friend, but how do I find the friend?”

Big Voice said, “Let me see what I can do. Maybe we can find something online, in Facebook perhaps. Perhaps we can find a directory for this Hennepin National. We will call you.”

“I will be waiting.”

T
URICEK
was moving fast.

After talking with Kline early in the morning, he and Kline together had erased Kline’s phone messages and phone log, and
Turicek said, “Christ, you can’t keep this stuff on here, this message from Kristina. It ties us all together.”

Kline told him there was even more on his home computer, gave Turicek his key, and a list of files that needed to be erased.

“You don’t have any cloud files?” Turicek asked.

“I’m not suicidal.”

Turicek had driven straight to Kline’s apartment, peeled off the police seal, which appeared to have already been tampered with, and let himself inside. He had no intention of erasing selected files: instead, he’d cracked the computer case and yanked out the two disk drives, and fled.

Back at his apartment, he used a ball-peen hammer to crack open the drive cases, removed the disks, beat the disks into fragments, and flushed them down the toilet.

At the rental office, where they took the gold deliveries, he’d waited until the morning packages came in. When Sanderson showed up, they talked for a couple minutes, then he passed the gold on to her and went to work.

H
E WAS
picked up there by Jenkins and Shrake, who had his license tag and a description of his car.

Jenkins and Shrake had determined that he wasn’t at work by calling and asking for him. They were told that he was working the afternoon shift, and would be in at one o’clock. He rolled into the parking garage at ten minutes to one, and when he was inside the bank, Shrake said, “Piece-of-shit old Chevy. We could crack it, no problem.”

“No problem as long as we don’t get caught,” Jenkins said.

“But if we crack it and find a pile of gold, and tell Lucas, he’ll
find a way to do a search, and then we’re … gold. If there’s nothing in it, we’re still cool.”

“Okay, I’m bored,” Jenkins said. “Let’s do it.”

They got in quickly enough. Jenkins blocked, standing by the car’s trunk while Shrake slid his slim jim down the window and popped the door. The car was clean, and, when he popped the trunk latch, so was the trunk.

“Life is hard and then you die,” Shrake said.

They closed up Turicek’s car, went back to their own vehicle, and started the surveillance: doing it the hard way.

W
HEN
S
ANDERSON
met Turicek at the rental office, she’d said, “We have to stop this. Jacob’s in the hospital, they could be coming for us.”

“Which
they
?” Turicek asked.

Sanderson shuddered: “Better the police than this crazy drug gang. My God, I can’t believe we’re doing this.”

“Well, we can’t stop now,” Turicek said. “There are more packages in the air, and if they just get dropped here, and nobody picks them up, sooner or later somebody will get curious and open them…. If they find a big bunch of gold, and go to the cops…”

“We should tell Edie to stop. It’s just too dangerous. If she stops, we pick up the last packages, and we’re done.”

“I’ll talk to her,” Turicek said. “There’s only three more million to go…. I’d hate to cut it off, but I will if I have to.”

“Ivan, the police are already on to Jacob. What more do you need?”

“I’ll talk to Edie about it,” Turicek said.

S
ANDERSON GOT
four more packages that afternoon, unwrapped the gold, repacked it, and took it to her mom’s home and hid it in a concealed closet where her daddy—now long gone—had hidden his gun safe. The gun safe was still there, though all the long guns had gone shortly after Daddy died, sold to his hunting buddies. A couple of handguns remained, which she hadn’t bothered to get rid of.

Since she and her mom didn’t share a last name, and her mother wouldn’t have remembered her last name if asked, the gold was safe enough, at least for a while.

Standing in front of the safe, looking at the now substantial stacks of coin—fifteen million worth? eighteen million?—and the two guns, Sanderson, though a gentle person, couldn’t help thinking:

If something happened to the other three, then she’d have it all….

W
HEN
L
UCAS
got to Minneapolis, he stopped first at Polaris, and went up to Bone’s office. Bone was in a meeting, but came out to talk: “What do you need?”

“Do you know anybody who’d do you a favor at Hennepin National?”

“Sure. I know the boss, Bob McCollum,” Bone said. “You’re still looking at this Kline guy?”