Stolen Prey (27 page)

“I think … I’m not sure … that another guy in the computer department might be in on it. I need to talk to somebody nice and quietly who knows the people in their systems
department. All of the people. Somebody who can keep his mouth shut.”

Bone tipped his head down the hall toward his office: “Come on. I’ll call Bob.”

H
ENNEPIN WAS
only three or four blocks from Polaris, and Lucas walked over, went up to McCollum’s office. McCollum was not particularly happy to see him, and less happy when Lucas finished outlining the problem.

“You think they’ve figured out a way to get into Polaris’s systems from here?”

“I think it’s a possibility. I’m most interested in Kline, Turicek, and Sanderson, but there might be others,” Lucas said. “Is there somebody outside the department who’d know them all?”

McCollum scratched his head, then picked up his phone, pushed a button, and said, “Babs, could you come in here?” To Lucas, he said, “My assistant.”

A woman stuck her head in a moment later and said, “Sir?” She was an older woman, with steel-gray hair; she did not, Lucas thought, look like a Babs.

“Come in and talk to this guy. This is Lucas Davenport, he’s with the BCA.”

Babs nodded. “I know the name.”

“So tell her,” McCollum said.

Lucas outlined the problem, and the woman thought for a moment and said, “Dave Duncan would be your best possibility. He’s in HR and he vets all the computer people. He had systems management courses in college, he knows that language.”

“Get him up here,” McCollum said.

M
C
C
OLLUM EXCUSED
himself to go to his private bathroom, and Lucas sat and read a
Cowboys & Indians
magazine, and decided he needed some cowboy boots. McCollum came back, his face and hair damp, and a minute later Babs escorted Duncan through the door. Duncan was a nervous, narrow-shouldered man in a gray suit, some indeterminate age between twenty-eight and forty, Lucas thought; one of those men who looked like they’d never quite grown up, and didn’t know what to do about it.

Lucas told him the story. Duncan rubbed his fingers together as he listened, looked away from Lucas out through office windows, across town toward the Polaris Tower, where, as far as Lucas knew, Bone might be staring back.

When Lucas finished, Duncan didn’t say anything until McCollum grunted, “Well?”

“Turicek may be a criminal,” he said. “There was a party once, a karaoke party over at the Raven, and he and Doris Abernathy got loaded and I think she may have gone home with him. May have continued to see him for a while. Anyway, Doris told me later that he’d get drunk and tell the most outrageous stories about himself, about the old days in computer school in Russia, or Lithuania. About hacking and so on. I did some careful research on him, but there was nothing to be found.”

“What about Kline?” Lucas asked.

“He came with a good recommendation from Polaris, but he’s not really a satisfactory employee. He’s sick too often, and we believe he’s faking it, but there’s no question that he’s been under
treatment for depression. Firing him … becomes complicated. In any case, he’s not really a satisfactory employee, though he’s smart enough.”

“Sanderson?”

“Quiet, but a little nutty? Nothing out of control, but, you know … a former girl nerd, so to speak, smart, does her work. The kind of person who, after a few years, might open a candle store.”

“Any other potential criminals down there?” McCollum asked.

“I wouldn’t call Sanderson a potential criminal. She’s very quiet, and reclusive,” Duncan said. “The other two … I just don’t know well enough to say. Turicek, maybe, but Kline … he doesn’t seem to have enough of an executive mind to run a big theft.”

“Executive mind?” McCollum asked, drily.

“Able to make a plan, then execute it,” Duncan said.

“If Turicek and Kline were going into another bank’s computer system, using your system here, how many of the systems people here would have to know about it?” Lucas asked.

Duncan shook his head. “Hard to say. I don’t know enough about computer programming, for one thing. Everything depends on the details of what you’re doing. Normally, if you had a complicated piece of programming to do, you could do it all off-site, and then bring it in and load it. But our systems have protections against that kind of thing—of rogue programs being loaded without a lot of checks and warnings. So it’d probably have to be done here … and it would take a while.”

“I know this is complicated, but make it as simple as possible for me: If this was being done in Systems, would everybody have to know about it?”

Duncan thought for a moment, then said, “Nooo … I don’t think so. But probably all the full-time programmers would. They’d be the only ones who could do it, in the first place, and they’re working there side by side, and their schedules are always overlapping. If somebody was doing some heavy programming, and working into another system from ours, they’d see it.”

“And that would be who?” Lucas asked.

“Just who you’re asking about—Kline, Turicek, and Sanderson. There’s another man, Ken Gleason, a supervisor, who could cover for any of them, but he’s actually in a different office. They could do this without him knowing.”

“Have any of them been taking days off lately? Traveling?”

“I’d have to call downstairs and ask. Take me a minute,” Duncan said.

Lucas: “If you could do that.”

Duncan did; they sat watching him talk into his phone, and as he said, it took only a moment. He hung up and said, “Kline is gone, obviously, and Sanderson has been coming in early to cover his shift. Turicek has been coming in later to cover his shift and part of Sanderson’s. There’s a gap around noon, so they aren’t overlapping at the moment. They’re both working a little overtime right now, because Kline’s out.”

Lucas said, “Huh,” and McCollum said, “Doesn’t exactly fit your model.”

Lucas disagreed: “It could. There’s always somebody here, but there’s always somebody not here. It’s what they’re doing when they’re not here that interests me right now.”

When he’d gotten as much as they knew, Lucas warned all of them not to talk. “This is a dangerous situation, and it’s
possible that this drug gang has people working for the banks. Watch the news: talking about this investigation could get people killed.”

He took the elevator down with Duncan, went to Duncan’s office, and got a printout of Turicek’s and Sanderson’s addresses. As he handed them over, Duncan said, “I have an observation, if you’d be interested.”

“I’m always interested in observations,” Lucas said.

“If I were a police officer, and if I wanted to shake one of these people by questioning them … I’d go after Kristina. She doesn’t strike me either as the criminal type, or as a strong person. If she’s involved, and she was pushed, she’d fall apart very quickly.”

Lucas nodded and said, “I’ll think about that.”

B
ACK ON THE STREET
, he got a call from Shrake: “What’re you doing here?”

“Talking to the bank president. Where’re you guys?”

“Jenkins is in the Skyway, watching the elevators there. I’m in the garage across the street—I can see both ground-floor exits from up here, and his car’s on the other side of the floor.”

“His car, huh?”

“We’re pretty sure a guy like that wouldn’t put anything incriminating in his car,” Shrake said.

Lucas said, “I trust your remarkable insight into the criminal mind.”

“Into the criminal glove compartment, too,” Shrake said. “Anyhoo … we’re here.”

L
UCAS KNEW
where Turicek was, so he drove the Lexus south and west out of downtown, to Sanderson’s place. On the way, he called in to the BCA duty officer and got the make and model of her car and the license tags, and, as a bonus, her home and cell phone numbers.

Sanderson lived in a small, yellow-brick apartment complex a short walk east of Lake Calhoun. The apartment had underground parking, with a gated entrance ramp, and he had no way into it. The place looked nice enough, without being rich—exactly the kind of place an orderly, intelligent, well-employed single woman would pick.

He sat for five minutes, working out the possibilities, then called her home phone number. It rang seven times, then clicked over to the answering service, and he hung up.

He was considering the possibility of trying to get into the building when his phone rang. Sandy. “Yeah?”

“Okay, I’ve been calling the gold dealers, and I think we’ve got a hit.”

“Excellent. Who is it?”

“There’s a woman who says she’s Syrian, has been showing up at a lot of gold dealers, both on the left and right coasts, and buying gold coins, fifty, seventy, a hundred thousand dollars at a time. She says her family is Christian and is getting out of Syria, and they don’t think anything is safe but gold. That’s what she tells them. She’s gone to
all
of the dealers you checked—I’d like to know how you did that—and a half dozen more places.”

“
Have they got a passport, a name, a description, a photograph, an address…?”

“They’ve got a cheap business card, the kind you print on your home computer, with an address in Damascus, in English, and some Arabic writing that nobody understands but looks like the same address. That’s it—we don’t even have a description, because she wears one of those veils. All they’ve seen is her eyes….”

As she was talking, two men walked down the sidewalk on the other side of the street. They were coming from up the block behind him, and he didn’t notice them until they passed his car. He glanced at them, went back to Sandy, said, “I can’t believe…” then trailed off, frowned, and looked at the men as they approached the sidewalk that led to the entrance of the apartment.

Two short men, slender, wearing baseball caps and T-shirts. Dark hair, athletic. Lucas said, “Holy shit,” and Sandy said, “What?” and Lucas said, “I’ll call you back,” and he punched in 911 and watched as the men walked up to the apartment entrance. They were planning to do wrong, he thought, because they had that wary, check-it-out attitude, looking here and there, while pretending not to.

When the 911 operator came up he identified himself and half-shouted the address and said, “The two Mexican shooters, I think they’re here. They’re going into the apartment building where one of our suspects lives. I need help here, fast as you can get it. These guys are shooters. I need people with vests and shotguns, I need them flooded in here.”

He was dealing with Minneapolis and expected a fast response,
and a few seconds later the operator said, “We’ve got a car two minutes away. We’ve got another car five minutes out, we’ll route them in there. What are you doing—?”

Lucas was shouting back at him, “They’re on foot, five-seven, five-eight, dark hair, jeans and running shoes, red T-shirt, blue T-shirt, worn outside their pants. I’m afraid they’ll take somebody down…. If they get in, I’m going after them. Tell everybody I’m in there….”

“Do you think—”

The two men disappeared behind the glass doors at the front of the apartment building, but he could see them behind the glass, apparently waiting to get through an inner door, and Lucas shouted over the operator, “They’re inside, but they’re stuck behind the inner door. Call that apartment if you can, tell them not to answer the—Shit, they’re inside, I can see them going in. I’m going, I’m going.”

He was fifty yards up the street and he gunned the car down the block, stopped just short of the sidewalk, and jumped out, pulling his Beretta as he did it. He couldn’t see the Mexicans inside, in the outer lobby, so he ran up the four wide steps to the front door, staying to one side, remembering Rivera, peeked at the door, saw nothing, peeked again, then pushed through.

Inside the door was a fifteen-foot-square lobby with mailboxes and an intercom, and he saw a button labeled Management and he leaned on it, and leaned on it some more, and nothing happened, nobody answered, and he leaned on it some more, and finally took a look at the door.

The door was wooden, but had a long, narrow glass window down the middle. He looked through the glass and could see an
empty atrium and an intersecting hallway, and the bottom of a curving stairway. He thought the chances of kicking the door in were remote—it was a solid chunk of wood with heavy brass hardware. Kicking it would make too much noise, anyway.

He leaned on the management doorbell again, got no answer, then took the end of his gun, pressed it against the glass in the door, and pressed it until the glass cracked and finally fell away, inside. He broke out more glass until he could reach through to the inside handle, and popped the door open.

Sanderson’s address said apartment 344, so she’d be up two flights. He ran up the first flight, looked both ways, and then a voice said, “Hey,” and he turned and saw a square-faced woman, red glasses, dishwater-blond hair, who saw the gun and said, “No, no,” and turned as though to run.

Lucas said, sharply but quietly, “I’m a cop. Did you just see two Mexican-looking guys come through, going to Kristina Sanderson’s?”

“Yes, I just … Oh, my God, are they…?” She looked up the stairs.

“Which way to her apartment?” Lucas asked. “Which way?”

“Top of the stairs, to the left.” She pointed.

“Did they go in?”

“They were just going to knock…. I left them when they were walking down the hall.”

“You’re the manager?”

“Yes. I’m Pat.”

Lucas went up the stairs, saying, as he went, “There are more cops on the way. Let them in.”

He took the stairs in five seconds, peeked down the hall to the
left. Nothing. He looked right. Nothing. Had they gone in? Was Sanderson home, maybe not answering her phone?

He hurried down the hall, checking off the numbers on the doors, got to 344. The door was closed, no sign that it had been forced. The door across the hall was also pristine. He continued down the hall, to an exit sign, went through a fire door, looked down the stairwell, heard and saw nothing at all.

He went back: Where had they gone? If they were in the apartment, they might be torturing her … although the place didn’t look substantial enough to smother a scream….