Stolen Prey (5 page)

“But couldn’t a drug gang be somehow using the…” He faltered, then said, “But why do it that way, when they could do it with an encrypted e-mail?”

“I can’t think of why,” she said.

“Who does the books?”

“Merit-Champlain, they’re an accounting company over in North St. Paul.”

“I know them,” Lucas said. He’d used the same outfit when he was running his computer company in the mid-nineties. As far as he knew, they were straight. “Did Brooks finance the company himself?” he asked.

“As far as I know, yes. He used to work for 3M, he made very good money,” Phillips said. “He had savings, and he borrowed money from his 401K. I think his brother chipped in. When we started, there were only three of us, full-time, Pat and me and Bob Farmer, who was the computer expert. Candy would come in after the kids were at school, and she’d stay until it was time to pick them up. Everything else, we’d farm out. Contract work.”

“Pretty much a success right from the start?”

“Not hardly,” Phillips said, shaking her head. “It was two years
before Pat took his first paycheck. After that it came on pretty good, and we’re still growing. Well, we were still growing … I don’t know what’ll happen now.”

“Are Brooks’s parents still alive?” Lucas asked.

“Yes. Nice folks. They live out in Stillwater. Agent Chang—”

“Dick,” Lucas said.

“Yes, Dick said they were being contacted.”

“They’d probably inherit,” Lucas said.

“Unless it’s his brother,” Phillips said. “I really don’t know. Nobody thought … this could happen. That they’d all be gone. Never in a million years.”

L
UCAS WORKED
her a bit more, got the name and address of Brooks’s brother, but had the feeling he was pushing on a string. He thanked her and left her in the office. Chang was standing in the hallway with a water-machine paper cup in his hand, and Lucas nodded and asked, “Anything?”

Chang shook his head. “Lot of Mexicans here, but I’m not seeing anything. They’re all confused as hell. The confusion feels real.”

“I wish they were making more money,” Lucas said. “I’m not seeing how they could be running a laundry. Maybe the accountants will have something.”

“Maybe,” Chang said. There was doubt in his voice. “You want to talk to anyone else?”

“Should I?”

Chang shrugged. “Well … no. If there’s some kind of secret deal going on, I don’t think they’re all in on it. Probably only
one of them … and he’ll lie about it. Just talking to them won’t help much.”

L
UCAS HEADED
back to his office, a nice quiet space where he could brood. In a complicated investigation, he found it useful to take whatever pieces he had and concoct a story around them. Even if the story was far-fetched, it gave him a starting place, and angles to work.

On the drive from Wayzata to downtown Minneapolis, his lead story had been “Money Laundry”: that the Brookses had been killed by a drug gang, after doing something fancy with the gang’s money. Chipping off an extra piece.

Other kinds of organized crime, where you might see the same level of violence, didn’t need the same level of money laundering, because they didn’t operate with huge numbers of small bills. Their violence was usually aimed at eliminating competition.

Sunnie would have been perfect for a drug gang, with small payments coming in from all over Latin America, consolidated, and moved to a bank. Except, if Phillips and the books were telling the truth, the money wasn’t large enough.

That one little fact was hard to get around. If it was a laundry, where was the money?

The other problem, and it could probably be checked, was that the business had been shaky at the start. If it had been set up as a laundry, it shouldn’t have been. Perhaps, he thought, it had been set up as a legitimate business, and had only later been spotted by the gang as a potential laundry.

H
IS OTHER STORY
—but it was far back, number ten on his list of two—was Del’s suggestion, that the murders had been the result of a home invasion by a couple of crazy killers, who’d picked a random house in a rich neighborhood. A couple of stupid, crazy guys who looked at the house and thought that there must be big money inside, not being all that familiar with checking accounts and American Express. When they got inside and found that there wasn’t much in the way of money, they amused themselves with rape, torture, and murder. That happened, a few times a year, most often in California or on the East Coast; not in Minnesota, though.

Another problem with that scenario was that the crime-scene people in Wayzata were positing at least three killers, and maybe four. House invasions of the crazy, murderous kind usually involved one or two people: three or four crazy people would be unusual.

Of course, there was always Charlie Manson to worry about….

Yet he didn’t like the Manson scenario, even with the bloody “were coming” written on the wall. The murders didn’t seem crazy enough for crazy people. They’d taken too long, there was that apparent progression, and there wasn’t the level of frenzy that you’d expect.

H
E WAS HALFWAY
back to the office when a phone call came in. The identifying tag said “City of Northfield.” He answered and a man asked, “Is this Lucas Davenport?”

“It is.”

“This is Chuck Waites at Northfield PD. I’m calling about your flyer. You said you’d be interested in ATM robberies, man and a woman, knocking down the victim.”

“Yeah, I sure am,” Lucas said. “You bust them?”

“No, no. They picked out one of our college kids taking cash out of a street ATM, robbed him with a gun, knocked him down, and ran off. This happened last night. Kid’s got a broken arm and he’s out eighty bucks.”

“Man and a woman?”

“Yeah, it’s like that flyer said: skinny guy, big woman,” Waites said. “Have no idea who they are, but we’ve got a
clue
for you.”

“I don’t like the way you said ‘clue,’” Lucas said.

The other cop laughed. “Well, it might be an identifier.”

“What is it?”

“The kid said they smelled like horse shit. Horse shit, specifically. We asked him if he was sure it wasn’t cow shit or sheep shit, but he said, ‘No, sir, it’s horse shit.’ He grew up on a dairy farm, and they ran a couple of riding horses and a few other animals. Sheep, chickens,” Waites said. “He said anybody who grew up on that kind of a place could tell the difference between cow shit, horse shit, sheep shit, and chicken shit. He said they had all those animals, and the people who robbed him smelled like horse shit. Like they’d been shoveling out a stable.”

“You know any meth addicts who run a riding stable?”

“Not me personally, but there’re a lot of meth cookers out in the countryside,” Waites said. “If these people are far gone on meth, like your flyer says, I don’t think they could be running a commercial stable. That’s pretty heavy work and
takes some ability to concentrate…. If it really was horse shit on them, I’d have to believe that they’re farmhands somewhere.”

“Huh. That’s interesting,” Lucas said. “It’s weird, but it narrows it down, and shoveling shit is about what I’d expect of those two. You know of any kind of organization that would have a list of stables?”

“Somebody in the state would, probably—they got a list of everything else,” Waites said. “If I were you, I’d just call the county agents. They’d know all the farms in their county, and maybe who works on them.”

“Thanks. If this works out, you’ll get the reward,” Lucas said.

“Really? What is it?”

“I go around and tell people that Chuck Waites is alert.”

Waites laughed and said, “And America needs more lerts.”

L
UCAS SPENT
the rest of the day at his office, making phone calls and scratching his left arm, under the cast, with the end of a coat hanger. He’d been told not to do that—scratch with a coat hanger—and he’d thought there was some good medical reason for the advice until Weather told him that it was to keep him from cutting himself and infecting the wounds.

That, Lucas thought, was advice for children. He wasn’t going to cut himself with the coat hanger, and besides, he’d rather cut himself than itch to death.

So he sat scratching and calling, making trips to the candy machine, interspersed with spasms of note-taking on yellow legal pads.

M
OST OF IT
involved the tweekers. The horse shit, he told himself, was actually a pretty interesting clue. Most people—he thought, but didn’t know—would clean up immediately if they’d come in contact with horse shit. But people who were in contact with it all the time might not even know that they smelled. He believed the kid, and his identification of the odor. He himself could tell the difference between the odor of fish slime from a northern pike and fish slime from a crappie.

A
SMALLER
percentage of his time was spent on the murders: he was not the primary investigator there, and the investigation seemed likely to turn into a long, slow grind. If you were intent on locating and knocking down leads, Shaffer could do that as well as anybody. Still, images of the murder scene kept popping up in his mind. He’d seen some bad ones in the past, but this was among the worst. Anything with children…

He called the DEA and asked about unusual activity in the Minneapolis area. He was told they’d check. He called a dozen people in his private intelligence net, including six Latinos, and asked about anything unusual going on in the underground Latino community.

He tried to work up another credible story, beyond Mexican dopers and the Charlie Manson scenario. Stories cost nothing but time.

Not that the BCA would have a lot of time.

W
AYZATA
, the town where the killings took place, was one of the richer places in the Twin Cities, filled with people who felt entitled to a lot of attention, as befitted their economic status. It was also a place where the news media could get in a hurry, and not have to pay much to do it. Every news outlet in town could send a reporter six times a day to ask the locals, “Is the killer living among you? And what about your children?”

The investigation would be pressured.

The BCA had eight people on it: the crime-scene people, plus four agents in the team led by Shaffer. Lucas didn’t count: he was essentially working for himself. Because the agents generally considered themselves equal, and only occasionally worked a case under hard supervision, they mildly resented Shaffer, though they understood the necessity of having a team coordinator.

Lucas was another matter: he was neither their boss nor their coordinator, and they didn’t like being interrupted by his calls. He called anyway, from time to time, and learned very little. They’d found nothing incriminating at Sunnie Software. They did determine that the house hadn’t been carefully robbed—the crime-scene people found two thousand dollars in a bathroom drawer.

Shaffer told him that they had one positive indication that something was wrong with the way the Brookses conducted their financial life. A forensic accountant—that’s how he referred to himself, though his colleagues called him “Specs”—said that they didn’t appear to spend any money on small stuff.

They didn’t take much money from the bank in cash, but
they didn’t charge groceries or clothing or gasoline or consumer electronics. In fact, their credit cards were almost unused, except for a few big-ticket items, like airline tickets. They’d once flown to Orlando, spent five days there, possibly at Disney World, and didn’t even show a motel bill.

Brooks had three cashmere jackets in his closet, all newer-looking, probably fifteen hundred dollars each. His wife shopped at Nordstrom and Neiman Marcus, had a closet full of clothes from Barneys in New York. They didn’t have credit cards at either place.

Shaffer suspected that they were spending cash where a credit card wasn’t mandatory; cash that didn’t show up anywhere else.

After the first half-day of investigation, that was it. It was way too early to say that the investigation was driving into a ditch, Lucas thought, but it might be true that the passenger-side tires had wandered onto the shoulder.

L
UCAS WENT
to lunch at two o’clock, ate a couple of bagel sandwiches, alone, thinking about his murder stories, then went back to his office and found a phone message from the Los Angeles office of the Drug Enforcement Administration. He called back and was hooked up with an agent named Tomas O’Brien.

“I was told you’re the guy I should talk to,” O’Brien said. “I’ve got a Delta flight out late this afternoon, I’m bringing a couple guys with me. We’d like to look at the books on this Sunnie Software.”

“I can fix that,” Lucas said. “You know something about Sunnie?”

“The name has come up a few times, but there’s been nothing specific. Nothing criminal. We took a look, once, even bought some of their software, like Hable Gringo en Treinta Días. Sorta sucks and it ain’t cheap.”

“We’ve been wondering if it’s a laundry,” Lucas said.

“That’s why our guy there in the Cities gave me a ring, after your call,” O’Brien said. “Sunnie buys product from a company here in LA called Los Escritores, which got started with a lot of twenty-dollar bills … or so we’ve been told. The software isn’t very good, but it sells like crazy. We’d like to look at what Sunnie’s been doing with them. Look back down the money chain.”

“You know the details on the murders?”

“Your people let our guy walk through,” O’Brien said. “From what he says, it looks like the work of Los Criminales del Norte, one of the cross-border gangs. They do a lot of that revenge-rape stuff. Killing families, sexual mutilation. Chopping off fingers, one joint at a time. They tend to go down shooting.”

“You definitely think it looks Mexican?”

“Oh, yeah, absolutely. Don’t see it up here, much, but this would be routine in Mexico,” O’Brien said. “We’d love to get one of their killers alive, if we could. Turn him over to the Federales for questioning.”

“We plan to do that up here,” Lucas said. “The questioning.”

“You’d get more answers from the Federales,” O’Brien said, persisting with the thought. “The LCN supposedly caught a Federale undercover cop and skinned him alive. Sent his skin to his boss, by FedEx, with a movie of the guy getting skinned. If we extradite one of these guys, to the right Federales, we will definitely get some answers.”