Stolen Prey (6 page)

“
I don’t think we’d want to do that,” Lucas said.

“Whatever, it’s your call,” O’Brien said. “Anyway, we’re gonna get there a little late. Maybe talk tomorrow?”

“I’ll fix things up with the lead investigator,” Lucas said. “See you then.”

T
HINKING ABOUT
the ATM robbers, Lucas called a list of county agents, missed a couple who were out of their offices, finally connected with one, and was told that there might be a list of some commercial riding stables, but a lot of stables were run off the books, as side ventures, and coming up with a complete list would be tough.

An opaque piece of the underground economy, Lucas thought, when he hung up. He ran into it all the time now; small businessmen had told him that government taxation and regulation had become so rapacious that cheating was often the only way they could survive.

Another step down to a third-world economy.

D
EL CAME BACK
at three o’clock from a surveillance job in Apple Valley, pulled a chair around, and asked, “Why don’t you turn on a light?”

“Forgot,” Lucas said. “Anything happening with Anderson?”

“Not on my shift. Maybe he knows we’re watching.”

Terrill Anderson was suspected of stealing a three-ton Paul Manship bronze art-deco sculpture,
Naiads of the North
, from the front driveway circle of a home in Sunfish Lake, a town just south
of St. Paul. The sculpture depicted three larger-than-life-sized nymphs dancing, flowers in their hair, hands joined overhead, standing in a kind of swirl, or whirlpool, of walleyes.

The owner of the sculpture, the fifth-generation heir of a railroad family, was massively rich, and had a daughter who chaired the state arts council. He wanted his sculpture back—the estimated worth, as a sculpture, was four million dollars. Looked at another way, three tons of bronze, which was mostly copper, was worth roughly eighteen thousand dollars if it had been in ingot form, or fifteen thousand or so on the scrap metal market.

The sculpture had been fitted to a granite base with six large steel bolts. Anderson had unbolted the statues and lifted the whole thing onto a flatbed trailer with a trailer-mounted crane, one night while the owner was inspecting a new home in Rio. The operation had been caught on a murky piece of low-res surveillance video from a house across the street—the heir’s own camera lenses had been covered with pink goop before the removal began.

Phone calls were made, and the hunt for the statues, or, more realistically now, the bronze scrap metal, which had been somewhat desultory, had sharpened. Somewhere, out there, maybe, Anderson was hiding a flatbed trailer and a lot of heavy metal. Del was watching him, waiting for him to go fetch it.

Lucas yawned, scratched the back of his head. “Hope he didn’t drop it in a lake.”

“He’s probably already shipped it to China,” Del said. “It’s possible that he had a boxcar waiting, loaded it right off the flatbed, and shipped it out. I’ve been talking to the railroad, but those guys have got no idea where most of their cars are, or what’s in them. Which I guess is a good thing.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. If a terrorist ever wants to blow up New York, he can’t just build a time bomb and put it in a railway car ’cause nobody would have any idea of exactly when it’d get to New York, or how it’d get there,” Del said. “More likely to blow up a cornfield than a city.”

“Or a riding stable,” Lucas said.

“What?”

Lucas told him about the Northfield robbery, and Del said, “Well, you can’t say it’s a horseshit clue.”

“I thought of that joke about fifteen seconds after the guy called me,” Lucas said. “I was embarrassed just thinking of it, and I never said it out loud.”

“You’re not going to ask me to look into it, are you? I mean, I got enough boring horseshit—”

“No, I’m just making phone calls to these county agent guys. See what turns up.”

“Might be better than watching Anderson,” Del said. “The guy is a slug. Never does anything, goes anywhere. I was sitting out there so long my ass got sore. But then, I read another hundred pages in the Deon Meyer, had four ideas for new iPhone apps, realized I could have had a career in Hollywood as a character actor, and tried to remember all the names of the women I could have slept with but didn’t. How about you?”

“I slept with all the women I could have slept with,” Lucas said. “Not being a complete fool. You think about the Brooks family?”

“I tried not to.”

Lucas filled him in on the investigation, and finished with “… so it’s gonna be slow and methodical. Lots of paperwork.”

“But a big deal—unlike Anderson and his statue.”

“Mmm. I called some of the people on my list, put out some lines in the Latino community,” Lucas said. “Haven’t gotten anything back yet. We need to be careful not to step on Shaffer’s toes. We’ll all be talking to the DEA tomorrow, we can figure out who’s doing what.”

Del stood up and stretched: “So, we go home and eat dinner with the kids?”

“Nothing wrong with that,” Lucas said. He thought about the bodies in the Brooks house.

L
UCAS WENT HOME
, watched the Brooks murder coverage on Channel Three; played with his son, Sam, throwing a Nerf ball at a basket; got a smile from his infant daughter, Gabrielle, who was now almost a toddler; and had a long, complicated discussion with his daughter Letty about television news.

Letty was between her junior and senior years in high school and had worked part-time at a TV station for three years. She’d met a politician that day, in the green room off the studio, who shook her hand and asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up. She said she was thinking about being a TV reporter, and the politician shook his head and said, “The thing about TV is, every single story is wrong. Nothing is ever quite right. If you go into TV work, you’ll spend your life telling lies.”

“Then what are
you
doing here?” she’d asked.

“I’m selling my side,” he’d said. “Television isn’t news—it’s
sales
. I’m selling my ideas.”

The conversation had troubled her and she’d expected some reassurance from Lucas. He failed to give it to her. So they talked
about that for a while, and then she said, “I dunno. I like it, TV. But…”

“Don’t tell me you want to be a lawyer,” Lucas said. “And not a cop.”

“This politician guy, when he came back out, I asked him what I should be. He said, ‘If I were a kid, about to go to college, and was smart, and knew what I know now … I’d study economics.’”

“I wouldn’t know anything about that,” Lucas confessed. “Sounds kinda … dry. Maybe you oughta talk to your mom.”

“You know what she thinks,” Letty said. “She’s already writing my essay for medical school. She wants me to take some surgical assistant classes at the VoTech and assist her in some surgeries next summer. She says she can fix it. But I just, uh, I like getting in the truck and running around town.”

“You like watching surgery.”

“Yeah, but in a
news
way,” she said. “I’m not sure I’d be interested in doing it,” she said. “Mom says every case is different, but to me, they all look a lot alike. I can’t see myself doing that for forty years.”

“So talk to your pals at Channel Three,” Lucas said. “My feeling is, TV’s like the cops: it’s interesting, but it can get old, and pretty quick.”

“Maybe I could be an actress,” she suggested.

“Ohhh … shit.”

A
T TEN O’CLOCK
that night, Lucas got a call from a Mexican guy who’d been hassled by St. Paul cops for running an unlicensed, backroom bar out of his house. Lucas heard about it through a friend, one thing led to another, Lucas talked to the cops, and the
pressure went away: the Mexican guy knew everybody, and was too valuable to hassle about a little under-the-counter tequila.

He said, “I talked to a guy today who talks to everybody, like I do, and he said there were some bad people in town from Mexico.”

“Yeah? Who’s this guy?”

“His name is Daniel. I think his last name is Castle. Something like that. But he knows the St. Paul police….”

The caller didn’t know much more than that, so Lucas rang off and called a St. Paul cop named Billy Andrews. “I’m looking for a guy named Daniel Castle, some kind of hustler around town—”

“That’d be Daniel Castells. What’d he do?”

“Nothing but talk. But we’re looking around for some bad Mexicans, and he told a friend of mine that there were some bad Mexicans in town. I understand you guys know him.”

“This about the Brooks case?”

“Yeah.”

“Let me check around. You don’t want him spooked.”

“No. All we want at this point is a quiet chat.”

“I’ll get back to you. Probably tomorrow morning,” Andrews said.

L
UCAS WENT
to bed, thinking about the phone call. A little movement?

Maybe.

But he didn’t dream about the killers. He dreamed about the tweekers.

W
eather was always out of the house by six-thirty in the morning. The housekeeper got breakfast for the kids and saw Letty off to summer school. Lucas rolled out a little after eight o’clock, which was early for him.

He’d put a small flat-panel TV in the bathroom and watched the morning news programs as he cleaned up. There was a story about the DEA coming in on the Brooks murders, and the anchorwoman seemed to think the DEA’s presence meant that everything would be okay.

He turned off the TV, spent a few minutes choosing a suit, shirt, and tie, had a quick breakfast of oatmeal and orange juice, called the office, found out that he was supposed to be at a nine-o’clock meeting with the DEA. Because he was hoping for a break on the “bad Mexicans,” and might be traveling around town with more than one other person, he left the Porsche in the garage and took his Lexus SUV.

He got to the meeting only a little late.

T
HE THREE
DEA agents were smart, bulky guys in sport coats, golf shirts, and cotton slacks. All of them had mustaches.
O’Brien was a dark-complected Texan, complete with hand-tooled cowboy boots, shoe-polish-black hair and eyes, apparently of Latino heritage. When Shaffer asked him about his last name, he shrugged and said, “My great-grandfather was Irish. He married my great-grandmother, who was Indio. My grandfather immigrated to Texas, but we kept marrying Mexicans. Lot of Irish in Mexico. The Mexican name, Obregon? It comes from O’Brien.”

“I didn’t know that,” Shaffer said. “Never heard the name Obregon.”

“He was a president of Mexico,” O’Brien said. “Got his ass assassinated. Like Lincoln, up here.”

“Didn’t know that,” Shaffer said. He nodded at Lucas, who’d paused at the doorway to listen.

Lucas took a chair and said, “Sorry I’m late—had a late night. Where are we?”

“Getting introduced,” Shaffer said. “I’m going to take them over to the house when we’re done here. We still haven’t moved the bodies. The crime-scene people are going over everything with microscopes.”

“W
E WANT TO LOOK
at Sunnie’s books, is the main thing,” O’Brien said. “These two guys”—he nodded at his colleagues—“are accountants. We’d really be interested in seeing what banks the company is using, and who they’re in touch with at the banks.”

“We don’t even know that this has anything to do with you guys,” Shaffer said. “Not for sure.”

“
Maybe not for sure,” O’Brien said. “But it looks to us like these folks were killed by the Los Criminales del Norte, the LCN.”

“Where’d they get that name?” Lucas asked. “Not particularly subtle.”

O’Brien shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe they gave it to themselves. They usually do.”

LCN, he said, specialized in the importation of marijuana and cocaine into the U.S., through New Mexico and Texas. Nobody knew what happened to the money they collected, and there was a lot of it. The theory had always been that it went to offshore banks, and from there to Europe or Asia, but nobody knew for sure how it got there.

“The thing is,” O’Brien said, “when one of their big shots gets killed, he’s always off in the sticks in Coahuila or Tamaulipas. No place near Europe or Asia. So where the money goes and what they do with it is really a mystery. If we could figure that out, and find out which banks are involved, we could hurt them.”

He said that the LCN had an alliance with growers in Colombia and Venezuela, and may have used some of the South Americans’ financial expertise to move the cash.

“They are not subordinates of the Colombia guys—they’re independent. The Colombians tried to get them under their thumbs, and a whole bunch of Colombians got their thumbs cut off,” O’Brien said. “Now the Colombians provide the product, and the LCN gets it across the border to their own retailers on this side. But they’ve got the same trouble everybody does who winds up with bales of hundred-dollar bills—how to get the money clean. We don’t know how they do that, either.”

“We can’t find it at Sunnie,” Shaffer said. “We’ve got an accountant of our own looking at the books and talking to Sunnie’s accountants, and it doesn’t look like much money was running through their accounts.”

“Maybe we’ll have to look at their accountants,” O’Brien said.

“They’re a pretty big company, been here a long time, and clean, as far as anybody knows,” Shaffer said. “It’d be hard to believe that they’d take on something as risky as a Mexican gang account.”

“It’s there somewhere,” one of the other DEA agents said. “Gotta be.”

Lucas nodded: he’d said the same thing himself.

L
UCAS SAID
, “Our big question is, why did they do it this way, this massacre, and turn it into a sensation? Maybe you can get away with that in Mexico, and maybe they do it when somebody needs public disciplining. But this … they’re not taking credit for it, so it wasn’t disciplinary. It looks like they were trying to extract some information from the Brookses, and not getting it.”

“And if the Brookses were knowingly dealing with these guys, it doesn’t seem likely that they’d be crazy enough to steal from them,” Shaffer said.

“Or not talk when they showed up,” Lucas added.