Stolen Prey

10

That night, Weather and Letty sat around and talked about the murder of Rivera, and Lucas worried that he’d messed things up.

“I knew something was up with him. I knew he was running around talking to the Latino community, and I might have figured he’d go hunting them on his own…. I just couldn’t imagine that he’d actually find them. I’ve been hung up on the horse shit gang. I wanted to get them, so I let him go. Now he’s dead.”

“You think you can know everything, but you can’t. You think you can anticipate everything, but you can’t,” Weather said. “I didn’t tell you my John Greene story, did I? What happened yesterday?”

“No.” Greene was a friend of theirs, a cardiac surgeon.

“Yesterday morning, he takes a sixty-five-year-old guy into bypass surgery. Vietnam vet, this is down at the VA hospital. They’ve done a huge workup on the guy, everything is perfect, he’s an excellent candidate, hasn’t smoked in thirty years, a little overweight but not terrible, always had high cholesterol but he’s gone on the reversal diet and he’s bringing it down…. But he’s having trouble breathing from all those years of eating pork chops. So it looks like if they do the operation, he’s good for twenty or thirty years. They do the work, the op is fine … but his heart won’t start. Nothing they can do—they try everything. Guy’s dead.”

“Jeez,” Letty said, her face going white.

“Bad day,” Lucas said, “But that doesn’t have—”

“Sure it does,” Weather said. “You can’t know everything. You’re walking through a fog, all the time. Even in situations where you think you know just about everything, like with John, something can go wrong. He’s devastated, because he’s the same kind of guy you are, a control freak. The patient had a nice wife and four kids, couple grandchildren … and he’s dead. But it’s not John’s fault. Same with this Rivera. Shit happens. That’s what everybody was telling John. He knows that, but he doesn’t feel like that. You’ve got the same problem.”

SO HE THOUGHT about it, and didn’t sleep well. Weather had planned a morning at the Minneapolis Institute of Art with Letty and Sam, and Lucas was invited, though he told them not to count on it. He slept through the phone when it rang early the next morning, but Weather, who was used to getting up early, picked it up, and then woke him by pulling on his big toe.

“What?” He was groggy, and pushed himself up.

She was still in her pajamas. “Your phone was buzzing, so I looked at it. It’s Ingrid. She says she needs to talk to you.” Weather held out his phone.

“Uhh…”

“Man, you sound like you’re dead,” ICE said.

“Just asleep. What happened?”

“You better come over here and interview a couple guys,” ICE said.

“You figure it out?” Lucas asked.

“I’m still working through the software,” ICE said. “This, I got with chitchat. Come over here and talk with these guys.”

“Who?”

“The pizza guy and one of the computer security guys. I’m serious, you need to talk to them. They’re waiting for you.”

“Ah, Jesus.”

“C’mon. Skip the mascara, just rinse off your face and run on over here,” ICE said.

HE TOOK the time to stand in the shower for three minutes, put on jeans and a T-shirt and a jacket to cover the Beretta, headed downstairs, unshaven. Weather got some coffee going, and Lucas made himself an egg sandwich, two eggs fried hard inside two slices of white Wonder bread. He borrowed one of Weather’s travel cups for the coffee, and was out of the house five minutes later.

The day was cool, though the cold front that had come with the initial killings had blown through, and it looked like the day would be sunny and reasonably warm. He took Mississippi River Boulevard north to the point where it leaked onto Cretin Avenue, by the St. Thomas University stadium, took Cretin to I-94, drove across the river and into downtown Minneapolis.

ICE was sitting on a granite post outside the bank, smoking a cigarette. When she saw him coming, she flagged him down, walked around to the passenger side, and got in the Porsche. “This is pure detective work on my part,” she said. “What happened was, it’s six o’clock and I’m stoned on speed and caffeine and I’m starving to death, so we order out for pizzas at the bank guys’ regular place, and the pizza guy comes by.”

“The bank guys work on Sunday morning?”

“This Sunday they do. Anyway…”

The pizza guy brought in a load of pies, she said as Lucas parked the Porsche, and she and the pizza guy and one of the computer guys started chatting, and the computer guy said that he hardly saw the pizza guys anymore after this guy named Jacob quit. And they said, yeah, he was more of a pizza eater than anyone else, came from all those years as a midnight writer … meaning a hacker.

“So I say, ‘Jacob who?’ This overnight computer guy, Jon, says, ‘Jacob Kline,’ and I say, ‘Holy shit, there’s your leak, right there. There’s your money.’ That’s when we decided I better get you out of bed.”

IN THE SECURE AREA, the pizza guy, who wore a little white paper hat like the ones that U.S. Marines called cunt hats, said, “Dude,” and a computer guy turned from his terminal and asked, “You Lucas?”

“So tell me,” Lucas said, taking a chair.

The pizza guy said, “Jacob was like this total stoner, slacker, bullshit artist, I don’t know how he kept the job.”

“Good programmer,” ICE said. “Smart.”

“But messed up,” said the computer guy named Jon. “He was depressed. I mean, like mentally ill, not like bummed out.”

“Okay,” Lucas said.

“And he wouldn’t take his meds, even when he was going down. He’d just sit there and get worse,” Jon said. “Said he couldn’t program when he was taking his meds, said it screwed up his head.”

“His head was totally screwed up,” said the pizza guy.

“So why does that make you think…?” Lucas let the question hang.

“He used to talk about making a killing with some computer app and then getting out, so he wouldn’t have to work,” Jon said. “He said work was what was killing him. It was so boring. So stupid. He couldn’t stand it. He said he went out to Silicon Valley one time, thinking it might be better, but it was worse, they treated people like robots. Anyway, he got fired for non-performance. He knew it was coming … and this stuff that ICE has been looking at, it feels like his work. It works and all, but it’s got these little flourishes….”

ICE nodded. “I know him from gamer work. He’s both fucked up and good. I don’t know his style well enough to pick it out, but I believe Jon when he says he can.”

“Like a writing style,” Lucas said. “Like a book-writing style.”

“Exactly,” said ICE. “The other thing that we didn’t think about long enough … whoever stole this money knew a lot about banking and how to set up accounts. So it had to be inside, right? But if it was inside, why did they set up this back door to get in? It’d be easier and less visible if they moved the money from in here. You wouldn’t have this doily to untangle.”

“But that would pin it down to somebody here,” Lucas said. “If you were in here, and you built a back door, it’d look like it was done by an outsider. The back door could function as a decoy.”

“True, I didn’t think of that,” ICE said. She looked at Jon. “I guess you’re fucked.”

“Not recently,” he said, and waggled his eyebrows at her.

“In your dreams,” she said.

“Okay, kids, calm down,” Lucas said. “You’re saying the main reason that Jacob did it is, he’s messed up.”

“Not exactly,” Jon said. “Because this almost has to be an inside job, which has everybody worried. But the people working here now are the straightest, most-insured, most 401k’d, middle-class…” He paused, then pointed at ICE. “She’s the biggest criminal who’s ever been in here. Except for Jacob. What I’m saying is, Jacob would do this. Nobody else would.”

“I agree except for one thing,” the pizza guy said. “He’s the laziest motherfucker in the world. He’s too lazy to steal. He’s too lazy to learn how to drive a car—he used to order pizzas at the end of his shift because he knew the store was down near where he lives, and he’d bum a ride home. That’s what I don’t see: he doesn’t give a shit, not enough to steal a billion dollars or whatever it is.”

“Also true,” ICE said. “And it’s not because he’s depressed. He’s just fuckin’ lazy.”

Jon and ICE said that whoever had built the back door had, in fact, created a little group of booby traps and alarms, but they were taking them out and should be done by the middle of the day. “I never did finish over at Sunnie, so after we’re done here, I’m gonna go home and get a few hours of sleep, then get some sliders and go back to Sunnie. When I get done with that, I’m going to Paris.”

“Where do I find this Jacob guy?” Lucas asked.

“I know the answer to that,” Jon said.

WHEN LUCAS left the bank, it was still before eight o’clock, and there was no reason to expect that Del would be awake. But there was no reason to expect that Lucas would be awake, either, and there was no reason that he should have to suffer alone, so he called Del, got his wife, and told her that he was on his way and to pull Del out of bed.

Del was not happy when Lucas arrived: “There’s a nuclear weapon somewhere in the Twin Cities and we only have a half hour to find it,” he said. He was sitting on his bed, pulling on his socks.

“No, there’s a guy named Jacob in an apartment off Lyndale who may have stolen twenty-two million dollars, and we have to shake it out of him,” Lucas said.

Del: “Jesus, couldn’t you have gotten a flunky to go with you?”

“Uh, Del…”

“I know, I am a flunky.” He got a pistol from under the bed, already in a holster, and stuck it in his belt. “I’m good.”

DEL LIVED in St. Paul. Lucas filled him in as they drove back to Minneapolis, then turned south.

“What you’re telling me,” Del said, “is that we got nothing but what some pizza guy suspects.”

“No. We’ve got solid judgments from two computer people that the work looks like Kline’s, and that he has voiced some inclination to make a killing, somehow. And that he was fired, and he was pissed about it. According to the Polaris computer guy, when they fired him, he threatened to shit in their revolving door.”

“Another Dillinger, no doubt about it,” Del said.

THEY WERE at the apartment by eight-thirty. Most of the parking around Kline’s apartment was on-street, but they found a space without much trouble. They walked around a corner past a basement-level mystery bookstore, and Del asked, “You read that stuff?”

Lucas nodded. “Sure. We’ve got a bunch of detective novels up at the cabin. I read them on rainy days. They’re mostly full of shit.”

“That’s because they have to combine Hollywood and the cops. An author told me that,” Del said. “He said if a book described what the cops really do, everybody would fall asleep. So they have to stick in some Hollywood. Maybe a lot of Hollywood.”

“What about true-crime books? Those sell pretty well.”

“Yeah, but … those aren’t about the cops,” Del said. “Those are about the criminals, and what they do. The bloodier the better.”

“You ever read that book about Ted Bundy?” Lucas asked, as they waited by the door to the apartment.

“No, but I saw the movie. He was cute as a button, Ted was.”

A guy came out of the apartment and Del hooked the door while it was open. The guy turned and looked at Del, frowned and asked, “Do you live here?”

“Would I be going in if I didn’t?” Del asked.

Lucas pulled his ID and said, “It’s okay, we’re cops.”

The guy nodded and took another look at Del, and went on his way.

“People are just too goddamn suspicious,” Del said.

ACCORDING TO the building directory, Kline was in 204. They took one flight of steps, turned right, and were looking at the door, one of twenty or thirty running down a long dim hallway. Lucas knocked. They waited. No response, so he knocked louder. No response, so he knocked louder yet, and they heard what sounded like a groan from the apartment, and heard somebody call, “I’m coming.”

They could tell before he got to the door that he was barefoot, from the soft footfalls. A chain rattled on the back of the door, and the man opened it. He was as tall as Lucas, or maybe an inch taller, white, with a curly black semi-Afro. He had thin, wispy whiskers on a face that probably wouldn’t need much shaving. He was wearing a pair of jockey shorts and nothing else. He said, “I don’t want any.”

“We’re with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension,” Lucas began.

“I don’t want any of that, either,” the man said.

“Are you Mr. Kline?” Del asked.

“Yeah. I think so. I was last night.” He pulled on the top of his underpants, peered into the opening, then looked up and said, “Yep. Still am. What do you want?”

“We need to talk to you,” Lucas said.

“Oh, right,” Kline said. “I let you in, you toss my apartment, take my stash.”

“Not interested in your stash,” Del said. “We don’t have a search warrant, so we won’t toss the apartment. We just need to talk to you about a problem at Polaris National.”

Kline snorted, “They got more than one problem.”

A young blond woman came out of her apartment down the hall, wearing what might have been a churchgoing dress, and as she pulled her door closed she called, “Jacob, you put some pants on or I swear to God I’ll call the cops.”

“These are the cops,” he said.

The woman was coming along the hall, slowed, and said to Lucas, “I was joking. He plays with it, but he never wags it.”

“Doesn’t necessarily qualify him for an honorary degree,” Lucas said. She was pretty, and he was always up for a chat with a pretty woman.

“No, but … he’s not actually a pervert,” the woman said. “Well, he is a pervert, but not a dangerous one.”

“They say they’re not looking for my stash,” Kline told the woman.

“Then they must not be,” she said. “The police never lie. It would be against their ethics.”

“You’re my witness,” Kline said to her. Then, to Lucas and Del, “You can come in, but you can’t search the place.”

“Okay, I’m your witness,” the woman said, and went on her way.

“Good-bye,” Lucas said, and she twiddled her fingers over her shoulder, but didn’t look back.

KLINE’S APARTMENT stank of tomato-based food-like products, ramen noodles, pepperoni, and maybe some spilled Two-Buck Chuck with an underlying whiff of ganj. Two wooden chairs faced each other across a tiny table in the compact kitchen; in the living room, a couch faced a huge television that was wired into three different game systems, the consoles of which sat on a plywood coffee table; and straight through, they could see the foot of an unmade bed.

Kline flopped full-length on the couch and said, “So, get the kitchen chairs.”

Del picked them up, handed one to Lucas, and they put them in the living room facing the couch, their backs to the TV, and Lucas asked, “Did you steal twenty-two million dollars from an account at Polaris National Bank through a back door you put into the system before you were fired?”

Kline looked from Lucas to Del and back, then said, “Noooo … Do they think I did?”

“Some of them do,” Lucas said.

“That’s right, blame it on the handicapped guy,” Kline said. Then, in what seemed a genuine question, “They lost twenty-two mil?”

“They didn’t exactly lose it,” Del said. “Somebody took it. We thought maybe it was you.”

“I confess, Ossifer, it was me,” Kline said. He waved his arm at his living quarters. “The first thing I did when I got the money is, I went out and rented this beautiful apartment, so I could live a life of leisure and luxury with a lot of high-price hookers.”

“If you didn’t do it, who did?” Lucas asked.

Kline pushed himself up, looked under the coffee table, came up with a pack of cigarettes and a Bic lighter, lit one, and blew smoke. “Good question. I mean, I didn’t do it, so it must be somebody else. But they’re all so fuckin’ straight … on the surface, anyway. I suspect Angela … have you met her?”

“No.”

“Blond chick, big headlights.” He cupped his hands on his chest, to indicate the size of the headlights. “One of the analysts down there. I suspect her of being a secret rubber freak. She denies it. Anyway, I don’t know who would take it. The money. I sort of can’t believe that anybody did. If somebody did, of the people who work down there, or used to work down there, it’d most likely be … me. That’s who I’d suspect. But let me tell you a secret: their security isn’t as good as it looks. You’ve got the cameras and the doors and all that, but if you’ve got administrator’s status, you can actually get in from a couple of places around the building. Did they tell you that?”

“Yeah, but we’ve got a pro checking it out, and it doesn’t look like that to her,” Lucas said. He hadn’t known about the other entries, and that worried him. “It looks like it took a pretty heavy programmer, who really knew the system. This wasn’t some casual hack from a secretary who took a college course in C.”

“Her?” Kline blew more smoke. “Would I know her? Your pro?”

Lucas said, “Ingrid—”

“ICE. Well, well.” Kline blew more smoke, and then laughed up at the ceiling. “They let little ICE into the security section, huh? Fuckin’ morons. They’ll be missing a lot more than twenty-two million before she gets out of there. She’s not gonna build in a back door, she’s gonna build in a fucking Holland Tunnel. How’d you ever hook up with a crook like ICE?”

“She used to work for me,” Lucas said.

“Oh, yeah,” Kline said. He shook a finger at Lucas. “Now I know the name. Davenport Simulations, right? Nice little gig. I heard you were a cop. Okay, I want to get really clear with you. A: I didn’t do it. Didn’t build a back door, didn’t take any money out. B: I don’t know who did it, but I find it hard to believe that it was one of my former associates, may their treacherous little souls burn in hell, anyway. C: I really need to light up a fatty, so if you guys are done…”

“I understand you’ve been a little depressed, from time to time,” Lucas said.

“No, I’ve been a lot depressed,” Kline snapped. “It’s not what you think it is. It’s not being bummed out. It’s…”

“I know what it is,” Lucas said.

“Ah.” Something softened in Kline’s face. “Well then, you know like Snoop says, I need my medicine.”

They worked him for a while, recycling the same questions, looking for holes, pushing him on other suspects. “So where’re you working now?” Lucas eventually asked.

Kline said, “Same ol’ same ol’. Hennepin National Bank, doing the same old shit.”

“They took you after you were fired by Polaris?” Lucas asked, surprised.

“I wasn’t fired. I resigned, with a good recommendation,” Kline said.

“And if they hadn’t let you do that, you would have shit in their revolving door,” Del said.

Kline smiled. “So you heard that, huh? I thought it was colorful.”

TWENTY MINUTES later, they were back out on the street, walking past the mystery bookstore. Del said, “The guy is unhinged. But I think he might know something about the money.”

“Yeah. He was a little too unconfused about the questions,” Lucas said. “I’m gonna get Jenkins and Shrake over here. Keep an eye on him for a few hours. Let’s just sit for a while, see if he moves.”

They found a no-parking zone where they could watch both of the building’s exits. They were still watching, an hour and a half later, when Jenkins and Shrake pulled up behind them. Lucas got out of the Porsche and went and sat in Jenkins’s backseat.

“We got a photo, but we can’t find a car,” Shrake said. “He must either borrow one, or get around on buses. So what are we looking for, other than time and a half?”

Lucas told them, and gave them a thorough description to go with the photo: “Figure out where he goes, if anywhere. We need to know who he talks to, and where. You’ve got the camera?”

“Yeah.” Jenkins held up a compact camera with a super-telephoto.

“If he meets somebody, when they split, make sure you get the other guy’s license tag or take him home, or something. If Kline is on foot, maybe one of you can follow him on foot.”

“We can do that,” Jenkins said. “By the way, Shaffer says he’s calling his whole crew in. They’ll be meeting in a bit. You’re invited.”

WHEN LUCAS AND DEL got to the BCA, the meeting was over. Lucas stopped at Shaffer’s office, intending to fill him in on the morning’s developments, and was told by another cop that Shaffer had gone to Sunnie Software, where the DEA accountants were still at work, and planned to go to Polaris after that.

Lucas walked back to his office and found Martínez sitting outside the door. Shaffer had told her that Lucas was on his way in, and she’d decided to wait. “I hoped to speak with you.”

“Sure, but I’ve got to make a phone call. Come on in.”

She took a visitor’s chair, and he settled behind his desk, got Shaffer’s phone number, and when Shaffer came on, filled him in. At the end, he said, “It could be a wild-goose chase, but Shrake and Jenkins weren’t doing much anyway, they’re not real churchy, so they’ll tag him around for a while.”

“That’s fine,” Shaffer said. “And you think Kline knows something that we don’t?”

“Yeah, I do. I don’t know what, or how much,” Lucas said. “It’s also possible that he suspects a particular person, and maybe’s gonna ask for a piece of the action. I was told that he’s too lazy to steal, so … take it for what it’s worth.”

When he got off, Martínez said, “My superior wishes that I stay here until we can send David’s body back to Mexico, and to come to the meetings in his place so I can relay the news back home. If that is okay. I am a certified police officer.”

“I don’t think anybody will have a problem with that,” Lucas said.

“You have been making progress, but I understand from this morning’s meeting that Agent Shaffer has not,” she said.

She already knew about the back door at Polaris, but not about Kline. He filled in what she hadn’t overheard in the phone conversation, then said, “It could be a complete waste of time. This guy is a slacker…. You know slacker…?”

“Yes, I know this,” she said.

“He’s a slacker and a depressive and he apparently smokes a lot of dope and doesn’t care who knows about it. He says this theft is way too ambitious for him, and I halfway believe him. But he’s all we’ve got, at the moment.”

“Okay,” she said, and stood up. “So now I go see your medical inspector, and they will tell me about the autopsy. You will call me if something happens?”

“Absolutely,” Lucas said.

HE CALLED ICE, who told him she couldn’t talk for a couple minutes. “I’m right in the middle of something. Call you back in three minutes.”

He looked at his watch, and again five minutes later when she called. “What I was right in the middle of, was a bunch of bank systems security people. The thing is, we cleared out the problems in the main system, and now that they’ve seen it, the security people can take care of the backups.”

“So you’re done there?”

“Pretty much. But you’ve got these accountants here, the DEA people?”

“What about them?” Lucas asked.

“Once we broke through on the back door, and the booby traps, I let the Polaris security people take it, and I started looking around the system. The thing is, I isolated at least some of the wire numbers where the thieves sent the money. The last of it went out three days ago, and it went to four different accounts in four different banks, all of it to either the east or west coasts, the big cities, LA, New York, Philadelphia. I don’t know where it went from there.”

“So get the DEA guys on it.”

“I told them, but that’s not what they’re here for,” ICE said. “They’re hot on the trail of this drug money, the big money, and they don’t give a rat’s ass about your twenty-two million. They say they do, but they don’t. You need to get your own people over here, or Bone’s people, or somebody, if you want to start running down where this money went, and who’s got it, and who’s going to get killed next.”

“Yes,” Lucas said. “That’s what I need to do.”

He called Shaffer, and Shaffer exploded and said, “Those fuckin’ feds … All right, I’ll get somebody there. I’ll get Specs over there.”

“Tell him to talk to Bone. Bone will help.”

“Listen, I heard two minutes ago—I swear to God, two minutes—the Roseville cops got the shooters’ SUV up at the Rosedale parking lot. I don’t think they’re shopping, I think they went there to get a new ride. I’m going up there. What about you? Heard anything back from Shrake and Jenkins?”

“No. They’re pretty good about updating me, so I suspect Kline is still holed up in his apartment.”

“Okay. I’m outa here,” Shaffer said. But just before he hung up, he said, “Things are moving.”

“Yeah, they are,” Lucas said.

MARTÍNEZ TALKED to the Big Voice a few minutes after she left Lucas’s office. She had known him when she was a child, and though his name was Sebastian, she’d always called him Sebas as a kid, and still did. “I think the money is gone,” she told him.

“Tell me why,” he said.

She explained about the DEA accountants and the two teams, one following the shooters and the stolen money, the other going after the main accounts where they’d been sending money for three years. “They know it is going through Sunnie, but they haven’t found the pathway yet. They will, it’s a matter of time. So, that is finished.”

“They won’t get the main money. It’s filtered three times, and then it goes poof, and disappears,” the Big Voice said. “The money stolen, this is a shame. I’ll talk to Javier, but I think you’re correct. It’s gone.”

“So, will you call back the children?”

“I’ll talk to Javier,” the Big Voice said. “To tell the truth, I think that since we’ve already made so much noise, it would not hurt to make a little more. To send the message. Also, this Kline. If there’s any chance…”

“They would have to be very careful. I know he is being watched,” she said.

“We will think about it,” the Big Voice said.

“So that’s up to you … and Javier,” Martínez said. “What do you want me to do?”

“Come back with the body. But be careful, Ana. This killing of Rivera, this was brilliant but dangerous. It frightens me. If we cut the money loose, there is no reason to stay.”

“Okay. I will go to these morning meetings, to hear what I can, and when they release Rivera’s body, I’ll come with it. You do want me to continue to work with the Federales?”

“I believe so. I will talk with Javier about this, also. If you wish to get out, we will consider it—this would not be a bad time to go, after Rivera’s death. You could claim that you are too frightened to continue.”

“I prefer to stay,” Martínez said. “A small raise would not be unwelcome.”

The Big Voice laughed and said, “Perhaps a big raise. I will talk with Javier.”

SHRAKE CALLED Lucas a half hour after he talked to Shaffer and said, “Our boy’s on the street. He’s on foot, and Jenkins is tagging him. We’ll keep you up.”

He called back twenty minutes later and said, “He took a bus, and he just dragged his sorry ass into Hennepin National.”

“Didn’t talk to anyone?”

“Not unless the other guy was on the bus,” Shrake said.

“Wonder why he’s going in there today?”

“I do not know the answer to that question,” Shrake said. “But it’s a big bank. Maybe they have a Sunday crew?”

“All right. If he’s working, you might as well come back in,” Lucas said. “Pretty much a fool’s errand, anyway. We’re not going to take him like that.”