Stolen Prey

13

Lucas was sitting at his desk when Martin Clark, the Minneapolis homicide detective, called and demanded, “What the hell did you do in Kline’s apartment last night?”

Lucas, confused, said, “What?”

“What’d you do to the computer?”

“I didn’t do anything to the computer,” Lucas said. “Your guy was there the whole time. What happened to it?”

“Somebody cracked it open and took the disk drive.”

“Ah, shit … Marty, I didn’t touch the goddamn computer. I was just sitting here trying to think of a way to get a search warrant…. Wait a minute, could I put you on hold for a minute? Or call you right back?”

Martínez stepped to the doorway, looked in; her face was drawn, her eyes puffy. Lucas held up a finger. Clark said, “Yeah, okay. What’s going on?”

“Tell you in one minute,” Lucas said. Then, “Wait, wait, was the door forced? It wasn’t, was it?”

“No, the door’s fine.”

“I’ll get right back to you,” Lucas said.

He hung up and pointed Martínez at a chair, said, “Ana, glad to see you. I was a little worried. I’ve been trying to get in touch.”

“My phone was off,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

“Gotta make a call.” Lucas called Hennepin Medical Center, was put through to the surgical intensive care ward, identified himself, and asked the nurse, “I really need to know if Mr. Kline had any visitors this morning…. Yeah, I’ll hold.”

When he was on hold, he said to Martínez, “Trying to get a line on the thieves…”

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.

LUCAS 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.

LUCAS 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.

LUCAS 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.”

MARTÍNEZ 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.”

TURICEK 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.

HE 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.

WHEN SANDERSON 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.

SANDERSON 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….

WHEN LUCAS 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?”

“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.”

HENNEPIN 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.

MCCOLLUM 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.”

BACK 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.”

LUCAS 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….

At the door, he stood quietly for just a second, then pressed his ear to it. He got back an almost unearthly silence. The whole building was quiet.

Kick the door? He looked at the door, and again, as with the door below, he doubted his ability to get through it. The door looked like it was metal, set in what was probably a concrete block wall.

He was still looking at it when he heard some scuffling on the stairway, and he padded back down the hall, and a cop peeked around the corner at him. Lucas held up a finger and continued that way and said, quietly, “Davenport, BCA,” and the cop said, “I know you. They in there?”

Lucas recognized him, but didn’t remember his name. “I don’t know. I kind of … I’m just not sure.”

“What do you want to do? We’ve got more guys on the way.”

“Set up and wait five minutes, until we’ve got the place blocked off, and then knock and see what happens.”

That’s what they did. A SWAT team showed up, and Lucas was talking to the commander when Pat, the manager, said, “Kristina’s out on the sidewalk. Do you want to talk to her?”

“Yes, I do,” Lucas said. To the SWAT commander, he said, “If she didn’t let them in, and if they didn’t have a key … then they left. We missed them. We gotta check, but I think we’re wasting our time.”

“We’ll get a key and check it,” the SWAT guy said.

“I’ll be outside,” Lucas said. “Goddamnit, anyway.”