Stolen Prey

15

Turicek had been taken to Regions Hospital, the major St. Paul public hospital. The cops who’d followed the ambulance didn’t find a wallet, but did find his cell phone. His last call had been to a blocked number out of state, and when they called it, they got a ring but no answer.

The next number had been Sanderson’s.

She’d driven herself across town to Regions, found that Turicek was in surgery, but had been walked into the OR, and identified him behind the tangle of breathing equipment. When she asked the surgeon how bad he was, the surgeon had said, “You’ll have to leave now.”

She followed the circulating nurse out of the room, and the St. Paul cops asked her if she knew what had happened, and she’d started blubbering. All she’d seen of Turicek was his head, which looked like an oversized raw turnip and was shaped all wrong, and a large patch on the abdominal covering, which showed a lot of blood and what she assumed was guts.

She told the cops, “The Mexicans, the Mexicans,” and they said, “The Mexicans?” and she’d nodded and said, “There was a police officer, and agent, from the state…”

One of the cops said, “Davenport?” and she nodded again, and the cop said, “Let’s give them a ring.”

About that time, the surgeon walked out of the emergency OR, pulling off his bloody gloves, and one of the cops, looking past her, said, “Uh-oh.”

BEFORE HEADING down to Regions, Lucas called Shaffer to fill him in. He’d parked and was walking toward the emergency room entrance when he saw Shaffer pulling into the parking area, and he slowed and waited until the other agent caught up.

“What the fuck happened?” Shaffer demanded. “Shrake and Jenkins take the day off? They were supposed to be all over him.”

“Take it easy,” Lucas snapped. “The guy knew we were there, and he bolted. He knew where he was going. We could have had a whole team on him and he would have lost them.”

“Wouldn’t have lost my team,” Shaffer said. “For God’s sakes, this was our big chance. We knew the Mexicans were looking for him.”

“Having a little trouble finding the Mexicans, Bob? Don’t lay it on us, that was your job.”

They snarled at each other some more on the way to the ER; too much media, too much attention, too many people watching. Tempers were going to flare….

“What about Turicek?” Shaffer asked.

“Last I heard, he was still breathing,” Lucas said.

They pushed through the door and saw a woman in a surgeon’s gown with blood at her waist, talking to Sanderson, one hand on Sanderson’s shoulder, and Sanderson was sobbing, and Lucas said, “Maybe that changed.”

TWO ST. PAUL homicide cops told them the story, and they went outside, where the driver of the Ford pickup had been stashed, waiting, in his truck. His name was Robert Johnson, and he was with his girlfriend, whose name was Betty Johnson, no relation, yet, and Robert Johnson said, “I couldn’t help it.”

One of the St. Paul detectives said, “We understand that, Mr. Johnson. We believe it was a kidnapping. If you could just tell the agents what you saw.”

The two Johnsons took turns: they’d just taken a left onto the freeway ramp at Snelling Avenue, not going fast at all—they agreed on that—and pulled up behind a white car that was accelerating even more slowly than they were. They were a truck length or two behind the white car when the trunk popped open and a man came flying out. He landed on the pavement directly in front of them, and Robert, who was at the wheel, swerved, but said that he didn’t know if he hit the brakes before or after they hit the man.

“It sounded like we’d hit a watermelon, or a basketball, there was this awful whump sound,” Betty said. “I knew we hit his head….”

The white car sped away while the two Johnsons jumped out of their truck and found Turicek half under it, about halfway down the length of the truck. He had a tire track on his pants, and the Johnsons said they’d probably run over his body, just at the hips.

They’d stopped traffic and called 911 on Robert’s cell phone. The ambulance had been there in five minutes, right behind a cop car. The ambulance attendants had pulled Turicek out from under the truck, and it seemed like he was dead, except that he kept blowing blood bubbles. They threw him on a gurney and rushed him back to the hospital. It was then, the responding St. Paul uniform said, that they saw that his arms were taped behind him.

Lucas turned to Shaffer and asked, “How’d they know where to find him? How did they know that?”

Shaffer shook his head: “Has to be a leak inside the bank. I mean, my team didn’t even know he’d run, and if it was only you and Jenkins and Shrake and…”

They turned and looked at Sanderson. She said, “Not me. I didn’t tell anybody.” Then she remembered the phone call, put her fingers to her lips, and said, “Oh … wait.”

Shaffer: “What?”

“Somebody called me and asked where he was. I told them he went jogging,” she said.

Lucas said to Shaffer, “That was Jenkins.”

“Who else did you mention it to?” Shaffer asked her.

“Nobody. Nobody else,” she said. “Not a single person called me, except that one person, after he went jogging. Who cares if somebody goes jogging?”

Lucas: “Did he ever go jogging before?”

“No. No. He showed up with some bags from Macy’s, went into the men’s room, changed, and said he was going jogging. He’d never jogged before.”

Shaffer looked at Lucas and conceded, “Okay. He knew.”

Lucas looked at Sanderson for another long minute, then said, “Miz Sanderson, I need to talk privately with Agent Shaffer for a few seconds, then I need to speak privately with you.”

She said, nervously, “Okay.”

Lucas and Shaffer walked down the sidewalk and Lucas said, “Why don’t you take off? You don’t want to witness this.”

“What’re you going to do?”

“Push her around,” Lucas said.

Shaffer said, “I’ll see you at the meeting tomorrow.”

LUCAS TOOK SANDERSON to an empty hospital room, pointed her at a chair, then stood over her, and too close.

“You’re going to prison for life.”

“No…”

“Yes, I think so. I’m almost sure of it. The fact is, you’ve been withholding information from us, and that information could have led to the arrest of these Mexican killers. That makes you complicit in a whole series of first-degree murders. They have a source of information inside your bank, and you could probably tell us who it is. Instead, you keep passing along this bullshit about how you know nothing, it was all Turicek. Well, I don’t believe it, and neither will a jury. I am going to arrest you. Just a matter of time, Kristina. It’s a matter of time.”

“But I don’t know anything,” she wailed. “I’ve tried to tell you everything—”

“You’re going to prison,” Lucas repeated. “But before I come over and arrest you, I want to tell you in some detail what they did to the Brooks children before they killed them.”

And he did, telling her about the throat-cutting, the knuckle amputations, the rape of the little girl and the mother while their father was bound on the floor beside them, about the puddles of blood and the bluebottle flies and the finger stumps used to write the bloody message on the wall.

Sanderson’s head went down, her hands between her thighs, pressed together, her forehead nearly on her thumbs. “This is what you guys did, bringing these killers into town,” Lucas said.

“It was all Ivan. It had to be,” she said. “I didn’t know.”

Lucas got up, sighed, and said, “Well. Be seeing you. Take care of yourself, these people are crazy.”

Now her head came up and she shouted at him, spittle flying across the room: “I know they’re crazy. You don’t have to tell me. They almost killed that poor Jacob, who wouldn’t hurt a fly, and they murdered Ivan, and they missed me just because I got lucky, and you know who brought them around to us? You police! You police dragged them in on top of us. That’s why they’re coming for us. You did this!”

“See ya,” Lucas said, and he was out the door. As soon as he was out of sight, he jogged down the corridor and around the corner, and outside to the parking lot to the truck. From the door pocket, he retrieved his own prepaid cell phone and punched in the first of the numbers he’d taken from Kline’s prepaid cell phone when he searched Kline’s apartment. When Sanderson appeared at the emergency room door a moment later, he tapped the “call” icon. A phone rang, but she made no move to answer it.

He punched in a second number and, as she walked up to her car, let it ring. Nothing. He put in the third number, and on the fourth ring, a man answered with a soft southern accent.

“Hello?”

“I must have the wrong number,” Lucas said. “Is this Jimmy?”

“No, this ain’t Jimmy,” the man said, with an amused chuckle. “This is the custodian who just took Jimmy’s phone out of the trash can at Newark airport.”

“I’ll have to kick Jimmy’s ass,” Lucas said.

“What do you want me to do with the phone?” the custodian asked.

“Keep it,” Lucas said. “It’s a prepay. When it runs out, you can pay for more.”

SANDERSON WAS in her car, backing out of the parking space, but one thing that Lucas knew, as sure as sin and taxes, was that if somebody called a woman on a cell phone, she’d answer it. Or at least look at it. Was it possible she really wasn’t part of the Kline-Turicek-Gold Buyer phone circle?

She took a left onto the road, heading down to I-35, and he followed, several cars back. She drove slowly across the Cities, all the way to her apartment, into her parking garage, and out of sight.

“Goddamnit,” Lucas said aloud.

Was it possible that she really was innocent?

No, he decided. It wasn’t. He did a U-turn and headed back home.

EDIE ALBITIS got into town just before midnight. She’d tried calling Turicek fifteen times on her second phone, hadn’t gotten an answer. As the plane rolled across the tarmac at MSP, she tried Sanderson. Sanderson, she thought, was probably the weak link in the whole chain, the one most likely to cough them up. She’d talked to Turicek about it, and he’d suggested that she probably wouldn’t screw up and talk until he and Albitis were safely in their respective bolt-holes in Lithuania, Ukraine, or Georgia. That had changed now, with all the attention from the cops.

She tried to get Turicek, failed, knew she couldn’t get Kline, who was still in the hospital and apparently didn’t have his prepaid phone with him, and so she went to Sanderson, who’d just walked in the door when she called, the phone ringing from where she’d left it, on the floor next to the living room couch.

“Yes?”

“It’s me,” Albitis said. They didn’t use names on the phone.

“Oh, my God, have you heard?” Sanderson cried.

“Heard what?”

“Ivan’s dead.”

“What?” Albitis freaked; if it hadn’t been for her lap belt, she might have leaped out of the airplane seat.

Sanderson told her about it, and Albitis listened, openmouthed, as they taxied up to the Jetway.

“All right,” Albitis said. “I’ll call you back in five minutes. I have to think.”

It wasn’t so much that she had to think, but she couldn’t talk with the guy in the next seat leaning over her. Once inside the terminal, she found an empty space next to a window and called Sanderson back. She said, “Okay, you’ve got this cop threatening you. That means he suspects, but he doesn’t know. He’s got no proof, or he already would have popped you. If you and Jacob keep your mouths shut, you’ll be okay.”

“I’m sitting here shaking like a leaf,” Sanderson said. “You should have seen poor Ivan’s head. There was hardly any skin left on it. Like his nose had almost been scraped off.”

“Okay, okay, I don’t want to hear that,” Albitis said. “I really don’t.”

“I had to look at it.”

“Enough. I’m going to the office to pick up today’s packages. I’ll sleep there, on the floor. The last of the packages come in tomorrow. I’ll pick them up, and then, we’ll just wait. We’ll have all the gold, and the cops’ll have no clue. We’ll split it up, and we’re done.”

“Will you call me?”

“I’ll call you three times a day…. Anything you hear, call me, but only on the cold phone, okay? Only on the cold phone. They’re probably monitoring your cell.”

“Oh, God, this agent said I’m going to prison for life, I’m an accessory to murder because I won’t help them.”

“Just stay cool.”

WHEN LUCAS GOT HOME, Weather was asleep, but Letty was still up. “Mom said to tell you she saw the autopsy stuff on your desk, and she says she’s got a bad feeling about it. Something’s not right. She says she can’t imagine how Rivera got shot, if it happened the way you said it did.”

Lucas frowned and said, “Did she say why?”

“No, she says she just couldn’t imagine it,” she said. “You know, if it was the way you said.”

Lucas went to his desk, found the autopsy file, and thumbed through it. Letty, munching on a PowerBar, came to look over his shoulder.

“You don’t have to see this,” Lucas said.

“I already did,” Letty said. “I couldn’t figure out what she meant, either. Maybe we should go wake her up.”

“Is she cutting tomorrow?”

“She’s got a nose … rhinoplasty.” Weather had outlawed the phrase “nose job” in the Davenport household.

“So we let her sleep,” Lucas said.

He looked through the photos, of both the crime scene and the autopsy, along with the autopsy notes.

“You see it?” Letty asked.

“No, because I’m going to have to imagine it, and I can’t do that with you crunching the PowerBar in my ear,” Lucas said.

“Chill.”

LUCAS LOOKED at the photos, closed his eyes. Simple enough. Rivera walked up the front steps, cocked his gun, made sure the safety was off, got his guts up, and kicked the door. He landed with one foot inside, saw the two men off to his right, turned that way. One of them went for his gun and he fired twice and the third man, whom he hadn’t seen, who was standing next to the picture window to his left, peeking through the drapes, that man swivels with a gun and shoots….

He looked at the pictures.

Closed his eyes. The man on the left shoots…

He shoots…

Lucas opened his eyes and said, “Houston, we’ve got a problem.”

“I’m Letty,” said Letty. “You had a stroke, or something?”

LUCAS SPENT a restless night working through it, realized he should have seen it a lot sooner. He’d sensed it, back at the shooting scene, but hadn’t been able to put his finger on the problem. But better late than never.

Weather’s alarm went off at six o’clock. He usually slept right through it, but this time he rolled out of bed with her, shaved, gave her a good scrub in the shower, which might have grown interesting if they’d only had more time, but they were both in a hurry. He took the time to say, “Thanks for the tip on the autopsy.”

“That’s something?” she asked.

“I’m afraid it is.”