Stolen Prey

3

Weather 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.

THE 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.”

“WE 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.

LUCAS 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.

“It’s gotta be money,” O’Brien said. “Maybe they’re killing two birds with one stone—looking for their money and making a point.”

“What are the chances that it’s a rogue element?” Shaffer asked. “Some smaller group inside the Criminales knew about Brooks, and they came up to hijack the money stream?”

O’Brien shrugged. “Dunno,” he said. “I guess it’s possible.” His voice said that it wasn’t possible, and that Shaffer should hang his head in shame for having suggested it.

Shaffer, his face slightly red, began to tap-dance. “Or maybe the Brookses just really pissed them off, or threatened them somehow, and they came up, you know, to shut them down.”

“But then, why the whole torture scene?” O’Brien asked. “These guys are brutal, but they’re not stupid. They really don’t do crimes of passion. They kill for business reasons. If they just wanted to shut Brooks down, they could have come up here, shot Brooks on the street, and gone back home. You guys would be scratching your heads. Nobody would even suspect anything other than a robbery…. Now, you’re gonna be chasing Mexicans all over town. The DEA gets involved, the Justice Department calls up the Mexican government, and they get more pressure put on them…. They’re not impervious to pressure, you know. They don’t want a battalion of Federales up their ass that might have gone up somebody else’s ass.”

THEY ALL thought about that for a minute, then Lucas asked O’Brien, “You’re not really here to catch the killers, are you?”

“We’d certainly like to,” O’Brien said. There was a tentative note in his voice.

“But basically, you’re here to see if you can find a way to mess with the business,” Lucas said. “From that perspective, the guys who did the actual killing are probably small potatoes. You’re here to look at the books, not to track somebody down in Minneapolis.”

O’Brien nodded. “Yeah. That’s pretty much the case. We’re not equipped to go chasing after individual murderers. We want to bust up their system. We’d like to find the cash that Brooks stole, and take it away from them. That’ll amount to a bunch of legal writs, freezing bank accounts somewhere. The street stuff—that’s you guys.”

THE BCA guys all glanced at each other, and Shaffer said, “Well, that’s clear enough. We’ll be glad to cooperate on that.”

Lucas asked a few more questions, the most critical one, for his immediate future, being “Can these guys pass as Americans?”

O’Brien said, “Probably not. In the border states, their retailers are mostly Hispanic, recruited out of the prison system in California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. Some of them are native English speakers, grew up in Los Angeles or Phoenix. Some of them hardly speak a word of English, and settle down in the barrios in LA. Up north, here, they use a lot of Anglo prison gangs—just a straight money deal. But their gunmen, their hit men, they almost all come from Mexico. They grow up with the gangs.”

“So the guys we’re looking for, they’re probably Mexican.”

O’Brien nodded. “Yeah. If we’ve got this right. If it’s not some kind of … French connection.”

They talked around for a while, and then Shaffer said he’d put all the accountants together after the DEA agents walked through the murder scene.

LUCAS WENT back to his office and found a call from Billy Andrews, the St. Paul cop, who said they’d located the guy who knew about bad Mexicans in town. Lucas called Del, who was still in the building, and recruited him to go along for the ride.

Before he left, he called Virgil Flowers, an agent who worked southern Minnesota, and told him about the horse shit clue to the ATM robbers.

“Sounds like it’s right up my alley,” Flowers said. “Horseshit.”

“I’ve been told that we could call around to county agents to see if they might know about riding stables, and who’d have hired hands as cleanup people … or some such. I’d do it myself, but now I’m all tangled up in this Wayzata murder. We’re talking Mexican drug killers.”

“Lot more eye-catching than horse shit,” Flowers observed.

“Well, I’m a lot more important than you are,” Lucas said. “So…”

“I’ll do it, but I’m working on the Partridge Plastics thing, so there’ll be extra hours involved,” Flowers said. “If I get them, I’ll want to work a little undertime in the next couple of weeks.”

“Just locate them,” Lucas said. “You don’t have to get them. I want to be there for the get. We can talk about the undertime … if you find them.”

“Oh, I’ll find them,” Flowers said.

ANDREWS WAS a detective with St. Paul narcotics/vice. He was so large that he was hard to miss: six seven or six eight, maybe 240 pounds, with over-the-ears blond hair and gold-rimmed glasses. He looked like a tight end with a PhD in European literature. He dressed in dark sport coats over black golf shirts because, he thought, they made him look smaller. They didn’t; they made him look like a hole in space. His nose had been broken a couple of times, and maybe his teeth: he had an improbably even white smile.

They picked him up at the St. Paul police headquarters. He got in the backseat of the Lexus and said, “Okay, this guy’s name is Daniel Castells.”

“Dope dealer?” Del asked.

“Don’t think so. He just sort of hangs out,” Andrews said. “It’s not real clear where his money comes from. He buys and sells, we hear … maybe, like stuff that’s fallen off a truck. Maybe. If a pound of coke came along, with no strings attached, he might find a place to put it. Or he might put that guy who had the coke with a guy who wanted it. Or maybe he’d run like hell. I dunno. People say he’s a smart guy.”

“Where is he?”

“He’s got a booth at McDonald’s, over at Snelling and University,” Andrews said. “Drinks a lot of coffee. Eats French fries. Talks to people on a cell phone. He’s there now. Dan Walker is keeping an eye on him.”

“Does he know we’re coming?” Lucas asked.

“We haven’t mentioned it,” Andrews said.

“Sounds like the guy to know,” Lucas said. “I’m surprised I haven’t heard of him.”

“Showed up here a couple of years ago, keeps his head down,” Andrews said. “I’ve thought about watching him, to see what he’s got going. I’d like to get some prints, or even some DNA, maybe track him down somewhere else.”

“Not a bad idea,” Lucas said.

THEY TOOK ten minutes getting to the McDonald’s, and Andrews called his watchman, Walker, on a handset and confirmed that Castells was still in his booth.

“He is,” he told Lucas, after he’d rung off. “He’s been talking on his cell phone for the last hour.”

University and Snelling was a mess because of construction for a light-rail right-of-way, and Lucas had to dodge around traffic barriers to get into the parking lot. When they were parked, they walked across the blacktop to the McDonald’s, past the window where Castells was sitting. He saw them coming, making eye contact with all three of them, one after the other. He looked at his phone and pushed a button, and Lucas nodded to him.

Inside, they walked over to his booth, and Castells said, “Officers,” and Lucas gestured at the other seats in the booth and asked, “Do you mind?”

Castells had sun-bleached eyebrows and sandy hair, over a well-tanned face. His face was thin, like a runner’s, his eyes pale gray. He was wearing a lavender short-sleeved shirt with a collar, and narrow jeans, with black running shoes. “Would it make any difference if I did?”

Lucas said, “Sure. Then we’d all stand up and talk to you, and pretty soon everybody in the place would be looking at us.”

“So sit down,” Castells said, waving at the booth.

ALTHOUGH he was the only one in it, he’d taken the biggest booth in the place, and had his phone charger plugged into a wall outlet below the table. A dealer of some kind, Lucas thought, with his own table at McDonald’s.

Andrews fitted in next to Castells, with Lucas and Del sitting across the table. Lucas said, “So, a couple cops from St. Paul were talking to some dope dealers, and one of them said you told him to look out because there were some bad Mexican people in town. Is that right?”

Castells didn’t answer immediately. Instead, he seemed to think for a moment, and then showed a thin flicker of a smile. He’d just figured out who’d talked to the cops, Lucas realized. Castells asked, “Does this have anything to do with those people who got killed on the other side of town?”

Del said, “Maybe.”

Castells said, “I gotta change my name. People keep thinking I’m a Mexicano.”

Lucas asked, “What kind of name is Castells?”

“Catalan,” Castells said. The three cops looked at one another, and Andrews shrugged, and Castells said, “Catalonia is a country currently occupied by Spain.”

“You some kind of radical?” Del asked.

Castells laughed and said, “No. I’m an antiquities dealer. You know—statues and stuff.”

“Who talks to dope dealers,” Andrews said.

“I talk to everybody,” Castells said. “I’m a friendly guy.”

“You never know who might need a statue,” Del offered.

“That’s right,” Castells said, smiling at Del. “You just put your finger on the core of the business, Officer Capslock.”

Del leaned back: “Where do you know me from?”

“You were pointed out to me once,” Castells said. “I was told that I shouldn’t be misled by the fact that you were wearing a trucker’s hat backwards.”

“Mmm,” Del said. Castells had pushed him off-balance. He asked, pushing back, “You haven’t seen a big bronze statue, have you? Some women dancing on some fish?”

“The Naiads,” Castells said. “No, I haven’t, and neither has anybody else in the statue business. There wouldn’t be any way to sell it. Your statue is now a bunch of little bronze pieces, if it’s not already been turned into ingots.”

“I hate it when people say things like that,” Del said.

Lucas jumped in: “So what about these bad Mexicans?”

“The thing about cops is, cops blab,” Castells said to Lucas. “They bullshit with everybody. If somebody’s talking about a particular group of bad Mexicans, well … you could get your head cut off on television.”

“Not us,” Lucas said. “We’ve all worked in intelligence. We keep our mouths shut.”

Castells made an open-hand gesture, as if to say, “Whatever,” and asked, “Which one of you is the boss?”

“We don’t actually have bosses,” Lucas said, but Andrews pointed a finger at Lucas and said, “He is.”

CASTELLS LOOKED at Lucas and said, “I don’t know very much, but I was talking to a couple of Mexicanos over in West St. Paul and one of them said to the other that it’d be best to stay away from the Wee Blue Inn, because there were some heavy hitters going through, supposedly from Dallas, but actually, he said, from Mexico. That is the sum total of what I know. I passed it on to another guy I know, because he is also a Mexicano. I didn’t know he was a drug dealer.”

“Why’d you think about the killings on the other side of town?” Andrews asked.

“’Cause I watched the TV news last night. Sounded like Mexican dopers to me.”

They talked for a couple more minutes, and when asked where he’d come from, Castells said, “Washington, D.C.”

“You were a congressman, or something?” Del asked.

Castells said, “Something like that.”

“You speak Spanish?” Del asked.

“Yes.”

Lucas asked, “French?”

“Mm-hmm. You looking for a language teacher?”

“No. German?” Lucas asked.

“Maybe a little. I travel on business.”

“Antiquities.”

“Yes. And high-end furniture.”

He did not, he said, have any more relevant information, but he’d keep his ear to the ground, his nose to the grindstone, and his feet on the fence. If he heard anything more, he’d call Lucas. Lucas gave him a card and stood up. “Stay in touch. We could be a valuable contact for a hardworking antique dealer.”

“Antiquities, not antiques. Antiques were made in Queen Victoria’s time. Antiquities were made by the Greeks and Romans and Egyptians. Entirely different market,” Castells said, as he put the card in his pocket. He was, Lucas thought, exactly the kind of guy who would keep it.

Outside, Lucas said to Andrews, “Interesting guy.”

Del said, “Yeah. So are we going down to the Wee Blue Inn?”

“Thought we might,” Lucas said.

THE WEE BLUE INN was a hole-in-the-wall motel and bar on Robert Street in West St. Paul. All three of them knew it, and Del and Andrews had been inside. “The owner is a guy named John Poe, like in Edgar Allan, but he doesn’t write poetry,” Del said. “He sells the occasional gun, and he’ll rent you a room for an hour at a time.”

“He sweats a lot,” Andrews said. “He usually smells like onion sweat. I think he eats those ‘everything’ bagels.”

“Can we jack him up without anybody looking in a window at us?” Lucas asked. “I’d rather talk to Poe straight up, see what he has to say, than go in with the whole SWAT squad.”

“I could go in and look around,” Del said. He looked nothing like a cop, a major asset in his job.

“Except that Poe knows you,” Lucas said.

“He won’t tell anybody,” Del said. “He doesn’t want his clientele knowing that cops are hanging around.”

“Let’s do that,” Lucas said. “If there are three bad Mexicans in there, we’ll call up the SWAT.”

THEY TALKED ABOUT Poe on the way over, and Andrews called headquarters and got them to put a couple squads in a dry cleaner’s lot two blocks away, no stoplights between them and the Wee Blue Inn. “Just in case,” he said.

At the Wee Blue Inn, they dropped Del and went on their way, around the block. Del called one minute later and said, “I talked to Poe. He says the Mexicans were here, but they’re gone. Checked out yesterday morning. They said they were going back to Dallas.”

“Did he ask them where they were going, or did they volunteer it?”

Del went away for a moment, then came back: “They volunteered it.”

“So they’re not going back to Dallas,” Lucas said.

“I wouldn’t think so,” Del said.

“Huh. Be back in one minute.”

THE WEE BLUE INN was an earth-colored stucco place with a blue-tile roof. The earth color came from dirt.

The floors inside were made of dark wood and squeaked underfoot, not from polish, but from rot, and the whole place smelled of old cigar smoke and something that might have been swimming-pool chlorine, or possibly old semen. Lucas tried not to touch anything, just in case; no swimming pool was visible.

Poe was a short fat man with a bad toupee and a three-day beard, whose lips formed a small but perfect O. Del had him in his office, where he sat sweating. He fit in the place like a finger in a glove, Lucas thought; or a dick in a condom. Andrews nodded to him, then pointed at him and said to Lucas, “This is Poe.”

Poe was adamant about the Mexicans leaving. “They had duffel bags, and they took off. Loaded up, said, ‘Thank you,’ and they were out of here.”

“Speak good English?” Lucas asked.

“So-so. They was Mexican, no doubt about that.”

“What, they were wearing sombreros?” Del asked.

“No, they just looked like Mexicans,” Poe said. “Mexican boxers. Welterweights. Small guys, good shape. Mean-looking. Most Mexicans around here don’t look mean.”

“Couldn’t have been, like, Colombians?” Del asked.

Poe was exasperated: “They was Mexicans. They was fuckin’ Mexicans, Del. What can I tell you?”

“They carrying guns?” Del asked.

“Don’t know. We have a strict privacy policy about entering our guests’ rooms.”

“That’s a little hard to believe,” Lucas said. “No offense.”

Poe said, “Well, we do. We got it when my ex entered a room and found the city council president banging his secretary. Who was of the same sex. Not that I got anything against fudge-punchers, in particular.”

“You always have been sort of a liberal,” Andrews said.

“I do what I can,” Poe said.

“IN OTHER NEWS,” Del said, “you got an ex. She around somewhere?”

“No. We agreed that she should stay in the southern states, and I’d stay in the north. We stick to that pretty close. And I got Vegas.”

Lucas: “These Mexicans, they said they were going back to Dallas?”

“That’s what they said.”

“You think they did?” Lucas asked.

“Well, they all told me that,” Poe said, “All of them. So that made me think that they weren’t. Really going back to Dallas.”

Lucas said, “Mmmm,” and they all looked at Poe for a while, and Poe sweated some more. “You didn’t get their tag number?”

“No, we don’t require it.”

“Credit cards?”

“They paid cash, up front, so we don’t require a credit card,” Poe said.

“Security photos?”

Poe wagged his head. “Too expensive.”

“Used glasses that might have fingerprints?”

“Cleaned up their rooms right after they left,” Poe said. “In this business, we live on turnover.”

“So really … you don’t know nothing about nothing,” Del said.

“That’s about it,” Poe said, sweating. “Thank God.”

“Yeah?”

He nodded and wiped his forehead. “They looked like the kind of little fuckers you don’t want to fuck with.”

THEY WERE still talking to Poe when Lucas got a call from Shaffer, who was at the crime scene with the DEA agents. “Got a call from the patrol. They found that SKY van. They ran us around a little bit. After they stole the van, they stole some tags off another van that looked just like it.”

“So they wouldn’t get stopped for a stolen van.”

“Yeah, that’s right. We finally got it straight, and a highway patrol guy found the actual stolen van at a rest stop up I-35.”

“Anything good?”

“As a matter of fact, there was. They wiped everything down, but they left a CD by a guy named El Shaka in the CD player,” Shaffer said. “The van’s owner doesn’t speak Spanish and says he never heard of the singer or the record. He listens to Springsteen. Anyway, you can see what looks like a partial thumbprint on the top side of the disc.”

“You running it?”

“No, no, I thought I’d just admire it for a few days,” Shaffer said.

“All right, stupid question,” Lucas said. “When you gonna see a return?”

“This afternoon, I hope. You doing any good?”

Lucas told him about the three Mexicans at the Wee Blue Inn, and Shaffer said he’d send an Identi-Kit guy over to build some pictures. Lucas looked across the room at Poe and said, quietly, to Shaffer, “You better do it quick. The guy who saw them is shaking in his shoes. He could take off.”

Shaffer said he’d have a couple of people there in a half hour. “I’m going to send along a crime-scene crew, too. A dump like the Wee Blue Inn didn’t scrub down all the surfaces: maybe we’ll get some more prints.”

Lucas turned back to the group and found Poe explaining where he got the name for the motel. “I stole it from a place up in Duluth,” he said. “It’s not like there aren’t six hundred of them.”

“Could have named it Dunrovin,” Del suggested.

“Yeah, or the Duck Inn. I thought about it, but I didn’t,” Poe said. To Lucas: “We done?”

Lucas said, “I may come back in the next couple of hours. Nobody’s gonna find out about this chat before then, so there’s no point in you running out the door. Hang around.”

“I was thinking Vegas,” Poe said.

“Vegas is too hot at this time of year,” Del said. “Stay here.”

OUT IN the parking lot, Andrews hitched up his pants and said, “There are two hundred thousand Latinos in Minnesota. I know that because I’m married to one. So all we have to do is eliminate a hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-six of them, counting out my old lady, and we got them.”

“You’re saying we ain’t got much,” Del said.

“That’s right.”

“But we got something,” Lucas said. “Maybe we’ll get some prints and some pictures, and we’ll start putting some pressure on them. Betcha we get them by tomorrow night.”

“Exactly how much would you be willing to bet?” Andrews asked, as they climbed into the truck.

Lucas shook his head. “I was using a common cliché intended to express optimism,” he said. “But gambling in Minnesota is illegal, outside the Indian casinos and the state numbers racket, so I would be unable to actually put any money on the line.”

“That’s what I thought,” Andrews said.

ON THE WAY back to St. Paul, Andrews asked whether Lucas had ever gotten a line on the robbers who’d broken his wrist. “Just did, last couple of days,” Lucas said. “I was never able to generate much interest in the whole thing, and I thought I was gonna lose them.”

He told him about the horse shit clue. “I got Flowers working it.”

“That’s pretty high-priced talent for a couple guys who get a hundred bucks at a time, and nobody gets hurt,” Andrews said.

“I got hurt,” Lucas said. “Some poor college kid got his arm broken.”

“I mean hurt bad, not getting your little snowflake wrist cracked,” Andrews said.

“Thank you,” Lucas said.

“Whatever,” Andrews said. “If that fuckin’ Flowers can’t find them, nobody can.”

“Especially with a USDA-certified clue like he’s got,” Del said.

AT THE OFFICE, Lucas had a message from Rose Marie Roux: Call me.

He called her, and she said, “I got a call from Washington, a young boy from the Department of Justice said they got a call from Mexico. The Mexicans want to send an observer up here to look at the Brooks case. Apparently they’ve been talking to the DEA about it, and they want to watch. The DOJ said sure, send them along.”

“Did you thank them for consulting with us?” Lucas asked.

“You got a problem with it?”

Lucas told her about the DEA agent’s suggestion that they send any Brooks murder suspect to Mexico for questioning—and why, including the story about the agent who was flayed alive.

“You think that’s a true story?” Rose Marie asked.

“Who knows? You hear all kinds of shit coming out of the border. Wouldn’t surprise me, one way or the other,” Lucas said.

“Well, we’re not turning anybody over to Mexico,” Rose Marie said. “But be nice with these people. They’ve got problems.”

“You said they wanted to send an observer, but then you kept saying ‘they.’ How many are there?”

“One cop and his assistant,” Rose Marie said. “Cop’s name is David Rivera. I don’t know the assistant’s name.”

“Okay. When do they get here?”

“If their plane’s on time … they’re coming Delta from LA … about forty-five minutes,” she said. “It’d be really, really nice if some senior BCA agent was there to meet them.”

LUCAS CALLED SHAFFER, who’d heard about the Mexicans coming in but had no details. “I’m going over to pick them up and run them out there,” Lucas said. “Have the bodies been moved?”

“Pretty soon now. Alex is talking to the ME’s guys now.”

“Hold off. If everything works, I’ll be out there in a couple of hours,” Lucas said.

“Why don’t you just have … you know … somebody else pick them up?”

“’Cause I want to talk to them about this whole Criminales business,” Lucas said. “Hope they speak English.”

Besides, he liked driving around town, looking out the window. You could never tell what you might learn. In this case, though, it wasn’t much—a few leaves turning yellow on maple trees. At the airport, Lucas locked his pistol in the truck’s gun safe, went inside, identified himself to the airport police, and got a piece of typing paper from them. He wrote “David Rivera” on it with a Magic Marker, and the airport cops walked him through security and out to the arrivals gate. The cop said, “With that sign, you’re gonna look like a limo driver.”

“But a very high-rent limo driver,” Lucas said.

“Well, yeah.”

They talked to the gate agent about the arrival, then Lucas found a seat while the airport cop wandered away. When the plane was parked, the agent came over and said, “They’re here,” and Lucas got up with his sign.

Rivera was one of the first passengers off the plane. He was a man of middle height, but more than middle breadth, with dark hair and a short, carefully trimmed mustache. He was wearing what looked like an expensive but ill-cared-for blue suit and a dress shirt open at the throat.

He looked at Lucas’s sign and said, in good English, “You don’t look like a limousine driver.”

LUCAS INTRODUCED HIMSELF, and Rivera thanked him for coming and said they had to wait for his assistant, who had been riding in coach. His assistant was female, a pretty woman with dark hair and dark eyes, carrying an oversized briefcase and pulling a rolling carry-on suitcase. Lucas took the briefcase from her, and Rivera said, “She can take it,” and Lucas said, “That’s okay,” and led them down to Baggage Claim, carrying the briefcase.

There was a big bag for Rivera, and a second small bag for the woman, and since Rivera had made no effort to introduce them, Lucas said to the woman, “I’m Lucas Davenport. I’m an agent with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.” She bobbed her head and gave him a quick smile and said her name was Ana Martínez. Lucas left them at the curb outside Baggage Claim, retrieved the Lexus, pulled around and loaded them up.

“I need to know about the Criminales,” Lucas said as they left the terminal. “Who they are, what they want. What their reach is.”

As he was talking, Martínez pulled an iPad out of her bag and began typing into it.

Rivera said, “They are not quite the worst of the worst, but they are close. They began with a family, or a clan, in Sonora. At first, they were cross-border smugglers, mostly people, not drugs. What drugs they did smuggle, they took the other way, from the U.S. back to Mexico. Prescription medicine that was hard to get out in the countryside. Then, they began with the cocaine, going into the U.S. There were wars with other gangs, and their leadership got wiped out a few times, and they kept getting lower, and lower, and now they are like mad dogs. They will bite anything that moves. They have several hundred members, two-thirds on this side of the border, in distribution, one-third on our side, for acquisition, smuggling, and enforcement. There are still some members of the original family, but most of those are dead. It is not hard to find new management.”

Lucas mentioned the agent who was allegedly skinned alive and asked, “Did they really do that? Or is that mostly an urban legend?”

“The skin was sent to my superior—I saw it,” Rivera said. “Along with a movie. They did it, really.”

“Jesus.”

“He was not involved,” Rivera said. “I can tell you something else. You never want to smell a skin that has been three days in the mail.”

“So then what?” Lucas asked. “You went to war with the Criminales?”

“We were already at war—if we don’t kill them soon, the whole snake, they will be coming for me.” He looked out the window at the lush August landscape of the Minnesota River Valley. “I come here to the States as often as I can, to stretch out my life.”

Martínez passed the iPad over the seat and said, “E-mail from Luis.”

Rivera looked at it, then said, “I’ll call him later.”

She took the iPad back and typed something else into it.

Rivera had more background on the LCN, but it was all fairly standard gang stuff. “They are not innovative,” Rivera said. “They are just crazy, and what can you say about that? They don’t seem to care whether they live or die.”

His real information was not sociological or anthropological, but factual: he had names, fingerprints, DNA profiles in a few cases. “I can tell you who is who, what rank they hold, where they usually are, and what their job is, when we know that. I don’t have any secrets. I want everybody to know them.”

“I’ve got people from St. Paul shaking out Latino gang members. Let’s see if we can figure out who belongs to who,” Lucas said. “If we find a Criminales clique, that’d be a step in the right direction.”

“If these killers were doing what we think they were doing, they won’t be local, and the local clique won’t know them,” Rivera said. “They will be from Mexico, and they’ll go back to Mexico when they are finished here.”

“You don’t think they’re finished?”

“I hope not,” Rivera said. “If they’re not, you might catch some of them. If you do, we will ask for extradition through our embassy. Or, if there is no proof, we will ask that you deport them. Illegal aliens.”

Lucas said, “Huh.”

Rivera smiled at him. “We don’t get rough with them.”

“Good to hear it,” Lucas said. There was a little doubt in his voice.

“We pull down their trousers, then we bring in the garbage disposal,” Rivera said. “They always talk. Mexican men are very adverse … adverse, correct? … adverse to having their personal parts placed in a garbage disposal. So, as we work to get it plugged in and operating … we always have to work at it, we invent problems, to invent time for them to watch the machine … drop some walnuts in, to test it … They start talking. We never have to get rough.”

Lucas said, “Hmm.” Then, “We had three Mexican guys check into a hotel here a couple days ago, and then they took off.”

Rivera was interested.

AT THE BROOKS HOUSE, Rivera wandered away from the driveway, to walk slowly around to the back of the house to look out at the lake. “This is very nice. I could retire here, on this lake.”

“You’d freeze in the winter.”

“So, I go to Argentina in the winter.” He looked at Lucas and added, “I speak Spanish.” He looked back at the lake. “In the summer, this would be very pleasant. Sit on the grass with a fishing pole, catch some fish, throw them back. Get a hammock, take a siesta. Drink some Cuba Libres. Many Cuba Libres.”

Lucas let him talk, then followed him back around the house. Martínez, the assistant, was always three steps behind them.

THE DOORS of the house were closed against the summer heat, and when the Wayzata cop pushed the door open to let them in, they were hit by the odor, and by the cold. The odor was purely one of old blood and death, not decomposition—the inside temperature, Lucas thought, must be down in the fifties—but it stank anyway.

The dead looked as though they’d been carved from wax, all the blood having drained to the bottom of the bodies, that blood that wasn’t soaked into the carpet around them. As they stepped inside, Martínez took some tissues from her purse and passed two to Rivera, who held them to his nose. Martínez did the same, and Lucas could smell the thin floral scent of perfumed bathroom tissues.

Rivera and Martínez had some experience of mass murder: neither one of them flinched at the sight of the four dead. Lucas introduced Rivera to Shaffer, who said he was pleased to meet them, and then took the two of them around the room, to the individual bodies, working through the established murder sequence.

When they were done, Rivera asked Martínez, “Criminales?”

She nodded. “Yes, I believe so. That work that they did in Agua Prieta. That looked like this. Very exactly.” She pinched the tissue to her nose.

“What was Agua Prieta?” Shaffer asked.

“Agua Prieta is a city near the border,” she said. “There was another family killed like this. The Criminales learned, or thought they learned, that the family was spotting for another gang, and so they made an example of them.”

“You have any names associated with that?”

Rivera nodded. “Six names, although we think there were only three killers. We think it was three of the six, but we don’t know which three.”

“You have photos? Mug shots?”

“Of four, but we don’t know how many are correct,” Rivera said.

“We’ll take them all, put them on TV,” Lucas said. “If anybody shows up to object, we apologize and deport them.”

“That would be excellent,” Rivera said.

RIVERA SPENT a half hour prowling through the murder scene, and watched when the ME’s people pried the bodies off the floor and bagged them. Martínez turned away from that and went outside. Lucas followed and said, “It’s ugly,” and then, because TV Mexicans usually added it to their affirmative sentences, he added, “No?”

“Yes. I see so much. Inspector Rivera is called to many of these.”

“How long have you worked together?” Lucas asked.

“Well … four years. But we don’t work together. He works, I assist. I am good with the laptop and the iPad. He is the thinker.”

“Are you a policewoman?” Lucas asked.

“Technically. I am a sergeant, mm, how do you say it? First class, I think. But I do not arrest people. I have my iPad and a MacBook.”

“Like a researcher.” Lucas thought of his researcher, Sandy, who had little interest in street work, or becoming a certified cop.

“Yes.”

“Inspector Rivera … sounds like he really has some personal antagonism … for these Criminales.”

“Yes,” she said. She looked as though she might say something more, but then just smiled. Rivera came out the door at that moment and walked over. “I hope my hotel has a dry cleaning. I now smell like yesterday’s blood.”

LUCAS WALKED them back to the truck and walked around to get in, but Shaffer shouted at him and called him back. When Lucas got close, Shaffer asked, “We know anything about the inspector?”

“No. I was going to ask the DEA guys,” Lucas said. “Where’d they go?”

“Conferring. The accountants are going to look at the books, and O’Brien is over at Sunnie,” Shaffer said. He glanced past Lucas at the two Mexicans. “Anyway, you know, you read that half these Mexican cops are owned by the narcos. I’m a little reluctant to pass on any real secrets.”

“I hear you,” Lucas said. “You got any secrets that you’re reluctant about?”

“Not yet,” Shaffer said. “But I will have.”

RIVERA WAS on his cell phone, speaking in Spanish. A moment later he hung up and asked Lucas, “I don’t want to ask too much, but could we go to a Hertz car rental business in downtown St. Paul? Ana has the address and a map on the iPad.”

“Not a problem,” Lucas said. “I live in St. Paul, and our headquarters is there. Where are you staying?”

“In Minneapolis, by the university,” Rivera said. “The St. Paul Hertz has the car we require, with a, ah, autopilot?”

“Navigation system.”

“Yes. We were awake much of the night last night and have traveled all day, so we would like to get the car and then go to our hotel. Agent Shaffer has invited us to a strategy meeting tomorrow at nine o’clock.”

“Good. I’d like to get those names and photos from you, however we do that. I’ll get them out to the television stations.”

“Ana has a USB drive, with files translated into English,” Rivera said.

A moment later, she passed it over the seat-back. Lucas glanced at it and stuck it in his shirt pocket. “Mac or Windows?”

“Both,” Martínez said. “They are in the file called Agua Prieta. The other files, you can look in them, they are what we know about Los Criminales del Norte.”

“Gracias,” Lucas said.