Stolen Prey

12

Sam and the baby were asleep when Lucas got home. Letty was reading a fantasy novel involving vampires, and when Lucas tried to talk to her, she gently shooed him away-somebody was about to get kissed. Weather was getting ready for bed: “Anything good?” she asked.

“Jim got on my case. He’s worried that the people who stole the money might somehow be able to get back in-that there might still be an inside man, and they’ll come back and hit him again.”

“Is there an inside man?”

“Probably at least one, and maybe two.” She knew about Kline getting shot, and he told her about the brief conversation in the hospital room. He didn’t mention searching Kline’s cell phone, because she had specific ethical viewpoints regarding the treatment of patients; a covert search of a patient’s personal effects while he was drugged would almost certainly be an occasion for a major confrontation and possibly a reeducation program of the kind meted out by the Communist Chinese to capitalist running dogs during the Great Leap Forward.

So he kissed her good night and went down to the den and got out his Strathmore sketch pad and began doodling: names, connections, questions, possibilities laid out in boxes connected by dotted lines and arrows.

One thing that seemed quite clear, and fascinating in its own way, was that information was leaking back to the Criminales. That meant that the gang almost certainly had an observer inside the bank, and the observer was close to the investigators-close enough to pick up clues and tips as to where the investigation was going.

Lucas began working out some ideas about who that person would be: who inside a bank would have a connection with the Criminales. He (or she) must still be in place, because he (or she) sicced the killers on Kline.

It seemed likely that the person would be Mexican … wouldn’t he?

He looked at his watch, went to his cell phone and called Bone’s home phone. Bone’s wife picked up, went to get him. Bone said: “You got them. Good work.”

“Could be a while yet,” Lucas said. “I have a question for you. Have you had anything weird happen with any of your people in the last few weeks? Say, people who would have been aware of an investigation of this account, so somebody up fairly high? Some unusual questions, or concerns…?”

Bone was crunching on something that sounded like a carrot stick. He crunched and said, “What do you mean, weird?”

“I’m thinking that the Criminales might have been paying somebody to watch for unusual attention to the account-you know, in case the cops came around, or the DEA. I can see two possibilities. The first is somebody with contacts back in Mexico, who got pulled in somehow. Could be a previous association, could be threats to a family. Whatever. The second possibility is that they simply looked at who was working at the bank, picked somebody out, and paid him. So you’d be looking at somebody who might have had a drug problem, somebody who might have had big financial problems. There’d be rumors around…”

“I don’t know of anything like that personally,” Bone said. “We’ve got a few alcoholics in positions where they might pick up an investigation, but I don’t know of any druggies. If we knew, we’d get rid of them. But let me ask.”

“How about Mexicans? Or Central Americans?”

“I’ll check that, too. I’ve already been thinking about that, and I can tell you, we’ve got quite a few people with Hispanic names. I don’t know who’s a Mexican, or whatever … Let me ask around.”

“Try not to disturb anyone.”

“Believe me, these guys I don’t want to disturb.”

“One more thing,” Lucas said. “When you were talking about the fact that they’d have to change the wire transfers, or whatever, into some high-value form, like gold or diamonds … it seems to me that would be pretty much a full-time job. That the thief would have to have accomplices.”

“Oh, sure,” Bone said. “Getting this done would be a full-time job. You’d have to buy whatever it is, make the payment, secure it…. Every purchase would involve several contacts with the sellers. These aren’t people who will give you a million bucks in gold with the promise of a check in the mail. I imagine it would take a couple of people, or more than that.”

“Gold or diamonds or stamps…”

“I thought about that some more when I got home,” Bone said. “I’d be willing to bet it’s gold. If you were trying to sneak out of Nazi Germany and needed to hide a lot of value, you might take a rare stamp or a bunch of stamps and hide it in a shoe or something. But stamps, and diamonds, and rare coins, have to be sold through specialists. Diamonds have to be evaluated, and that all takes time, and multiple contacts. But you could take a stack of American Eagles into any number of places-hundreds of places here in the States, thousands more in Europe or Asia-and walk away with cash. Say you set up a company called International Goober, and take your Eagles to a gold dealer, get a check made to International Goober, and who’s to know what happened there?”

“So, gold.”

“That’s what I think.”

After talking with Bone, Lucas turned to the problem of the thieves.

A reverse directory got him the full names of Ivan and Kristina-Ivan Turicek and Kristina Sanderson. A check with the NCIC showed no criminal history for either one of them. He got photos, ages, addresses, and car tags from the DMV and found that Turicek had used a Lithuanian passport and a Green Card as identification when he got his first Minnesota driver’s license, five years earlier. Sanderson had held Minnesota licenses since she was sixteen, and so probably was a native.

He called ICE, got her on the first ring, and said, “In the Polaris computer system, you could see the back door they came through, but you couldn’t see the computer system the instructions came from.”

“That’s right. What they apparently did was set up their back door, then they’d come in and move money, and each time they backed out, they touched off a little program that wiped the incoming addresses,” ICE said. “If we’d had them, we might have been able to nail down which computers they’d been working from, what the IP addresses were, and so on. All that’s gone-but it probably wouldn’t have helped much anyway.”

“Why not?”

“Because if they’ve got a brain in their heads, and they do, they would have gone to Best Buy and bought some cheap laptops with cash, and signed on from Starbucks. When they finished, they would have dropped the laptops in the river.”

“You know Kline was attacked.”

“Yeah, the DEA guys told me what happened,” she said. “I feel kind of bad about it. Not too bad, because he’s such an asshole.”

“You kept telling me that he’s too lazy to steal.”

“He’s pretty lazy,” she agreed.

“So the question I have is this: From the time he found out he was going to be fired until he walked out the door, would he have had time to program in this back door? Those systems are supposed to be pretty secure.”

“Hmm. Well, I don’t know their work schedules down there. It’s not something you’d do just casually. Usually, if you’re going to be fired, they don’t let you have access to the systems anymore. They don’t want some pissed-off programmer bombing them out. On the other hand, programmers, by definition, are pretty smart, and would probably know they were going to be fired before they actually were. He might have been proactive, so to speak.”

“Okay. Now answer me this: Could you get into Polaris’s systems from another bank’s secure systems? Without a back door?”

There was a long silence, then she said, “Damnit. You know, we didn’t look at that. All the banks’ systems have links between them. If you had the protocols for the target bank, you might be able to get in from a secure link from another bank. You’d need administrator’s status, but, you know, people have ways to get that.”

“So they could have gotten in without a back door?”

“But there was a back door,” she said. “I found it.”

“It just seems to me that if you were coming in from another bank, because you didn’t have a back door…”

“You’d probably build one,” she finished. “Genius. Yes. That’s what I would have done … if I didn’t have the back door to begin with. Do you have any reason to think that’s what he did?”

“I’m not sure-it could go either way. I think he planned the theft with two other people he works with, from Hennepin National,” Lucas said. “He knew about the account, but didn’t move to steal from it until he got to Hennepin. He didn’t steal while he was at Polaris, as far as we know, and he didn’t start stealing until he’d been at Hennepin for quite a while. Didn’t even try to steal when he was unemployed, and he was out of work for months, which makes me think he didn’t have the back door then. Then he ran into these other people, at Hennepin. He’s lazy, he’s depressed, but somebody gave him a push.”

“I’d buy that,” ICE said. “I’ll tell you what-if that’s what happened, there won’t be any sign of it anymore. They’ll have taken everything out.”

“Shoot. You’re sure?”

“I would have. It wouldn’t be hard.”

When he got off the phone, Lucas spent some time thinking about Bone’s theory that the thieves were buying gold or diamonds-probably gold. If they were, they’d have to send it somewhere to be collected, and that would probably be the Twin Cities, simply because they were based there. They couldn’t just stick it in a suitcase and bring it on a plane. It’d be too heavy, and might bring questions from the TSA.

He didn’t know how gold was normally delivered, though he’d been told once that the post office would handle it via registered mail. The problem with the post office, from the police point of view, was that you had to jump through your ass to get any information about deliveries-they seemed to delight in making sure every legal technicality was observed before they’d cooperate with the cops.

But once a package was delivered, all he’d need was a search warrant. If Kline was taking deliveries…

He thought about that, looked at his watch again. Getting late, but fuck it, people were being killed. He went to his black book, got the number of Martin Clark, the head of Minneapolis Homicide-Homicide would have covered the Kline shooting-and called him.

When Clark came up, Lucas asked, “Are you done with the crime scene at the Kline shooting?”

“Pretty much,” Clark said. “Kline told us the story, and everything we saw jibed with what he said.”

“Get anything I need to know about?”

“Wasn’t much to get, other than a bunch of used-up slugs and brass,” Clark said. “From talking to Kline, we know the shooters weren’t in the apartment for more than a minute or two, and he thinks they were wearing gloves. So…”

“Could I get in there? Tonight?” Lucas asked.

“Ah, man…”

“Look, you don’t have to have anything to do with it,” Lucas said. “Get the watch guy downtown to get me the key. You got the key in an evidence locker?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll go on down and get it, and you can have a squad meet me at the door,” Lucas said. “The thing is, I talked to Kline, and I don’t like his story. I think he’s involved in the theft of this money from Polaris…. I just want to see the scene.”

After a moment, Clark said, “I’ll get you the key-but don’t get me in trouble.”

“I won’t,” Lucas promised. “I’ll be over at Homicide in twenty minutes, and over at Kline’s in forty-five. You get a squad down there, I’ll go in for ten minutes, and I’ll drop the key off when I get finished walking through.”

“Just leave the key with the uniform,” Clark said.

“Good with me,” Lucas said.

Lucas was at Homicide in fifteen minutes and signed for the key. Back on the street, he drove as quickly as he could to an all-night convenience store in North Minneapolis, known for its burglary support services, walked through to the back and got a once-and-future convict named Kevin to make a duplicate key for him.

“I keep losing mine,” he said.

“They all say that,” Kevin said.

By the time Lucas got to Kline’s apartment building, it was after eleven o’clock, and the building was mostly dark, and quiet. A cop was sitting out front, in his squad, the engine running and the internal light on, reading a hard-cover comic.

“Nice night,” he said, as Lucas walked up, after parking the Porsche.

“Not bad,” Lucas agreed.

Kline’s apartment was the first one at the top of the landing. Lucas pulled off a piece of crime-scene tape, let himself in, turned on the lights, put his hands in his pockets, and walked through the place.

The uniform said, “Stinks.”

Lucas spent fifteen minutes inside, looking at bullet holes, looking at angles. Finally he said, “Maybe.”

“Maybe?”

“Maybe he’s telling the truth. It sort of looks like he’s telling the truth. Problem is, nobody saw the supposed Mexicans.”

The cop shrugged. “He got shot, and they don’t have a gun, right? Seems pretty straightforward.”

“Nothing is straightforward in this,” Lucas said. He took a last look around. “Okay. I’m done.”

Outside, he passed the key to the cop and said, “I’d appreciate it if you’d sign it back in as quick as you could. Your boss didn’t like the whole idea.”

“I’ll do that,” the cop said.

Lucas sat in his car, his cell phone up to his face, faking a conversation, until the cop pulled away and a half dozen cars were between them. Then Lucas did a U-turn and followed, until he was sure the cop was headed downtown.

Five minutes later, he was back at Kline’s door. He used the new key to unlock it, pulled on a pair of latex gloves, and began searching the place.

He needed, specifically, a stash of coins, or a discarded envelope or package wrapping that would connect him to a gold dealer, or anything that could suggest a conspiracy with Turicek and Sanderson.

The apartment was small and shabby, smelling of spaghetti sauce overlain with the scent of human waste and blood; there was minimal cooking gear, three large bookcases full of paperback books and DVDs, an oversized TV with a game console hooked to it. The floor was littered with medical detritus, the paper and plastic packaging for bandages and syringes and whatever. Though he went through each cupboard and drawer, rolled and poked the mattress, looked in the toilet tank, and even removed every electric-outlet cover plate-took his time-he came up empty.

Then, in a military-styled shirt-jac, the kind with zippers on the sleeve, he found a cheap cell phone. He brought it up, looked at the call log, found dozens of incoming and outgoing calls, but only to three numbers. He took the numbers down and put the phone back.

When he finished the general search, he sat at Kline’s desk, going through the paper around the Mac Tower, and found a lot of litter and cryptic notes of the same kind Lucas had on his own desk. He turned on the computer and was asked for a password. He took out his notebook and looked up the password he’d found on the back of the Sirius Satellite Radio card, and typed it in: 6rattata6.

The computer shook him off, and he closed it down and turned away from the desk for a last look around the place.

There were two big framed posters on the wall opposite the desk, each showing multiple images of Japanese cartoon characters. He hadn’t looked behind them, so he looked behind them and found the back side of posters. When he was straightening the second one, his eye caught a caption with the word Rattata.

He looked closer. The posters were composites of favorite cartoon characters, if anime meant “cartoon.” There were a couple dozen of them, and if Kline was taking his passwords from anime characters…

He went back to the computer and brought it up and it occurred to him that most people didn’t have large numbers of different passwords, but just a couple of passwords, with perhaps variations.

So instead of plugging in all the anime characters, he started with plain “rattata,” and worked from 0rattata0 through 9rattata9, and was shaken off with each of them.

“Goddamnit.”

He looked at the pictures again, then pulled the closest one off the wall. Forty minutes later, working from the names on the picture, he typed in “5pikachu5”-and he was in.

“Excellent,” he said to himself.

He went to the Spotlight feature and typed in “Gold,” and got dozens of hits. He said, “Gotcha,” and then, a minute later, “Don’t gotcha.”

As he started working through the hits, he found that most of them were document and online files that included the word Gold, as in one place, Golden Artist Colors, and in another, WhatsUp Gold, some kind of network monitoring software. Then, as he was growing discouraged, he found Donleavy Precious Metals, and a website for a Chicago dealer in gold, silver, and platinum. A few minutes more got him a link to Las Vegas Numismatics, and he said, “Now I’ve gotcha.”

When he shut down the computer an hour later, he had a list of twelve dealers on the west and east coasts.

Too late to do anything about it, he thought.

Somewhere along the line, it occurred to him that he hadn’t spoken to Virgil Flowers. He’d probably taken the day off, and knowing Flowers, he’d done it in a boat. The thing about Flowers was, in Lucas’s humble opinion, you could send him out for a loaf of bread and he’d find an illegal bread cartel smuggling in heroin-saturated wheat from Afghanistan. Either that, or he’d be fishing in a muskie tournament, on government time. You had to keep an eye on him.

In bed that night, he spent little time thinking about the tweekers-Flowers would get them-and more time thinking about the gold. The gold was interesting because it tied everything together. He also thought about Shaffer: the problem with Shaffer was that he was straight. Very straight. He had little sense of humor when it came to things like illegal searches, using unknowing innocent people as decoys, and so on.

He would have to use some finesse, he decided.

The next morning, before he left for work, he called Sandy, the researcher, and said, “I need to find the biggest gold dealers in the country. Maybe, like, the top one hundred.”

“Do you have any idea how I’m supposed to figure that out?” she asked.

“No, I don’t,” he said. “I need the list this morning. Also, I have three phone numbers. I’d like to know who the subscribers are.”

“Well, that part’ll be easy enough,” she said.

Outside, he found that Letty had parked the Lexus behind the Porsche, and instead of shuffling cars, he took the truck and headed downtown. They met at nine o’clock, the whole murder crew, and Shaffer reported that they had enough evidence to convict anybody they managed to arrest, with fingerprints and DNA from three suspects. “We’ve got everybody in the metro area on board, every single cop has the photos and the Identi-Kits, and we think we may have a line on the car they’re driving. It’s a green Subaru Forester owned by a pretzel seller named Ferat Chakkour, who disappeared after he left his job at the Rosedale mall an hour or so after the shoot-out in St. Paul. He usually parked in the same lot where we found the Texas truck. We think they picked him up, probably killed him, dumped him somewhere, and are driving his car. This is confidential information-we’ve asked everybody to hold it close, make sure it doesn’t get out to the media. We’ve talked to all the highway patrols all the way to the Mexican border.”

“Gonna leak pretty quick,” Lucas said. “This guy got any family?”

“He’s got a housemate, another student, we’ve asked him to keep his mouth shut, but he’s already been talking to Chakkour’s parents in Cairo. Chakkour’s from Egypt. The roommate’s already talked to some classmates … but we’re hoping to keep it close for a day or two, maybe pick up the car before it breaks out.”

They’d already had four separate alerts, from cops who thought they might have spotted the suspects, but nothing had panned out; still, it kept them jumping.

The DEA, O’Brien said, was working the offshore banks but hadn’t gotten anything yet. “Probably get it later today-we’re talking to the state department and our own people, squeezing as hard as we can. It’s not usually as hard to get it if we say it’s drug money. The problem is, every time the IRS goes after some corporation for tax evasion, they start out by saying it’s drug money, so the banks don’t always believe us anymore.”

Shaffer wrote a note and pushed it to another BCA agent while O’Brien was talking; Shaffer didn’t care about the banks.

Lucas told them about his conversations with Kline and Bone, and his conclusions from those conversations: that the thieves who’d hijacked the bank account were probably buying gold, and that there were probably several of them. He mentioned that he was having a researcher get together a list of gold dealers who could be checked for suspicious gold sales. He also suggested that the Criminales must have had a contact at the bank who tipped them to the suspicions about Kline.

“So you keep doing that, working on the thieves, and we’ll keep pushing people on the shooters,” Shaffer said. “If anything comes up, for anybody, call us.”

“The thing is, Kline’s the best lead we’ve got for the thieves, and the Criminales apparently think the same thing. I’d love to find something we could use to serve a search warrant on his young ass,” Lucas said. “If anybody thinks of anything…”

O’Brien asked, “Say, anybody seen Ana Martinez?”

Shaffer shrugged. “I know she was making arrangements to take Rivera’s body back to Mexico. I talked to her last night. I thought she’d be here. I called her, but she didn’t answer her phone.”

Lucas said, “That’s a little worrisome. I’ll check on her.”

As they were breaking up, O’Brien took a call, listened for a minute, then said, “We’ll be right over. We’re just leaving here, about twenty minutes.”

He hung up and said, “That was ICE. She found the shadow books at Sunnie. She said they’ve been there right from the start, when the system was first put together.”

“Bingo,” Shaffer said. “That’s large. I’m coming with you. Lucas?”

“I’ll be around.”