Stolen Prey

16

Lucas began by calling Shaffer, taking a certain amount of satisfaction at the thought of blowing him out of bed. Shaffer answered the phone on the second ring and sounded unnaturally alert, saying, “Yeah? What’s up?”

“You’ve been up for two hours and you’ve already done your yoga exercises and now you’re drinking fresh-squeezed orange juice, aren’t you?” Lucas asked.

“Carrot juice,” Shaffer said. “Getting ready to run. You’re calling for juice advice?”

“No. I need to meet with you at eight o’clock instead of nine, and out of sight. You drink coffee?”

“You broke something?”

“Maybe.”

“Tell me where.”

Del was not quite as alert. “Jesus. Is the sun up?”

“I need to talk to your brother-in-law, the real estate guy,” Lucas said. “I need to talk to him right now.”

“We’re not an early-up family,” Del said.

“Well, you’re up, so why shouldn’t your brother-in-law be up?” Lucas asked.

“That’s a point. I’ll call him,” Del said.

When he got off the phone, Lucas went to his study and got out a yellow pad and started making a list. When he finished, after some thought, the list had only three items.

— Rivera choreography.

— Sanderson apartment.

— Insider information.

He worked through it all again and was convinced. He wasn’t sure Shaffer would be.

Del’s brother-in-law called. His name was Dominic and he worked the east side of St. Paul. “Dom, I need an empty east side house, a little run-down, not occupied. I can get you a thousand dollars for three days, starting today. You got somebody?”

“This for a sting?”

“Yeah.”

“Let me call around.”

Lucas and Shaffer met at an east side coffee shop. They got a couple of cups of something that looked and tasted like Folgers, and found a corner where they could talk. Lucas pulled a legal pad out of his briefcase, pushed it across the table, and said, “I’m going to walk you through it.” He used a pen to draw a sketch of the entry area of the house where Rivera had been shot to death.

“Here’s the steps, here’s the couch where the one Mexican was shot,” he said, tapping his pen on the outline drawing. “Now, Rivera kicks the door, presumably having done a peek so he knows where the Mexicans are. Now, if you saw one out of three, or two out of three, when you peeked, would you kick the door? Or would you call for backup?”

“I’d call for backup under any conditions,” Shaffer said. “If he’d called for backup, we’d have taken them all and he’d still be alive. He should have done what you did down at Sanderson’s apartment.”

“But he’s got the macho gene, he’s hot, he hates these guys,” Lucas said. “They literally skinned one of his fellow agents alive, then mailed the guy’s skin to his boss. So he sees two of them. Does he kick the door or not?”

Shaffer considered, then shook his head. “He’s gonna have trouble just with the two of them, unless he went in planning to kill them. If there’s a third one, that he can’t see, he’s got a serious problem.”

“The crime-scene guys say there was a shooter game plugged into the TV, with two consoles. Both were turned on. Probably two guys on the couch, one of them shot to death,” Lucas said, tapping the sketch. “The third guy, they thought, was probably by this window, may have seen Rivera coming, at the last minute, and had his gun out. Maybe heard Rivera on the step or something. Rivera kicks the door, gets two shots off, and the guy by the window shoots him. Then the two who are still alive run for it.”

Shaffer said, “Yup.”

“But I’m saying, if he could only see two out of three, he probably wouldn’t have kicked it,” Lucas said. “But, just for argument’s sake, let’s say he’s super-macho, so maybe he does kick it. Now you’ve done this. You’ve got a target off to the right that you know about. So you kick the door, your gun goes right, but you glance to the left, just an instant, to clear the rest of the room, and then you come back to the gun’s sights. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Now, he got off two aimed shots, but he apparently never looked left, never suspected anybody was to his left, and he apparently never saw the other guy coming. The other guy put the gun so close to Rivera’s head that he burned his hair, tattooed his scalp,” Lucas said. “To do that, he would have had to hold the gun out at arm’s length and crank his hand to the left, to make that shot. And not be seen while he did it. The bullet went in at the right-side base of Rivera’s skull, and came out of the top of his skull, above his left eye, having gone all the way through his brain.”

“The guy couldn’t have been by the window to his right because the door would be in the way,” Shaffer said. Then, “Okay, I see what you’re saying.”

“Do you?”

“Yeah.” Shaffer grimaced and shook his head. “You’re saying he was probably shot by somebody standing behind him to the right, shorter than he was, or somebody standing one step down, somebody that he knew was there and maybe trusted.”

Lucas nodded, and Shaffer continued: “You’re saying that Martinez shot him in the back of the head.”

“Attaboy,” Lucas said.

“Sonofabitch. I knew you couldn’t trust those people.” Shaffer, agitated, got up and walked around a couple of tables, then came back and sat down again.

“You could trust Rivera. You couldn’t trust Martinez,” Lucas said. “It all depends on the individual. The goddamn gang planted her on him, knew every move he was making. She could do her ‘research’ and point him at other gangs, but tip off the Criminales if he ever went after them. I’m pretty sure she was sleeping with him. She was sleeping with him and when the time came, she swatted him like a fly. If I’m right.”

Shaffer stared at the yellow pad, wiping his tongue across his bottom lip, and then, “I’m buying it, but it’d be nice if there was something else.”

“There is,” Lucas said. “I’m down at Sanderson’s apartment, looking for Sanderson, and what happens? Two of the Mexicans come walking down the sidewalk. I can’t believe it. For one thing, how’d they know so fast? How’d they figure that out? They go up to the front door and go inside, and I pull the car out and across the street, jump out and run up the steps,” Lucas said. “I wasn’t more than a minute behind them, going through the front door. I punch out the door panel, get inside. I know what her apartment number is, I run up the steps. They can’t have gotten to her apartment as fast as I did-for one thing, they had to talk with the manager, at least for a second or two. So I run up the steps, and they’re gone. Gone. Vanished. Nobody ever saw them again. Why is that?”

“Tell me,” Shaffer said.

“First, because I semi-fucked up. We were always dealing with the idea of three Mexican men. One was dead, here were the other two. Why would I worry about another one? But, the thing is, I’d given Rivera and Martinez a ride in the Lexus. She knew the car. And guess what? She’d driven them over there, and was waiting up the street, behind me. I never saw her. That’s where they were walking from. Her car. She saw the Lexus, saw me jump out, and she called them on their cell phones. They ran out the back way and around the building, and she picked them up and they were out of there. It’s the only thing that works.”

Shaffer thought about it for a minute, then said, “I’m buying that, too.”

“Third,” Lucas said. “We’ve known we had a leak. They weren’t one step ahead of us or behind us-they were exactly in step with us. We thought it was in the bank-but why would a leak in the Polaris bank know about Sanderson over at Hennepin? At least, know that fast? But when we suspected Kline or Sanderson had something to do with the theft, with no proof at all, we couldn’t do anything about it. We just had to keep looking. But they could do something about it. They were right there, ready to go. They were all over Kline right after we told her about him.”

“So what are we going to do about it?” Shaffer asked.

“We’re gonna set them up,” Lucas said. “I’m already moving on it. But I’m going to need you to do some acting.”

Shaffer scratched his head. “I can do that.”

Lucas laid out the rest of his plan, and when he finished, Shaffer said, “It bothers me that we don’t tell the rest of the crew until later.”

“Somebody will give it away,” Lucas said. “I’ll tell you what, Bob, she’s both a major crook and a kind of a cop-she’s worked both sides, and if she smells a rat, she’s outa here. She’ll just take Rivera’s ashes and go home. So we don’t tell anybody what we’re doing. The whole discussion will be real, instead of phony.”

“Some of the guys will be pissed,” Shaffer said.

“Hey, a little rain, you know? Apologize later,” Lucas said. “What worries me more is that some of them are going to argue that it’s really stupid not to cover the house from the get-go. We gotta go with the idea that we just don’t have the guys, and we don’t have anything for a warrant. We say we’re gonna put two on Kline, we’re gonna put two on Sanderson, we’re gonna put four out at the airport, wait for the plane and then follow her.”

“What’s her name? The chick we’re following?”

“Martha … something?”

“Martha White,” Shaffer said. “Like the biscuit mix.”

“Good. So you want to do this?” Lucas asked.

“Got nothing to lose,” Shaffer said. “If you’re wrong, we pay some overtime. But if you’re right, we get three killers.”

Lucas got a call back from Dom, the brother-in-law, who’d found a house off East Margaret Street, owned by an absentee landlord who’d be happy to take a thousand dollars for three days, plus costs, if the cops did any damage. Lucas okayed the deal, Dom gave him the number for the realtor’s lockbox on the front door and said he’d pull the FOR SALE sign.

“You could do the landlord a favor and fire a few shots through the roof,” Dom said. “The place really needs a new roof before he can sell it.”

“We’ll do that for sure. You can count on it,” Lucas said.

They were out of the coffee shop by eight-thirty, and since the house was not too far from the BCA, they went that way. The key was in the lockbox, as Dom had said, and they cracked the door and walked through. The house was probably eighty years old, Lucas thought, and thoroughly scuffed up, two stories, fifteen hundred square feet or so, with gritty hardwood floors and a refrigerator-stove combination that came from the fifties. It smelled like plaster, nicotine, and old rugs. There were three outside doors.

“You want to use it as a dummy, or do you want to put a couple of guys in here?” Shaffer asked.

“I don’t have anybody to spare, but if we could get a couple of guys from the SWAT, that’d work,” Lucas said.

O’Brien from the DEA was at the morning meeting, along with Shaffer and three members of his team, Lucas and Del, and Martinez. She arrived carrying her five-pound briefcase, pulled out several report books that appeared to run to a hundred pages or more, each, and said, “I spent last night printing these. This is a report from our central headquarters on known and suspected gang connections in St. Paul. We thought it might provide some information on where the fugitives have hidden themselves.”

She handed a copy to Lucas, slid one across the table to O’Brien, walked around the table and passed one to Shaffer, and left another one in the middle of the table. Lucas, Shaffer, and O’Brien spent a few seconds flipping through the reports, which were in English, then Lucas put his copy aside and said, “That’s gonna take some reading time.”

“Why are they in English?” Shaffer asked.

“Because they are prepared with a DEA task force. They are both English and Spanish.”

“Any specific contacts for the Criminales?” Lucas asked.

“Two possibilities, but we are not sure. They might be worthy of surveillance,” Martinez said.

“We’ve had a break,” Shaffer said, setting his copy aside, as Lucas had. “Lucas, do you want to tell us about it?”

Lucas nodded and said, “We know when the money was taken from Polaris. We know when they stopped. We know that they will have to break the chain of checks and formal money transfers, which we are now tracing. Both the DEA and the bankers involved agreed that they would probably use the stolen money to buy gold coins, which would break the identification chain. They’d have to buy a lot of gold-twenty-two million dollars’ worth. We figured they’d have to go to several major dealers, so I assigned my research assistant to track down all the major dealers in the U.S. She found a Syrian woman….”

The woman had disguised herself by wearing a veil, and nobody had seen her face. Purely by coincidence, he said, one of the dealers had seen Delta airline tickets in her shoulder bag, and she’d said that she was in a hurry to get to the airport.

“We checked Delta flights around that time, out of Los Angeles to several major destinations, but there weren’t many: one was to here. We got the names for all the female passengers on that trip and ran them against the other major gold sellers, in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Denver, New York, Philadelphia, Miami, and so on. A Martha White shows up right after a purchase in each of those cities.”

“So you got her,” one of the agents said.

“Sort of,” Lucas said. “The problem is, she looks nothing like an Arab woman. She was born here, and though she has a passport, it doesn’t show her traveling to anywhere in the Middle East. She has no connection with either of the banks involved in this. She’s got a house not far from here.”

He looked at his notebook and read off the Margaret Street address. “That’s a block or two south of East Seventh. It’s a rental. She’s had it for three months. We think … and I emphasize think, or suspect … that she’s sending the gold back here, probably by FedEx or UPS or even registered mail, then flies back here to receive it. It’s possible that it’s in her house. But. We can’t get a warrant. Our attorney says we’re not even close. We need to show some connection between her and the other suspects-Kline, Sanderson, anything that would help. If we can build a solid enough case, without her knowing it, we can hit the house.”

One of Shaffer’s agents asked, “So we’re surveilling the house?”

Lucas said, “Not yet. Not enough people, is what it comes to. She’s coming into the airport today. In fact”-he looked at his watch-“she ought to be getting up in the air right now, out of Phoenix. We’re putting six people on her, we’ll keep her in a moving box. Once we ID her car, we’ll get a tech to put a GPS on it. At the same time, with her coming in, we’re going to have a couple guys each on Sanderson and Kline. Kline’s getting out today. He’s still screwed up, but he’s getting out. If we’re watching the house, and they meet somewhere … I mean, maybe we’re wrong about the house, but I don’t think we’re wrong about her.”

Shaffer said, “The house isn’t going anywhere. The thing is this: they think they’ve kept Martha White out of sight. And now they’ve got lots of reasons to lie low for a while. I suspect what they’re going to do is, they’re gonna leave the gold alone.”

“Seems kind of strange to leave twenty-two million in gold coins unguarded in a neighborhood like that,” another of the agents said. “Seems more like they’d put it in a bunch of safe-deposit boxes.”

Lucas nodded. “Bob and I considered that, and you’re right. They might have done that: it’s probably fifty-fifty. That’s why we cannot lose her. We need to see everywhere she goes. If she goes into a bank, we can make inquiries. On the other hand, they’ve got to know that if they put it in a bank, and the smallest thing goes wrong, we can paper every bank in the country and keep them from getting the gold back. If she hides it in this old house, and she’s smart about it, her biggest worry wouldn’t be some crackhead finding it, it’d be that the house burns down.”

They spent another five minutes talking about it, working through the equities, dismissing suggestions that they bring in more cops from St. Paul or Minneapolis.

Martinez hadn’t said a word during the discussion, and during a lull in the arguments, Lucas turned to her and asked, “Rivera’s remains…”

“I will get them today.”

“We’re so sorry about what happened.”

“Before we start celebrating United Nations Day,” one of the agents said, “I’m happy enough that we’re getting these thieves, but what about the shooters?”

Shaffer said, “Well, it’s mostly a snake hunt, now, Roy. I’m calling up every police chief between here and the border. We don’t think these guys can move, but who knows? Maybe they had a private jet over in St. Paul, and they’re now on the beach at Cabo, drinking cocktails with little umbrellas.”

“It just seems like we’re giving everything we’ve got to tracking down the thieves, and do we really care that much?” said another agent.

“There are a couple bankers who care that much,” Lucas said.

“Is that what this is about? Bankers getting their money back? Did somebody make a phone call?”

“Hey, fuck you, George. We’re not paying anybody off.” Lucas was pissed, and let it show.

Shaffer held up his hands and said, “George, I’ll talk to you in my office in just a bit. But that was bullshit. I agree with Lucas. I mean, what the hell are you planning to do, drive around town until you see them?”

“There’s gotta be something.”

“Well, I’m waiting,” Shaffer said. “Tell me what it is. I’m more interested in the killers than the money, but I got nothing. So what do you have that we don’t? That we could personally do? Come on. Tell me.”

George had nothing, and, cornered, he admitted it. O’Brien said, “I’ll tell you what, if we can get that gold, that’s not going to wreck the Criminales, but it’s going to give them a couple of flat tires. We’re starting to see some places that they’re taking their investments in Europe.”

“What about the thieves?” Lucas asked. “You see where their money is going?”

“Yeah, but we’re not getting to the end of the line. We’ve got them in Europe, but it’s coming out of there to somewhere else. We’re talking to Interpol now, but that always takes time.”

“We don’t have time.”

“Tell that to some time-wasting asshole in Lyon,” O’Brien said. “They gotta cross every T twice.”

“So we’re doing a full-court press on Martha White,” Shaffer said. “We keep our mouths shut on this. If anything leaks, somebody’s gonna be learning the private detective trade, because his ass is gonna be outa here. We all clear?”

Everybody nodded, and the meeting broke up, with Shaffer saying, “We’ll get back here in two hours. Everybody take a leak, get something to eat. We could be on her for a while.”

Out in the hall, Martinez touched Lucas’s arm and said, “If I get the ashes, and they say I will, I will not be here tomorrow morning. My flight leaves at nine o’clock. So, I thank you for your help.”

“What can I say?” Lucas said. “It’s a tragedy, but honestly … he brought it on himself. If he’d only called us…”

“I tried to get him to do it,” she said. “But he was a very stubborn man, with very big…” She hesitated, looking for the right word.

“Cojones,” Lucas said.

She smiled then and said, “Ah, your Hemingway. But yes, exactly. So…” She put out her hand, which was small and soft, and Lucas took it and said, “If I don’t see you again, I thank you for coming and trying to help.”

That conversation, Lucas thought as they parted, should just about cover the state of Minnesota’s daily minimum requirements for hypocrisy.

From his office, he watched her walk across the parking lot to her car, and when she was rolling, he called Shaffer and said, “She’s gone.”

“You think she bit?”

“She was so straight that I’m beginning to worry that I could be wrong,” Lucas said.

“She’s been spying on the guy she’s been working next to for, what, four, five years, and then she killed him? If she couldn’t look you in the eye and sell you a lie, she would have been dead a long time ago,” Shaffer said.

“Yeah, you’re right. I know goddamn well she’s the one,” Lucas said.

“I’m calling my crew back. Get Del, Jenkins, and Shrake over here, and let’s put it together. She might be moving fast.”

“Wish we’d had time to box her,” Lucas said.

“Just no time,” Shaffer said. “Besides, she’ll be coming back.”

Martinez was moving fast. After leaving the BCA headquarters on Maryland Avenue, she took Maryland west to a CVS pharmacy and got out in the parking lot with her sat phone. A few minutes later, she was speaking to the Big Voice, telling him what had happened at the meeting, reading off the address for Martha White. The Big Voice got it on his computer screen, asked her where she was, and said, “You are perhaps two kilometers away. A few minutes.”

“I will find it on my iPad.”

“I will alert Uno and Tres. Meet with them, go in there, see if the gold is there, and get out. Do you have your alternate ID?”

“Yes.”

“I will have a car rental for you in … Bloomington, Minnesota,” the Big Voice said. “This one is near the airport, on the same freeway, but farther west than the airport. I will send a map for your iPad.”

“Thank you.”

“I will have another car and a new ID for you in Kansas City, Missouri. If you drink enough coffee, you can be on the border tomorrow afternoon.”

“Yes.”

“You’re not worried about entering the house?”

“Not if we do it fast enough,” Martinez said. “They are deploying at the airport in two hours…. We have to be out in two hours, or sooner.”

“Then go.”

But she was worried. Her conscious mind had bought the charade at the BCA, but her unconscious, her intuition, nagged at her. She paid attention to that, the nagging feeling. Rational analysis argued that she had not given herself away, but there was something about the situation….

And she still hadn’t made up her mind about the gold. Keep it, or turn it over to the boss? If she kept it, she’d have to do something about Uno and Tres. She decided that she’d worry about that when the gold was in her car.

The phone rang a minute later, and it was Uno.

“Where do we meet?”

“There is a school here. In the parking lot. I will tell you the directions….”

They were fifteen minutes away.

She resented all fifteen of them.