Stolen Prey

18

They were all still standing around the parking lot, looking at the body, when Sandy, the researcher, called Lucas and said, “All that bullshit you said at the meeting this morning, about the Martha White woman on the airplane?”

“Yeah?”

“You were right. Except that her name is Edie Albitis and she flew in here last night from Newark,” Sandy said. “She’d just picked up two hundred thousand dollars in gold at Biedermann’s in Manhattan, and another two hundred thousand at Scone’s in Brooklyn.”

“You’re sure?”

“Well, every time we get a sale or a pickup, the TSA says we’ve got Albitis flying in and out of the local airport,” Sandy said. “Another thing-she’s an immigrant, from the same neck of the woods as Turicek.”

“Call the TSA,” Lucas said. “We want her held the next time she goes through airport security, if we don’t get her first.”

“I talked to Rudy, and we’ve already started the process.”

“Excellent. Be nice if we could find an address.”

“I’m looking for all that,” Sandy said. “Nothing so far, anywhere in the metro area. I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s using another name, or staying with somebody. I’m trying for her credit cards, to see if we can pick up hotels or whatever.”

Lucas told her to keep pushing it and rang off, told Del about it.

“Almost done,” Del said.

The shooting scene was shut down, and the media showed up, and after a while Lucas went back to the office to start writing his piece of the after-shooting report. Shaffer’s team had gotten a warrant and had gone into Martinez’s hotel room, and found it empty. Security tapes from BCA cameras covering the parking lot got them a description of her car, and the number on its plate. The TV stations were running photos of her every fifteen minutes or so, along with photos of two other Mexican suspects.

Lucas suggested that Shaffer, in the inevitable press conference after the killing of Uno, tell the reporters a strategic lie. Shaffer thought about it for a while, then demurred, saying that it felt unethical.

“But I won’t give you up, if you tell it,” he said.

So Lucas, speaking last, told the assembled reporters that the fleeing Mexicans were believed to have escaped with millions of dollars in gold coins, taken from the thieves who had stolen from the drug gang’s account. The gold, he said, had been taken from Turicek’s apartment at the time the gang had kidnapped him.

Lucas watched tapes of his performance, with Shaffer standing next to him, and Shaffer said, “You lie really well.”

“If I have to,” Lucas said. “I figured it was too important to pussy out on.”

“Hey…”

“Ana’s got a problem, now,” Lucas said. “Can’t stay here-and if she goes back to Mexico, the gang’s gonna want the gold, and the Federales are gonna want her ass.”

“I didn’t pussy out.”

“Yeah, you did, Bob. Pretty amazing-you’ve got no problem shooting it out with a Mexican hit man, but you puss out when it comes to lying to reporters. Listen: everything you see on TV news is bullshit,” Lucas said. “You would have added a teaspoon of bullshit to an ocean of it. Nobody would have noticed, and it’ll help catch a couple more killers. So fuck your qualms, and your ethics.”

Del got between them and said, mildly, “Let’s agree to disagree. At least while there are cameras around.”

Virgil Flowers called a while later and said he didn’t have much to report. “We’re trying to figure out how to get some surveillance on the farm. I might have actually seen the truck that your two robbers drive around, but we didn’t want to stop them. We’re afraid we might give something away.”

“Like what?”

“Dunno,” Flowers said. “Something.”

Martinez knew the police would be looking for her car, so they dumped it for the Toyota and headed back to the Newport house, and put the car in the garage.

Tres hadn’t asked about Uno: he knew what had happened. When they got inside, they turned on the television and saw the breaking news story. Tres said, “I thought I would be the one to go. The saints said so.” Martinez patted him on the shoulder, went out in the backyard, sat on the ground between a couple of bridal wreath bushes, and called the Big Voice.

“They know about me, my photo is on the television. We have lost the car, but still have the truck. We are safe for now, I think, but I’m afraid to move.”

“Stay there. One day, two days, we can get you out. If they have your face, and the Federales have it, then the only safe place for you is farther south. If we can pick you up, arrangements can be made-Venezuela, perhaps. Ecuador. So. Hide. Call me every four hours.”

Two hours later, eating tomato soup and microwave tacos, and clicking compulsively through the cable channels, they caught Davenport: “… believe she has twenty-two million dollars in American gold eagles. That’s a lot of money and it’s also a lot of weight, so we think they’re moving it by car or truck. We’ve alerted every gas station and truck stop between here and the border….”

“Oh, no,” she said.

Tres didn’t understand. He looked from her stricken face to the TV: “?Que?”

Early in the afternoon, Sanderson went to Mom’s house. She’d been worrying obsessively about the gold-with Turicek dead and Kline incapacitated, with the Mexicans visiting her apartment, with the cops all over her, she began experiencing the symptoms of what her doctors had previously described as a schizophrenic break; she’d experienced them a few times before, but not for a few years. She hadn’t been able to eat or sleep at all, a ragged headache was a constant companion, and her normal mental playacting had become dominant, the plays more real than the world around her.

One of the plays ran over and over, a sequence in which Edie Albitis went to Mom’s house and stole all the gold, and then Sanderson, seeing herself standing in the house with an empty bag, peeked out the window and saw Davenport and more cops gathering on her lawn, with guns….

She kept trying to rerun the vision to eliminate the cops, to get the gold back, but none of it worked: the vision was assertive, and inescapable.

So she went to Mom’s: the presence of the gold, she thought, would be curative: if she had it in her hands, it couldn’t have gone with Albitis. If she had the gold in her hands, the vision would go away.

And she should move the gold, she thought. Take it somewhere nobody would know, for safekeeping. Out in the countryside. She could get a shovel….

As was the case with paranoia, a little schizophrenia could work for you, if it wasn’t too severe. In her most acute episodes, Sanderson’s visions were actually tactile. When the visions involved conflict with threatening people, she’d worked out all kinds of evasive tactics. She would evade the threats on foot and in her car, in airplanes, on horseback, on snowmobiles, and in boats…. She’d worked all through it, in her dreams.

Now, with an actual threat of police surveillance, she went down to the garage and carefully looked around, until she was confident that she was alone, then looked under her car for suspect boxes and wires. She’d seen GPS trackers on some cop show on TV, though she wasn’t sure whether they were real or fictional.

Finding nothing, she got in her car and went through an evasive routine imagined many times in the past; it took a while, and involved twisting routes through the parking ramps at the Mall of America, followed by a trip through country lanes south of the Cities, and finally, unable to discover the slightest sign that she was being followed, she drove back into town, to Mom’s.

Calmer now, after her journey through the real world, she pulled into the driveway, lifted the garage door, and drove in. The gold was packed into small cardboard boxes, and made a fairly compact stack. But then, dumbbells were also fairly compact: gold is heavier than lead, and though the gold pile was not particularly impressive, it weighed something like 860 pounds.

She looked at it for a few minutes, snapped to the vision of the cops arriving outside, and ran to the front window and peeked: the street was empty. Breathing hard, and struggling to calm herself, she went to the kitchen, got a glass of water, then went back to the gold. She tried picking up three boxes, but together they were heavier than a car battery, and she dropped the bottom one. Two at a time were more manageable, and she took two the first and second trips, shuttling out to the garage, but after that, she slowed down, taking one box at a time.

She was two-thirds of the way down the stack when she heard a car in the driveway. She was standing next to her own car, having just dropped another box in front of the backseat, when she heard it, and there was no doubt about it.

But then, what she heard and saw wasn’t necessarily what was out there, and she knew that: she was mildly schizophrenic, and fully aware of that fact. She went back to the front window and peeked again.

Edie Albitis was getting out of a car parked at the curb.

Albitis had spent the night sleeping at the office condo, on a blow-up mattress she’d bought at an all-night Walmart. She had her suitcase with her, and in the morning had managed to clean up using a six-pack of bottled water she’d gotten at the same Walmart.

She was frightened: the drug gang and the police had been all over Turicek, Kline, and Sanderson. It was unclear to her whether the Mexicans had had Turicek for any length of time, if he might have given away Mom’s house, and her name. It was unclear if the police had been able to track her through something said by one of the others. In any case, she’d decided not to risk the Ramada, and had gone to the rental office.

FEDEX made two separate deliveries that morning, totaling more than a half million dollars. She moved the gold out to her car, and headed for Mom’s.

The thing about Mom’s was, you could see the driveway from a long way out. She stopped at a convenience store, peed one last time, got three bottles of water and a submarine sandwich, went to Mom’s, but stopped five blocks short and parked.

She was patient. There was too much involved to be hasty, and she took the quiet time, with the sandwich, to plot out her next moves. If either the gang or the police had her name, and she’d have to assume they did, she’d have to drive out to New York with her share of the gold. Turicek’s share, too. That was only fair, she thought: he was her partner, not Sanderson’s or Kline’s.

With that much gold, an ID would not be a problem. There were several Eastern European consulates where she could buy a completely legitimate passport for a couple thousand dollars. Just a matter of locating the right guy, and again, with the gold, that would be simple enough.

Then where? Prague, she thought. Maybe Budapest. Romania … maybe not. She wanted a solid legal system, with at least some respect for the privacy of safe-deposit boxes. Latvia?

She’d been there three hours and was beginning to feel a little bladder pressure when she saw Sanderson arrive. She sat up, watching intently. Nothing moved. Nothing moved…

Sanderson opened the door and Albitis stepped inside and asked, “What’s going on?”

Sanderson thought it would look bad, so she stuttered, “Ah, mmm, I’m moving the gold. I’m afraid the police are going to find this place. They’re just everywhere.”

“How do you know they’re not watching you?”

“I was very careful,” Sanderson said. “Unless they had an airplane, they couldn’t have followed me.” She explained about driving down the dusty gravel roads, and Albitis came around.

“All right,” she said. “But: I want our share of the gold right now. Mine and Ivan’s. I’m leaving. I’m heading for California, and I’m getting a boat out of San Francisco. So let’s start dividing it up.”

Sanderson said, “But … that’s not fair. Ivan’s dead. You get one-third now-”

“Ivan was my partner. I get his,” she said. “You still get plenty.”

“Oh, no…”

Sanderson was bigger and stronger than Albitis, but Albitis had a kind of feral toughness that frightened Sanderson; and Albitis began crowding the other woman, not realizing that Sanderson was experiencing the schizophrenic break, and finally, when Albitis reached out and pushed Sanderson, Sanderson struck back with a wild roundhouse punch that bounced off the back of Albitis’s head, not having much effect, and Albitis screamed and launched herself at Sanderson, fingernails flashing, and they went right to the floor, punching and screaming.

Sanderson was better on the floor, since she was stronger. Albitis finally managed to wrench herself free and, being quicker, got to her feet and ran into the bedroom where the safe was: Daddy’s guns.

Sanderson knew exactly where she was going, looked at the back door. The door was locked, and she’d have to fit a key into it. Albitis was between her and the front door. She panicked and pulled open the nearest door, the one that went to the attic, and as she heard the mechanical ratcheting as the.45 was cocked, she ran up the stairs.

The stairs were a straight shot, eighteen steps straight up: the entry into the attic was simply a hole in the floor, wrapped on three sides by a banister. The attic, which had been Sanderson’s bedroom when she was a teenager, was full of junk. She looked around wildly, anything that she could use to defend herself, heard Albitis start up the stairs, shouting, “Kris! Kris!”

Daddy’s golf clubs, nearly twenty years old and covered with dust, were poking out of his old Golden Golphers-themed golf bag, propped against the wall behind the back banister. She pulled out the biggest one, an original Big Bertha, raised it over her head, looked over the banister, and Albitis was right there, nearly at the top of the stairs with the.45 in her hand.

Albitis shouted, “Kris! I don’t want-”

Sanderson didn’t hear any of that: she just saw a killer coming for her, and she swung the club in a long arc. Albitis either sensed the motion or heard it, cocked her head upward, and caught the face of the Big Bertha on her forehead.

Crunch.

It sounded bad. It sounded like somebody had broken a board over his knee.

Albitis stiffened, looked right at Sanderson with blank eyes, and then toppled and fell down the stairs in three stages. She went thumpa-thump, and stopped, then thumpa-thumpa-thump, and stopped a couple of steps from the bottom, then turned one last time, thumpa-thump, and hit the floor at the bottom.

Sanderson cried, “Oh, my God, Edie, are you hurt?”

She ran down the stairs and found Albitis in a heap; still breathing, her eyes still open, and blank as a sheet of paper. There was no blood, but there was a major dent where the crown of her head met her forehead.

“Oh, my God,” Sanderson cried again. She tried to get Albitis to sit upright, but Albitis was as loose as a bag of laundry.

Sanderson ran to the front door and looked out, and then to the back door and looked out, and then to the garage. She frantically threw the boxes of gold onto the garage floor, then half-carried, half-dragged Albitis to the car and across the backseat.

“Are you all right?” she sobbed.

No answer.

She ran back into the house, got Albitis’s shoulder bag, and threw it on the other woman’s body.

As she backed out of the garage, she saw the boxes of gold lying on the garage floor and got out and ran back up the driveway, pulled the door down, making sure it latched. She was five minutes from Regions Hospital. She didn’t dare take Albitis all the way in because there would be questions. Instead, she drove around on side streets until she found a place where she couldn’t easily be seen, dragged Albitis out of the car, and propped her against a tree.

She got Albitis’s bag and propped it against her side: What’s a woman without her bag? Albitis was still as loose as death, but she wasn’t dead: she was now snoring. As Sanderson turned away from the body, she saw Albitis’s cell phone on the ground, where it had fallen out of a pocket. She picked it up, looked at it, and thought, Keys. She went back to Albitis’s bag and got the car keys. With the keys in her pocket, she drove out to the end of the street and called 911.

The 911 dispatcher asked, “Is this an emergency?”

A St. Paul Cop called Lucas through the BCA switchboard.

“Uh, you guys had that pickup request on an Edie Albitis?”

“Yeah! You got her?”

“Well, sort of…”

Albitis was being prepped for surgery when Lucas arrived at the emergency room. He talked briefly to a neurosurgeon who said that Albitis had not regained consciousness since she’d arrived, and had a significant depressive fracture of the frontal bone.

“The imaging shows we’ve got significant epidural bleeding under the impact site, and there appears to be some rebound bleeding on the opposite side of her head,” he said. “We need to relieve the pressure from the bleeding as quickly as we can, so we’re going in right now. She was lucky in that whatever hit her didn’t break the skin, so the wound is closed.”

“She gonna make it?” Lucas asked.

The surgeon shrugged. “I’d say she should, but I don’t know how bad she’s been scrambled. She took a terrific whack with something. Something smooth, no edges to rip the skin. I was almost thinking it might be something like a fender, but the radius of a fender is too large. This was a small-radius impact, and nearly symmetrical. It’s like somebody whacked her with one of those iron balls they use in the shot put.”

“An iron ball?”

“Just an example,” the doc said. “But like that. I’d say small radius, metal, smooth, moving fast. The frontal bone is tough. This took a lot of energy.”

A St. Paul cop was in the waiting room, one of the first responders, and he described the scene where they picked her up. “Got a nine-one-one call, and we were close and went over there and found her. Her purse was there, but nothing else.”

There was no sign of an accident, no glass in the street. She was propped up against a tree, completely out of it, when the cops arrived. “We could see something was wrong with her head, so we called for an ambulance. Talked to some of the neighbors, but nobody had seen anything. Where she was … wasn’t like concealed, or anything, she was right out in the open, but she would have been hard to see from any of the houses. The place was picked.”

“What about the call to nine-one-one?”

“Woman caller, gave the exact location, sounded freaked out. The call came from a no-name phone. Didn’t find a phone with Albitis, so it may have been her own phone.”

“Shoot.”

After thinking about it, Lucas called the dispatch center and had them play the 911 call for him. He couldn’t have proven it, not in a court, but he recognized the trembling panic of the caller. “That fuckin’ Sanderson. Kristina Sanderson,” he said aloud, and he went to find her.

After dropping Albitis and making the call to 911, Sanderson wiped the phone with a Kleenex and dropped it out the window onto the freeway, where it was run over several hundred times in the next hour or so, before the biggest chunk of the finely ground remnant made it to the shoulder.

She was worried about Albitis, but was now more focused on the gold. Albitis, she thought, really couldn’t turn her in, without implicating herself. So, however that turned out, it was something for the future. For now, she had to take care of the gold, which was the only remaining reason for doing any of this.

Back at the house, she threw the boxes of gold back in the car. Since she’d already moved them once, by the time she was finished, she’d moved seventeen hundred pounds of heavy metal, almost as though she’d been stacking car batteries all day.

When the gold was loaded, she went out to Albitis’s car and found more gold in the trunk. She backed Albitis’s car up to the garage and transferred the gold to her car. Then she got a bunch of garbage bags from under the kitchen sink, a spade, and a blue plastic tarp from the garage, put them in her car, and pulled out to the street. Albitis’s car went into the garage: she’d move it later.

With all that done, she headed out into the countryside. Out to the farm.

She’d never really expected to have the money to buy the place, but she’d visited it a dozen times, touring her dream. Dog kennels over here, a stable over there. Chicken coops to the right.

The drive south took a bit more than an hour, into the Cannon River Valley south of Farmington. The farm was barely a farm anymore-forty acres were planted with a ragged cornfield, but the other forty were nothing but weeds and a scattering of saplings sprouted from windblown seed. A line of taller timber marked the north side, where the land started to fold as it dropped down to the river. The acreage didn’t border on the river itself, but was close. She could walk to a bridge….

She got to the farm as the sun was hovering above the horizon, turning the overhead clouds a gorgeous lavender-and-salmon. She pulled open the gate-the owner of the land had told her she could stop by anytime-and pulled in, closed the gate behind herself, and drove slowly along a thin track toward the timber.

She dug carefully, throwing the dirt onto the blue tarp. By the time she finished, it was nearly dark, the sun long gone; she put one of the plastic bags in the hole, filled it with boxes of gold, then cinched up the bag so it would be as waterproof as possible, then did the same with a second bag. She refilled the hole, replaced a few pieces of sod by flashlight, then threw her equipment back in the car. If anybody were to come by before the next rain, they might find themselves some gold. But that was unlikely: one in a million.

When she was done, she examined the site one last time with the flashlight, then drove carefully back across the field to the gate, drove through, replaced the gate, and drove home.

She missed Lucas by ten minutes.