Stolen Prey

2

Patrick Brooks had run Sunnie Software out of an office suite in a rehabbed brick warehouse north of Minneapolis’s downtown. Lucas decided to swing by on his way back to the BCA offices to sniff around and get a feel for the Brooks operation.

He left the car on the street and climbed the internal stairs to the third floor; the office was glass and gray carpet, with potted palms sitting around on redbrick room dividers. The place smelled like feminine underarm deodorant and carpet cleaner. A dozen employees were sitting in a low-walled cube farm, each with his or her own computer, but nobody was working. Instead, they’d pulled their chairs into groups of three and four, and were talking about the killings.

A BCA agent named Jones was keeping an eye on them. He spotted Lucas at the door, and as the employees turned to watch, came over and said, “We’re talking to them one at a time. Not seeing much yet.”

Lucas said, “Shaffer says they do Spanish-language software.”

“Yeah. We already talked to the office manager. She said some of the sales are down in the Southwest, but most of them are south of the border-Mexico and Central America. They do some down in South America, Colombia and Venezuela.”

“All drug countries,” Lucas said. “You think they’re running a money laundry?”

“Can’t tell yet,” Jones said. “If it is, it’s not that big. They only did about two million in sales last year. Brooks took out about two hundred thousand, himself. They got a million-dollar payroll on top of that, they’re paying some stiff rent, they contract for the software, there’re taxes…. There’s not really much left over.”

“Is there any way to verify the sales?” Lucas asked.

“Not really, not if somebody wanted to tinker with the books. It’s all delivered online, there aren’t any physical deliveries.” Jones nodded at the office, and added, “We’ve got all of these people sitting here, they all say they get paid, we know they pay rent on the office space … It’d be a hell of a conspiracy.”

“We’ve got a killing that looks like it’s dope-related, we’ve got people peddling untraceable software in Mexico. It’s gotta be here somewhere,” Lucas said.

Jones shrugged. “You’re welcome to look. I’ll tell you one thing. If it’s a laundry, and they were stealing money, it wasn’t worth it.” Jones had been to the murder house and had seen the damage.

“No, it wasn’t,” Lucas agreed.

“So … Dick and Andi are in the back, doing the interviews,” Jones said. “You want to sit in?”

“Maybe … but you’re done with the office manager?”

“For the time being.”

“Let me talk to her,” Lucas said.

Barbara Phillips was a heavyset blonde in her late forties or early fifties, with an elaborate hairdo, low-cut silky tan blouse, and seven-inch cleavage. She’d been crying, and had mascara running down her face, with wipe lines trailing off toward her ears. She’d been sitting in her office with two other employees when Jones stuck his head in: “We have another agent who’d like to chat with you,” he said to Phillips.

She nodded and said, “You guys be careful,” to the other employees, and they all shook their heads and trooped out of the room. When Lucas stepped in, Phillips asked, “You think the killers are looking for us?”

Lucas took a chair and said, “I doubt it … unless there’s some reason you think they might be.”

“Mr. Chang, Agent Chang, said they thought maybe a Mexican drug gang did it. What does that have to do with us?”

Lucas shrugged. “I don’t know. Can you think of anything at all?”

Tears started running down her face, and she sniffed and wiped the tears away, and said, “Our business is with Mexicans. We like Mexicans. Half the people working here are Mexicans, or Panamanians.”

“Liking Mexicans doesn’t mean much to these people, if they’re actually a drug gang,” Lucas said. “Most of the people they murder are Mexicans.”

“Well, I don’t know,” she said, her voice rising almost to a wail.

Lucas sat and watched her for a moment, and she gathered herself together and said, “Those poor kids. God, those poor kids. I just hope they didn’t suffer.”

Lucas didn’t know how to respond to that, given the truth of the matter, so he said, “Tell me one thing that would let this business…” He paused, then continued, “What am I asking here?” He scratched his chin. “Tell me one thing that would allow a drug gang to use this business for their own purposes. I’m not asking if they did, just make something up. One possibility.”

She peered at him for a moment, confused, and then sat up, looked at a wall calendar as if it might explain something to her, then looked back and said, “There isn’t any. Not that I can think of. We don’t buy or sell any physical product, so you can’t use us to smuggle anything. There aren’t any trucks, nobody crosses any border. We don’t make that much in profit … and all of our income is recorded because it’s all done with credit cards. So, I don’t know.”

“Is there any way they could use your computer systems for communications of some kind?” Lucas asked. “Or anything like that?”

“Why would they?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I’m just trying to think of anything that might help,” Lucas said.

Phillips said, “Listen, if they want to communicate, they can buy an encryption package, for a few dollars, that the CIA couldn’t break, and just send e-mails. Why would they go through us?”

Lucas turned his palms up. “Don’t know. Maybe they didn’t. But somewhere, there’s a reason they were killed. Possibly in this company. Did Mr. Brooks speak Spanish?”

“Oh, yes. He was fluent. So was his wife,” Phillips said. “They lived in Argentina for five years, and that’s where Pat got the idea for the company. Everybody’s got computers down there, but it’s hard to get good software in Spanish. His idea was, get some of these really good, inexpensive, second-level software packages-business software, games, whatever-and translate them into Spanish. That’s what we did. We’d buy the rights, get a contractor to recode in Spanish, and put it online.”

“Then the customers would download it and that’d be the end of it,” Lucas said.

“That’s it,” she said.

“But couldn’t a drug gang be somehow using the…” He faltered, then said, “But why do it that way, when they could do it with an encrypted e-mail?”

“I can’t think of why,” she said.

“Who does the books?”

“Merit-Champlain, they’re an accounting company over in North St. Paul.”

“I know them,” Lucas said. He’d used the same outfit when he was running his computer company in the mid-nineties. As far as he knew, they were straight. “Did Brooks finance the company himself?” he asked.

“As far as I know, yes. He used to work for 3M, he made very good money,” Phillips said. “He had savings, and he borrowed money from his 401K. I think his brother chipped in. When we started, there were only three of us, full-time, Pat and me and Bob Farmer, who was the computer expert. Candy would come in after the kids were at school, and she’d stay until it was time to pick them up. Everything else, we’d farm out. Contract work.”

“Pretty much a success right from the start?”

“Not hardly,” Phillips said, shaking her head. “It was two years before Pat took his first paycheck. After that it came on pretty good, and we’re still growing. Well, we were still growing … I don’t know what’ll happen now.”

“Are Brooks’s parents still alive?” Lucas asked.

“Yes. Nice folks. They live out in Stillwater. Agent Chang-”

“Dick,” Lucas said.

“Yes, Dick said they were being contacted.”

“They’d probably inherit,” Lucas said.

“Unless it’s his brother,” Phillips said. “I really don’t know. Nobody thought … this could happen. That they’d all be gone. Never in a million years.”

Lucas worked her a bit more, got the name and address of Brooks’s brother, but had the feeling he was pushing on a string. He thanked her and left her in the office. Chang was standing in the hallway with a water-machine paper cup in his hand, and Lucas nodded and asked, “Anything?”

Chang shook his head. “Lot of Mexicans here, but I’m not seeing anything. They’re all confused as hell. The confusion feels real.”

“I wish they were making more money,” Lucas said. “I’m not seeing how they could be running a laundry. Maybe the accountants will have something.”

“Maybe,” Chang said. There was doubt in his voice. “You want to talk to anyone else?”

“Should I?”

Chang shrugged. “Well … no. If there’s some kind of secret deal going on, I don’t think they’re all in on it. Probably only one of them … and he’ll lie about it. Just talking to them won’t help much.”

Lucas headed back to his office, a nice quiet space where he could brood. In a complicated investigation, he found it useful to take whatever pieces he had and concoct a story around them. Even if the story was far-fetched, it gave him a starting place, and angles to work.

On the drive from Wayzata to downtown Minneapolis, his lead story had been “Money Laundry”: that the Brookses had been killed by a drug gang, after doing something fancy with the gang’s money. Chipping off an extra piece.

Other kinds of organized crime, where you might see the same level of violence, didn’t need the same level of money laundering, because they didn’t operate with huge numbers of small bills. Their violence was usually aimed at eliminating competition.

Sunnie would have been perfect for a drug gang, with small payments coming in from all over Latin America, consolidated, and moved to a bank. Except, if Phillips and the books were telling the truth, the money wasn’t large enough.

That one little fact was hard to get around. If it was a laundry, where was the money?

The other problem, and it could probably be checked, was that the business had been shaky at the start. If it had been set up as a laundry, it shouldn’t have been. Perhaps, he thought, it had been set up as a legitimate business, and had only later been spotted by the gang as a potential laundry.

His other story-but it was far back, number ten on his list of two-was Del’s suggestion, that the murders had been the result of a home invasion by a couple of crazy killers, who’d picked a random house in a rich neighborhood. A couple of stupid, crazy guys who looked at the house and thought that there must be big money inside, not being all that familiar with checking accounts and American Express. When they got inside and found that there wasn’t much in the way of money, they amused themselves with rape, torture, and murder. That happened, a few times a year, most often in California or on the East Coast; not in Minnesota, though.

Another problem with that scenario was that the crime-scene people in Wayzata were positing at least three killers, and maybe four. House invasions of the crazy, murderous kind usually involved one or two people: three or four crazy people would be unusual.

Of course, there was always Charlie Manson to worry about….

Yet he didn’t like the Manson scenario, even with the bloody “were coming” written on the wall. The murders didn’t seem crazy enough for crazy people. They’d taken too long, there was that apparent progression, and there wasn’t the level of frenzy that you’d expect.

He was halfway back to the office when a phone call came in. The identifying tag said “City of Northfield.” He answered and a man asked, “Is this Lucas Davenport?”

“It is.”

“This is Chuck Waites at Northfield PD. I’m calling about your flyer. You said you’d be interested in ATM robberies, man and a woman, knocking down the victim.”

“Yeah, I sure am,” Lucas said. “You bust them?”

“No, no. They picked out one of our college kids taking cash out of a street ATM, robbed him with a gun, knocked him down, and ran off. This happened last night. Kid’s got a broken arm and he’s out eighty bucks.”

“Man and a woman?”

“Yeah, it’s like that flyer said: skinny guy, big woman,” Waites said. “Have no idea who they are, but we’ve got a clue for you.”

“I don’t like the way you said ‘clue,’” Lucas said.

The other cop laughed. “Well, it might be an identifier.”

“What is it?”

“The kid said they smelled like horse shit. Horse shit, specifically. We asked him if he was sure it wasn’t cow shit or sheep shit, but he said, ‘No, sir, it’s horse shit.’ He grew up on a dairy farm, and they ran a couple of riding horses and a few other animals. Sheep, chickens,” Waites said. “He said anybody who grew up on that kind of a place could tell the difference between cow shit, horse shit, sheep shit, and chicken shit. He said they had all those animals, and the people who robbed him smelled like horse shit. Like they’d been shoveling out a stable.”

“You know any meth addicts who run a riding stable?”

“Not me personally, but there’re a lot of meth cookers out in the countryside,” Waites said. “If these people are far gone on meth, like your flyer says, I don’t think they could be running a commercial stable. That’s pretty heavy work and takes some ability to concentrate…. If it really was horse shit on them, I’d have to believe that they’re farmhands somewhere.”

“Huh. That’s interesting,” Lucas said. “It’s weird, but it narrows it down, and shoveling shit is about what I’d expect of those two. You know of any kind of organization that would have a list of stables?”

“Somebody in the state would, probably-they got a list of everything else,” Waites said. “If I were you, I’d just call the county agents. They’d know all the farms in their county, and maybe who works on them.”

“Thanks. If this works out, you’ll get the reward,” Lucas said.

“Really? What is it?”

“I go around and tell people that Chuck Waites is alert.”

Waites laughed and said, “And America needs more lerts.”

Lucas spent the rest of the day at his office, making phone calls and scratching his left arm, under the cast, with the end of a coat hanger. He’d been told not to do that-scratch with a coat hanger-and he’d thought there was some good medical reason for the advice until Weather told him that it was to keep him from cutting himself and infecting the wounds.

That, Lucas thought, was advice for children. He wasn’t going to cut himself with the coat hanger, and besides, he’d rather cut himself than itch to death.

So he sat scratching and calling, making trips to the candy machine, interspersed with spasms of note-taking on yellow legal pads.

Most of it involved the tweekers. The horse shit, he told himself, was actually a pretty interesting clue. Most people-he thought, but didn’t know-would clean up immediately if they’d come in contact with horse shit. But people who were in contact with it all the time might not even know that they smelled. He believed the kid, and his identification of the odor. He himself could tell the difference between the odor of fish slime from a northern pike and fish slime from a crappie.

A smaller percentage of his time was spent on the murders: he was not the primary investigator there, and the investigation seemed likely to turn into a long, slow grind. If you were intent on locating and knocking down leads, Shaffer could do that as well as anybody. Still, images of the murder scene kept popping up in his mind. He’d seen some bad ones in the past, but this was among the worst. Anything with children…

He called the DEA and asked about unusual activity in the Minneapolis area. He was told they’d check. He called a dozen people in his private intelligence net, including six Latinos, and asked about anything unusual going on in the underground Latino community.

He tried to work up another credible story, beyond Mexican dopers and the Charlie Manson scenario. Stories cost nothing but time.

Not that the BCA would have a lot of time.

Wayzata, the town where the killings took place, was one of the richer places in the Twin Cities, filled with people who felt entitled to a lot of attention, as befitted their economic status. It was also a place where the news media could get in a hurry, and not have to pay much to do it. Every news outlet in town could send a reporter six times a day to ask the locals, “Is the killer living among you? And what about your children?”

The investigation would be pressured.

The BCA had eight people on it: the crime-scene people, plus four agents in the team led by Shaffer. Lucas didn’t count: he was essentially working for himself. Because the agents generally considered themselves equal, and only occasionally worked a case under hard supervision, they mildly resented Shaffer, though they understood the necessity of having a team coordinator.

Lucas was another matter: he was neither their boss nor their coordinator, and they didn’t like being interrupted by his calls. He called anyway, from time to time, and learned very little. They’d found nothing incriminating at Sunnie Software. They did determine that the house hadn’t been carefully robbed-the crime-scene people found two thousand dollars in a bathroom drawer.

Shaffer told him that they had one positive indication that something was wrong with the way the Brookses conducted their financial life. A forensic accountant-that’s how he referred to himself, though his colleagues called him “Specs”-said that they didn’t appear to spend any money on small stuff.

They didn’t take much money from the bank in cash, but they didn’t charge groceries or clothing or gasoline or consumer electronics. In fact, their credit cards were almost unused, except for a few big-ticket items, like airline tickets. They’d once flown to Orlando, spent five days there, possibly at Disney World, and didn’t even show a motel bill.

Brooks had three cashmere jackets in his closet, all newer-looking, probably fifteen hundred dollars each. His wife shopped at Nordstrom and Neiman Marcus, had a closet full of clothes from Barneys in New York. They didn’t have credit cards at either place.

Shaffer suspected that they were spending cash where a credit card wasn’t mandatory; cash that didn’t show up anywhere else.

After the first half-day of investigation, that was it. It was way too early to say that the investigation was driving into a ditch, Lucas thought, but it might be true that the passenger-side tires had wandered onto the shoulder.

Lucas went to lunch at two o’clock, ate a couple of bagel sandwiches, alone, thinking about his murder stories, then went back to his office and found a phone message from the Los Angeles office of the Drug Enforcement Administration. He called back and was hooked up with an agent named Tomas O’Brien.

“I was told you’re the guy I should talk to,” O’Brien said. “I’ve got a Delta flight out late this afternoon, I’m bringing a couple guys with me. We’d like to look at the books on this Sunnie Software.”

“I can fix that,” Lucas said. “You know something about Sunnie?”

“The name has come up a few times, but there’s been nothing specific. Nothing criminal. We took a look, once, even bought some of their software, like Hable Gringo en Treinta Dias. Sorta sucks and it ain’t cheap.”

“We’ve been wondering if it’s a laundry,” Lucas said.

“That’s why our guy there in the Cities gave me a ring, after your call,” O’Brien said. “Sunnie buys product from a company here in LA called Los Escritores, which got started with a lot of twenty-dollar bills … or so we’ve been told. The software isn’t very good, but it sells like crazy. We’d like to look at what Sunnie’s been doing with them. Look back down the money chain.”

“You know the details on the murders?”

“Your people let our guy walk through,” O’Brien said. “From what he says, it looks like the work of Los Criminales del Norte, one of the cross-border gangs. They do a lot of that revenge-rape stuff. Killing families, sexual mutilation. Chopping off fingers, one joint at a time. They tend to go down shooting.”

“You definitely think it looks Mexican?”

“Oh, yeah, absolutely. Don’t see it up here, much, but this would be routine in Mexico,” O’Brien said. “We’d love to get one of their killers alive, if we could. Turn him over to the Federales for questioning.”

“We plan to do that up here,” Lucas said. “The questioning.”

“You’d get more answers from the Federales,” O’Brien said, persisting with the thought. “The LCN supposedly caught a Federale undercover cop and skinned him alive. Sent his skin to his boss, by FedEx, with a movie of the guy getting skinned. If we extradite one of these guys, to the right Federales, we will definitely get some answers.”

“I don’t think we’d want to do that,” Lucas said.

“Whatever, it’s your call,” O’Brien said. “Anyway, we’re gonna get there a little late. Maybe talk tomorrow?”

“I’ll fix things up with the lead investigator,” Lucas said. “See you then.”

Thinking about the ATM robbers, Lucas called a list of county agents, missed a couple who were out of their offices, finally connected with one, and was told that there might be a list of some commercial riding stables, but a lot of stables were run off the books, as side ventures, and coming up with a complete list would be tough.

An opaque piece of the underground economy, Lucas thought, when he hung up. He ran into it all the time now; small businessmen had told him that government taxation and regulation had become so rapacious that cheating was often the only way they could survive.

Another step down to a third-world economy.

Del came back at three o’clock from a surveillance job in Apple Valley, pulled a chair around, and asked, “Why don’t you turn on a light?”

“Forgot,” Lucas said. “Anything happening with Anderson?”

“Not on my shift. Maybe he knows we’re watching.”

Terrill Anderson was suspected of stealing a three-ton Paul Manship bronze art-deco sculpture, Naiads of the North, from the front driveway circle of a home in Sunfish Lake, a town just south of St. Paul. The sculpture depicted three larger-than-life-sized nymphs dancing, flowers in their hair, hands joined overhead, standing in a kind of swirl, or whirlpool, of walleyes.

The owner of the sculpture, the fifth-generation heir of a railroad family, was massively rich, and had a daughter who chaired the state arts council. He wanted his sculpture back-the estimated worth, as a sculpture, was four million dollars. Looked at another way, three tons of bronze, which was mostly copper, was worth roughly eighteen thousand dollars if it had been in ingot form, or fifteen thousand or so on the scrap metal market.

The sculpture had been fitted to a granite base with six large steel bolts. Anderson had unbolted the statues and lifted the whole thing onto a flatbed trailer with a trailer-mounted crane, one night while the owner was inspecting a new home in Rio. The operation had been caught on a murky piece of low-res surveillance video from a house across the street-the heir’s own camera lenses had been covered with pink goop before the removal began.

Phone calls were made, and the hunt for the statues, or, more realistically now, the bronze scrap metal, which had been somewhat desultory, had sharpened. Somewhere, out there, maybe, Anderson was hiding a flatbed trailer and a lot of heavy metal. Del was watching him, waiting for him to go fetch it.

Lucas yawned, scratched the back of his head. “Hope he didn’t drop it in a lake.”

“He’s probably already shipped it to China,” Del said. “It’s possible that he had a boxcar waiting, loaded it right off the flatbed, and shipped it out. I’ve been talking to the railroad, but those guys have got no idea where most of their cars are, or what’s in them. Which I guess is a good thing.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. If a terrorist ever wants to blow up New York, he can’t just build a time bomb and put it in a railway car ’cause nobody would have any idea of exactly when it’d get to New York, or how it’d get there,” Del said. “More likely to blow up a cornfield than a city.”

“Or a riding stable,” Lucas said.

“What?”

Lucas told him about the Northfield robbery, and Del said, “Well, you can’t say it’s a horseshit clue.”

“I thought of that joke about fifteen seconds after the guy called me,” Lucas said. “I was embarrassed just thinking of it, and I never said it out loud.”

“You’re not going to ask me to look into it, are you? I mean, I got enough boring horseshit-”

“No, I’m just making phone calls to these county agent guys. See what turns up.”

“Might be better than watching Anderson,” Del said. “The guy is a slug. Never does anything, goes anywhere. I was sitting out there so long my ass got sore. But then, I read another hundred pages in the Deon Meyer, had four ideas for new iPhone apps, realized I could have had a career in Hollywood as a character actor, and tried to remember all the names of the women I could have slept with but didn’t. How about you?”

“I slept with all the women I could have slept with,” Lucas said. “Not being a complete fool. You think about the Brooks family?”

“I tried not to.”

Lucas filled him in on the investigation, and finished with “… so it’s gonna be slow and methodical. Lots of paperwork.”

“But a big deal-unlike Anderson and his statue.”

“Mmm. I called some of the people on my list, put out some lines in the Latino community,” Lucas said. “Haven’t gotten anything back yet. We need to be careful not to step on Shaffer’s toes. We’ll all be talking to the DEA tomorrow, we can figure out who’s doing what.”

Del stood up and stretched: “So, we go home and eat dinner with the kids?”

“Nothing wrong with that,” Lucas said. He thought about the bodies in the Brooks house.

Lucas went home, watched the Brooks murder coverage on Channel Three; played with his son, Sam, throwing a Nerf ball at a basket; got a smile from his infant daughter, Gabrielle, who was now almost a toddler; and had a long, complicated discussion with his daughter Letty about television news.

Letty was between her junior and senior years in high school and had worked part-time at a TV station for three years. She’d met a politician that day, in the green room off the studio, who shook her hand and asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up. She said she was thinking about being a TV reporter, and the politician shook his head and said, “The thing about TV is, every single story is wrong. Nothing is ever quite right. If you go into TV work, you’ll spend your life telling lies.”

“Then what are you doing here?” she’d asked.

“I’m selling my side,” he’d said. “Television isn’t news-it’s sales. I’m selling my ideas.”

The conversation had troubled her and she’d expected some reassurance from Lucas. He failed to give it to her. So they talked about that for a while, and then she said, “I dunno. I like it, TV. But…”

“Don’t tell me you want to be a lawyer,” Lucas said. “And not a cop.”

“This politician guy, when he came back out, I asked him what I should be. He said, ‘If I were a kid, about to go to college, and was smart, and knew what I know now … I’d study economics.’”

“I wouldn’t know anything about that,” Lucas confessed. “Sounds kinda … dry. Maybe you oughta talk to your mom.”

“You know what she thinks,” Letty said. “She’s already writing my essay for medical school. She wants me to take some surgical assistant classes at the VoTech and assist her in some surgeries next summer. She says she can fix it. But I just, uh, I like getting in the truck and running around town.”

“You like watching surgery.”

“Yeah, but in a news way,” she said. “I’m not sure I’d be interested in doing it,” she said. “Mom says every case is different, but to me, they all look a lot alike. I can’t see myself doing that for forty years.”

“So talk to your pals at Channel Three,” Lucas said. “My feeling is, TV’s like the cops: it’s interesting, but it can get old, and pretty quick.”

“Maybe I could be an actress,” she suggested.

“Ohhh … shit.”

At ten o’clock that night, Lucas got a call from a Mexican guy who’d been hassled by St. Paul cops for running an unlicensed, backroom bar out of his house. Lucas heard about it through a friend, one thing led to another, Lucas talked to the cops, and the pressure went away: the Mexican guy knew everybody, and was too valuable to hassle about a little under-the-counter tequila.

He said, “I talked to a guy today who talks to everybody, like I do, and he said there were some bad people in town from Mexico.”

“Yeah? Who’s this guy?”

“His name is Daniel. I think his last name is Castle. Something like that. But he knows the St. Paul police….”

The caller didn’t know much more than that, so Lucas rang off and called a St. Paul cop named Billy Andrews. “I’m looking for a guy named Daniel Castle, some kind of hustler around town-”

“That’d be Daniel Castells. What’d he do?”

“Nothing but talk. But we’re looking around for some bad Mexicans, and he told a friend of mine that there were some bad Mexicans in town. I understand you guys know him.”

“This about the Brooks case?”

“Yeah.”

“Let me check around. You don’t want him spooked.”

“No. All we want at this point is a quiet chat.”

“I’ll get back to you. Probably tomorrow morning,” Andrews said.

Lucas went to bed, thinking about the phone call. A little movement?

Maybe.

But he didn’t dream about the killers. He dreamed about the tweekers.