Stolen Prey

4

The three Mexican killers were driving an Alamo rental car they’d gotten at El Paso International Airport. They’d driven it hard, two days straight, north out of El Paso, up I-25 through Albuquerque and Santa Fe and Denver, then I-76 to I-80 to Des Moines, and I-35 north, the only car on the highway that never exceeded the speed limit. They’d stopped only for gas and to pee and eat at McDonald’s; they had a trunk full of guns and a couple of spare license plates. If a cop had stopped them and gotten too curious, they’d have killed him and gotten off the highway and changed the plates.

When they got to St. Paul they had intended to stay with a man who came from a village in Sonora, but when they got to the man’s home, the house was dark and locked up. Not knowing the neighborhood, or the level of local police surveillance, they walked away, made some phone calls, and wound up at the Wee Blue Inn.

The next day, they stole a van and switched plates with a similar van, as an extra layer of security, and the day after that, slaughtered the Brooks family. Nothing came of the murders, and they were told to sit tight.

They had been trying to get in touch with the Sonoran, and when they did, he was in Georgia, delivering some workers to a tire-recapping company. He said he’d misunderstood their arrival date. These things happen, hey? He told them a key was hidden under a rock to the right of the front door, and they were welcome to the house. They moved in after dark on their third day in the Twin Cities, the day after they’d slaughtered the Brooks family.

Then they sat and waited for more instructions. Every few hours, they’d go out to the backyard, turn on a satellite phone, and talk to a man they called the Big Voice. The Brooks family, they told the Big Voice from Mexico, hadn’t known where the money went. They were quite certain of that. If the Brookses didn’t know, they were confronted with a mystery. How should they work that out? They weren’t exactly detectives. Big Voice got back to them and said, “Stay out of sight, but be ready. We will send help.”

The three-El Uno, El Dos, and El Tres-had all been named Juan by their parents, and were all cousins to one another. Because they had the same job at the same time and place, they became El Juan Uno, El Juan Dos, and El Juan Tres, or One, Two, and Three.

They were young men, the youngest still in his teens, the oldest only twenty-four, but even the youngest had been killing for five years. They were not overly bright, were poorly educated and a long way from sophisticated. They knew four things well: guns, cars, road maps, and video games. In their temporary living quarters, they had a theater-quality television equipped with a PlayStation, and two cases of Budweiser.

They gathered around the PlayStation and wrecked a lot of cars, and shot up a lot of aliens, hooting and laughing at the chaos. They didn’t talk about the Brooks family, because the Brooks family was dead, and therefore irrelevant. Uno and Dos and Tres simply waited, in the cool of the air-conditioning, washed by the slightly stale breezes of Real Housewives of New Jersey and Dancing with the Stars reruns, the artificial excitement of the shooter games, a bagful of real guns by their feet.

Tres was the odd one out, the youngest, and the one for whom both the others had the greatest affection. Tres was not entirely of the world. He could kill as efficiently as anyone else, but he talked with God and other spirits, and went to church when he could.

The spirits lived in churches. All churches. He could find his dead baby sister in Dallas as easily as in Juarez. She was always there, playing around the feet of the plaster Virgin.

There were evil spirits in the churches as well, mean old priests and nuns ready to stick their claws in your neck. Tres was afraid of them, but he went anyway, and always to confession on Saturday afternoons. He confessed all of his sins, down to the smallest verbal transgression, with the exception of those committed on behalf of the LCN. Always, “I took the Lord’s name in vain, three times,” but never “I carved his eyeballs out with a pocketknife.”

When he was done, he scuttled out of the churches, sweating and shaking, but clean.

His uncle had brought him to the LCN when he was fourteen, said that he could do anything, but “This boy is a little crazy. Not a problem, but something you should know.”

A little craziness was not a problem with the LCN. So he talked to ghosts? There were worse things in the world. And, with a good pistol, the boy could shoot the heart out of a peso coin at twenty feet. Also, he loved his mother greatly, and knew that if he ever said a word to the Federales, his employers would cut his mother’s head off. He was ultimately trustworthy.

So the three Mexicans sat and played with the toys, and Tres would take his personal pistol out sometimes and stroke it and speak to it, and then Big Voice called and said they had another target.

“A gay boy,” Big Voice said.

Inspector David Rivera inspected his room at the Radisson Plaza. It was okay, he decided, not great; a faint odor of disinfectant lingered in the air, mixed with the scent of thousands of Golden Gopher supporters, their beer and potato chips.

He had checked both himself and Martinez into separate rooms. After he’d looked at the first one, he turned and handed the other key to her and said, “I won’t need you anymore tonight.”

She’d nodded and left.

When she was gone, Rivera went to the window and looked out, then stepped back to his bag, unzipped the top compartment, and took out a cell phone. He carried it to the window, waited for it to come up: and he could see a satellite. He punched in a number and a man on the other end said, “David.”

Rivera said, in Spanish, “I’m here. I was taken to the crime scene. The Americans already are looking for Mexican involvement, and Martinez told them that it looks like LCN. We’ve given them the six faces, which they will put on television.”

“Do they have any solid leads?”

“No. Not that they told me about,” Rivera said. “The team leader on the investigation does not like us. He thinks we are talking to the cartels. I think he will hold back information.”

“I have two names for you. Good people, I’m told. They will meet you at the Garzas’. They might have useful information, if you can get away from the Americans.”

“Getting away won’t be a problem,” Rivera said. “The Americans are polite, but they know almost nothing. They don’t care if we’re around, or not. I will go to any crime scenes they find, and to meetings in the morning. Otherwise, I will work on my own.”

“Call me often,” the man said. “The names, addresses, and telephone numbers of the contacts will be in your home file.”

“I’ll see to it.”

He rang off, plugged in his laptop, went online, went to a Facebook location, copied the names, addresses, and phone numbers to an encrypted file on the laptop. When he was done, he looked in the minibar, took out miniature bottles of rum and blended whiskey, and a bottle of Coca-Cola, mixed himself two drinks, and drank them both. Looked at the telephone.

The alcohol slowed him down a bit; he was hungry, he thought. He called room service, ordered a steak and salad, then went into the bathroom and showered. The food came, and he ate it, looked at the telephone, lay on the bed, and finally picked up the phone.

And sighed.

Another sin, he thought.

He called Martinez’s room and said, “I’ve changed my mind. I’ll need you tonight.”

Kristina Sanderson looked at Jacob Kline, who was lying facedown on his bed, wearing nothing but a grayed pair of white Jockey briefs. His bed smelled like sweat and other bodily fluids. She said, “I can’t possibly know what it’s like from the inside, but I can tell you that there isn’t any doubt about it, looking at you from the outside. You’re more cheerful, you get around, you eat-”

“Can’t think,” Kline said. They were talking about the possibility that he might go back on his antidepressant meds.

“You don’t have to think,” she said. “All you have to do is be there. Skipping work could make it look like you’re hiding something. Like you’re guilty. If the police came down on you, do you really think you’re in any shape to resist?”

“Yeah, I could. I think they’d look at me and talk to me and give up,” Kline said. “I can handle it. I’m like one of those demonstrators who goes limp in the street. I go mentally limp. And, I am guilty.” They both thought about that for a few seconds, and then Kline added, “I could kill myself.”

“I don’t see it,” Sanderson said. She sometimes thought he played with his own depression, deliberately deepening it, walking right up to the edge of the pit and looking in. If he looked too long, he might kill himself, and she couldn’t have that, not at the moment. “The thing is, if you kill yourself, that’d look like guilt, too, and then they’d get all over the rest of us. So if you’re going to kill yourself, do it on your own time.”

Kline groaned, and did a low crawl across the bed to the top end, which was pushed against the bottom of a window. He parted the venetian blinds and looked out. “Still light,” he said. And, “I’m not going to kill myself, yet. Though, I have to say, it’s an attractive option. I just don’t want to hurt myself when I do it, or screw up and turn myself into a vegetable. All the painless and safe ways, like pills, are such a drag to organize.”

He let go of the blind, rolled onto his back, and scratched his balls. “I guess I better get up.”

“Get cleaned up, a little bit anyway. Okay? Get downtown in time for Don to see you tonight. He’ll be there until eight. Give him the whole depression bit, tell him you’ll work your regular shift tomorrow.”

Jacob pulled the briefs off, scratched himself again. Sanderson and Kline had done a couple of overnights, and, in any case, she had slept with a large enough number of men that she was no longer impressed by the sight of a dangling penis; nor was Jacob trying to impress her. He was just the kind of a guy who didn’t much care if he was naked or not. “Ah, Christ,” he said. “The idea of going in there…”

“Three more weeks, and you can quit,” she said. “We worked it all out. You tell them you’ve got to get treatment, and you check into a facility. Nobody will argue with you. Sit there for a month. Talk to a shrink, and get better. When you get out, you tell Don that you’re going to quit to travel through Europe. Then, quit and travel through Europe. You always talk about it.”

“Yeah, but when I actually get to planning it, it seems like such a drag.”

“So go somewhere else. Like not Mexico. And get dressed. You need to talk to Don tonight. He has to see you. We can cover for you, if he sees you.” Don was their mutual supervisor.

Kline had helped steal the money because the theft was an intellectual challenge. He didn’t really care much about getting rich. He was too depressed to care-what would he do, go shopping? He didn’t even drive.

To the others, he was beginning to look like a threat, a loose cannon. What can you do with a crook who, if caught, wouldn’t even try to run?

Sanderson, on the other hand, was a woman with a plan. Her mother had early Alzheimer’s and lived in a crappy nursing home paid for by the state. If Sanderson had the money, she’d like to spend a few hundred dollars a month for an upgrade in her care.

Then there were the animals. She had her eye on a 160-acre semi-wooded acreage in southeast Minnesota. The owners wanted a half-million dollars for it, which she didn’t have. She actually didn’t have half of a thousand dollars, not at the moment. If she could get the half-million dollars, or even qualify for a mortgage on it, she would start a farm for rescue horses and rescue dogs. Maybe rescue chickens-she had a soft spot for good-looking chickens.

She lay awake at night, thinking of herself as a kind of saint, surrounded by the animals, and the souls of the animals, she’d saved. With her various instabilities, her schizophrenia, her OCD, she could actually experience the farm, the animals, and her impending sainthood.

Like, the karma cash-out was enormous.

So she didn’t want the money for herself … it wasn’t like she was greedy.

The movement toward the theft began casually, when Kline noticed the odd ebb and flow of cash in the Bois Brule account while he was working at Polaris National. Money would flow in from Bois Brule, but always in individual amounts of less than ten thousand dollars, which made him suspicious. Amounts of less than ten thousand were not reportable to the government.

Then the money would leave again, in much larger amounts, on its way to a variety of obscure investment funds. Where it went from there, he didn’t know-but he did know that as much as twenty-five million dollars a month flowed into and out of the account. He also noticed other oddities: the money was dead for each calendar month, earning minimal interest. The large amounts moving out always moved on the last business day of the month.

Almost, he thought, as if everything were on autopilot.

He did an experiment, which would have gotten him fired if he’d been caught. He deliberately entered an error on the account, sending money to a fake account he set up inside the bank. He heard nothing-and a week before the usual transfer, he put the money back.

The next month, he moved more money, a lot of it, into the fake account. He waited even deeper into the month before replacing it. Again he heard nothing. He carefully erased his tracks and thought it over.

Interesting. The account was on some kind of autopilot. He could think of only one reason that might be: it was being run with an eye to minimal involvement.

He filed the information in the back of his head. The idea of stealing some of the money occurred to him right away, but planning a theft, working out all the contingencies, all the details, was a total drag. So he didn’t do it.

A few weeks later, he realized he was about to be fired for absenteeism and general neglect of duties. Before they could do it, he set up a back door into the bank accounts that would allow him to come in from the outside. He had no specific plan in mind, he just did it.

During the exit interview, the firing supervisor was kind but firm. Kline was the one who showed a streak of nastiness. “I will not be fired,” he said. “I will resign. I want decent recommendations when I go for a new job. If you don’t agree, I’ll sue you for firing me, claiming you did it because of my well-documented disability. I will get my disabled friends to march naked outside the bank. I will shit in the revolving door. I am not joking.”

After considering their options, they gave him a decent severance and a good-enough, if not hearty, letter of recommendation. After he spent the severance, he got a job at Hennepin National, where he met Turicek, who’d had a previous life as a minor Lithuanian criminal while studying computer programming at Kaunas University of Technology, and Sanderson.

Turicek had mostly done credit-card scams around Western Europe, and thought it was criminal not to steal what you could. Turicek didn’t think that working out a huge theft was a drag. Not at all. He came from a country with a glorious history in chess-playing.

Turicek and Kline worked out the details, lounging about the office, and after work, in bars. Turicek would propose a method, Kline would shoot it down; if he couldn’t shoot it down, it was listed as a possibility. Sanderson had to be brought in because there was no way she wouldn’t know what was happening, and the two men were pleased to learn of her animal-rescue dreams.

The problem was moving the stolen money into a form they could use, and could get at. Turicek knew a man who knew a man who’d once led a raid on an American prepaid credit-card company, stealing some thirty-two million dollars over a weekend. They’d hacked into the company and changed the withdrawal limit on the cards to the highest level allowed, which was nine hundred and ninety-nine dollars, and when the limit was reached, simply did an automatic refill.

They then used hundreds of zombie cards, and after business hours on a Friday, began the withdrawals.

“A cool deal,” Turicek said, “but the problem is, you need a major gang to pull it off. To get that money over the weekend, they had to make thirty-two thousand withdrawals. How would the four of us do that? They used hundreds of people. We’ve got four.”

He brought in Albitis, whom he’d met at a job in Ukraine. She had some experience in moving money around the Middle East, from accounts in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan through Israeli banks, which was not commonly done. She also had an acquisitive streak. When Turicek called her and mentioned an amount, she started a list, headed by names like Malibu and Le Marais, like Porsche and Mercedes and Harry Winston and Cartier.

Albitis was their professional, the one who knew how to do it.

She told them, “Stealing this money is like kidnapping. The big problem is, collecting the take-where the money goes from legal to illegal. Somebody has to be there, with his hand out, and that’s where you will get caught. If you try to take this money in cash, people will notice. Bank tellers notice you if you take twenty-five hundred in cash. If we steal twenty million, as you say we can, and we put it in a bank, or lots of banks, and then if we withdraw twenty-five hundred each time, we’d have to go to a bank eight thousand times to get the money out. And we’d be on camera. And even if you got it, what would you do with it? If you want to buy a million-dollar house, you can’t show up with a suitcase full of hundred-dollar bills. They’d call the FBI.”

“So what do we do?” Sanderson asked.

“We funnel the money into a few big accounts that look like businesses, and we use those accounts to buy gold.”

“Gold?”

Minnesotans don’t know gold, Albitis thought.

Albitis was a little impatient, explaining the fundamentals. “Look. We take the money out of this bank account, twenty million dollars, which I’ll only believe when I see it.”

“You’ll see it,” Turicek said.

“Okay. When we get it, we have to move it. Move it fast. We send it through a line of accounts we’ve set up in advance. Onshore banks, offshore banks, Lebanese banks. From there, we send it to Wells Fargo, to some made-up account. Syrian Investments Limited, International Marketing of Lebanon. The problem is, the FBI can walk right down that chain. The longer we make the chain, the longer it will take them to do it, but they can do it.”

“If we make the chain too long, wouldn’t it take us a long time to get the money to Wells Fargo?” Kline had asked.

Albitis poked a finger at him. “Don’t interrupt-but you are correct. So we send the money to Florida, then jump to the Caymans, then to Lebanon, then back to the U.S., to the fake account. With the right banks, we can do that in four days, and it will take the FBI two weeks to walk down it. But, in the end, we can’t take the money as a check, because we still have to cash it, and nobody is going to cash a check for twenty million dollars. Nobody. Or even twenty checks for a million each. They’re going to want to see all kinds of ID and background details and fingerprints. They’ll take pictures, they’ll record serial numbers, they’ll inform the feds. There just isn’t a convenient way to get twenty million dollars in cash.”

“What difference does gold make?” Sanderson asked.

“Okay. Gold. All kinds of people buy it and move it around for their own reasons, a lot of them legitimate. Like making gold jewelry. Women in India keep their wealth hanging around their necks and wrists. People in the United States put it in their basement because they think the end of the world is coming. People in Russia put it in their basement because the end of the world is already here. The thing about gold coins is, they can’t be tracked. There’s no real paper trail, any more than there is for candy bars. Gold coins have no serial numbers. And, there are gold dealers all over the United States, and everyplace else. If you have the money, they give you the gold. They’re dealers, not banks. When we get the gold, we’ve broken the chain.”

“Gonna be a lot of gold,” Kline said.

Albitis nodded, and her eyes turned up as she ran the numbers. “Mmm … three hundred and sixty kilos of gold, about eight hundred of your pounds, which, right now, is worth a little less than sixty thousand dollars a kilo.”

“But then we’ve got to sell the gold,” Sanderson said. “And we’re stuck with dollars again.”

Albitis shook her head. “No. We’ve got the gold, and our trail goes cold. We’re free of the banking system, and the paperwork. Then we start businesses in, say, Nigeria, or maybe Brazil-”

“I don’t want to go to Nigeria,” Kline said.

“You won’t have to,” Albitis said. “I know the man who’ll set it up. You’ll make up a job with a fancy name, with fancy letterhead paper and business cards-Kline Petroleum Futures, Kline Oil Mobilities. Whatever. You’ll set up a bank account and then start selling the gold through a merchant in Lagos, who will feed dollars into your business account in return for your gold coins, at a slight discount of, say, five percent.”

“So the merchant gets a mil,” Turicek said.

“Correct. We take out twenty million, and nineteen million shows up in our bank accounts, which have no connection whatever to the accounts used to take the original money.”

“But we have to live in Nigeria?” Kline asked. He was stuck on the idea.

“No. No. Listen to me. You can live anywhere you want. Look: we won’t even have to get the gold to Lagos. My guy has contacts here in the U.S. We drop the coins with them, the dollars pop up in the Lagos account.”

“Why couldn’t we do that with cash?” Sanderson asked.

Albitis looked at her as though she were retarded. “We could, if we had the cash. But I keep telling you, it’s getting the cash that’s impossible. It’s getting from a bank account to dollar bills that we can’t do. But we can get from a bank account to gold. A gold dealer is a store. Buying gold is like buying a toaster. There’s no trail. That’s all we’re talking about: killing the trail.”

“Okay,” Sanderson said. It’d take a while. “I guess.”

“Anyway, when we’ve moved the gold, you hire some legitimate accountants to repatriate your money,” Albitis said. “In the end, you have several million apparently legitimate dollars in your bank account. You pay whatever taxes you need to pay. The gold disappears into the souks. Nobody ever sees it again, except in rings and bracelets and so on.”

“What soup?” Sanderson asked.

“Soup?” Albitis frowned.

“You said the gold would disappear into the soup.”

“Souk,” Albitis said. “Souk. A market.” She looked at Turicek. “What kind of people are these two? Have they ever been out of Minneapolis?”

Turicek nodded at Kline and said, “Sleepy,” and then at Sanderson and said, “Dopey,” and tapped his own chest. “Grumpy.”

“And I’m Greedy,” Albitis said. “Okay. Now all we need is Snow White.”

Albitis and Turicek were solid with the deal. Sanderson and Kline were a little shaky. Kline had been somewhat satisfied by simply knowing that he could do it; he didn’t necessarily need to do it. The money was attractive, not mandatory. But they were not particularly strong people, and in the end, despite misgivings, they went along.

Now, with that family dead out in Wayzata, things looked a little bleaker. Before, Sanderson had mostly thought of ways they could do it; now she began to think of ways they could get caught. Turicek and Albitis could disappear into the former Soviet Union and probably be safe enough. But where would she go? Duluth?

Kline was another problem, she thought. He was erratic, and it was hard to tell what he might do, if the cops came around to talk to him. He had a weird sense of humor, a grotesque sense of humor. If he started trying to play games with the cops … And who knew, maybe he’d find prison comforting. He always said he never had a real home.

She had to think about all of that.

Lucas copied David Rivera’s LCN files and photos to his computer, then gave the thumb drive to Shaffer to read. Shaffer said he’d put the six LCN mug shots on television that night and ask people to keep an eye out. When Lucas was done with that, he made a few more calls on the case, learned nothing useful, then went home early and collected Letty and a couple of pistols.

Lucas was an excellent shot. Part of that came from being a good athlete, with the kind of long-term training in hockey and basketball that allowed him to quickly grasp the essentials of accurate rifle and pistol work. Just as, in basketball, there had to be an instant of focus before the ball was released, a focus that excluded almost everything but the basket itself, good shooting required that same moment of mental exclusion, that moment when you saw nothing but the target. The athletic background also taught him that patience was needed to get good in any difficult endeavor. He developed the patience.

He wasn’t particularly fond of guns, but he was effective, and he believed that since guns were one of the ubiquitous tools of violence in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, it behooved one to know how to use them.

Weather disagreed; Letty did not.

Letty, in her previous life, had been severely neglected. She’d grown up in an isolated house, far out in the countryside in northwestern Minnesota. She had, at times, literally been required to hunt for her dinner. She also had been a fur trapper, a preteen wandering in rubber boots and a Goodwill parka around the muskrat swamps of northwest Minnesota, trying to make a buck. Then her mother was murdered, and she met Lucas, who eventually adopted her; in the course of that case, Letty had shot a cop. On two different occasions-the same crooked cop. She had no regrets or second thoughts whatsoever.

On this afternoon, they got Lucas’s Colt.45 Gold Cup and Beretta 92F, and drove up to the St. Paul police pistol range in Maplewood, where a half dozen guys were going through annual testing. Lucas had a standing arrangement with the department to use the range, and had gotten a quiet okay to bring Letty along.

On the way up, they talked about her school, and about the Wayzata case, and Lucas gave her the details that he had.

“Nothing there for me,” she said, thinking about the possibilities for her television job. “The cop reporters got all that stuff.”

“I talked to Jen, and she said you were working on some Apple computer thing.”

“Yeah, boring, boring,” she said. “I’m doing a review of favorite laptops of the rich and fashionable kids, for the next school year.” She pitched up her voice, “Oh, my God, she’s got only four gigs of RAM.”

“Girls don’t talk like that,” Lucas ventured.

“They do now. Everybody’s got a Mac, an iPhone, and maybe an iPad, and God help you if you show up with a Dell,” Letty said. “Then you’re really socially f-worded.”

“Really.”

At the range, they put on ear and eye protection, got the okay from the range officer, and began working with the.45, and then the Beretta. The Beretta offered more firepower, in terms of sheer number of rounds, but Lucas had sent the.45 to a Kansas gunsmith to be tuned, and it was more accurate. Because of the relatively mild recoil, and smaller grip, Letty had no problem handling it.

“If you’re shooting for real, shoot at the smallest spot you can see clearly,” Lucas said, as he was looking at one of her targets. The bullet holes were scattered in a loose group around the center of the target. “A button is good. The smaller the aiming point, the tighter your group will be, but you still want a substantial target behind the aim point. Like the chest triangle: nipples and navel. An eye is small, and you naturally look at an eye, but the overall target, the head, is small, and it’s always moving. The nipple-navel triangle doesn’t move so much. Whatever you do, you don’t want to just start whaling away, because if you do, you’ll have a whaled-away group.”

“I knew that,” she said. “When I’d kill a rat, I’d always aim at that little white spot in their eye. ’Course, I was using a twenty-two, from two inches. Still like that gun.”

“Lot to like about it,” Lucas agreed. “Saved your life.”

He got into his gun bag and brought out a round red sticker about the size of a dime and stuck it to the center of the target. “Shoot at that. Focus on it. Even try to focus on the middle of the spot, if you can.”

She did, and her group tightened up dramatically. “Interesting,” she said.

“Let’s do it again,” Lucas said. “Then we’ll run through the slap, rack, and fire.”

“Always hurts my hand.”

“You need the training,” he said. “And what’s a little pain?”