Stolen Prey

7

Tres couldn’t stop talking about his conversation with Jesus and the saints, and his continual reflection began to get on the others’ nerves, and finally Dos told him to shut up. Tres smiled and said, “I’m to die soon, why should I listen to you?”

“Because if you don’t, you will die immediately.” They all laughed at that, and Tres shut up.

They hung out and watched television until midnight, then carried Pruess’s body out through the side door to the driveway, and heaved it into the back of the Tahoe. They planned to go out far enough that the body, if discovered, wouldn’t bring the police into their neighborhood, and then throw it in a dumpster, and hope that it was hauled away to the dump, or the incinerator, or wherever the yanquis got rid of their trash.

Nothing worked quite right for them.

There were dumpsters everywhere, but it was hard to find one where they could safely and discreetly lift the lid and deposit a two-hundred-pound body. Especially since the body, wrapped in its blue tarp, looked more like a dead body than it would have if it’d been in a coffin. Somebody would look at the bundle and say, “Well, there’s the head, and there’s the feet, and that thick part is the butt….”

Another problem was that the body wasn’t easy to handle: it carried like two hundred pounds of Jell-O. They found an obscure dumpster behind an office building, but after pulling up in the car, realized that none of them were tall enough to lift the lid on the dumpster. That got them laughing, but didn’t make things any smoother.

They laughed less when they found one short enough that they could lift the lid-barely-and then found they couldn’t both hold the lid up and lift the mushy body high enough to get it inside. They were strong little guys, but it was two hundred pounds of mushy dead weight. They kept looking.

Eventually they found a shorter dumpster on Upper St. Dennis Road, outside a driveway where a house was being remodeled. After driving past a few times, they quickly hopped out, in the deep dark night, popped open the lid, and threw the body in.

Five seconds later, they were gone.

Five hours later, Muffy St. Clair, a dog, stopped just down the street to poop. Her owner, Bonnie St. Clair, picked the poop up in a plastic baggie and carried it over to the dumpster to throw it in. Pruess’s body-bundle was folded into the dumpster, feet and head up, butt down, bent in the middle. It took a few seconds, then Bonnie said, “Jesus fuckin’ Christ, Muffy, it’s a body.”

She ran home to call the cops, and after a while, a St. Paul homicide cop named Roger Morris called Lucas, who had planned to sleep in late on a Saturday morning.

“Somebody tore the guy to pieces,” Morris said. “It looks like what happened to those people in Wayzata, if those rumors are true.”

“Half hour,” Lucas said. “Did you call Bob Shaffer?”

“Naw, he’s an asshole,” Morris said. “You can call him if you want.”

“Did the dead guy have any ID on him?”

“We haven’t completely unwrapped him yet. He’s wrapped in a plastic tarp.”

“Well, his name is probably Richard Pruess, and he was a vice president for Polaris National Bank over in Minneapolis. He was probably killed because some Mexican narcos think he stole a bunch of money from them.”

“Huh. So I got nothing left to detect,” Morris said.

“You could detect where the killers are,” Lucas said. “We have no idea.”

“Okay. Get your ass over here. And call Shaffer.”

Lucas did, but Shaffer lived in one of the far north suburbs, and his wife said he was out running. “He left his cell phone here. He doesn’t like to be disturbed,” Shaffer’s wife said.

“Well, tell him to call me,” Lucas said. “I need to disturb him.”

Then he called Rivera, who was eating breakfast, and gave him an address, and headed for the shower. Thirty-one minutes after he took the call, he pulled up to the St. Paul crime-scene tape and got out of the Porsche, held his ID up for the rookie who was minding the tape, and went through the line.

Morris, a fat black guy in a pink dress shirt and black slacks, was looking with discouragement into the dumpster, while a crime-scene guy walked around the area with a video camera. Morris’s partner, who was standing on a nearby front porch, talking to the home owner, raised a hand, and Lucas waved back. Lucas walked up to Morris and said, “I really like you in pink, sweetie.”

“Fuck you. You don’t look this good in your dreams.” He tipped his head toward the dumpster. The body was still folded inside, but had been partially unwrapped.

Lucas looked in, winced, turned back to Morris and said, “Same guys.”

“Yeah, I thought maybe. I saw all that stuff on TV. They cut his fingers off at the joints, and the pieces are rolling around like unchewed chunks of Dubble Bubble gum.”

“Nice simile,” Lucas said. “Kinda literary.”

“I’m a literary kind of guy, but … who’re these people?” Morris was looking back over Lucas’s shoulder.

Lucas turned and saw Rivera and Martinez walking up to the crime-scene line. He shouted down to the cop, “Let them in,” and said to Morris, “Mexican cops. They’re up here to observe, see what they can pick up.”

Rivera walked up, looking unsettled: a kind of after-sex look, and Lucas glanced at Martinez, who looked a little glassy herself, and thought, Hmm. Rivera had told him he was married to a nice hometown girl.

Rivera said, “Thank you for the call,” and Lucas introduced him to Morris. Rivera looked in the dumpster, then called Martinez up with a crook of his finger, and they both looked in for a moment. Then Martinez turned to Morris and said, “This is the Agua Prieta group. The same people.”

“Mexicans?” Morris asked.

Rivera nodded and said, “Yes. We think somebody robbed one of their drug laundries, and they are either trying to get their money back, or are on a punishment mission.”

“Well, hell. I am definitely nonplussed,” Morris said.

“As we all are,” Lucas said. “Let’s find a place to sit down, and we’ll fill you in.”

“One thing,” Morris said. “We found a clue.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Really. C’mere.” He led the way to his car, opened the door, took out a big plastic bag. “This was inside the wrapper right by the face. It’s a napkin with a smear of blood on it, and what smells like a little dog shit.”

“Dog shit?” Lucas, Rivera, and Martinez were looking through the transparent plastic.

“The body was found when a woman opened the dumpster to throw in a bag of dog shit. I guess they all go around picking up dog shit in this neighborhood,” Morris said. “Anyway, she threw it in, and it landed on the head part … but when we unwrapped, we found this. Looks like somebody used it to wipe up some blood or something. It’s a napkin from Zapp’s.”

Lucas said, “Jesus, it is. It’s like a clue. Like somebody dropped a matchbook from a bar.”

“Whatever,” Morris said. “Anyway, the crime-scene guys are gonna work this, and I’m gonna run over to Zapp’s. You’re welcome to come, if you want. It’s as much your case as mine.”

Lucas was in Zapp’s every month or so. He looked at his watch. “Not open yet.”

“I called John Sappolini, he’s gonna meet us there. He’s calling his crews in.”

“Let’s go,” Lucas said.

Morris rode over with Lucas, and Lucas filled him in on the murders in Wayzata. “I’ll send you the book. But it’s the same guys.”

“I don’t want that shit starting up here,” Morris said.

“I hear you,” Lucas said.

Shaffer called, Lucas told him about Pruess, and Shaffer said he’d be down as soon as he could make it. Lucas gave him Morris’s cell phone number, but didn’t mention that he was riding along.

When he got off, Morris said, “I wish I wasn’t gonna be working with him.”

“Something personal?”

“Just style. He’s one of those ball-bearing guys, who goes ricocheting around banging into people,” Morris said. “He’s got no sense of humor. No style.”

“He’s sort of a cowboy guy,” Lucas said. “He and his wife used to teach line dancing. They came down to the office a few times and gave lessons to guys who wanted them, and their wives. Everybody was wearing cowboy boots.”

“Now, see, that’s something I didn’t know,” Morris said. “I can’t believe that guy can dance. Not that line dancing is really dancing.”

“Of course it is, and it’s very romantic,” Lucas said. “I actually got addicted to it, for a while.”

Morris bit: “Really? I never would’ve thought you were that kind of guy.”

Lucas nodded. “Got so bad my shrink put me in a two-step program.”

Morris tried not to laugh, but finally let it out, and they laughed for a block or two, until Lucas’s cell phone rang. He looked at the screen: Virgil Flowers.

“What’s up?” Lucas asked.

“Got a minute?”

“Yeah, I’m just riding around with Roger Morris. He’s wearing a hot-pink short-sleeved dress shirt.”

“Tell him he looks fabulous,” Flowers said.

Lucas passed the word, then said, “Roger gives you the sign of the horns, and knowing your second ex-wife, he’s probably right. Anyhow…”

“I found out that there are roughly a million riding stables out here, or people with horses, anyway,” Flowers said. “Using my quick intellect, I called up everybody I knew, and I’m starting to get some serious vibes from the Waseca area. Horse people there have seen them. Hauling horse shit on an old Ford flatbed.”

“Man, that’s terrific,” Lucas said. “What’s next?”

“I’m going over there, talk to the various sheriffs, the county agents, anybody else. I don’t have anything definite, though-I’m basically checking in. Wanted you to know I’m not out fishing, even though it is Saturday, and my day off.”

“Hey, Virgil-find them for me. Honest to God, I’ll introduce you to one of my old girlfriends.”

“Thanks anyway,” Flowers said. “But she’d be too old for me. I’ll call you tonight or tomorrow, soon as I get anything.”

“Too old? What the hell…” Flowers was gone.

“What’s that?” Morris said, when Lucas rang off.

“Best news I’ve had all summer,” Lucas said, as they turned into Zapp’s parking lot.

Zapp’s Pizza was a tightly run ship, with good pizza and bread, a bunch of red-vinyl booths in the back, along with a half dozen tables, and, this early in the morning, an empty salad bar. The owner, John Sappolini, was not happy about the napkin, but had no trouble talking to police. “Half the cops in St. Paul eat here,” he said.

He’d once told Lucas that he called the place Zapp’s because his Wells Fargo small-business counselor suggested he not call it Sapp’s.

Sappolini had two crews working eight-hour shifts, from ten o’clock in the morning until two o’clock in the morning, with the restaurant open from eleven o’clock until one. After the call from Morris, he’d called both crews in. He had the first ones brew up a few gallons of coffee, and Lucas and Morris sat at one of the tables and everybody pulled chairs around to talk about the situation; Rivera and Martinez sat out on the edge.

They’d been talking for fifteen minutes, with late-arriving members of the crew straggling in as they talked. One of the last ones in was a short, wide-shouldered man who listened for one minute and then said, “There was a short Mexican kid in here yesterday afternoon with a gun in his belt. I think.”

Lucas looked at him and asked, “You think?”

“Couldn’t see it because he was wearing an iguana shirt,” the man said.

“Guayabera,” Morris said.

The guy shook his head. “No, iguana. It’s like a golf shirt, but instead of like that polo pony, you know, it had an iguana on it.”

“Yes, they sell them in Mexico, on the coast,” Rivera said.

The pizza guy said, “See?”

“Si,” Rivera said.

“So what else about him?” Lucas asked.

“He was just a kid, and he was looking for a place to pray while he waited for the pizzas, so I sent him down to the cathedral. He went, or at least he said he went, and he said he saw the big windows, and Jesus spoke to him.”

“Spoke to him,” Lucas repeated.

“Yeah, he said Jesus spoke to him, and Jesus told him he was going to die soon.”

Morris looked at Lucas, and they simultaneously shrugged. From the back, Rivera asked, “How many pizzas did he buy?”

“Two. Extra large.”

Rivera said, “Enough for three or four.”

The pizza guy didn’t know whether the kid had arrived on foot or had come by car, but had the impression that he’d been on foot. “I don’t know why, it’s just an impression.”

Morris: “Is a cold-blooded killer going to church? I don’t think so.”

“But you’d be wrong,” Rivera said. “Some of these bangers, they go to church every Sunday and pray for their souls. And because their mothers make them go.”

“Then, if he is one of the guys, they’d be holed up around here somewhere,” Morris said. They all looked out the window.

“I’ll tell you what,” Lucas said, when they looked back. “We’ve probably got DNA on these guys, we probably have at least one fingerprint and maybe more, they’ve committed at least five torture-murders of the worst kind. If we catch them, they’re going away forever, so they’ve got nothing to lose by shooting as many cops as they see. They’ve probably got an arsenal with them, and they’ve had lots of practice.”

Morris said, “Huh. Better talk to SWAT.”

“Better talk to everybody,” Lucas said. “You don’t want a lot of patrol cops rolling around sticking their noses into everything. If somebody finds them just sort of spontaneously, he’ll probably be killed. I think you put together a good crew, start working the neighborhood, but you gotta be discreet. You don’t want to scare them off, but you don’t want to get anybody killed, either. No impetuosity.”

“No impetuosity,” Morris repeated.

When they’d extracted everything they could from the Zapp’s crews, they broke up. Lucas headed over to the BCA, and Morris went back to the murder scene-from there he’d head to police headquarters, which was about five minutes away, to arrange for a careful survey of the neighborhoods around Zapp’s.

Rivera and Martinez went back to their car, and Rivera dug his pistol out from under the front seat and said to Martinez, “You drive.”

“To where?”

“Up and down these streets. If he walked, he is not far. We’ll circle the streets, go out for a kilometer-”

She said, “This is crazy. We-”

“We know the car. This neighborhood, most of the cars are on the street,” Rivera said. “I predict that we will find them.”

“Then what?”

“Then we will see,” Rivera said.

“You are too crazy,” Martinez said. She bit her lip, as though she feared she’d gone too far.

All Rivera said was, “Drive.”

The neighborhood around Zapp’s Pizza was all old. From north to south, it varied from rich, south of Grand Avenue, to increasingly poor, north of Summit Avenue, to poor, next to I-94. Grand Avenue itself was mostly commercial and apartments.

Rivera didn’t think the shooters would be in an apartment. Somebody, he thought, had probably arranged a house. The house wouldn’t be on Summit, because those houses were basically mansions. This would be more discreet, in a neighborhood where people might be a bit more reluctant to ask questions.

The streets stepped back from the expressway were the most likely place, he told Martinez. The faces on the sidewalks were of every shade of black, brown, and white, from African to Scandinavian to Latino and American Indian. The Mexicanos would fit here, he said.

Even so, there were a lot of streets to look at, in the grid around Zapp’s. They started a little after ten o’clock in the morning. Rivera was a little surprised when it took them only three hours to find them; or that they found them at all.

After several false alarms-it seemed that half the people in St. Paul drove oversized SUVs-and a stop for a quick lunch and to fill up the car’s gas tank, they spotted the Tahoe sitting down a driveway, tight between two aging white houses.

“There it is,” Rivera said suddenly. Martinez looked that way, and saw the truck. “There. Keep going, keep driving … Yes, Texas plates.” He was sweating with excitement. “Go to the corner.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Look in the window,” Rivera said. “See what is what.”

“Crazy,” Martinez said. “David, don’t do this.”

“You sound like an American, like Shaffer,” Rivera said. “Pull over, pull over.”

She pulled over and Rivera jacked a round into the chamber of the single-action pistol, and said, “When you see me look at the window, call Lucas. Do not call before you see me look in.”

“David, please, please don’t do this. Let me call the police. You watch them. I will call-”

“I won’t be made a fool. I will look before we call. I’ll know that I am right.”

“All you will do is look in?”

“The situation could develop,” Rivera said. “Be ready.”

“Ah, no, David…” She grabbed his jacket sleeve. “Don’t go, don’t go-”

“Call Lucas when you see me look in,” Rivera said again, and he hopped out. She watched him down the street, a stout man with a dark face behind his sunglasses, his street-side hand under his jacket. He walked right past the house, only glancing at it, but she shook her head. He did not look like a pedestrian: he looked like a cop giving the place the once-over.

Rivera’s heart was pounding like a trip hammer. He gave the house what he thought was a casual glance, went on by. The house was small, shabby, probably built after World War II. He’d seen houses like it in eastern California, in Riverside, in parts of San Diego, and down the coast in Baja.

The house would probably have a living room in the front, he thought, with a hall at one side leading back to a kitchen, a utility room, and a side door. A hall on the other side of the living room would lead back to two bedrooms and a single bath. There’d be a stairway leading to an attic, or a converted third bedroom, under the roof.

A large window looked out at the street from the left side of the front door, and a smaller one from the right. The window on the left had drapes, with a two-inch gap between them. The gap was dark, but there could have been somebody standing back, watching him. The window on the right had venetian blinds, fully lowered. He continued down the block, then came back in a hurry, walking across the lawns of the adjacent houses, close to the front of houses, the gun now in his hand.

He came into the house on the side with the venetian blind, and clambered up the concrete stoop. There was a small head-height window in the front door, and the door looked weak. He stood beside the door, unmoving, listening.

He heard laughter, and the sounds of a video game, not far behind the door. They were probably sitting on a couch in the living room, he thought. At least two, but from the jumble of voices, he thought probably three.

And the door looked really weak-dry rot in the wood, flaking paint. He risked a peek at the door window, just his left eye, drifting slowly across a corner of the glass. There was no entryway: the door opened directly on the living room, and he could see one man, and the shoulder of another, on the couch. The man he could see had a game remote in his hand and was looking to his right, at what must have been the TV. Then a third man, just his arm and shoulder, came into view, for a second or two. He was also watching the game. Two of the faces were from the mug shots.

He had them.

He turned and looked at the car, and saw Martinez looking at him. He put his hand to his ear, gesturing “phone,” and she waved, a flash of her hand.

Rivera got his guts together, stood back, took a deep breath. He’d done this before. He was a large man, and strong, and he could kick like a horse.

With one quick move, he shifted back on his right foot, lifted his left, and kicked the door as hard as he could, two inches from the knob. The door exploded open and he was inside, behind the muzzle of the gun.

Inside was chaos, three men scrambling off the couch, a game console and cables and a bag of Cheetos flying, and Rivera screamed at them in Spanish, “Stop! Stop or I’ll kill you! Stop!”

One of the men didn’t stop: Dos had a gun on the back of the couch, and quick as a snake, he reached over for it and got his hand on it and started to swing back to Rivera, but he did it too fast and fumbled the pistol and it went up in the air and landed on the rug with a thump.

They all froze, looked first at the gun and then at Rivera, and Rivera said to Dos, “Too bad for you,” and shot him twice in the heart. To the others: “Raise your hands.”

Uno and Tres raised their hands, and Rivera heard footsteps behind him and saw Martinez coming and called, “Did you call…?”

Martinez came up close behind and took a small revolver out of her purse and put it one inch behind Rivera’s skull and pulled the trigger. The slug blew through the back of his head and emerged at the forehead and Rivera went down, dead as Dos.

Uno and Tres stood, hands still up, stunned, and Martinez said, “You have one-half minute. Get all the guns and money you have, get the telephones, leave everything else, run out to the car and go. Find a motel, not the Wee Blue Inn, the police have been there. Check into a motel, put the guns inside, and your suitcases, and then abandon the car. I will find you one hour to do this. Call the Big Voice and he will tell you where to go after that, will tell you where to get a new car. Tell Big Voice that I will call tonight. Now run, children. RUN.”

They were out of the house in thirty seconds, never looking at Dos’s body, or Rivera’s. As they went out the back door, she handed them the revolver and said, “Take this. Throw it where they’ll never find it. A river.” They took the revolver, threw the bag of guns in the back of the truck, along with their suitcases, backed out of the drive, and were gone.

Martinez took ten seconds, gathering herself, looked at Rivera, and said, “You idiot.” If he’d called for backup, she would have found time to step away, to call the Big Voice to warn the children, to get them out. She shook her head, then turned and ran screaming out the front door, half fell down the steps, went down on the sidewalk, skinning her hands, ricocheted down the empty street. She landed a bit sideways on one of her heels and lost the shoe and let it go, and got on the cell phone and called Lucas and when he answered, screamed, “Help us. David is shot David is shot help us…”

Lucas was working the computer when the call came in, and he listened astonished to the screaming and then shouted at her, “Where? Where are you? Where?”

“I don’t know, near the pizza, near the pizza…”

“Look for a street sign,” he shouted. “Find a green sign at the end of a block.”

She called back a minute later, “Marshall and Kent.”

“I’m coming,” Lucas said. He punched in 911 and shouted at the man who answered, “Davenport, BCA. We’ve got a cop down at Marshall and Kent in St. Paul. There’s a woman there who was with him. Look for the woman. Tell everybody to be careful, there’s three men with guns.”

And he was running down the hall, the people in the offices around him looking after him because he was running like something very bad had happened.