Stolen Prey

8

The first St. Paul cop car got to the shooting scene in three minutes. Morris had been organizing the search of the streets around Zapp’s Pizza, which had been going slowly, but it also meant that a dozen additional cops arrived in the next five minutes.

The first cops gathered up Martinez and locked her in their car, and posted watchers on the corners of the house, nobody going in or out. Martinez, apparently in shock, told them she thought the house was empty and she didn’t know how badly Rivera was hurt, so the next cops went in and cleared the place.

One came out a minute later and told an arriving patrol sergeant, “Two down. Both of them are gone.”

“You sure?”

“Oh, yeah. One of them’s missing most of his brain. The other one took two shots in the heart.”

“No sign of anybody?”

“Didn’t clear the basement, but I think it’s empty. I didn’t recognize either of them, but one could be a cop. He’s gotta be federal or something. Doesn’t look local. He was shooting some big old automatic like you don’t see anymore.”

The sergeant nodded and saw Morris’s car fishtail into the street. “Here comes the man. You get Rudy and block off the street.”

The cop took off and then Morris was there. He nodded at the sergeant and walked up the steps, took a look at Rivera and said, “Shit. I was just talking to this guy.”

“He’s a cop?”

Morris nodded. He might have been Mexican, but a dead cop was a dead cop. The dead man in the dumpster was just another dead man in a dumpster.

Morris walked back outside and saw Davenport’s Porsche curl into the curb up the street. Davenport jumped out and jogged toward them.

“He got here in a hurry,” the sergeant said.

“He’s gonna kill somebody,” Morris said.

Lucas dumped the Porsche and jogged through the scene, past clusters of neighbors watching from the sidewalks. Morris was talking to a couple of other cops, and he waved Lucas toward the front door of the house, which stood open.

Lucas stepped up, looked inside, said, “Ah, man.” He stepped inside, moved carefully around the body, squatted to look at it: Rivera was facedown, his brown eyes still open, but flat and dead. A pistol sat a few inches from his right hand, the hammer back, the safety off.

Across the room, a Mexican guy slumped half-on, half-off the couch, looking dead. Lucas had read of shooting victims looking surprised, but he hadn’t seen that. They just looked dead. The Mexican’s T-shirt was stained with blood, a circle at the heart with seepage lines down the front.

“Looks like he kicked the door,” Morris said.

Lucas stood up, made a hand-dusting motion, glanced at the door handle, then looked back in the room. “Did you talk to Martinez?”

“For a minute, but she’s fucked up. We’re looking for a silver SUV of some kind. Don’t know what kind, don’t know the size, don’t know the plates.”

“Good luck with that,” Lucas said.

“Yeah.” Morris waved at the scene. “What do you think?”

“Looks like he kicked the door, landed on his feet, the guy on the couch pulled a gun and he shot him.” Lucas looked at the front drapes. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he made a little noise, a sound, coming up the steps. Another guy steps over to the window, to look, he’s got a gun in his hand….”

Morris nodded. “Rivera kicks the door, lands inside looking at the couch, the guy on the couch goes for his gun, Rivera shoots him, never sees it coming from the guy at the window. I’d buy that.”

“The question is,” Lucas said, “where are those fuckers now?”

“Not too far away. This only happened fifteen minutes ago.”

Lucas looked around the living room. “We need to find out who owns this place and grab him. If we get to him quick enough, he might not know what happened.”

Morris said, “We probably can’t screw the scene up too much-we know what happened. There could be something that would tell us everything we need.”

“So we’ll walk easy,” Lucas said.

The house seemed to be lightly lived-in-not much in the way of personal stuff, but on the kitchen counter they found a basket full of paid utility bills, which had been sent to a Ricardo Nunez, and in the bedroom, a box of business cards, half of them in English, half in Spanish. Under Nunez’s name was a business name, “International ReCap, Inc.” with a phone number, but no address.

Lucas called his researcher, Sandy, at home, told her he needed her to work despite the fact that she’d planned to go to a flea market that morning. He gave her the information he had about the house and said, “We need to know where International ReCap is, and what it does, and we need to get our hands on Nunez.”

“Sounds like some kind of finance company, International ReCapitalization, or something like that,” she said. “I’ll get back to you.”

“Quick as you can,” he said.

Lucas said to Morris, “Let’s go talk to Martinez.”

The neighboring house had a small covered porch, with two chairs behind a banister. Nobody home. Morris and Lucas took Martinez up onto the porch and sat her down, and Lucas leaned back against the banister: “You okay?”

“No, I’m not,” Martinez said, though she looked fairly composed, sitting with her hands in her lap. No tears.

“I was under the … impression … that you and David had a personal relationship,” Lucas said.

She nodded, and now Lucas saw the crystalline glimmer of a tear. “I hope this does not become official. He is married, he has four children.”

Morris, in the chair to her right, said quietly, “Do you remember anything else about the vehicle?”

She shook her head. “No. A silver truck. David knew something more about it, I think, he didn’t say anything to me. When he got out, he wasn’t sure it was right … so he peeked in the window. I was parked there”-she pointed down the street to the car-“and I heard the gunshots and I got out. I was going to call…” She pointed at Lucas.

“Okay,” Lucas said.

“I didn’t know what happened inside, but I thought David probably succeeded. He was a, mmm, not devil, that’s not right, I don’t know the English, a daring devil…”

“Daredevil,” Morris said.

“Yes. A daring devil. He has done this before. He is very proud of this, of taking down these Criminales. He calls it the American phrase, going in hard, from some movie, I do not know which.”

“That’s when you called?”

“No, I heard shouting…. It didn’t sound like David. I don’t have a gun, I don’t shoot, but I started to walk that way, and then I started to run, and I went to the steps and I saw him lying there, his shoes, anyway, and I knew it was him, he wears those white stockings, and I went up the steps and then the men ran out the back door, I think, and I heard the truck start and I ran up the steps so they couldn’t see me, because I’m afraid they will … kill me … and David is there and I see he is dead and the car goes past the door, fast, and I run outside, I fell down.”

She turned her wrists toward them, showing them the bloody scrapes. “And I tried to call you, but I couldn’t push the button right….” She brought her purse with her, like women do, unconscious of it, but always with them, and she dug inside and produced a cell phone. “The fuckin’ telephone, this is a piece of shit, this telephone, this, this, Samsung shit…”

She stood suddenly and pitched the phone into the street, where it clattered across the blacktop, and she said to Lucas, “He is gone. I was waiting for this. I rehearsed this, sitting talking to the investigators, saying, ‘David is gone.’”

They worked through the details. Halfway through, she began to sob, and asked where they could find a bathroom. She didn’t want to go back in the death house, so they walked her down to a neighbor’s place, and asked, and the neighbor said she’d be welcome to use the bathroom.

She was in there for ten minutes, and Morris said, “Jesus, wonder what’s going on in there.”

“Crying out of sight,” Lucas said. “She’s got her pride.”

When she finally came back out, they went back to the porch and walked her through the details: how they’d found the shooters’ car, the meeting the night before. She said Rivera had gotten some information about the shooters’ car from his friends, but she didn’t know exactly what that information was.

“But he didn’t tell you?” Lucas asked.

“He might have told me, but I don’t remember. The name, I don’t remember-but he said it was a silver SUV, and it was. I don’t know cars. My job was to drive slowly up the streets, and his job was to look for the car.”

“Why didn’t he tell us?” Lucas asked.

She shrugged. “He might have told you, but this Shaffer … Shaffer runs this investigation, and David does not like how he is treated, like he is a stupid brown man up here in the white state. You know what I mean?”

“I got a small feel for that,” said Morris.

“Yes, a Negro, yes, I suppose,” she said, unself-consciously. “So this is how he is treated, and he told me that when he learned about the truck, and then this morning, with the Zapp’s place … he thought they must be close, and that if we drove around…”

“You found them,” Lucas said.

“It took a long time,” she said. “Three hours.”

“Hell of a lot better than we did,” Morris said. “We hardly got started in three hours.”

Morris’s partner showed up, and leaned against the banister with Lucas, and they walked through it all over again. When they were finished, Morris and Lucas walked off a bit and Morris said, “You know what the British say, this ‘fuck-all’ thing that they say? ‘You don’t know fuck-all about whatever’?”

“Sure,” Lucas said.

Morris looked back at Martinez sitting on the porch, still talking with his partner. “That’s what we got from her,” he said. “We got fuck-all.”

“I’m gonna go find this Latino guy he talked to last night,” Lucas said. “You want to come?”

“Let me talk to Larry, I’ll be right with you,” Morris said. Larry was his partner. While Morris was doing that, Lucas went back up the porch steps and looked at Rivera’s body. Martinez said he’d done this before, but Lucas thought that it didn’t look like he’d done it before. Why he thought that, he couldn’t say: but he thought it.

He walked back out to Martinez and said, “We have to notify the Mexican police. Can you do that informally, and then we could follow up? We need to know the official contact. Preferably somebody who speaks English.”

She nodded: “I will arrange that.”

And he asked, “Did David bring that pistol with him? On the plane?”

She shook her head. “No, he got it last night. If he hadn’t gotten it, he would be alive now.”

She’d driven to the meeting the night before, and the address was still on the car’s GPS. Lucas took it down and then said, “I’m sorry. I’m really, really sorry.”

Red-eyed, she started snuffling into another Kleenex, and he went to get Morris.

Morris drove a city sedan so bland that Lucas could barely see it, even when he was sitting inside it.

“Better than the death trap you’re driving around in,” Morris said.

Tomas Garza lived south of downtown St. Paul, just off one of the main commercial streets, amid a clutter of food, shoe, and auto franchises, mom-and-pop restaurants, carpet stores, remodeling contractors, and a couple of big box stores and supermarkets.

He wasn’t home, but his wife was, and worried when they showed her their IDs. “He is gone. I don’t know when he’ll be back,” she said.

“We don’t have anything to do with immigration,” Lucas said. “We need to talk to him about David Rivera. We need to talk to him right away.”

Morris played the bad guy: “If we don’t find him right away, we’ll have to ask the immigration people to get involved. They’ve got more sources than we do.”

Her face went blank, and Lucas added hastily, “We don’t want to do that. Rivera was hurt. We need to find out what was said at the meeting last night. Miz Martinez is cooperating with us, she’s back … uh…”

“How bad hurt?” she asked.

“Ah, he’s dead, Miz Garza. He was shot to death an hour or so ago, when he found these bandits who murdered the family over in Wayzata.”

She put a hand to her face: “He is dead? He was just here.”

“We know, Miz Martinez told us,” Lucas said. “That’s why we need to talk to Tomas. Somebody last night told him the kind of car and maybe the license plate numbers of the bandits…. We desperately need that information.”

She said, “Nobody knew the license plate numbers. But it was a silver Chevrolet Tahoe with Texas license plates, and they thought it was a rental car. This came from somebody else-not Tomas. I don’t know who.”

“I’m going to call that in,” Morris said.

“Let me do it,” Lucas said. “My researcher’s looking for that Nunez guy. She can switch over to this. She’ll have it for us in twenty minutes.”

Morris nodded and went back to Garza: “We still need to talk to your husband.”

“He works very hard for his family,” she said.

“We really don’t care about his status,” Morris said. “We really don’t.”

“He works at Europa Car,” she said.

LUCAS GOT on the phone and called his office, got switched to Sandy, and told her what he needed. “How long?”

“Not too,” she said. “Fifteen minutes. Half an hour.”

“Fifteen minutes,” he said. “The shooters may still be in the car. Push Nunez.”

“I can’t push both of them,” she said.

“Sure you can.”

Europa Car was a repair shop a half-mile down the street, a bunch of older BMWs, Mercedeses, and an ancient Porsche, covered with gray primer paint, in its parking lot, which was surrounded by a chain-link fence with concertina wire on top.

Garza was sitting in the outer office, nervously smoking a cigarette, when they arrived: his wife had called, and he’d decided to talk.

“We know the Tahoe and the Texas plates. What else?”

Garza took them through the meeting, didn’t mention the gun until Lucas asked. He looked away, then back and said, “David said you treated him like a child. This is a man who’d been fighting the gangs in a way you Americans just don’t know. You have nothing like this, except, maybe Afghanistan.”

Lucas and Morris looked at him, but he turned away again, and Lucas decided, what the hell, and said, “Okay. He needed the weapon. I’ll buy that.”

“If anybody pushes it, it could be a problem, later on,” Morris said. “I’m not saying it will be, but it could be.”

“Whatever,” Garza said, in what was almost a valley accent.

They talked for a few more minutes, then Sandy called back and said, “There’s a silver Tahoe out on the road from El Paso, been gone a week, to a man named Simon Perez, who showed a Texas driver’s license and credit card. It looked good, so I called this Perez in El Paso, and he answered and he says he doesn’t know anything about a car rental. Says he’s never rented a Hertz in his whole life.”

“That’s it,” Lucas said. “Put that out to every agency in the state, the description and the plate, and get the highway patrol looking down the interstates. They might be running for home. Tell everybody for God’s sakes be careful: they’ve now killed six people that we know about, and another two or three won’t make any difference to them. Put an alert out on that credit card. I want to know where and when they use it.”

“I’ll do that. About that International ReCap-I’m not sure, but I think it’s a tire place. They buy used tires here in the U.S., recap them, and ship them south, across the border.”

“Where’s their headquarters?”

“Brownsville, Texas.”

“Call them up and find out about Nunez-where he might be.”

“I did that, but I got a woman who says she’s an answering service,” Sandy said. “She can take messages, but that’s all she does. She won’t give me Nunez’s phone number.”

“So call the Brownsville cops, have them drop in and ask her. Those places don’t like cop trouble.”

“I’ll try,” Sandy said.

Lucas went back to Morris and told him about the car: “All right. Now we’re getting some traction,” Morris said. “They’re either riding in a car we know, or they’re walking around with a bunch of suitcases.”

“No traction on Nunez,” Lucas said.

He explained, and then they said good-bye to Garza-told him to stay away from street guns-and headed back to the crime scene. On the way, Lucas took a call from the BCA duty officer who said he had a Mexican cop on the line. “He says he’s Rivera’s boss. You want the call?”

“Yeah, give him the number,” Lucas said.

The phone rang again a minute later. A Comisario General Jorge Espinoza, a secretary said, and Espinoza came on a minute later. “David is gone, I’m told.”

“I’m afraid so,” Lucas said. “He located the shooters in our case, and he went after them himself. He shot one of them, but was shot himself. The shooters are running, and we’re trying to track them.”

“I can give you a probable car and license plate number for them,” Espinoza said. “David called in to our office last night and asked us to trace a late-model Chevrolet Tahoe with Texas license plates. We were waiting to call the information to him, but then we could not reach him this morning….”

Lucas took down the information, which matched the information he’d gotten from Sandy; and that made Lucas feel that Espinoza could be trusted, to some extent. He gave Espinoza the details of the investigation, including the discovery of the pizza napkin, and told him how Rivera and Martinez had used the car information to track the killers.

“This is typical: I have told him at least one hundred times that someday he would be killed kicking down doors like this. He did it anyway. I think he got some kind of pleasure from it, going in with a gun, naked, so to speak.”

“So he’s done it a lot,” Lucas said, thinking again of Rivera’s body.

“More than anybody else,” Espinoza said. “Ah, David, this is so stupid. So stupid, to get killed like this….”

Back at the Nunez house, the St. Paul crime-scene people were at work. Martinez was still sitting on the porch of the house next door, but when she saw Lucas and Morris arrive, she came down and asked, “Did you find them?”

“Got the plates and make and model,” Lucas said. “We’re looking for them now. Couldn’t find Nunez, but we found his answering service in Brownsville. We’re going to ask the Brownsville cops to check for a cell number. That should give us his location.”

She nodded, then said, “I’m going back to my room, if you don’t need me.”

“I’ll drop you,” Lucas said.

She shook her head: “No. You stay here and do what you do. I have a taxi on the way.”

“What a day,” Lucas said. “What a sad day. I’m sorry for David and for you. So sorry.”