Stolen Prey

by John Sandford

  Inside, they walked over to his booth, and Castells said, “Officers,” and Lucas gestured at the other seats in the booth and asked, “Do you mind?”

  Castells had sun-bleached eyebrows and sandy hair, over a well-tanned face. His face was thin, like a runner’s, his eyes pale gray. He was wearing a lavender short-sleeved shirt with a collar, and narrow jeans, with black running shoes. “Would it make any difference if I did?”

  Lucas said, “Sure. Then we’d all stand up and talk to you, and pretty soon everybody in the place would be looking at us.”

  “So sit down,” Castells said, waving at the booth.

  ALTHOUGH he was the only one in it, he’d taken the biggest booth in the place, and had his phone charger plugged into a wall outlet below the table. A dealer of some kind, Lucas thought, with his own table at McDonald’s.

  Andrews fitted in next to Castells, with Lucas and Del sitting across the table. Lucas said, “So, a couple cops from St. Paul were talking to some dope dealers, and one of them said you told him to look out because there were some bad Mexican people in town. Is that right?”

  Castells didn’t answer immediately. Instead, he seemed to think for a moment, and then showed a thin flicker of a smile. He’d just figured out who’d talked to the cops, Lucas realized. Castells asked, “Does this have anything to do with those people who got killed on the other side of town?”

  Del said, “Maybe.”

  Castells said, “I gotta change my name. People keep thinking I’m a Mexicano.”

  Lucas asked, “What kind of name is Castells?”

  “Catalan,” Castells said. The three cops looked at one another, and Andrews shrugged, and Castells said, “Catalonia is a country currently occupied by Spain.”

  “You some kind of radical?” Del asked.

  Castells laughed and said, “No. I’m an antiquities dealer. You know—statues and stuff.”

  “Who talks to dope dealers,” Andrews said.

  “I talk to everybody,” Castells said. “I’m a friendly guy.”

  “You never know who might need a statue,” Del offered.

  “That’s right,” Castells said, smiling at Del. “You just put your finger on the core of the business, Officer Capslock.”

  Del leaned back: “Where do you know me from?”

  “You were pointed out to me once,” Castells said. “I was told that I shouldn’t be misled by the fact that you were wearing a trucker’s hat backwards.”

  “Mmm,” Del said. Castells had pushed him off-balance. He asked, pushing back, “You haven’t seen a big bronze statue, have you? Some women dancing on some fish?”

  “The Naiads,” Castells said. “No, I haven’t, and neither has anybody else in the statue business. There wouldn’t be any way to sell it. Your statue is now a bunch of little bronze pieces, if it’s not already been turned into ingots.”

  “I hate it when people say things like that,” Del said.

  Lucas jumped in: “So what about these bad Mexicans?”

  “The thing about cops is, cops blab,” Castells said to Lucas. “They bullshit with everybody. If somebody’s talking about a particular group of bad Mexicans, well … you could get your head cut off on television.”

  “Not us,” Lucas said. “We’ve all worked in intelligence. We keep our mouths shut.”

  Castells made an open-hand gesture, as if to say, “Whatever,” and asked, “Which one of you is the boss?”

  “We don’t actually have bosses,” Lucas said, but Andrews pointed a finger at Lucas and said, “He is.”

  CASTELLS LOOKED at Lucas and said, “I don’t know very much, but I was talking to a couple of Mexicanos over in West St. Paul and one of them said to the other that it’d be best to stay away from the Wee Blue Inn, because there were some heavy hitters going through, supposedly from Dallas, but actually, he said, from Mexico. That is the sum total of what I know. I passed it on to another guy I know, because he is also a Mexicano. I didn’t know he was a drug dealer.”

  “Why’d you think about the killings on the other side of town?” Andrews asked.

  “’Cause I watched the TV news last night. Sounded like Mexican dopers to me.”

  They talked for a couple more minutes, and when asked where he’d come from, Castells said, “Washington, D.C.”

  “You were a congressman, or something?” Del asked.

  Castells said, “Something like that.”

  “You speak Spanish?” Del asked.

  “Yes.”

  Lucas asked, “French?”

  “Mm-hmm. You looking for a language teacher?”

  “No. German?” Lucas asked.

  “Maybe a little. I travel on business.”

  “Antiquities.”

  “Yes. And high-end furniture.”

  He did not, he said, have any more relevant information, but he’d keep his ear to the ground, his nose to the grindstone, and his feet on the fence. If he heard anything more, he’d call Lucas. Lucas gave him a card and stood up. “Stay in touch. We could be a valuable contact for a hardworking antique dealer.”

  “Antiquities, not antiques. Antiques were made in Queen Victoria’s time. Antiquities were made by the Greeks and Romans and Egyptians. Entirely different market,” Castells said, as he put the card in his pocket. He was, Lucas thought, exactly the kind of guy who would keep it.

  Outside, Lucas said to Andrews, “Interesting guy.”

  Del said, “Yeah. So are we going down to the Wee Blue Inn?”

  “Thought we might,” Lucas said.

  THE WEE BLUE INN was a hole-in-the-wall motel and bar on Robert Street in West St. Paul. All three of them knew it, and Del and Andrews had been inside. “The owner is a guy named John Poe, like in Edgar Allan, but he doesn’t write poetry,” Del said. “He sells the occasional gun, and he’ll rent you a room for an hour at a time.”

  “He sweats a lot,” Andrews said. “He usually smells like onion sweat. I think he eats those ‘everything’ bagels.”

  “Can we jack him up without anybody looking in a window at us?” Lucas asked. “I’d rather talk to Poe straight up, see what he has to say, than go in with the whole SWAT squad.”

  “I could go in and look around,” Del said. He looked nothing like a cop, a major asset in his job.

  “Except that Poe knows you,” Lucas said.

  “He won’t tell anybody,” Del said. “He doesn’t want his clientele knowing that cops are hanging around.”

  “Let’s do that,” Lucas said. “If there are three bad Mexicans in there, we’ll call up the SWAT.”

  THEY TALKED ABOUT Poe on the way over, and Andrews called headquarters and got them to put a couple squads in a dry cleaner’s lot two blocks away, no stoplights between them and the Wee Blue Inn. “Just in case,” he said.

  At the Wee Blue Inn, they dropped Del and went on their way, around the block. Del called one minute later and said, “I talked to Poe. He says the Mexicans were here, but they’re gone. Checked out yesterday morning. They said they were going back to Dallas.”

  “Did he ask them where they were going, or did they volunteer it?”

  Del went away for a moment, then came back: “They volunteered it.”

  “So they’re not going back to Dallas,” Lucas said.

  “I wouldn’t think so,” Del said.

  “Huh. Be back in one minute.”

  THE WEE BLUE INN was an earth-colored stucco place with a blue-tile roof. The earth color came from dirt.

  The floors inside were made of dark wood and squeaked underfoot, not from polish, but from rot, and the whole place smelled of old cigar smoke and something that might have been swimming-pool chlorine, or possibly old semen. Lucas tried not to touch anything, just in case; no swimming pool was visible.

  Poe was a short fat man with a bad toupee and a three-day beard, whose lips formed a small but perfect O. Del had him in his office, where he sat sweating. He fit in the place like a finger in a glove, Lucas thought; or a dick in a con
dom. Andrews nodded to him, then pointed at him and said to Lucas, “This is Poe.”

  Poe was adamant about the Mexicans leaving. “They had duffel bags, and they took off. Loaded up, said, ‘Thank you,’ and they were out of here.”

  “Speak good English?” Lucas asked.

  “So-so. They was Mexican, no doubt about that.”

  “What, they were wearing sombreros?” Del asked.

  “No, they just looked like Mexicans,” Poe said. “Mexican boxers. Welterweights. Small guys, good shape. Mean-looking. Most Mexicans around here don’t look mean.”

  “Couldn’t have been, like, Colombians?” Del asked.

  Poe was exasperated: “They was Mexicans. They was fuckin’ Mexicans, Del. What can I tell you?”

  “They carrying guns?” Del asked.

  “Don’t know. We have a strict privacy policy about entering our guests’ rooms.”

  “That’s a little hard to believe,” Lucas said. “No offense.”

  Poe said, “Well, we do. We got it when my ex entered a room and found the city council president banging his secretary. Who was of the same sex. Not that I got anything against fudge-punchers, in particular.”

  “You always have been sort of a liberal,” Andrews said.

  “I do what I can,” Poe said.

  “IN OTHER NEWS,” Del said, “you got an ex. She around somewhere?”

  “No. We agreed that she should stay in the southern states, and I’d stay in the north. We stick to that pretty close. And I got Vegas.”

  Lucas: “These Mexicans, they said they were going back to Dallas?”

  “That’s what they said.”

  “You think they did?” Lucas asked.

  “Well, they all told me that,” Poe said, “All of them. So that made me think that they weren’t. Really going back to Dallas.”

  Lucas said, “Mmmm,” and they all looked at Poe for a while, and Poe sweated some more. “You didn’t get their tag number?”

  “No, we don’t require it.”

  “Credit cards?”

  “They paid cash, up front, so we don’t require a credit card,” Poe said.

  “Security photos?”

  Poe wagged his head. “Too expensive.”

  “Used glasses that might have fingerprints?”

  “Cleaned up their rooms right after they left,” Poe said. “In this business, we live on turnover.”

  “So really … you don’t know nothing about nothing,” Del said.

  “That’s about it,” Poe said, sweating. “Thank God.”

  “Yeah?”

  He nodded and wiped his forehead. “They looked like the kind of little fuckers you don’t want to fuck with.”

  THEY WERE still talking to Poe when Lucas got a call from Shaffer, who was at the crime scene with the DEA agents. “Got a call from the patrol. They found that SKY van. They ran us around a little bit. After they stole the van, they stole some tags off another van that looked just like it.”

  “So they wouldn’t get stopped for a stolen van.”

  “Yeah, that’s right. We finally got it straight, and a highway patrol guy found the actual stolen van at a rest stop up I-35.”

  “Anything good?”

  “As a matter of fact, there was. They wiped everything down, but they left a CD by a guy named El Shaka in the CD player,” Shaffer said. “The van’s owner doesn’t speak Spanish and says he never heard of the singer or the record. He listens to Springsteen. Anyway, you can see what looks like a partial thumbprint on the top side of the disc.”

  “You running it?”

  “No, no, I thought I’d just admire it for a few days,” Shaffer said.

  “All right, stupid question,” Lucas said. “When you gonna see a return?”

  “This afternoon, I hope. You doing any good?”

  Lucas told him about the three Mexicans at the Wee Blue Inn, and Shaffer said he’d send an Identi-Kit guy over to build some pictures. Lucas looked across the room at Poe and said, quietly, to Shaffer, “You better do it quick. The guy who saw them is shaking in his shoes. He could take off.”

  Shaffer said he’d have a couple of people there in a half hour. “I’m going to send along a crime-scene crew, too. A dump like the Wee Blue Inn didn’t scrub down all the surfaces: maybe we’ll get some more prints.”

  Lucas turned back to the group and found Poe explaining where he got the name for the motel. “I stole it from a place up in Duluth,” he said. “It’s not like there aren’t six hundred of them.”

  “Could have named it Dunrovin,” Del suggested.

  “Yeah, or the Duck Inn. I thought about it, but I didn’t,” Poe said. To Lucas: “We done?”

  Lucas said, “I may come back in the next couple of hours. Nobody’s gonna find out about this chat before then, so there’s no point in you running out the door. Hang around.”

  “I was thinking Vegas,” Poe said.

  “Vegas is too hot at this time of year,” Del said. “Stay here.”

  OUT IN the parking lot, Andrews hitched up his pants and said, “There are two hundred thousand Latinos in Minnesota. I know that because I’m married to one. So all we have to do is eliminate a hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-six of them, counting out my old lady, and we got them.”

  “You’re saying we ain’t got much,” Del said.

  “That’s right.”

  “But we got something,” Lucas said. “Maybe we’ll get some prints and some pictures, and we’ll start putting some pressure on them. Betcha we get them by tomorrow night.”

  “Exactly how much would you be willing to bet?” Andrews asked, as they climbed into the truck.

  Lucas shook his head. “I was using a common cliché intended to express optimism,” he said. “But gambling in Minnesota is illegal, outside the Indian casinos and the state numbers racket, so I would be unable to actually put any money on the line.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Andrews said.

  ON THE WAY back to St. Paul, Andrews asked whether Lucas had ever gotten a line on the robbers who’d broken his wrist. “Just did, last couple of days,” Lucas said. “I was never able to generate much interest in the whole thing, and I thought I was gonna lose them.”

  He told him about the horse shit clue. “I got Flowers working it.”

  “That’s pretty high-priced talent for a couple guys who get a hundred bucks at a time, and nobody gets hurt,” Andrews said.

  “I got hurt,” Lucas said. “Some poor college kid got his arm broken.”

  “I mean hurt bad, not getting your little snowflake wrist cracked,” Andrews said.

  “Thank you,” Lucas said.

  “Whatever,” Andrews said. “If that fuckin’ Flowers can’t find them, nobody can.”

  “Especially with a USDA-certified clue like he’s got,” Del said.

  AT THE OFFICE, Lucas had a message from Rose Marie Roux: Call me.

  He called her, and she said, “I got a call from Washington, a young boy from the Department of Justice said they got a call from Mexico. The Mexicans want to send an observer up here to look at the Brooks case. Apparently they’ve been talking to the DEA about it, and they want to watch. The DOJ said sure, send them along.”

  “Did you thank them for consulting with us?” Lucas asked.

  “You got a problem with it?”

  Lucas told her about the DEA agent’s suggestion that they send any Brooks murder suspect to Mexico for questioning—and why, including the story about the agent who was flayed alive.

  “You think that’s a true story?” Rose Marie asked.

  “Who knows? You hear all kinds of shit coming out of the border. Wouldn’t surprise me, one way or the other,” Lucas said.

  “Well, we’re not turning anybody over to Mexico,” Rose Marie said. “But be nice with these people. They’ve got problems.”

  “You said they wanted to send an observer, but then you kept saying ‘they.’ How many are there?”

&n
bsp; “One cop and his assistant,” Rose Marie said. “Cop’s name is David Rivera. I don’t know the assistant’s name.”

  “Okay. When do they get here?”

  “If their plane’s on time … they’re coming Delta from LA … about forty-five minutes,” she said. “It’d be really, really nice if some senior BCA agent was there to meet them.”

  LUCAS CALLED SHAFFER, who’d heard about the Mexicans coming in but had no details. “I’m going over to pick them up and run them out there,” Lucas said. “Have the bodies been moved?”

  “Pretty soon now. Alex is talking to the ME’s guys now.”

  “Hold off. If everything works, I’ll be out there in a couple of hours,” Lucas said.

  “Why don’t you just have … you know … somebody else pick them up?”

  “’Cause I want to talk to them about this whole Criminales business,” Lucas said. “Hope they speak English.”

  Besides, he liked driving around town, looking out the window. You could never tell what you might learn. In this case, though, it wasn’t much—a few leaves turning yellow on maple trees. At the airport, Lucas locked his pistol in the truck’s gun safe, went inside, identified himself to the airport police, and got a piece of typing paper from them. He wrote “David Rivera” on it with a Magic Marker, and the airport cops walked him through security and out to the arrivals gate. The cop said, “With that sign, you’re gonna look like a limo driver.”

  “But a very high-rent limo driver,” Lucas said.

  “Well, yeah.”

  They talked to the gate agent about the arrival, then Lucas found a seat while the airport cop wandered away. When the plane was parked, the agent came over and said, “They’re here,” and Lucas got up with his sign.

  Rivera was one of the first passengers off the plane. He was a man of middle height, but more than middle breadth, with dark hair and a short, carefully trimmed mustache. He was wearing what looked like an expensive but ill-cared-for blue suit and a dress shirt open at the throat.

  He looked at Lucas’s sign and said, in good English, “You don’t look like a limousine driver.”

  LUCAS INTRODUCED HIMSELF, and Rivera thanked him for coming and said they had to wait for his assistant, who had been riding in coach. His assistant was female, a pretty woman with dark hair and dark eyes, carrying an oversized briefcase and pulling a rolling carry-on suitcase. Lucas took the briefcase from her, and Rivera said, “She can take it,” and Lucas said, “That’s okay,” and led them down to Baggage Claim, carrying the briefcase.