Stolen Prey

by John Sandford

  He’d had a thought when he was talking to Rivera, and Rivera and Martínez were going through all the papers, and not finding any more than he had.

  The torture of the Brookses had continued until they were all dead: the last of them had apparently died as the torture was continuing. Which probably meant that the torturers hadn’t gotten what they wanted.

  What nobody had considered was the possibility that the Brookses had no idea what they were talking about. That they hadn’t given anything up because there was nothing to give up. That Sunnie was not involved with the narcos.

  He thought about that for a moment, but couldn’t twist a story around so that it made sense. The narcos had to know who they were dealing with … didn’t they?

  But why had the Brookses taken it down to the bitter end?

  Why?

  VIRGIL FLOWERS CALLED. “I’ve been talking to victims, and we have one more report of horse shit odor. Wasn’t mentioned in the police report because the victim didn’t think to do it. The pattern is what you said it was—I think they’re out of a triangle with the bottom line from Mankato to Owatonna to Rochester, with the point up in the Twin Cities. Or a big circle around Faribault. Somewhere in there. But there’s something else going on, too.”

  “Yeah?”

  “A guy who runs a stable out by Waterville came home a year ago, after a weekend up in the Cities, and found out somebody had stolen a big pile of horse shit.”

  “You’re joking,” Lucas said.

  “I’m not joking. There’s rumors that somebody else is missing a pile of horse shit, too, but I haven’t run that down, yet,” Flowers said. “Anyway, a couple that sounds like the pair who jumped you were in Waterville just before this shit was stolen. They were driving a big old beat-up Ford flatbed with side panels, the sort of thing you’d want if you were stealing horse shit. People say they were sort of at loose ends.”

  “Virgil, if you’re fucking with me…”

  “I knew you’d think that, but I’m not,” Flowers said.

  “All right. But if you are fuckin’ with me…”

  “Lucas … listen, this isn’t going to take long. These aren’t big-time crooks. I’ll get something in the next few days.”

  “Keep me up,” Lucas said.

  He hung up with the feeling that Flowers was fucking with him. Horse shit thieves?

  HE WAS pushing paper again when Del called. He was talking fast: “What’re you doing? Right this minute?”

  “Trying to choose between Caspian mocha and Castilian Café au Lait when I paint the hallway.”

  “All right. Listen, can you get down to South St. Paul? Anderson just pulled into a junkyard by the river. I think he’s going for it, and I need some backup.”

  “The sculpture?”

  “The sculpture. You still keep your running gear in the office? The shoes and pants?”

  “Sure. You think—”

  “Change into it and get your ass down here,” Del said. “Bring somebody else, too, if you can find anybody. Down by the river, by that little airport.”

  LUCAS GOT specific directions, then went out to the main office and found an agent named Jenkins, who wasn’t too busy, got him moving. Back in his office, he took his gym bag out of a file cabinet, sniffed it—not bad, he must’ve washed it after his last run—closed the office door, changed into gray sweatpants and a dark blue hoodie over an Iowa Hawkeyes T-shirt, and running shoes. His Beretta went under the hoodie.

  Jenkins was a very large man who, with his sidekick, Shrake, had a reputation for asking questions later. They took Jenkins’s personal car, a three-year-old Crown Vic that Lucas felt would work better with the riverside gestalt than would a Lexus.

  “Is there gonna be any shooting?” Jenkins wanted to know.

  “Nooo … probably not,” Lucas said. “I just needed somebody large to load up this sculpture, if we find them. They weigh like three tons, it’s gonna take some work. A crane or forklift or something.”

  “Screw that,” Jenkins said. “My hands were made for love, not for heavy labor.”

  They took twenty minutes getting south, and found Del waiting in a beat-up Jeep Wrangler in a park off Concord Street.

  “I’ll drive,” Del said.

  “You sure you got them?” Lucas asked.

  “Eighty-three percent,” Del said. “There’s a big old metal shed down there, used to be a barge terminal. It’s big enough to hide the low-boy with the crane. And the thing is, before he came over, he drove around for a while, like he was trying to figure out if anybody was tailing him.”

  “And you being a genius tracker, he never saw you,” Jenkins said.

  “That’s right. We wound up down here,” Del said.

  “Unless he’s chumping you, and we go running in there, and he says, ‘Aha, you were following me,” Lucas said. “No copper here, copper.”

  “It’s bronze. Like I said, I’m eighty-three percent,” Del said. “The other seventeen percent is what you just said.”

  THEY LEFT Jenkins’s Crown Vic on the street and took the Jeep back into the tangle of streets and tracks that ran along the river, Del at the wheel. He eventually took them down a muddy dirt road, then off onto a branching track that ran down to the water. He parked and said, “We walk from here. Bring the camera. I got some glasses.”

  They walked back to the dirt road, then farther along it, another hundred yards, then Del led the way through some low brushy trees to the top of a dirt levee that smelled like beached carp and dead clams. “Watch the snakes,” he said.

  Lucas: “Really?”

  “Yeah, I almost stepped on a great big fucker when I came up here. Bull snake, I think.”

  “What do you know about snakes?” Jenkins asked. He was watching his ankles.

  “Not much. Just garter, bull, and rattle. Wasn’t a rattlesnake, I don’t think, and too big to be a garter.”

  “Yeah, well … I don’t fuck with snakes,” Lucas said, with a shudder.

  “Neither do I,” Del said. “That thing scared the shit out of me.”

  AT THE TOP OF the levee, Lucas could see what Del called a junkyard, but was really a long raw-dirt clearing with five chunks of wrecked, rusting machinery of uncertain purpose, and a couple of abandoned cars and trucks, some of which looked like they’d been submerged by past floods. The shed sat in the middle of it: dull-silver corrugated steel, the same thing farmers once used to build silos, but this structure was probably a hundred and fifty feet long and sixty feet wide, in the domed shape of a Quonset hut.

  There were two sliding doors, closed tight, but big enough to accommodate a light airplane; Lucas thought the building might have been designed as a hangar. Although the big doors were closed, tracks in the dirt outside suggested that trucks had been coming and going. A black Cadillac sedan and an older twin-cab Chevy pickup sat outside the only human-scale door on the building. There were four windows down the length of the building, but all looked dark and dirty.

  “Now what?” Jenkins asked.

  “We watch for a couple minutes, then we run like hell down there and find a window clean enough to see inside.”

  “We’re not going to get shot, are we?” Jenkins asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Del said. “You ready?”

  The three of them ran like hell down the levee and across a hundred feet of open dirt driveway, trying to be quiet about it, past the doorway, to the side of the building and the first of the windows. Del peeked and whispered, “I can’t see a thing.”

  “Next window.”

  They couldn’t see anything in the other windows, either. All were encrusted with what looked like several decades of dirt. Around in the back, they found a rotten door, and when Jenkins gently tried the rusty knob, the knob pulled out in his hand. He knelt and looked in the knob hole, shook his head, and said, “Nothing.”

  On the far side, they found a cracked window. “Don’t tell the court I did this,” Del said, and using a pocketknife, pr
ied out a shard of dirty glass. He dropped it under the window and pressed his eyes to the hole, looked for a moment, then turned to Lucas and whispered, “Got them. I can see the truck. There’s a pile of stuff off to the side. It could be a cut-up statue. It’s too dark to see.”

  Lucas looked, and saw the truck first, then close to the entrance door, a pile of what might have been junk, except that it looked too manufactured, somehow. Too regular for junk. He pulled back and turned his ear to the door and could hear distant voices.

  “Still in there,” he whispered.

  “We could wait at the front door, get them when they come out, see if they say enough that we can go in,” Del whispered back. “I’m not sure about crashing in without a warrant.”

  “What if somebody comes?” Jenkins asked.

  “Then we tap-dance,” Lucas said.

  They walked quietly around to the front and waited, and six or seven minutes later, sure as God made little green apples, they heard a truck coming down the road. There was no time to run and hide, so Del and Jenkins propped their butts against the Cadillac’s bumper, and Lucas faced them, gesturing with one hand, as though they were arguing. Del said, “Don’t wave your hand around so much … it looks fake.”

  “What the fuck am I supposed to do with it?” Lucas asked.

  “Just cross your arms and take a step back and then turn around and look at the truck coming in,” Jenkins said. “You’re supposed to be curious.”

  Lucas did that, and the truck pulled up. Del muttered, “Check the bumper sticker.” The bumper sticker said: “My other auto is a .45.” A middle-aged man, balding with gray hair pulled back in a stubby ponytail, got out of the truck and asked, “You the guys with Middleton?”

  “Who’re you?” Del asked.

  “I’m the guy with the copper,” the man said.

  “Anderson’s the guy with the copper,” Del said. “We’ve been sitting here arguing … never mind. Whose copper is it?”

  “Mine. C’mon, we’ll get it straight,” the guy said.

  Jenkins nodded: “Thanks for the invite.”

  An invitation was all they needed.

  THEY FOLLOWED ponytail inside. The sculpture was right there, on the floor, but in a thousand pieces: the first thing Lucas saw was a streamlined hand at the top of the pile. Anderson was talking to a guy in jeans and jean jacket, with dirty blond hair and black plastic-rimmed glasses like people wore in Europe. They walked up and Anderson looked at the ponytail guy, and then at the three cops, and asked, “Who’re these guys?”

  Del held up a badge in one hand, a gun in the other, and said, “The BCA. You’re under arrest.”

  “Shit,” said the guy with the glasses, and with no further ado, he began running, three feet, four feet, and then, as he would have passed Lucas, Lucas reached out with his fiberglass cast and swatted the guy on the nose, and he went down, his glasses, still intact, spinning away.

  “Don’t do that,” Del said. “Next guy who runs, I’m gonna shoot him.”

  “I gotta get a cast,” Jenkins said, impressed by the impact.

  “I didn’t do nothing,” said the guy who’d led them inside. He looked at Anderson and said, “Tell them—I didn’t do nothing.”

  Anderson shrugged and said, “It’s your copper.”

  Del said, “Bronze.”

  The guy on the floor moaned, “Man, that smarts. That really fuckin’ hurts.”

  They sat all three of them down and read them their rights, and gave the glasses guy a bunch of paper shop towels to squeeze against his bloody nose. Jenkins wandered over to the pile of metal, peered at it for a moment, then pulled out a semi-sphere the size of a soccer ball and said, “Look, a tit.” To Anderson, “How could you do that?”

  Anderson said, “With a Sawzall.”

  Del called for help from South St. Paul, and five minutes later two squads were parked outside. The three would be booked into the Ramsey County Jail.

  “Four million bucks,” Del said, looking at the scrap. “State Farm is gonna be really unhappy. They’re holding the policy on it.”

  THEY WERE going through the rigmarole of handing the guys off to South St. Paul when Lucas’s phone rang, and he looked at the screen and saw that it was from an old friend, James T. Bone.

  Bone was president of the third-largest bank in Minneapolis, after Wells Fargo and U.S. Bank. Lucas touched the answer button and said, “Hey, T-Bone. What’s up?”

  “I’ve got a problem, and it could be serious,” Bone said. “Are you at your office?”

  “No, I’m down in South St. Paul, arresting some guys,” Lucas said.

  “Damnit. Well, this is the thing. I saw on television that you’re involved in this murder out in Wayzata,” Bone said.

  “Some,” Lucas said. “I’m not running it.”

  “That’s good enough,” Bone said. “I’ve got a vice president named Richard Pruess. He’s about six tiers down and he’s involved in a bunch of investment funds. Basically, he’s a salesman. If a customer is big enough, and wants an investment adviser, Richard sets that up.”

  “What does that have to do with Wayzata?” Lucas asked.

  “Pruess is missing,” Bone said. “He didn’t come to work today. He’s been sick some, I guess—I don’t see him much, myself. Anyway, he’s been under the weather for a few days, but still working. Today he didn’t show up at all, and he didn’t call in. He had a couple of meetings scheduled and hung up some customers. His supervisor tried to contact him, but couldn’t. His cell phone keeps kicking us over to the answering service. He’s gay, somebody in the office knew his partner, and his partner said Pruess was getting ready for work this morning, he was fine, when the partner left. The partner went back to their apartment and Pruess isn’t there.”

  “You call the cops? I mean, other cops?” Lucas asked.

  “No, I decided to come straight to you. The reason is, you know … Pruess used to work with Candace Brooks. She was his assistant.”

  “What?” Lucas had been watching the copper thieves being put into the back of the squads, but now he walked away, across the oily dirt outside the shed.

  “That’s why I decided to call you,” Bone said. “Candace Brooks worked here until a year ago, or fifteen months. Something like that—I don’t have her file yet. She had an assistant VP job in Pruess’s office. I didn’t know that myself—I just heard it from Sandy Bernstein, who runs that end of things. Anyway, I’m wondering if there might be something going on.”

  “Jesus, Jim, I hope not, but there might be,” Lucas said. “Listen, we’re going to a full-court press on this. If you hear from this guy, call me right away. I’ll be there quick as I can. Another guy’s actually running the investigation, his name is Bob Shaffer. I’m gonna call him, I’m sure he’ll want to be there. And some DEA guys, and even a Mexican Federale.”

  “You think it’s dope?” Bone asked.

  “I’m afraid it could be. I don’t want to get ahead of ourselves, here, maybe your guy’s just out getting a haircut, but this business out in Wayzata … it’s bad as it can get,” Lucas said. “We can’t let this go, we can’t wait. We’ve got to find out if it’s related.”

  “I really don’t need any of this money-laundering bullshit dropped on us,” Bone said.

  “I can’t help what falls on you, if it’s anything,” Lucas said. “But this Pruess guy could be in the worst kind of trouble. The worst kind. I can’t even begin to tell you…. Listen, I’ll see you in an hour or so.”

  “See you then,” Bone said. “I’ll do some poking around, maybe I’ll turn something up.”

  Lucas got off the phone and told Del, “I gotta go, man, I gotta run.”

  “Bad?”

  “Yeah. Feels bad. Like, really bad.”

  6

  Lucas called everybody on the way back to the office, and once there, got a quick rinse in the men’s room, dried off with paper towels, and changed back into his suit. As he went out the door, Weather phoned and as
ked if he was interested in going to dinner.

  “Probably, if it’s like routine. I don’t want to do a big deal.”

  “I’ll call the Lex.”

  “Fine. I’ve gotta go over and talk to T-Bone. I’ll probably be six o’clock.” He told her, briefly, what had happened.

  “I hope Jim doesn’t get hurt,” Weather said.

  “If his bank’s been laundering, he’s probably gonna get hurt,” Lucas said.

  “I can’t believe that he’d know about it.”

  “Neither can I,” Lucas said. “But it’s open season on bankers right now. Maybe … He’s a smart guy. He’ll figure a way to handle it.”

  ON THE WAY over to the bank, Bone called again and asked how long he’d be.

  “Ten more minutes,” Lucas said. “Something happen?”

  “Yeah. Your guy Shaffer is here and he’s pissed because I won’t talk until you get here. And ’cause I got a lawyer to sit in.”

  “Nine minutes,” Lucas said.

  POLARIS NATIONAL BANK was in downtown Minneapolis, a skyscraper of pale yellow stone and blue glass. Bone’s corner office was on the fiftieth floor, from where he could look crosstown at the slightly higher IDS Center. Lucas had been in Bone’s office probably fifty times, after men’s league basketball games, to drink a glass of bourbon or a G&T, if it was hot, and talk about money.

  Lucas pushed through the revolving door into the lobby a little after five o’clock and found Rivera and Martínez talking to the security guards. Lucas walked over, showed his BCA identification, and they went up together.

  In the privacy of the elevator, Rivera said, a question in his voice, “Mrs. Brooks?”

  “Could be a false alarm,” Lucas said.

  “Do you think it’s a false alarm?” Martínez asked.

  “No, I don’t,” Lucas said. “But I’ve been wrong before.”

  “She was the first to die.”

  Lucas said, “We assumed they’d torture the main target last—let him see the others suffer. They didn’t. They went right after her, and when she died, they tried to get what they wanted out of the husband, by torturing the daughter, and then the husband himself. He had nothing to give them.”