Stolen Prey

by John Sandford

  “You keep saying ‘I think.’ Is this for sure?”

  She shook her head. “I’m pretty sure, but the only way to know for sure is to run the program and see what happens…. And there’s some other stuff in here that looks like it might be parts of a booby trap. That’s why I called it a programmer’s doily—you pull on the wrong string, and the whole doily unravels, and you’ll never figure it out.”

  From behind Lucas, Bone said, “The important points are, he had administrator’s privileges, and he had to know enough about the security system to turn off the alarm.”

  Lucas swiveled around and, with a question mark in his voice, asked, “Pruess?”

  “Not unless he took some serious programming classes somewhere, and then figured out how to get in from a remote terminal. I don’t believe it—there’s nothing on his record that would suggest that he knew anything about programming. He was a sales guy,” Bone said.

  “The programming here isn’t particularly hard,” ICE said. “There’s a lot of it—finding this little knot was essentially a problem of finding a needle in a haystack—but the knot itself is pretty simple.”

  “To simplify all the techie bullshit,” Lucas said, “you’re telling me that somebody here set up this … doily … and then he could call in from the outside and loot the account.”

  “You’re smarter than you look,” ICE said.

  “Thank you,” Lucas said. “But what you’ve given us here, I could have figured out myself, eventually, even though I don’t know anything about computers. We need you to give us some details, not this sort of, excuse me, generalized bullshit.”

  ICE turned her palms up and said, “We might need a warrant for that. The Bonester is seriously unhappy. He’s dragging his feet.”

  Bone said, “Look, we’ll get it done—but I can’t have you setting off some logic bomb that’s going to blow up the bank’s accounts. I’ve got three hundred billion dollars in assets floating around in there. I need to know what’s going to blow if you touch the wrong wire.”

  “You’ve got multiple redundancies—” ICE began.

  “But there might be multiple bombs,” Bone said. “What’s the point of taking us down, if we go back online in ten minutes? If there’s one bomb, there could be lots of them.”

  ICE stuck out a lip and tilted her head: “It’s a thought.”

  Lucas asked ICE, “How long would it take you to evaluate the situation? In detail?”

  “A day, maybe,” she said. “Depends on how tangled up the knitting gets.”

  “Too long, too long,” Lucas said. “They’re killing people every day. You have to move faster.”

  Bone said to ICE, “No. No. If you gotta go slow, go slow. And I want my computer security people looking over your shoulder while you’re doing it. I’m not bullshitting you two—”

  Lucas interrupted: “Jim. People are being killed—”

  Bone said, “Look. Lucas. Ol’ buddy. If she touches off a string of bombs and brings down the bank, Wall Street dumps two thousand points and the economy goes into recession. You’d kill more people than a whole bunch of Mexican gangbangers.”

  Lucas grunted, a short laugh, and ICE put on her mildly amused look, but Bone wasn’t laughing. He was snarling: “You think I’m joking? I’m not. This bank crashes, and the first thing everybody thinks is, ‘Terrorists. Gotta get out.’ And they run for the doors. Lucas, I’m not fucking you around here. Miz ICE is wearing a suicide vest, she just doesn’t know it.”

  Lucas said, “All right.” To ICE, “Fast as you can, without blowing anything up. These guys, they’re crazy, and they’re going to kill again.”

  “Gonna take a lot of high-priced speed,” ICE said.

  “I don’t want to hear about it,” Lucas said. “I just want to get it done.”

  10

  That night, Weather and Letty sat around and talked about the murder of Rivera, and Lucas worried that he’d messed things up.

  “I knew something was up with him. I knew he was running around talking to the Latino community, and I might have figured he’d go hunting them on his own…. I just couldn’t imagine that he’d actually find them. I’ve been hung up on the horse shit gang. I wanted to get them, so I let him go. Now he’s dead.”

  “You think you can know everything, but you can’t. You think you can anticipate everything, but you can’t,” Weather said. “I didn’t tell you my John Greene story, did I? What happened yesterday?”

  “No.” Greene was a friend of theirs, a cardiac surgeon.

  “Yesterday morning, he takes a sixty-five-year-old guy into bypass surgery. Vietnam vet, this is down at the VA hospital. They’ve done a huge workup on the guy, everything is perfect, he’s an excellent candidate, hasn’t smoked in thirty years, a little overweight but not terrible, always had high cholesterol but he’s gone on the reversal diet and he’s bringing it down…. But he’s having trouble breathing from all those years of eating pork chops. So it looks like if they do the operation, he’s good for twenty or thirty years. They do the work, the op is fine … but his heart won’t start. Nothing they can do—they try everything. Guy’s dead.”

  “Jeez,” Letty said, her face going white.

  “Bad day,” Lucas said, “But that doesn’t have—”

  “Sure it does,” Weather said. “You can’t know everything. You’re walking through a fog, all the time. Even in situations where you think you know just about everything, like with John, something can go wrong. He’s devastated, because he’s the same kind of guy you are, a control freak. The patient had a nice wife and four kids, couple grandchildren … and he’s dead. But it’s not John’s fault. Same with this Rivera. Shit happens. That’s what everybody was telling John. He knows that, but he doesn’t feel like that. You’ve got the same problem.”

  SO HE THOUGHT about it, and didn’t sleep well. Weather had planned a morning at the Minneapolis Institute of Art with Letty and Sam, and Lucas was invited, though he told them not to count on it. He slept through the phone when it rang early the next morning, but Weather, who was used to getting up early, picked it up, and then woke him by pulling on his big toe.

  “What?” He was groggy, and pushed himself up.

  She was still in her pajamas. “Your phone was buzzing, so I looked at it. It’s Ingrid. She says she needs to talk to you.” Weather held out his phone.

  “Uhh…”

  “Man, you sound like you’re dead,” ICE said.

  “Just asleep. What happened?”

  “You better come over here and interview a couple guys,” ICE said.

  “You figure it out?” Lucas asked.

  “I’m still working through the software,” ICE said. “This, I got with chitchat. Come over here and talk with these guys.”

  “Who?”

  “The pizza guy and one of the computer security guys. I’m serious, you need to talk to them. They’re waiting for you.”

  “Ah, Jesus.”

  “C’mon. Skip the mascara, just rinse off your face and run on over here,” ICE said.

  HE TOOK the time to stand in the shower for three minutes, put on jeans and a T-shirt and a jacket to cover the Beretta, headed downstairs, unshaven. Weather got some coffee going, and Lucas made himself an egg sandwich, two eggs fried hard inside two slices of white Wonder bread. He borrowed one of Weather’s travel cups for the coffee, and was out of the house five minutes later.

  The day was cool, though the cold front that had come with the initial killings had blown through, and it looked like the day would be sunny and reasonably warm. He took Mississippi River Boulevard north to the point where it leaked onto Cretin Avenue, by the St. Thomas University stadium, took Cretin to I-94, drove across the river and into downtown Minneapolis.

  ICE was sitting on a granite post outside the bank, smoking a cigarette. When she saw him coming, she flagged him down, walked around to the passenger side, and got in the Porsche. “This is pure detective work on my part,” she said. “What h
appened was, it’s six o’clock and I’m stoned on speed and caffeine and I’m starving to death, so we order out for pizzas at the bank guys’ regular place, and the pizza guy comes by.”

  “The bank guys work on Sunday morning?”

  “This Sunday they do. Anyway…”

  The pizza guy brought in a load of pies, she said as Lucas parked the Porsche, and she and the pizza guy and one of the computer guys started chatting, and the computer guy said that he hardly saw the pizza guys anymore after this guy named Jacob quit. And they said, yeah, he was more of a pizza eater than anyone else, came from all those years as a midnight writer … meaning a hacker.

  “So I say, ‘Jacob who?’ This overnight computer guy, Jon, says, ‘Jacob Kline,’ and I say, ‘Holy shit, there’s your leak, right there. There’s your money.’ That’s when we decided I better get you out of bed.”

  IN THE SECURE AREA, the pizza guy, who wore a little white paper hat like the ones that U.S. Marines called cunt hats, said, “Dude,” and a computer guy turned from his terminal and asked, “You Lucas?”

  “So tell me,” Lucas said, taking a chair.

  The pizza guy said, “Jacob was like this total stoner, slacker, bullshit artist, I don’t know how he kept the job.”

  “Good programmer,” ICE said. “Smart.”

  “But messed up,” said the computer guy named Jon. “He was depressed. I mean, like mentally ill, not like bummed out.”

  “Okay,” Lucas said.

  “And he wouldn’t take his meds, even when he was going down. He’d just sit there and get worse,” Jon said. “Said he couldn’t program when he was taking his meds, said it screwed up his head.”

  “His head was totally screwed up,” said the pizza guy.

  “So why does that make you think…?” Lucas let the question hang.

  “He used to talk about making a killing with some computer app and then getting out, so he wouldn’t have to work,” Jon said. “He said work was what was killing him. It was so boring. So stupid. He couldn’t stand it. He said he went out to Silicon Valley one time, thinking it might be better, but it was worse, they treated people like robots. Anyway, he got fired for non-performance. He knew it was coming … and this stuff that ICE has been looking at, it feels like his work. It works and all, but it’s got these little flourishes….”

  ICE nodded. “I know him from gamer work. He’s both fucked up and good. I don’t know his style well enough to pick it out, but I believe Jon when he says he can.”

  “Like a writing style,” Lucas said. “Like a book-writing style.”

  “Exactly,” said ICE. “The other thing that we didn’t think about long enough … whoever stole this money knew a lot about banking and how to set up accounts. So it had to be inside, right? But if it was inside, why did they set up this back door to get in? It’d be easier and less visible if they moved the money from in here. You wouldn’t have this doily to untangle.”

  “But that would pin it down to somebody here,” Lucas said. “If you were in here, and you built a back door, it’d look like it was done by an outsider. The back door could function as a decoy.”

  “True, I didn’t think of that,” ICE said. She looked at Jon. “I guess you’re fucked.”

  “Not recently,” he said, and waggled his eyebrows at her.

  “In your dreams,” she said.

  “Okay, kids, calm down,” Lucas said. “You’re saying the main reason that Jacob did it is, he’s messed up.”

  “Not exactly,” Jon said. “Because this almost has to be an inside job, which has everybody worried. But the people working here now are the straightest, most-insured, most 401k’d, middle-class…” He paused, then pointed at ICE. “She’s the biggest criminal who’s ever been in here. Except for Jacob. What I’m saying is, Jacob would do this. Nobody else would.”

  “I agree except for one thing,” the pizza guy said. “He’s the laziest motherfucker in the world. He’s too lazy to steal. He’s too lazy to learn how to drive a car—he used to order pizzas at the end of his shift because he knew the store was down near where he lives, and he’d bum a ride home. That’s what I don’t see: he doesn’t give a shit, not enough to steal a billion dollars or whatever it is.”

  “Also true,” ICE said. “And it’s not because he’s depressed. He’s just fuckin’ lazy.”

  Jon and ICE said that whoever had built the back door had, in fact, created a little group of booby traps and alarms, but they were taking them out and should be done by the middle of the day. “I never did finish over at Sunnie, so after we’re done here, I’m gonna go home and get a few hours of sleep, then get some sliders and go back to Sunnie. When I get done with that, I’m going to Paris.”

  “Where do I find this Jacob guy?” Lucas asked.

  “I know the answer to that,” Jon said.

  WHEN LUCAS left the bank, it was still before eight o’clock, and there was no reason to expect that Del would be awake. But there was no reason to expect that Lucas would be awake, either, and there was no reason that he should have to suffer alone, so he called Del, got his wife, and told her that he was on his way and to pull Del out of bed.

  Del was not happy when Lucas arrived: “There’s a nuclear weapon somewhere in the Twin Cities and we only have a half hour to find it,” he said. He was sitting on his bed, pulling on his socks.

  “No, there’s a guy named Jacob in an apartment off Lyndale who may have stolen twenty-two million dollars, and we have to shake it out of him,” Lucas said.

  Del: “Jesus, couldn’t you have gotten a flunky to go with you?”

  “Uh, Del…”

  “I know, I am a flunky.” He got a pistol from under the bed, already in a holster, and stuck it in his belt. “I’m good.”

  DEL LIVED in St. Paul. Lucas filled him in as they drove back to Minneapolis, then turned south.

  “What you’re telling me,” Del said, “is that we got nothing but what some pizza guy suspects.”

  “No. We’ve got solid judgments from two computer people that the work looks like Kline’s, and that he has voiced some inclination to make a killing, somehow. And that he was fired, and he was pissed about it. According to the Polaris computer guy, when they fired him, he threatened to shit in their revolving door.”

  “Another Dillinger, no doubt about it,” Del said.

  THEY WERE at the apartment by eight-thirty. Most of the parking around Kline’s apartment was on-street, but they found a space without much trouble. They walked around a corner past a basement-level mystery bookstore, and Del asked, “You read that stuff?”

  Lucas nodded. “Sure. We’ve got a bunch of detective novels up at the cabin. I read them on rainy days. They’re mostly full of shit.”

  “That’s because they have to combine Hollywood and the cops. An author told me that,” Del said. “He said if a book described what the cops really do, everybody would fall asleep. So they have to stick in some Hollywood. Maybe a lot of Hollywood.”

  “What about true-crime books? Those sell pretty well.”

  “Yeah, but … those aren’t about the cops,” Del said. “Those are about the criminals, and what they do. The bloodier the better.”

  “You ever read that book about Ted Bundy?” Lucas asked, as they waited by the door to the apartment.

  “No, but I saw the movie. He was cute as a button, Ted was.”

  A guy came out of the apartment and Del hooked the door while it was open. The guy turned and looked at Del, frowned and asked, “Do you live here?”

  “Would I be going in if I didn’t?” Del asked.

  Lucas pulled his ID and said, “It’s okay, we’re cops.”

  The guy nodded and took another look at Del, and went on his way.

  “People are just too goddamn suspicious,” Del said.

  ACCORDING TO the building directory, Kline was in 204. They took one flight of steps, turned right, and were looking at the door, one of twenty or thirty running down a long dim hallway. Lucas kn
ocked. They waited. No response, so he knocked louder. No response, so he knocked louder yet, and they heard what sounded like a groan from the apartment, and heard somebody call, “I’m coming.”

  They could tell before he got to the door that he was barefoot, from the soft footfalls. A chain rattled on the back of the door, and the man opened it. He was as tall as Lucas, or maybe an inch taller, white, with a curly black semi-Afro. He had thin, wispy whiskers on a face that probably wouldn’t need much shaving. He was wearing a pair of jockey shorts and nothing else. He said, “I don’t want any.”

  “We’re with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension,” Lucas began.

  “I don’t want any of that, either,” the man said.

  “Are you Mr. Kline?” Del asked.

  “Yeah. I think so. I was last night.” He pulled on the top of his underpants, peered into the opening, then looked up and said, “Yep. Still am. What do you want?”

  “We need to talk to you,” Lucas said.

  “Oh, right,” Kline said. “I let you in, you toss my apartment, take my stash.”

  “Not interested in your stash,” Del said. “We don’t have a search warrant, so we won’t toss the apartment. We just need to talk to you about a problem at Polaris National.”

  Kline snorted, “They got more than one problem.”

  A young blond woman came out of her apartment down the hall, wearing what might have been a churchgoing dress, and as she pulled her door closed she called, “Jacob, you put some pants on or I swear to God I’ll call the cops.”

  “These are the cops,” he said.

  The woman was coming along the hall, slowed, and said to Lucas, “I was joking. He plays with it, but he never wags it.”

  “Doesn’t necessarily qualify him for an honorary degree,” Lucas said. She was pretty, and he was always up for a chat with a pretty woman.