“They all say that,” Kevin said.
By the time Lucas got to Kline’s apartment building, it was after eleven o’clock, and the building was mostly dark, and quiet. A cop was sitting out front, in his squad, the engine running and the internal light on, reading a hard-cover comic.
“Nice night,” he said, as Lucas walked up, after parking the Porsche.
“Not bad,” Lucas agreed.
Kline’s apartment was the first one at the top of the landing. Lucas pulled off a piece of crime-scene tape, let himself in, turned on the lights, put his hands in his pockets, and walked through the place.
The uniform said, “Stinks.”
LUCAS SPENT fifteen minutes inside, looking at bullet holes, looking at angles. Finally he said, “Maybe.”
“Maybe?”
“Maybe he’s telling the truth. It sort of looks like he’s telling the truth. Problem is, nobody saw the supposed Mexicans.”
The cop shrugged. “He got shot, and they don’t have a gun, right? Seems pretty straightforward.”
“Nothing is straightforward in this,” Lucas said. He took a last look around. “Okay. I’m done.”
OUTSIDE, he passed the key to the cop and said, “I’d appreciate it if you’d sign it back in as quick as you could. Your boss didn’t like the whole idea.”
“I’ll do that,” the cop said.
Lucas sat in his car, his cell phone up to his face, faking a conversation, until the cop pulled away and a half dozen cars were between them. Then Lucas did a U-turn and followed, until he was sure the cop was headed downtown.
Five minutes later, he was back at Kline’s door. He used the new key to unlock it, pulled on a pair of latex gloves, and began searching the place.
He needed, specifically, a stash of coins, or a discarded envelope or package wrapping that would connect him to a gold dealer, or anything that could suggest a conspiracy with Turicek and Sanderson.
The apartment was small and shabby, smelling of spaghetti sauce overlain with the scent of human waste and blood; there was minimal cooking gear, three large bookcases full of paperback books and DVDs, an oversized TV with a game console hooked to it. The floor was littered with medical detritus, the paper and plastic packaging for bandages and syringes and whatever. Though he went through each cupboard and drawer, rolled and poked the mattress, looked in the toilet tank, and even removed every electric-outlet cover plate—took his time—he came up empty.
Then, in a military-styled shirt-jac, the kind with zippers on the sleeve, he found a cheap cell phone. He brought it up, looked at the call log, found dozens of incoming and outgoing calls, but only to three numbers. He took the numbers down and put the phone back.
WHEN HE finished the general search, he sat at Kline’s desk, going through the paper around the Mac Tower, and found a lot of litter and cryptic notes of the same kind Lucas had on his own desk. He turned on the computer and was asked for a password. He took out his notebook and looked up the password he’d found on the back of the Sirius Satellite Radio card, and typed it in: 6rattata6.
The computer shook him off, and he closed it down and turned away from the desk for a last look around the place.
There were two big framed posters on the wall opposite the desk, each showing multiple images of Japanese cartoon characters. He hadn’t looked behind them, so he looked behind them and found the back side of posters. When he was straightening the second one, his eye caught a caption with the word Rattata.
He looked closer. The posters were composites of favorite cartoon characters, if anime meant “cartoon.” There were a couple dozen of them, and if Kline was taking his passwords from anime characters…
He went back to the computer and brought it up and it occurred to him that most people didn’t have large numbers of different passwords, but just a couple of passwords, with perhaps variations.
So instead of plugging in all the anime characters, he started with plain “rattata,” and worked from 0rattata0 through 9rattata9, and was shaken off with each of them.
“Goddamnit.”
He looked at the pictures again, then pulled the closest one off the wall. Forty minutes later, working from the names on the picture, he typed in “5pikachu5”—and he was in.
“Excellent,” he said to himself.
He went to the Spotlight feature and typed in “Gold,” and got dozens of hits. He said, “Gotcha,” and then, a minute later, “Don’t gotcha.”
As he started working through the hits, he found that most of them were document and online files that included the word Gold, as in one place, Golden Artist Colors, and in another, WhatsUp Gold, some kind of network monitoring software. Then, as he was growing discouraged, he found Donleavy Precious Metals, and a website for a Chicago dealer in gold, silver, and platinum. A few minutes more got him a link to Las Vegas Numismatics, and he said, “Now I’ve gotcha.”
When he shut down the computer an hour later, he had a list of twelve dealers on the west and east coasts.
Too late to do anything about it, he thought.
Somewhere along the line, it occurred to him that he hadn’t spoken to Virgil Flowers. He’d probably taken the day off, and knowing Flowers, he’d done it in a boat. The thing about Flowers was, in Lucas’s humble opinion, you could send him out for a loaf of bread and he’d find an illegal bread cartel smuggling in heroin-saturated wheat from Afghanistan. Either that, or he’d be fishing in a muskie tournament, on government time. You had to keep an eye on him.
In bed that night, he spent little time thinking about the tweekers—Flowers would get them—and more time thinking about the gold. The gold was interesting because it tied everything together. He also thought about Shaffer: the problem with Shaffer was that he was straight. Very straight. He had little sense of humor when it came to things like illegal searches, using unknowing innocent people as decoys, and so on.
He would have to use some finesse, he decided.
THE NEXT MORNING, before he left for work, he called Sandy, the researcher, and said, “I need to find the biggest gold dealers in the country. Maybe, like, the top one hundred.”
“Do you have any idea how I’m supposed to figure that out?” she asked.
“No, I don’t,” he said. “I need the list this morning. Also, I have three phone numbers. I’d like to know who the subscribers are.”
“Well, that part’ll be easy enough,” she said.
OUTSIDE, he found that Letty had parked the Lexus behind the Porsche, and instead of shuffling cars, he took the truck and headed downtown. They met at nine o’clock, the whole murder crew, and Shaffer reported that they had enough evidence to convict anybody they managed to arrest, with fingerprints and DNA from three suspects. “We’ve got everybody in the metro area on board, every single cop has the photos and the Identi-Kits, and we think we may have a line on the car they’re driving. It’s a green Subaru Forester owned by a pretzel seller named Ferat Chakkour, who disappeared after he left his job at the Rosedale mall an hour or so after the shoot-out in St. Paul. He usually parked in the same lot where we found the Texas truck. We think they picked him up, probably killed him, dumped him somewhere, and are driving his car. This is confidential information—we’ve asked everybody to hold it close, make sure it doesn’t get out to the media. We’ve talked to all the highway patrols all the way to the Mexican border.”
“Gonna leak pretty quick,” Lucas said. “This guy got any family?”
“He’s got a housemate, another student, we’ve asked him to keep his mouth shut, but he’s already been talking to Chakkour’s parents in Cairo. Chakkour’s from Egypt. The roommate’s already talked to some classmates … but we’re hoping to keep it close for a day or two, maybe pick up the car before it breaks out.”
They’d already had four separate alerts, from cops who thought they might have spotted the suspects, but nothing had panned out; still, it kept them jumping.
The DEA, O’Brien said, was working the offshore banks but
hadn’t gotten anything yet. “Probably get it later today—we’re talking to the state department and our own people, squeezing as hard as we can. It’s not usually as hard to get it if we say it’s drug money. The problem is, every time the IRS goes after some corporation for tax evasion, they start out by saying it’s drug money, so the banks don’t always believe us anymore.”
Shaffer wrote a note and pushed it to another BCA agent while O’Brien was talking; Shaffer didn’t care about the banks.
Lucas told them about his conversations with Kline and Bone, and his conclusions from those conversations: that the thieves who’d hijacked the bank account were probably buying gold, and that there were probably several of them. He mentioned that he was having a researcher get together a list of gold dealers who could be checked for suspicious gold sales. He also suggested that the Criminales must have had a contact at the bank who tipped them to the suspicions about Kline.
“So you keep doing that, working on the thieves, and we’ll keep pushing people on the shooters,” Shaffer said. “If anything comes up, for anybody, call us.”
“The thing is, Kline’s the best lead we’ve got for the thieves, and the Criminales apparently think the same thing. I’d love to find something we could use to serve a search warrant on his young ass,” Lucas said. “If anybody thinks of anything…”
O’Brien asked, “Say, anybody seen Ana Martínez?”
Shaffer shrugged. “I know she was making arrangements to take Rivera’s body back to Mexico. I talked to her last night. I thought she’d be here. I called her, but she didn’t answer her phone.”
Lucas said, “That’s a little worrisome. I’ll check on her.”
As they were breaking up, O’Brien took a call, listened for a minute, then said, “We’ll be right over. We’re just leaving here, about twenty minutes.”
He hung up and said, “That was ICE. She found the shadow books at Sunnie. She said they’ve been there right from the start, when the system was first put together.”
“Bingo,” Shaffer said. “That’s large. I’m coming with you. Lucas?”
“I’ll be around.”
13
Lucas was sitting at his desk when Martin Clark, the Minneapolis homicide detective, called and demanded, “What the hell did you do in Kline’s apartment last night?”
Lucas, confused, said, “What?”
“What’d you do to the computer?”
“I didn’t do anything to the computer,” Lucas said. “Your guy was there the whole time. What happened to it?”
“Somebody cracked it open and took the disk drive.”
“Ah, shit … Marty, I didn’t touch the goddamn computer. I was just sitting here trying to think of a way to get a search warrant…. Wait a minute, could I put you on hold for a minute? Or call you right back?”
Martínez stepped to the doorway, looked in; her face was drawn, her eyes puffy. Lucas held up a finger. Clark said, “Yeah, okay. What’s going on?”
“Tell you in one minute,” Lucas said. Then, “Wait, wait, was the door forced? It wasn’t, was it?”
“No, the door’s fine.”
“I’ll get right back to you,” Lucas said.
He hung up and pointed Martínez at a chair, said, “Ana, glad to see you. I was a little worried. I’ve been trying to get in touch.”
“My phone was off,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“Gotta make a call.” Lucas called Hennepin Medical Center, was put through to the surgical intensive care ward, identified himself, and asked the nurse, “I really need to know if Mr. Kline had any visitors this morning…. Yeah, I’ll hold.”
When he was on hold, he said to Martínez, “Trying to get a line on the thieves…”
A woman came on the phone and identified herself as the charge nurse. Lucas told her that they were worried about possible interference with Kline, and asked if he’d had any visitors. She said that he had, apparently a coworker, a tall thin man with a sandy beard and a foreign accent—she thought he might be Russian. He’d visited very early, before seven o’clock, saying he was on his way to work.
Lucas thought: Ivan Turicek.
“Did you get a name?”
“No, I didn’t ask. Mr. Kline knew him,” the nurse said. “They were friendly. At least, when I was there.”
“Is Mr. Kline awake?”
“Yes, for the time being. They’ll be taking some drains out of his legs this morning, and he’ll go to the OR for that. He’ll be sleepy for a while.” That, she said, would happen whenever the doc was ready for him—there were three patients in front of Kline, all getting minor procedures.
Lucas said, “If that man shows up again, could you not allow him into Mr. Kline’s space by himself? It might be important to our investigation.”
She said she would keep an eye on him.
LUCAS GOT back on the phone to Clark.
“You know why these shooters hit Kline? Because we, and they, think Kline had something to do with hijacking the drug money account.”
“I know that,” Clark said.
“I don’t know this for sure, but I think one of his accomplices is a coworker named Ivan Turicek. They work together at Hennepin National. Anyway, if they’re the ones who did it, they got in through a computer … and Turicek visited Kline at the hospital, early this morning.”
“Ah, man.”
“Yeah. I talked to Kline yesterday, and the drawer was open on his bedside table. His keys were in there. Kline’s going into the OR this morning. If you could have somebody go over and maybe just peek in that drawer while he’s in the OR…”
“That would be legally questionable,” Clark said.
“But morally correct,” Lucas said. “Besides, maybe the drawer is still open … like it was yesterday.”
“All right, you talked me into it,” Clark said. “I’ll send Potach over. He’s a moral guy.”
“Sneaky, too,” Lucas said. “Good choice.”
“If we dust the keyboard, we won’t find any Davenport prints?”
“You will not,” Lucas said, happy about the fact that he’d worn gloves the night before. “You might find some from Ivan Turicek. That would be useful. And he’s an immigrant, so the feds will have his prints.”
“Talk to you,” Clark said.
LUCAS TURNED to Martínez, who said, “It will be another two days before I can send David’s ashes home. Your medical examiner has to complete some forms that I do not understand, and then we will cremate. In the meantime, my superiors wish to have reports on the progress of the investigation.”
“As for the progress, we have every cop in the Twin Cities looking for the shooters, and there is reason to believe we know what kind of a car they’re driving,” Lucas said.
He told her about the disappearance of Ferat Chakkour, and about the interview with Kline, and about Bone’s belief that the money was being converted to gold coin, about ICE’s discovery of the shadow books at Sunnie, about the DEA’s tracing of the Criminales’ bank accounts through the Cayman Islands. He told her about everything except his search of Kline’s apartment and the phone numbers from Kline’s phone.
“So, you are questioning these people? These computer thieves?”
“Not yet—everything I’ve told you is conjecture … guesswork. Right now, we’re trying to find out who’s buying the gold, and where they’re putting it.”
“So somewhere, there is a thief with a large pile of gold.”
“That’s what I think. And the shooters are somewhere. And the drug money is somewhere, but we don’t know where any of those things are.”
“Very complicated,” she said. She stood and said, “I am no David Rivera, I cannot help you with this investigation as he did. But if you can keep me, mmm, informed, this will be much appreciated by my superiors.”
“I will keep you informed,” Lucas promised.
LUCAS CALLED for Shrake and Jenkins, and got them pulled off some bullshit that involved the theft of ATM
machines from convenience stores. They showed up together, Jenkins wearing a straw cowboy hat and western boots, which made him about six-eight.
Lucas explained Kline and Turicek, and said, “If Turicek’s getting gold from somewhere, it would be nice to know where he’s putting it, and where it’s coming from.”
When they were gone, he got his jacket, planning to head for Minneapolis: he wanted to talk to Kline again, and then to Bone. He opened his office door and saw Sandy, the researcher, coming down the hall. She was a tall woman, thin, introverted, bespectacled, a latter-day hippie in paisley dresses with an improbable talent for tracking crooks through her computer systems. Everybody in the BCA abused her talent, when they could, and Lucas and Virgil Flowers led the pack. She said, “I’ve got your list. I can’t guarantee that they’re exactly the top one hundred, but they’re big.”
Lucas said, “All right. Sit in Cheryl’s chair.” He pointed her to a chair where his secretary normally worked. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
“Wait,” she said. “I also checked those three phone numbers—they’re all to prepaid cell phones. No credit cards attached to them. Sold through Walmart. So you’re outa luck, unless you actually find one of the phones.”
He went back in his office, closed the door, got out the list of gold dealers he’d found in Kline’s computer, and compared his list to Sandy’s. All twelve of Kline’s shops were on the list.
He made check marks next to the dealers he’d found in Kline’s computer, put his list away, and carried Sandy’s back to her.
“I want you to call the top twenty-five, plus the ones I’ve checked. Everybody should know about these killings, what’s going on here. You can imply that we’re calling because of that investigation.”
“Are we?”
“Yeah—but we’re chasing the people who took the money, not the killers,” Lucas said.
“I’d like to get the killers,” she said.
“So would I, but we do what we can.”
“So what are we looking for?”
“We want physical descriptions of people who are making big buys, of gold coins, not bars with serial numbers. We only want people who started last month and have come back repeatedly. They want physical delivery of the coins, and they want fast delivery. We’re talking buys in the hundreds of thousands of dollars…. Tell the dealers we don’t necessarily need names, but we need the physical descriptions. If you find somebody making really big buys, at a lot of shops, somebody who sounds like the same guy, then call all one hundred dealers and see if you can figure out how much gold the guy is taking and anything else you can get—name, bank, whatever.”
Stolen Prey Page 20
