“That’ll take me all day,” she said.
“Probably.” He put his jacket on. “Better get to work.”
MARTÍNEZ DID NOT call the Big Voice immediately. Instead, she drove back to the St. Paul Hotel, lay on her bed, and thought about her next move. Twenty-two million dollars, or a large part of that, was sitting out there in gold. She was paid quite well by the Criminales, but the compensation was nothing like a million a year. Not even a tenth of that. Twenty-two million…
She considered several possibilities:
She might try to go for the gold herself. If Davenport would keep filling her in on the investigation, and if she could get to one of the thieves first, with Uno under control, she would find out where the gold was: Uno was the designated torturer. Then, if something happened to Uno, she would be there with the gold. If she weren’t greedy, and took only part of it—say, five million—and let the police find the remainder, who would know, or be able to figure out, what happened to the rest?
Or, she could recover all the gold for the Criminales and suggest to the powers that she deserved a cut for her actions. They’d probably give her something—not five million, but something. Five percent? One million? Maybe. It wouldn’t cost them much, compared to what they got back, and would demonstrate their generosity toward loyal employees.
Or, she could recommend that they cut the cord, with everybody pulling back to Mexico. That, she thought, was a problem for one big reason: she, Uno, and Tres weren’t important enough to save, compared to the value of the gold. They’d want her to risk everything in going for it—and if she lost, and was killed or imprisoned … well, she just wasn’t that big a deal, to them.
She considered the possibilities and decided that whatever she eventually did, she didn’t have to make a decision immediately.
So she called the Big Voice and filled him in: told him about the discovery of the shadow books at Sunnie, about Lucas’s focus on Kline and Turicek, about the DEA: “I hope you have all the money out of the pipeline. The DEA is now in the Caymans and they have the account numbers.”
“Don’t be concerned about that—all the proper people know,” the Big Voice said. “We are now more interested in the possibilities with this gold. Do you need help there? Is there anything to be done?”
“Mmm, the police have now put surveillance on this Turicek, and Kline is protected by more policemen at the hospital. Davenport believes there is at least one more accomplice, the person who does the buying. I cannot think of how to find that person. Turicek and Kline work in the computer department of another bank. If we could find a friend of theirs at the bank … we might learn something from the friend, but how do I find the friend?”
Big Voice said, “Let me see what I can do. Maybe we can find something online, in Facebook perhaps. Perhaps we can find a directory for this Hennepin National. We will call you.”
“I will be waiting.”
TURICEK was moving fast.
After talking with Kline early in the morning, he and Kline together had erased Kline’s phone messages and phone log, and Turicek said, “Christ, you can’t keep this stuff on here, this message from Kristina. It ties us all together.”
Kline told him there was even more on his home computer, gave Turicek his key, and a list of files that needed to be erased.
“You don’t have any cloud files?” Turicek asked.
“I’m not suicidal.”
Turicek had driven straight to Kline’s apartment, peeled off the police seal, which appeared to have already been tampered with, and let himself inside. He had no intention of erasing selected files: instead, he’d cracked the computer case and yanked out the two disk drives, and fled.
Back at his apartment, he used a ball-peen hammer to crack open the drive cases, removed the disks, beat the disks into fragments, and flushed them down the toilet.
At the rental office, where they took the gold deliveries, he’d waited until the morning packages came in. When Sanderson showed up, they talked for a couple minutes, then he passed the gold on to her and went to work.
HE WAS picked up there by Jenkins and Shrake, who had his license tag and a description of his car.
Jenkins and Shrake had determined that he wasn’t at work by calling and asking for him. They were told that he was working the afternoon shift, and would be in at one o’clock. He rolled into the parking garage at ten minutes to one, and when he was inside the bank, Shrake said, “Piece-of-shit old Chevy. We could crack it, no problem.”
“No problem as long as we don’t get caught,” Jenkins said.
“But if we crack it and find a pile of gold, and tell Lucas, he’ll find a way to do a search, and then we’re … gold. If there’s nothing in it, we’re still cool.”
“Okay, I’m bored,” Jenkins said. “Let’s do it.”
They got in quickly enough. Jenkins blocked, standing by the car’s trunk while Shrake slid his slim jim down the window and popped the door. The car was clean, and, when he popped the trunk latch, so was the trunk.
“Life is hard and then you die,” Shrake said.
They closed up Turicek’s car, went back to their own vehicle, and started the surveillance: doing it the hard way.
WHEN SANDERSON met Turicek at the rental office, she’d said, “We have to stop this. Jacob’s in the hospital, they could be coming for us.”
“Which they?” Turicek asked.
Sanderson shuddered: “Better the police than this crazy drug gang. My God, I can’t believe we’re doing this.”
“Well, we can’t stop now,” Turicek said. “There are more packages in the air, and if they just get dropped here, and nobody picks them up, sooner or later somebody will get curious and open them…. If they find a big bunch of gold, and go to the cops…”
“We should tell Edie to stop. It’s just too dangerous. If she stops, we pick up the last packages, and we’re done.”
“I’ll talk to her,” Turicek said. “There’s only three more million to go…. I’d hate to cut it off, but I will if I have to.”
“Ivan, the police are already on to Jacob. What more do you need?”
“I’ll talk to Edie about it,” Turicek said.
SANDERSON GOT four more packages that afternoon, unwrapped the gold, repacked it, and took it to her mom’s home and hid it in a concealed closet where her daddy—now long gone—had hidden his gun safe. The gun safe was still there, though all the long guns had gone shortly after Daddy died, sold to his hunting buddies. A couple of handguns remained, which she hadn’t bothered to get rid of.
Since she and her mom didn’t share a last name, and her mother wouldn’t have remembered her last name if asked, the gold was safe enough, at least for a while.
Standing in front of the safe, looking at the now substantial stacks of coin—fifteen million worth? eighteen million?—and the two guns, Sanderson, though a gentle person, couldn’t help thinking:
If something happened to the other three, then she’d have it all….
WHEN LUCAS got to Minneapolis, he stopped first at Polaris, and went up to Bone’s office. Bone was in a meeting, but came out to talk: “What do you need?”
“Do you know anybody who’d do you a favor at Hennepin National?”
“Sure. I know the boss, Bob McCollum,” Bone said. “You’re still looking at this Kline guy?”
“I think … I’m not sure … that another guy in the computer department might be in on it. I need to talk to somebody nice and quietly who knows the people in their systems department. All of the people. Somebody who can keep his mouth shut.”
Bone tipped his head down the hall toward his office: “Come on. I’ll call Bob.”
HENNEPIN WAS only three or four blocks from Polaris, and Lucas walked over, went up to McCollum’s office. McCollum was not particularly happy to see him, and less happy when Lucas finished outlining the problem.
“You think they’ve figured out a way to get into Polaris’s systems from here?”
/> “I think it’s a possibility. I’m most interested in Kline, Turicek, and Sanderson, but there might be others,” Lucas said. “Is there somebody outside the department who’d know them all?”
McCollum scratched his head, then picked up his phone, pushed a button, and said, “Babs, could you come in here?” To Lucas, he said, “My assistant.”
A woman stuck her head in a moment later and said, “Sir?” She was an older woman, with steel-gray hair; she did not, Lucas thought, look like a Babs.
“Come in and talk to this guy. This is Lucas Davenport, he’s with the BCA.”
Babs nodded. “I know the name.”
“So tell her,” McCollum said.
Lucas outlined the problem, and the woman thought for a moment and said, “Dave Duncan would be your best possibility. He’s in HR and he vets all the computer people. He had systems management courses in college, he knows that language.”
“Get him up here,” McCollum said.
MCCOLLUM EXCUSED himself to go to his private bathroom, and Lucas sat and read a Cowboys & Indians magazine, and decided he needed some cowboy boots. McCollum came back, his face and hair damp, and a minute later Babs escorted Duncan through the door. Duncan was a nervous, narrow-shouldered man in a gray suit, some indeterminate age between twenty-eight and forty, Lucas thought; one of those men who looked like they’d never quite grown up, and didn’t know what to do about it.
Lucas told him the story. Duncan rubbed his fingers together as he listened, looked away from Lucas out through office windows, across town toward the Polaris Tower, where, as far as Lucas knew, Bone might be staring back.
When Lucas finished, Duncan didn’t say anything until McCollum grunted, “Well?”
“Turicek may be a criminal,” he said. “There was a party once, a karaoke party over at the Raven, and he and Doris Abernathy got loaded and I think she may have gone home with him. May have continued to see him for a while. Anyway, Doris told me later that he’d get drunk and tell the most outrageous stories about himself, about the old days in computer school in Russia, or Lithuania. About hacking and so on. I did some careful research on him, but there was nothing to be found.”
“What about Kline?” Lucas asked.
“He came with a good recommendation from Polaris, but he’s not really a satisfactory employee. He’s sick too often, and we believe he’s faking it, but there’s no question that he’s been under treatment for depression. Firing him … becomes complicated. In any case, he’s not really a satisfactory employee, though he’s smart enough.”
“Sanderson?”
“Quiet, but a little nutty? Nothing out of control, but, you know … a former girl nerd, so to speak, smart, does her work. The kind of person who, after a few years, might open a candle store.”
“Any other potential criminals down there?” McCollum asked.
“I wouldn’t call Sanderson a potential criminal. She’s very quiet, and reclusive,” Duncan said. “The other two … I just don’t know well enough to say. Turicek, maybe, but Kline … he doesn’t seem to have enough of an executive mind to run a big theft.”
“Executive mind?” McCollum asked, drily.
“Able to make a plan, then execute it,” Duncan said.
“If Turicek and Kline were going into another bank’s computer system, using your system here, how many of the systems people here would have to know about it?” Lucas asked.
Duncan shook his head. “Hard to say. I don’t know enough about computer programming, for one thing. Everything depends on the details of what you’re doing. Normally, if you had a complicated piece of programming to do, you could do it all off-site, and then bring it in and load it. But our systems have protections against that kind of thing—of rogue programs being loaded without a lot of checks and warnings. So it’d probably have to be done here … and it would take a while.”
“I know this is complicated, but make it as simple as possible for me: If this was being done in Systems, would everybody have to know about it?”
Duncan thought for a moment, then said, “Nooo … I don’t think so. But probably all the full-time programmers would. They’d be the only ones who could do it, in the first place, and they’re working there side by side, and their schedules are always overlapping. If somebody was doing some heavy programming, and working into another system from ours, they’d see it.”
“And that would be who?” Lucas asked.
“Just who you’re asking about—Kline, Turicek, and Sanderson. There’s another man, Ken Gleason, a supervisor, who could cover for any of them, but he’s actually in a different office. They could do this without him knowing.”
“Have any of them been taking days off lately? Traveling?”
“I’d have to call downstairs and ask. Take me a minute,” Duncan said.
Lucas: “If you could do that.”
Duncan did; they sat watching him talk into his phone, and as he said, it took only a moment. He hung up and said, “Kline is gone, obviously, and Sanderson has been coming in early to cover his shift. Turicek has been coming in later to cover his shift and part of Sanderson’s. There’s a gap around noon, so they aren’t overlapping at the moment. They’re both working a little overtime right now, because Kline’s out.”
Lucas said, “Huh,” and McCollum said, “Doesn’t exactly fit your model.”
Lucas disagreed: “It could. There’s always somebody here, but there’s always somebody not here. It’s what they’re doing when they’re not here that interests me right now.”
When he’d gotten as much as they knew, Lucas warned all of them not to talk. “This is a dangerous situation, and it’s possible that this drug gang has people working for the banks. Watch the news: talking about this investigation could get people killed.”
He took the elevator down with Duncan, went to Duncan’s office, and got a printout of Turicek’s and Sanderson’s addresses. As he handed them over, Duncan said, “I have an observation, if you’d be interested.”
“I’m always interested in observations,” Lucas said.
“If I were a police officer, and if I wanted to shake one of these people by questioning them … I’d go after Kristina. She doesn’t strike me either as the criminal type, or as a strong person. If she’s involved, and she was pushed, she’d fall apart very quickly.”
Lucas nodded and said, “I’ll think about that.”
BACK ON THE STREET, he got a call from Shrake: “What’re you doing here?”
“Talking to the bank president. Where’re you guys?”
“Jenkins is in the Skyway, watching the elevators there. I’m in the garage across the street—I can see both ground-floor exits from up here, and his car’s on the other side of the floor.”
“His car, huh?”
“We’re pretty sure a guy like that wouldn’t put anything incriminating in his car,” Shrake said.
Lucas said, “I trust your remarkable insight into the criminal mind.”
“Into the criminal glove compartment, too,” Shrake said. “Anyhoo … we’re here.”
LUCAS KNEW where Turicek was, so he drove the Lexus south and west out of downtown, to Sanderson’s place. On the way, he called in to the BCA duty officer and got the make and model of her car and the license tags, and, as a bonus, her home and cell phone numbers.
Sanderson lived in a small, yellow-brick apartment complex a short walk east of Lake Calhoun. The apartment had underground parking, with a gated entrance ramp, and he had no way into it. The place looked nice enough, without being rich—exactly the kind of place an orderly, intelligent, well-employed single woman would pick.
He sat for five minutes, working out the possibilities, then called her home phone number. It rang seven times, then clicked over to the answering service, and he hung up.
He was considering the possibility of trying to get into the building when his phone rang. Sandy. “Yeah?”
“Okay, I’ve been calling the gold dealers, and I think we’
ve got a hit.”
“Excellent. Who is it?”
“There’s a woman who says she’s Syrian, has been showing up at a lot of gold dealers, both on the left and right coasts, and buying gold coins, fifty, seventy, a hundred thousand dollars at a time. She says her family is Christian and is getting out of Syria, and they don’t think anything is safe but gold. That’s what she tells them. She’s gone to all of the dealers you checked—I’d like to know how you did that—and a half dozen more places.”
“Have they got a passport, a name, a description, a photograph, an address…?”
“They’ve got a cheap business card, the kind you print on your home computer, with an address in Damascus, in English, and some Arabic writing that nobody understands but looks like the same address. That’s it—we don’t even have a description, because she wears one of those veils. All they’ve seen is her eyes….”
As she was talking, two men walked down the sidewalk on the other side of the street. They were coming from up the block behind him, and he didn’t notice them until they passed his car. He glanced at them, went back to Sandy, said, “I can’t believe…” then trailed off, frowned, and looked at the men as they approached the sidewalk that led to the entrance of the apartment.
Two short men, slender, wearing baseball caps and T-shirts. Dark hair, athletic. Lucas said, “Holy shit,” and Sandy said, “What?” and Lucas said, “I’ll call you back,” and he punched in 911 and watched as the men walked up to the apartment entrance. They were planning to do wrong, he thought, because they had that wary, check-it-out attitude, looking here and there, while pretending not to.
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