Stolen Prey

by John Sandford

  “You’re going to prison,” Lucas repeated. “But before I come over and arrest you, I want to tell you in some detail what they did to the Brooks children before they killed them.”

  And he did, telling her about the throat-cutting, the knuckle amputations, the rape of the little girl and the mother while their father was bound on the floor beside them, about the puddles of blood and the bluebottle flies and the finger stumps used to write the bloody message on the wall.

  Sanderson’s head went down, her hands between her thighs, pressed together, her forehead nearly on her thumbs. “This is what you guys did, bringing these killers into town,” Lucas said.

  “It was all Ivan. It had to be,” she said. “I didn’t know.”

  Lucas got up, sighed, and said, “Well. Be seeing you. Take care of yourself, these people are crazy.”

  Now her head came up and she shouted at him, spittle flying across the room: “I know they’re crazy. You don’t have to tell me. They almost killed that poor Jacob, who wouldn’t hurt a fly, and they murdered Ivan, and they missed me just because I got lucky, and you know who brought them around to us? You police! You police dragged them in on top of us. That’s why they’re coming for us. You did this!”

  “See ya,” Lucas said, and he was out the door. As soon as he was out of sight, he jogged down the corridor and around the corner, and outside to the parking lot to the truck. From the door pocket, he retrieved his own prepaid cell phone and punched in the first of the numbers he’d taken from Kline’s prepaid cell phone when he searched Kline’s apartment. When Sanderson appeared at the emergency room door a moment later, he tapped the “call” icon. A phone rang, but she made no move to answer it.

  He punched in a second number and, as she walked up to her car, let it ring. Nothing. He put in the third number, and on the fourth ring, a man answered with a soft southern accent.

  “Hello?”

  “I must have the wrong number,” Lucas said. “Is this Jimmy?”

  “No, this ain’t Jimmy,” the man said, with an amused chuckle. “This is the custodian who just took Jimmy’s phone out of the trash can at Newark airport.”

  “I’ll have to kick Jimmy’s ass,” Lucas said.

  “What do you want me to do with the phone?” the custodian asked.

  “Keep it,” Lucas said. “It’s a prepay. When it runs out, you can pay for more.”

  SANDERSON WAS in her car, backing out of the parking space, but one thing that Lucas knew, as sure as sin and taxes, was that if somebody called a woman on a cell phone, she’d answer it. Or at least look at it. Was it possible she really wasn’t part of the Kline-Turicek-Gold Buyer phone circle?

  She took a left onto the road, heading down to I-35, and he followed, several cars back. She drove slowly across the Cities, all the way to her apartment, into her parking garage, and out of sight.

  “Goddamnit,” Lucas said aloud.

  Was it possible that she really was innocent?

  No, he decided. It wasn’t. He did a U-turn and headed back home.

  EDIE ALBITIS got into town just before midnight. She’d tried calling Turicek fifteen times on her second phone, hadn’t gotten an answer. As the plane rolled across the tarmac at MSP, she tried Sanderson. Sanderson, she thought, was probably the weak link in the whole chain, the one most likely to cough them up. She’d talked to Turicek about it, and he’d suggested that she probably wouldn’t screw up and talk until he and Albitis were safely in their respective bolt-holes in Lithuania, Ukraine, or Georgia. That had changed now, with all the attention from the cops.

  She tried to get Turicek, failed, knew she couldn’t get Kline, who was still in the hospital and apparently didn’t have his prepaid phone with him, and so she went to Sanderson, who’d just walked in the door when she called, the phone ringing from where she’d left it, on the floor next to the living room couch.

  “Yes?”

  “It’s me,” Albitis said. They didn’t use names on the phone.

  “Oh, my God, have you heard?” Sanderson cried.

  “Heard what?”

  “Ivan’s dead.”

  “What?” Albitis freaked; if it hadn’t been for her lap belt, she might have leaped out of the airplane seat.

  Sanderson told her about it, and Albitis listened, openmouthed, as they taxied up to the Jetway.

  “All right,” Albitis said. “I’ll call you back in five minutes. I have to think.”

  It wasn’t so much that she had to think, but she couldn’t talk with the guy in the next seat leaning over her. Once inside the terminal, she found an empty space next to a window and called Sanderson back. She said, “Okay, you’ve got this cop threatening you. That means he suspects, but he doesn’t know. He’s got no proof, or he already would have popped you. If you and Jacob keep your mouths shut, you’ll be okay.”

  “I’m sitting here shaking like a leaf,” Sanderson said. “You should have seen poor Ivan’s head. There was hardly any skin left on it. Like his nose had almost been scraped off.”

  “Okay, okay, I don’t want to hear that,” Albitis said. “I really don’t.”

  “I had to look at it.”

  “Enough. I’m going to the office to pick up today’s packages. I’ll sleep there, on the floor. The last of the packages come in tomorrow. I’ll pick them up, and then, we’ll just wait. We’ll have all the gold, and the cops’ll have no clue. We’ll split it up, and we’re done.”

  “Will you call me?”

  “I’ll call you three times a day…. Anything you hear, call me, but only on the cold phone, okay? Only on the cold phone. They’re probably monitoring your cell.”

  “Oh, God, this agent said I’m going to prison for life, I’m an accessory to murder because I won’t help them.”

  “Just stay cool.”

  WHEN LUCAS GOT HOME, Weather was asleep, but Letty was still up. “Mom said to tell you she saw the autopsy stuff on your desk, and she says she’s got a bad feeling about it. Something’s not right. She says she can’t imagine how Rivera got shot, if it happened the way you said it did.”

  Lucas frowned and said, “Did she say why?”

  “No, she says she just couldn’t imagine it,” she said. “You know, if it was the way you said.”

  Lucas went to his desk, found the autopsy file, and thumbed through it. Letty, munching on a PowerBar, came to look over his shoulder.

  “You don’t have to see this,” Lucas said.

  “I already did,” Letty said. “I couldn’t figure out what she meant, either. Maybe we should go wake her up.”

  “Is she cutting tomorrow?”

  “She’s got a nose … rhinoplasty.” Weather had outlawed the phrase “nose job” in the Davenport household.

  “So we let her sleep,” Lucas said.

  He looked through the photos, of both the crime scene and the autopsy, along with the autopsy notes.

  “You see it?” Letty asked.

  “No, because I’m going to have to imagine it, and I can’t do that with you crunching the PowerBar in my ear,” Lucas said.

  “Chill.”

  LUCAS LOOKED at the photos, closed his eyes. Simple enough. Rivera walked up the front steps, cocked his gun, made sure the safety was off, got his guts up, and kicked the door. He landed with one foot inside, saw the two men off to his right, turned that way. One of them went for his gun and he fired twice and the third man, whom he hadn’t seen, who was standing next to the picture window to his left, peeking through the drapes, that man swivels with a gun and shoots….

  He looked at the pictures.

  Closed his eyes. The man on the left shoots…

  He shoots…

  Lucas opened his eyes and said, “Houston, we’ve got a problem.”

  “I’m Letty,” said Letty. “You had a stroke, or something?”

  LUCAS SPENT a restless night working through it, realized he should have seen it a lot sooner. He’d sensed it, back at the shooting scene, but hadn’t been able to
put his finger on the problem. But better late than never.

  Weather’s alarm went off at six o’clock. He usually slept right through it, but this time he rolled out of bed with her, shaved, gave her a good scrub in the shower, which might have grown interesting if they’d only had more time, but they were both in a hurry. He took the time to say, “Thanks for the tip on the autopsy.”

  “That’s something?” she asked.

  “I’m afraid it is.”

  16

  Lucas began by calling Shaffer, taking a certain amount of satisfaction at the thought of blowing him out of bed. Shaffer answered the phone on the second ring and sounded unnaturally alert, saying, “Yeah? What’s up?”

  “You’ve been up for two hours and you’ve already done your yoga exercises and now you’re drinking fresh-squeezed orange juice, aren’t you?” Lucas asked.

  “Carrot juice,” Shaffer said. “Getting ready to run. You’re calling for juice advice?”

  “No. I need to meet with you at eight o’clock instead of nine, and out of sight. You drink coffee?”

  “You broke something?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Tell me where.”

  DEL WAS not quite as alert. “Jesus. Is the sun up?”

  “I need to talk to your brother-in-law, the real estate guy,” Lucas said. “I need to talk to him right now.”

  “We’re not an early-up family,” Del said.

  “Well, you’re up, so why shouldn’t your brother-in-law be up?” Lucas asked.

  “That’s a point. I’ll call him,” Del said.

  WHEN HE GOT off the phone, Lucas went to his study and got out a yellow pad and started making a list. When he finished, after some thought, the list had only three items.

  —Rivera choreography.

  —Sanderson apartment.

  —Insider information.

  He worked through it all again and was convinced. He wasn’t sure Shaffer would be.

  DEL’S BROTHER-IN-LAW called. His name was Dominic and he worked the east side of St. Paul. “Dom, I need an empty east side house, a little run-down, not occupied. I can get you a thousand dollars for three days, starting today. You got somebody?”

  “This for a sting?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Let me call around.”

  LUCAS AND SHAFFER met at an east side coffee shop. They got a couple of cups of something that looked and tasted like Folgers, and found a corner where they could talk. Lucas pulled a legal pad out of his briefcase, pushed it across the table, and said, “I’m going to walk you through it.” He used a pen to draw a sketch of the entry area of the house where Rivera had been shot to death.

  “Here’s the steps, here’s the couch where the one Mexican was shot,” he said, tapping his pen on the outline drawing. “Now, Rivera kicks the door, presumably having done a peek so he knows where the Mexicans are. Now, if you saw one out of three, or two out of three, when you peeked, would you kick the door? Or would you call for backup?”

  “I’d call for backup under any conditions,” Shaffer said. “If he’d called for backup, we’d have taken them all and he’d still be alive. He should have done what you did down at Sanderson’s apartment.”

  “But he’s got the macho gene, he’s hot, he hates these guys,” Lucas said. “They literally skinned one of his fellow agents alive, then mailed the guy’s skin to his boss. So he sees two of them. Does he kick the door or not?”

  Shaffer considered, then shook his head. “He’s gonna have trouble just with the two of them, unless he went in planning to kill them. If there’s a third one, that he can’t see, he’s got a serious problem.”

  “The crime-scene guys say there was a shooter game plugged into the TV, with two consoles. Both were turned on. Probably two guys on the couch, one of them shot to death,” Lucas said, tapping the sketch. “The third guy, they thought, was probably by this window, may have seen Rivera coming, at the last minute, and had his gun out. Maybe heard Rivera on the step or something. Rivera kicks the door, gets two shots off, and the guy by the window shoots him. Then the two who are still alive run for it.”

  Shaffer said, “Yup.”

  “But I’m saying, if he could only see two out of three, he probably wouldn’t have kicked it,” Lucas said. “But, just for argument’s sake, let’s say he’s super-macho, so maybe he does kick it. Now you’ve done this. You’ve got a target off to the right that you know about. So you kick the door, your gun goes right, but you glance to the left, just an instant, to clear the rest of the room, and then you come back to the gun’s sights. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Now, he got off two aimed shots, but he apparently never looked left, never suspected anybody was to his left, and he apparently never saw the other guy coming. The other guy put the gun so close to Rivera’s head that he burned his hair, tattooed his scalp,” Lucas said. “To do that, he would have had to hold the gun out at arm’s length and crank his hand to the left, to make that shot. And not be seen while he did it. The bullet went in at the right-side base of Rivera’s skull, and came out of the top of his skull, above his left eye, having gone all the way through his brain.”

  “The guy couldn’t have been by the window to his right because the door would be in the way,” Shaffer said. Then, “Okay, I see what you’re saying.”

  “Do you?”

  “Yeah.” Shaffer grimaced and shook his head. “You’re saying he was probably shot by somebody standing behind him to the right, shorter than he was, or somebody standing one step down, somebody that he knew was there and maybe trusted.”

  Lucas nodded, and Shaffer continued: “You’re saying that Martínez shot him in the back of the head.”

  “Attaboy,” Lucas said.

  “Sonofabitch. I knew you couldn’t trust those people.” Shaffer, agitated, got up and walked around a couple of tables, then came back and sat down again.

  “You could trust Rivera. You couldn’t trust Martínez,” Lucas said. “It all depends on the individual. The goddamn gang planted her on him, knew every move he was making. She could do her ‘research’ and point him at other gangs, but tip off the Criminales if he ever went after them. I’m pretty sure she was sleeping with him. She was sleeping with him and when the time came, she swatted him like a fly. If I’m right.”

  Shaffer stared at the yellow pad, wiping his tongue across his bottom lip, and then, “I’m buying it, but it’d be nice if there was something else.”

  “There is,” Lucas said. “I’m down at Sanderson’s apartment, looking for Sanderson, and what happens? Two of the Mexicans come walking down the sidewalk. I can’t believe it. For one thing, how’d they know so fast? How’d they figure that out? They go up to the front door and go inside, and I pull the car out and across the street, jump out and run up the steps,” Lucas said. “I wasn’t more than a minute behind them, going through the front door. I punch out the door panel, get inside. I know what her apartment number is, I run up the steps. They can’t have gotten to her apartment as fast as I did—for one thing, they had to talk with the manager, at least for a second or two. So I run up the steps, and they’re gone. Gone. Vanished. Nobody ever saw them again. Why is that?”

  “Tell me,” Shaffer said.

  “First, because I semi-fucked up. We were always dealing with the idea of three Mexican men. One was dead, here were the other two. Why would I worry about another one? But, the thing is, I’d given Rivera and Martínez a ride in the Lexus. She knew the car. And guess what? She’d driven them over there, and was waiting up the street, behind me. I never saw her. That’s where they were walking from. Her car. She saw the Lexus, saw me jump out, and she called them on their cell phones. They ran out the back way and around the building, and she picked them up and they were out of there. It’s the only thing that works.”

  Shaffer thought about it for a minute, then said, “I’m buying that, too.”

  “Third,” Lucas said. “We’ve known we had a leak. They weren’t on
e step ahead of us or behind us—they were exactly in step with us. We thought it was in the bank—but why would a leak in the Polaris bank know about Sanderson over at Hennepin? At least, know that fast? But when we suspected Kline or Sanderson had something to do with the theft, with no proof at all, we couldn’t do anything about it. We just had to keep looking. But they could do something about it. They were right there, ready to go. They were all over Kline right after we told her about him.”

  “So what are we going to do about it?” Shaffer asked.

  “We’re gonna set them up,” Lucas said. “I’m already moving on it. But I’m going to need you to do some acting.”

  Shaffer scratched his head. “I can do that.”

  LUCAS LAID OUT the rest of his plan, and when he finished, Shaffer said, “It bothers me that we don’t tell the rest of the crew until later.”

  “Somebody will give it away,” Lucas said. “I’ll tell you what, Bob, she’s both a major crook and a kind of a cop—she’s worked both sides, and if she smells a rat, she’s outa here. She’ll just take Rivera’s ashes and go home. So we don’t tell anybody what we’re doing. The whole discussion will be real, instead of phony.”

  “Some of the guys will be pissed,” Shaffer said.

  “Hey, a little rain, you know? Apologize later,” Lucas said. “What worries me more is that some of them are going to argue that it’s really stupid not to cover the house from the get-go. We gotta go with the idea that we just don’t have the guys, and we don’t have anything for a warrant. We say we’re gonna put two on Kline, we’re gonna put two on Sanderson, we’re gonna put four out at the airport, wait for the plane and then follow her.”

  “What’s her name? The chick we’re following?”

  “Martha … something?”

  “Martha White,” Shaffer said. “Like the biscuit mix.”

  “Good. So you want to do this?” Lucas asked.

  “Got nothing to lose,” Shaffer said. “If you’re wrong, we pay some overtime. But if you’re right, we get three killers.”