Stolen Prey

by John Sandford

  “Yeah, used to be an Anoka County public defender,” she said. “Has a general-law practice in Minneapolis. Does some criminal and personal injury.”

  “Good trial lawyer?” Lucas asked.

  “As a trial lawyer, on a scale of one to ten, I’d give him about a seven.”

  “Not the sharpest arrow in the quiver, huh?”

  “It’s not that—it’s that he looks like a fourteen-year-old Albert Einstein, with this fright-wig hair,” Wolf said. “He’s just no damn good with juries. I understand that he is excellent in pretrial negotiation, and trial prep. Excellent with insurance companies, where nobody wants to go to trial. When they do go to trial, he has an associate, Don Pew, who’ll usually handle it. Pew looks and acts like Jimmy Stewart. Between the two of them, they get the job done.”

  “So, if we’re trying to work a deal, get a guy to turn state’s evidence in return for a reduced charge…”

  “That’s how Jay made his living for a decade or so. He’s done hundreds of them. Be ready for him.”

  “Thanks, Annie.”

  SATISFIED THAT he’d stampeded Kline, but a little worried about Kline’s choice of attorney, Lucas called the Ramsey County attorney they’d be working with and told him about Keisler.

  “Not the best news, but not the worst,” the prosecutor said. “He’ll wring every inch out of us … but in the end, he’ll deal.”

  “That’s what I wanted to hear,” Lucas said. “You’ll be around tomorrow?”

  “All day. Give me a call.”

  Lucas checked with Shaffer, learned that there was nothing new with Martínez or the last shooter, but Shaffer said, “The hunt’s gone viral. Everybody in the country’s looking for her. You see the thing about Brooks, the last hour or so?”

  “No…”

  Lucas was standing in the doorway of Shaffer’s office, and Shaffer leaned back in his chair and put his feet up on his desk. Lucas had never seen him do that before; had never seen him look quite as pleased with himself.

  “Sunnie will now be owned by Brooks’s brother, Stan. Stan was the final disaster inheritor in Brooks’s will. You know, one of those provisions that lawyers put into wills in case the whole family dies in a plane crash?”

  “I know about those,” Lucas said. “I got one.”

  “Anyway, he’s also on the company board of directors,” Shaffer said. “He got the board to offer a hundred-thousand-dollar reward for anyone who spots Martínez. Anyone who spots her. Don’t even have to convict her. Just call the cops on her. It’s like a nationwide Easter-egg hunt with a hundred-thousand-dollar egg. Plus, everybody’s talking about all that gold they think she has.”

  “Easter egg with a Mac-10,” Lucas said. “Hope nobody gets killed.”

  Shaffer pulled his feet down. “Well, yeah…”

  “I wonder if this Stan had anything to do with setting up the fake Bois Brule account? Seems to me that there are going to be a lot of claims on Sunnie. Maybe it’d be better not to get too enthusiastic about Stan’s reward offer.”

  Shaffer rubbed his chin. “You could be right.”

  “We’re still going with the press conference tomorrow? Ten o’clock?” Lucas asked.

  “Still scheduled,” Shaffer said.

  “My daughter Letty works part-time as an intern at Channel Three,” Lucas said. “She said Ralph Richter is coming over. He’s going to do his media-asshole thing on us. Don’t worry about it, and don’t let him get under your skin. That’s just his gig, you know? Playing the tough guy.”

  Shaffer suddenly looked worried again.

  His job there done, and not feeling at all guilty, Lucas went back to his own office.

  LOOSE ENDS: He called Virgil Flowers.

  “What’s taking so long?” he asked.

  “I gotta tell you,” Virgil said. “I think I’ve got them spotted. I’m talking to Richie. He’s got a deputy with a big fucking pair of binoculars and a radio, hiding out in an oat field, watching the farm. We think your robbers work out of the place, but there’re ten other people out there. Something’s up. Could be a big meth operation. We’re tracking people coming out of there, running their plates, all kinds of different places, Missouri, Colorado, lot of drug busts. Richie’s all excited. When we know something, I’ll call you.”

  “I want to be there when you take my two,” Lucas said.

  “I’ll call you. I gotta say, we don’t know how horse shit ties into meth, but we’re researching it.”

  WHILE LUCAS was calling around, Martínez and Tres lay low. Tres’s face wasn’t on television, so Martínez gave him two hundred dollars and a shopping list and sent him out for food. When he came back, he said that a Xerox picture of her was on a bulletin board at the supermarket.

  “They have put out a reward,” Martínez said. She felt a little like a fool for confiding in a child. “One hundred thousand dollars for anyone who finds us.”

  “So, we hide. I one time, with Dos, hid for ten days in an attic, fifty degrees every day, we could smell our skin cooking up there, it’s so hot. Better than getting shot, you know?”

  One way or another, she thought, they had a good chance of making it across the border. If she could make it to El Paso, she could make the last mile. The problem was that Davenport had told everybody that she had the gold … and that Big Voice had heard about it.

  “You have the gold safe?” Big Voice asked.

  “No. We don’t have any gold at all,” she’d said. She explained Davenport, how he was trying to keep her nailed down.

  “Very clever,” Big Voice said. Then, with disappointment plain in his big voice, he said, “You have no gold at all?”

  And in that, she sensed doubt.

  The next time he talked to her, he mentioned that the “powers” had heard that she had the gold and had been upset when they heard that she denied it.

  “We have never seen the gold. I can let you talk to Tres—”

  “Tres is a child,” the Big Voice said. “You could hide the gold from him.”

  “If I had the gold, I would not come back to you,” she said. “If I had the gold, I would disappear. But I am coming back to you.”

  “That is a point in your favor,” the Big Voice said. “When will you come?”

  THE “POWERS” wanted the gold. They weren’t sure about her. They were looking for somebody to blame for its loss.

  This would not, she thought, end well for her.

  She saw the tape again, of Davenport talking about the gold.

  It was his fault, she thought.

  He was squeezing her, squeezing her. Squeezing her to death.

  WHILE LUCAS called around, and Martínez watched the television, Sanderson was in her car, doing her frantic escape-and-evasion routine, worried that she was being tracked. Eventually, she decided that if anyone was following her, they were just too smart for her, and she drove around to a half dozen Walmart and Target stores, where she bought small flattened cardboard shipping boxes and packaging tape. Scared to death of fingerprints and DNA, she bought two extra boxes at each store, and touched only the top and bottom boxes in the stack.

  Once she had them to her car, she separated the boxes with the fingerprints from the boxes without, and put the boxes with prints in the front seat. She also bought a bottle of Windex and some kitchen gloves.

  An hour after she left the last of the stores, she was back at the farm. She made sure she was alone, then she drove through the gate, closed it behind her, and bounced across the field to the spot where she’d buried the gold. She parked thirty feet away from it, not wanting to make new car tracks through the weeds that might lead somebody to the burial spot.

  Digging up the gold was a bit less hot and sweaty than putting it in the ground, but not much. Then, when the gold was uncovered, she had to pull it out of the hole and run it back to the car, eight hundred–plus pounds of heavy metal. She was frightened that she might be seen, and so did it as fast as she could, laboring like a ditchdigger
with a short deadline. When she was done, she was more angry than scared, and breathing hard: all of this work, and all of this blood, and they were taking it away from her.

  She deserved this gold. Now the cops would get it.

  Well: most of it.

  Some of it, she carefully rewrapped and left at the bottom of the hole. She filled the hole again, replaced the chunks of sod and weed, and spent a half hour cleaning up the area around it. When she was done, it looked better than it had the first time. She got in the car, bounced back across the field, out through the gate, which she carefully closed, and down the dusty road toward the Cities. She still had work to do at the office.

  LUCAS CALLED FLOWERS: “Anything yet?”

  “Won’t be today. But Richie says they’re doing drugs, one way or another. So probably tomorrow afternoon. Next day at the latest. Your two guys, the guys who robbed you, are probably named Duane Bird and Bernice Waters. Both have a long trail, but all minor stuff, not counting these robberies. Bernice stole sixteen thousand dollars from the Full Bible Church of Darby five years ago, and spent some time out at the women’s prison…. That’s about as big as they’ve gotten.”

  “All right. Keep talking to me,” Lucas said.

  Lucas went home, and Weather, who always got home earlier, said, “Cast is coming off.”

  “Which is good,” Lucas said. “Which is about time.”

  “For such a big lug, you’re such a baby,” she said. “You got anything else tomorrow?”

  He told her about the press conference, and about Virgil’s investigation, and she said, “So you’re going to have to get up early.”

  “Eight o’clock.”

  “Maybe we ought to go to bed early. We could get this week’s sex out of the way.”

  “I’ll have to look at my calendar again, and maybe have an extra glass of milk,” he said, “but it’s a possibility.”

  He barely thought about Martínez, except to wonder where she might be. Still in the Cities? In Missouri or Oklahoma? Back in Mexico already?

  Whatever. He no longer much cared—she was Shaffer’s Easter egg.

  LUCAS’S EYES popped open at six o’clock, when he felt Weather stirring around. She said, quietly, “The alarm is set for eight.”

  “See you tonight,” he said. He tried to go back to sleep, dozed for a while, but at seven he got up; there was too much going on for sleep. He cleaned up, dressed for the press conference in a blue suit and a white shirt with a thin blue stripe, saw the Martínez photo again on the morning news, and a promo for the ten-o’clock news conference. Letty was kicking around in the kitchen getting some cereal when he got downstairs, and he chatted with her about Channel Three and asked her about a kid named Tom who’d been hanging around the driveway, and was told that he was just a friend.

  Further efforts to elicit information were fruitless, but he decided that Tom would bear watching.

  He was out of the house at eight-thirty, at Hennepin Medical Center at nine, where he checked with Weather’s secretary and was told that she was already doing a scar revision. He went down to the clinic, stated his business, and was told to take a seat.

  He was reading a home furnishings magazine when his name was called. He took a seat in an examination room, and five minutes later a small fussy middle-aged man showed up, said he was a doctor, and showed Lucas what he, the doctor, called “a specialized kind of saw.” The saw looked a little like a Dremel tool with a sanding disk. “It will cut the cast with a vibration. It will not cut your arm,” the doctor said.

  “Sounds good to me,” Lucas said.

  The doctor peered at the tool, as though he was unsure exactly how to turn it on, then said, “I don’t usually do this—a nurse practitioner usually does it, but she’s not here right now.”

  “Just glad to get it off,” Lucas said.

  The doctor began cutting, and it went quickly enough, but an inch down the foot-long cast, Lucas felt a cutting pain, and flinched. The doctor said, “Just hold on, you may feel a few twitches, but it won’t cut.”

  He started again, and another inch or two along the way, there was another slicing pain, and Lucas flinched away again.

  “Don’t do that,” the doc said impatiently. He took the head of the tool and pressed it against his palm, where it buzzed away. No cut.

  “You think it’s cutting, but it’s not,” he said. “Let’s not break the cutting head.”

  Another inch, and Lucas said, “Ahhhh…” but didn’t flinch; another inch, and he did flinch, and the doctor said, “Hold on, hold on.” To Lucas, it didn’t seem like his imagination…. One more searing pain, and the cast popped loose.

  The doctor carefully pulled it off and said, “See, no cuts.”

  Lucas could still feel something like cuts, and looked closely at his arm. There were five inch-long white lines on the fresh pink skin.

  “What’re these things?” he asked. “They hurt like hell.”

  DEL SAID, “Burns?”

  Lucas: “Yeah. I’ve got five burns, each one an inch long, gonna be scars, right up my arm. What he didn’t know was, the saw doesn’t cut you, but if you go through the cast slowly enough, like he did, the blade gets red hot. He was branding me, and telling me the pain was just my imagination, the silly asshole.”

  Del said, “Ah, well … you know. Accidents happen.”

  “Accidents? The guy was supposed to be a medical doctor.”

  “You’re getting to be a sissy, man….”

  “Sissy?”

  AT THE PRESS conference, Shaffer spent fifteen minutes describing and discussing the extent of the hunt for Martínez and the last of the Mexican shooters, and Lucas said that the BCA was expecting some kind of movement in regard to the thieves who’d started the chain reaction that led to the murders.

  “Any more about the gold?” he was asked.

  “I just want to say that anyone who sees Martínez should not get any ideas about this gold—that will get you killed,” Lucas said. “We believe she has it, as much as twenty-two million in untraceable gold coins, but that should not be a motive to go after her. Let the law handle this. No amount of gold is worth losing your life, and these two people are professional killers. So stay clear.”

  VIRGIL FLOWERS called fifteen minutes after the press conference. “You looked good. Nice suit.”

  “You know what I was doing? I was saying ‘gold,’” Lucas said. “Gold, gold, gold, gold. I want everybody thinking gold, and that Martínez has it.”

  “Whatever works,” Flowers said. “Listen, Richie wants to pop these guys at the farm so bad that he walks around with his legs crossed. He can’t wait—I think we’ll be going in this afternoon. Everybody coming out of there has had a drug problem. He’s talking to his favorite judge about a warrant, and probably Channel Three. Did I mention that he’s up for reelection this fall?”

  “Yeah, you did. What time you want me there?” Lucas asked.

  “I don’t know. I’ll call you. Be ready. It’s about an hour out of town.”

  KLINE’S ATTORNEY, Jay Keisler, called: “Can we get together?”

  “If you make it worth our while,” Lucas said.

  “I think we can, but maybe not exactly the way you want it,” Keisler said. “We’ve run into a bump in the road.”

  “If I hear about bumps, we might have to go with what we’ve got,” Lucas said.

  “Who’re we talking to over at the county?”

  “Dave Morgan,” Lucas said.

  “So let’s let Dave decide,” Keisler said. “What time’s good for you? I’ve got to be in court at eleven-thirty, but only for a motion, take five minutes.”

  “One?” Lucas suggested.

  “One’s good,” Keisler said.

  “I’ll check with Dave and get back to you.”

  Lucas checked with Morgan, who said try for twelve-forty-five, because that’s what lawyers do, and Keisler sighed as though it were the end of the world, but agreed.

  Luca
s, Del, Shrake, and Jenkins went out for an early lunch, much of it spent in a thoroughly despicable gossip session about another agent and an extraordinarily attractive female tech, both in their early forties, both married with children, who may or may not have been having a hot affair, that may or may not have included sex on the upstairs gun-testing range.

  BY THE TIME they got back to the office, Lucas had to hurry to make the appointment at the prosecutor’s office. Morgan’s office was in the Ramsey County courthouse, and Lucas parked kitty-corner in the Victory parking garage. As he hustled across the street, something felt wrong, but he wasn’t sure what it was, so he kept going.

  A secretary showed him into a conference room, where Kline was waiting with a man who looked as though he’d just been electrocuted: the Einstein hair. Lucas said, “You must be Jay,” and they shook hands, and then Morgan bustled into the office and said, to Lucas, “We’ve been talking for a couple of minutes in the hallway…. It’s not quite what I thought.”

  Lucas looked at Kline: “What’s up?”

  Keisler answered. “We have a small problem. My client is innocent. I try not ever to get into that question, but he told me before I could stop him. Then, you know, he convinced me. He also convinced me that even if he isn’t innocent, you could never convict him. So, we don’t have a basis for a bargain. But we do have something.”

  Morgan: “What?” He was not at all perturbed; just another workday.

  “There’s the possibility that my client might be able to provide you with some information about an accomplice of the real criminal in this matter, Ivan Turicek,” Keisler said.

  “If your client is innocent, he has the obligation to provide us with any information he has,” Morgan said.

  “But not misinformation. Let me put it this way. This is more of a feeling than hard information, and while it includes a name, it’s possible that he would be implicating a completely innocent person. He wants to cooperate, and if he cooperates, and you guys, from some misplaced sense of vengeance, go after him, we want the court to know that he cooperated.”