The Professionals

by Owen Laukkanen

  Far better, then, to pull quick scores. Lower numbers, but higher volume. The Pender method. Snatch guys like Terry Harper, Martin Warner. Midlevel executives, hedge-fund managers, guys with enough cash to make the job worthwhile, with families to pay the ransoms, but with no glamour to their names. No romance. Anonymous upper-class fellas who just wanted to see things return to normal.

  The first of their marks had been a Silicon Valley systems engineer, a tech-boom millionaire whose girlfriend delivered the ransom in a bright red Ferrari. Marcus Sinclair, an arrogant braggart in thousand-dollar sneakers and a solid-gold Rolex, a prick with a fake tan and a potty mouth. To a gang of impoverished students used to part-time jobs and ramen noodles, Sinclair’s hundred grand seemed like a fortune.

  Afterward, walking on a long, empty stretch of California coastline, Marie had wrapped her arms around Pender, staring out at the Pacific Ocean, eyes wide and bright, and asked if he really thought they should retire right now or if they could maybe manage one more score.

  The question had surprised him. He’d been asking himself the same thing. He had believed from the start they could make a career as kidnappers, but it had been a daydream to Pender, a theory. He figured they’d cash out and go home and try and find normal jobs. He had never imagined Marie would get off on the rush as much as he did. He’d turned to her. “You’re serious.”

  She smiled at him, drunk off success, beautiful in the dying light of the day. She kissed him. “Just one more time,” she said.

  “You know we’ll go to jail for this,” he said. “This is a major crime.”

  “We won’t go to jail,” said Marie. “We won’t get caught. Anyway, we’re not hurting anyone. Not really.”

  “That guy was an asshole.”

  “He was an asshole,” she said. “We didn’t hurt him. What’s a hundred thousand dollars to a guy like that?”

  “Nothing,” said Pender. “Less than nothing.”

  “To us, though.” She kissed him again. Smiled. She was beautiful that night, even more than normal, the way her eyes caught the light, the way that thick mane of deep chestnut hair fell over her shoulders—and, above all, her perfect, carefree smile. She was happy tonight, Pender realized. He hadn’t seen her this happy in weeks.

  “I don’t want to go back to Seattle,” she said. “Wondering what I’m going to do with my life. Not yet, Arthur. Think what we could do with another hundred grand.”

  She had visions of a long vacation, a chance to see the world—Machu Picchu and South Africa and Rome—and then a master’s degree in something useful and a chance at some kind of career. Just one more score to get a head start on real life. One more perfect crime.

  But Pender was dreaming bigger. And when he told her that in four years they could afford to retire in the Maldives or New Zealand, she’d laughed him off, disbelieving. But he’d mapped it out for her, for the team, showed them his projections, and now they held tight to that image, a little grass-roofed hut at the edge of a sparkling sea a million miles from anywhere.

  The goal. The Dream. Pender’s five-year plan. Criminals in the short term. The only way to get ahead. No job market, no unemployment lines, no Social Security or foreclosures. No 401(k) and no taxpayer bailouts. Just five years making low-risk, no-violence scores and then a worry-free existence forever.

  Sawyer and Mouse, he knew, had similar aspirations. Maybe not the Maldives and maybe not a grass-roofed hut, but dreams nonetheless. Sawyer, Pender remembered, had been taken with that Silicon Valley man’s Ferrari. Mouse was more into the guy’s girlfriend, a pneumatic blonde with enhanced breasts and legs up to her ears. Both men saw their current occupations as a means toward those ends, toward fast cars and girls with fake breasts, a long life of leisure and luxury.

  As they’d migrated eastward after those first big scores, however, away from the slacker-rich Silicon Valley geeks and gaudy Hollywood players and inland toward Middle America, even a hundred grand began to sound like an exorbitant ransom. Now, two years into the project, working sixty-thousand-dollar deals in frigid Minnesota, Pender knew it would be easy to forget the grind. It would be tempting to get greedy, to go for one big haul to end the show and set each of them up for life. And though nobody on the team had said anything yet, Pender still lay awake nights, fearing his teammates’ greed and praying they’d stay on the program—his program—for as long as it would take to make the Dream something real.

  six

  Sandra Harper paid the ransom by sunset.

  Pender chose a suburban McDonald’s for the drop spot and gave the woman fifteen minutes to be there. Told her put the money in a trash bag, leave it by the dumpster out back. Come alone. Park in the northwest corner of the lot. Way out in back. Do not follow us after the drop. Any deviation and your husband gets it.

  They got there first. Pender watched from the van as Sandra drove in a few minutes later, a slight, graying woman in a navy blue Infiniti. She dropped the money bag beside the dumpster and parked as instructed.

  Sawyer drove up, and Pender counted the money. All of it there. Pender nodded and Mouse kicked Harper to the curb and the men drove off in the van.

  Marie hung around the parking lot in the rented Hyundai, watching Terry Harper pick himself up off the pavement and walk, indignant, to his car, where his wife had vacated the driver’s seat and waited on the passenger side, darting nervous glances at her husband and then back into the lot.

  Marie followed them home and waited outside for a few hours, watching the lights go on and off, watching the shadows and silhouettes playing in the windows. Then Pender called and, with no police in sight, told Marie to bring it home.

  They drove the Savana out to a nature reserve northwest of town. Marie met them in the barrens in the Hyundai, and they wiped the van clean, parked it deep in the woods at the end of a long dirt road, and said prayers for early snow. Then they drove the Hyundai back into Minneapolis and checked out of the Super 8 and checked into a Best Western across town and divvied up the money in the room.

  The next day Pender and Marie took the rental car out and went van shopping, putting cash down on a red Ford E-Series passenger van and using another of Mouse’s fake IDs for the registration. They took the rental car back to the airport and swung back to the Best Western to pick up Mouse and Sawyer.

  Then Pender drove them out onto the highway, pointing the van northeast on a bearing for Green Bay and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, the late afternoon sunset a fire show over the Twin Cities in the rearview mirror.

  They said no police,” said Sandra Harper, peering through the living room blinds and out into the shadows beyond. “They said they’d hurt Alice if we did.”

  “Bullshit.” Terry Harper paced the room behind his wife. “They’re not out there anymore. They’re not watching us.”

  “But how do you know?”

  “They have their money. Makes no sense them sticking around. They throw a threat at us and get the hell outta Dodge.”

  “But how do you know?”

  “Goddamn it, Sandra, I just know.”

  In a corner of the living room, Alice Harper lingered, watching her father pace the room as her mother stared out into the street. Sandra replaced the curtain, looked back, and noticed her daughter, her eyes wide. “We’re safe, Terry.”

  Her husband stopped pacing. “What?”

  “We’re safe. All of us. Safe.” She gestured around the room. “You’re safe. Alice is safe. I’m safe. So we lost some money. Big deal. Do you really want to risk our lives to get it back?”

  For the first time that evening, Terry Harper looked his wife in the eye. “Yes,” he said. “We have to send a message. You don’t fuck with Terry Harper and expect to get away with it. Whether it’s two dollars or two million.”

  Sandra sank into a couch. “I just want this to be over.”

  Her husband followed her, stood staring down at her. “If we don’t make a stand, it will never be over,” he said. “It could be you nex
t, or Alice, God forbid. We have to make a stand.”

  His wife looked up at him, her eyes tired and swollen. His daughter crept out from the corner. “Daddy,” she said. “What if someone else gets kidnapped like you were?”

  Harper looked at his daughter, then at his wife. Sandra stared at Alice. “You’re right,” she said finally. “Let’s call the police.”

  seven

  Kirk Stevens’s third player was not at all hard to find.

  A Burger King employee found a pistol in the trash outside a restaurant in Burnsville and a ballistics test confirmed it for the semitruck shooting. Stevens checked out the gun and followed it back to a retired schoolteacher in Dayton’s Bluff. The teacher was clean; he’d bought the gun for protection and reported it stolen a week or so prior, but Stevens called in a favor with the St. Paul city cops and they came back with the news that the teacher had hired an old student of his to do the occasional odd job—rake leaves or buy groceries or whatever else. Wayne Harris was the kid’s name.

  Stevens and the St. Paul police did some looking around. Found Wayne Harris holed up in his grandmother’s home in Burns Park. The kid played innocent for a minute, told the St. Paul city cop he was at a party that night. Stevens came around later and followed the kid to a pawnshop downtown, where Stevens made him unloading four or five hot DVD players from the back of his granny’s Corolla.

  Stevens hauled the kid in and it didn’t take long. A couple hours in an interrogation room, a line or two about a long sentence and a brokenhearted grandmother and Harris burst into tears and confessed the whole thing. It wasn’t supposed to go bad, he said. Nobody was supposed to die.

  Stevens bought the kid a sandwich and a Coke and then brought him down to be charged. He spent the rest of his afternoon doing paperwork at his desk, and by about eight his stomach was growling and he was ready to call the case closed. He shut down his computer and was halfway out of his chair when his phone started ringing, loud and obnoxious in the near-empty confines of the BCA headquarters. Stevens stared at it a moment, his stomach rumbling its impatience. Then he sighed and sank back in his seat and picked up the handset. “Stevens.”

  “This is Special Investigations?”

  “You got it,” said Stevens. “Who am I talking to?”

  “Powell, Minneapolis PD. Agent, we’ve got a case you’re probably going to want to hear about.”

  Minneapolis PD, thought Stevens. This ought to be good. In general, the police on the Twin Cities forces worked separate beats from their BCA counterparts. When Minneapolis PD came calling, it could only mean something major.

  “Shoot,” said Stevens, reaching for his notepad. “I’m all ears.”

  “Well, Agent,” said the detective. “We got a kidnapping.”

  Stevens straightened, any thought of food now forgotten. “You’re serious.” Kidnappings were about as rare in Minnesota as swimsuits in January. “If it’s a kid gone missing, you gotta take it to the FBI.”

  “Not a kid,” said Powell. “A grown man. Name’s Harper, Terrence. Late forties. Taken two days ago from the sidewalk outside his home in Lowry Hill. Walking home from work.”

  Stevens leaned forward on his desk and started copying Powell’s dictation, his heart rate quickening. A kidnapping in Minneapolis, he thought. Bona fide. “Who is this guy Harper?” he said. “He a rich guy? Poor guy?”

  “He’s rich,” said Powell. “Some kind of stockbroker or something.”

  “All right. Family get any kind of note? Phone call? Any ransom demanded?”

  “Phone call, night of. Harper himself, asking for sixty grand in unmarked twenties.”

  “Small-time crooks.”

  “You said it. Wife paid in full the next day. Harper released safe and sound.”

  Stevens felt his stomach start to growl again. “The husband’s safe.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Not missing any fingers, toes, ears, eyes.”

  “Everything present and accounted for.”

  Stevens sighed. He rubbed his eyes. Probably just some kids going out on a dare. Not likely to be any fun at all.

  “Sorry to disappoint,” said Powell. “If you don’t want it, I can tell my sergeant you’re passing.”

  Stevens sat back in his chair. He glanced around the room, catching his own face reflected momentarily in a darkened window. He saw the career cop again, the bags under the eyes and the latest spiderweb wrinkles, the face of an agent who’d once dreamed of making a difference but who’d seen those dreams replaced by an admirable service record and a decent outlook and a comfortable chair in a comfortable office.

  Cheer up, he told himself. A middle-aged man gets himself stolen and brought back within twenty-four hours. A sixty-thousand-dollar ransom. Maybe it wasn’t going to change the world, this case, but it sure beat the hell out of paperwork.

  “I’ll take it,” he told Powell. “What else am I gonna do tonight?”

  eight

  Terry Harper was a bulldog of a man, a round ball of indignation who would not be calmed despite the presence of the state police and the best efforts of his wife and daughter, both of whom had given up by this point and slunk, defeated, to the margins of the room.

  Stevens stood in the living room doorway, watching him pace and feeling his own stomach churn. He’d stopped for Taco Bell on the way over and the molten cheese and low-grade beef weren’t playing nice with his digestive tract. He swallowed a burp and fixed his eyes on Harper. “Give it to me from the beginning,” he said.

  Harper didn’t break stride as he launched into his story. He had been walking home from work, he said, just before dusk. He was turning onto his block when a young woman called to him by name. No, he did not see the woman; she was behind him. Though he may have caught a glimpse of brown curls. She was, he believed, white.

  Before he could notice anything else, he was wrapped up and tossed in the back of a van, his arms tied, his eyes blindfolded, and his mouth gagged. He was driven to some sort of compound—an apartment, it seemed like—where he was instructed to phone his wife and then beaten by an assailant.

  There were probably three kidnappers, he thought, including the girl, and he had talked to one of them during the night. “The guy didn’t sleep,” said Harper. “Kept pacing the room. Changing channels on the TV.”

  Ultimately, Harper slept, and spent the morning listening to the television before being tossed in the back of the van again and driven to a McDonald’s parking lot. No, he didn’t get a good look at the van. It was blue. Navy. The make? No idea.

  “They said they were watching the house,” he said. “And we shouldn’t talk to the police.”

  Sandra Harper eyed Stevens and stepped forward. “They said they’d come for Alice,” she said.

  “They’re not coming for your daughter,” said Stevens. “Your family is safe.”

  “I know we’re safe,” said Harper. He stopped pacing and fixed Stevens with a glare. “I’m not afraid. I’m mad. I want you to do your damn job. Find them.”

  Stevens sighed to himself. You’d almost wish a guy like this would stay kidnapped, he thought. “These people,” he said. “Two men. One woman. All white?”

  “Far as I could tell.”

  “Weapons?”

  Harper shrugged. “I was blindfolded. Maybe a handgun.”

  “How old were they?”

  “Young.” He started pacing again. “Late twenties, early thirties.”

  “Catch any names?”

  “No. Everything was tight. No wasted words. Everything quick.”

  “Tell him the other thing,” said Sandra Harper. “The money thing.”

  “Sixty grand,” said Harper. “Kind of small, don’t you think?”

  “Sure.”

  “You’d think, you’re kidnapping someone, you ask for more money. Big money. I’ve got it. I told the guy straight up. He could have asked for a million, and he would have got it.”

  Stevens scratched his head. “What did he
say?”

  “Didn’t say anything. Told me go to sleep. But I figured they wanted me in and out, quick, before anyone else caught on. Twenty-four hours.”

  “You figured, hey?”

  “Why else would they aim so low?”

  Maybe they were junkies, thought Stevens. Addicts looking to make a quick score. But junkies would be sloppy and desperate. They would make mistakes. If these kids had made a mistake, it wasn’t showing through yet.

  A woman with curly brown hair. A blue panel van. A low ransom demand and a quick turnaround. A hit-and-run job.

  Agent Stevens could count the number of kidnappings he’d worked on one hand. And they’d all been easy compared to this: a couple jealous parents playing musical kids, a drug dealer snatching his rival off a street corner. The kids came back overdosed on ice cream, and the rival came back in a block of concrete. Not exactly whodunits. Nothing like this job.

  But he had to start somewhere. Kids in an apartment. A bunch of students, maybe, having a laugh. An elaborate senior prank. Minneapolis had a number of universities. Get a detail of Metro uniforms to canvass the campuses, ask around.

  The McDonald’s may have had a security camera. And there was the blue van. Had to be hundreds in the Twin Cities, but it wouldn’t hurt to put out a notice, get people looking around. The phone records might work, too. Figure out where the calls were coming from and you get your kidnappers’ geography. The more Stevens figured, the better he liked it. Maybe it wasn’t such a dead end after all.

  Stevens turned to Harper. “You have any enemies? Anyone who’d want to hurt you?”

  Harper gave him a withering look. “I’m no asshole, buddy. I play the goddamn stock market.”