Stolen Prey p-22

by John Sandford

  That one little fact was hard to get around. If it was a laundry, where was the money?

  The other problem, and it could probably be checked, was that the business had been shaky at the start. If it had been set up as a laundry, it shouldn’t have been. Perhaps, he thought, it had been set up as a legitimate business, and had only later been spotted by the gang as a potential laundry.

  His other story-but it was far back, number ten on his list of two-was Del’s suggestion, that the murders had been the result of a home invasion by a couple of crazy killers, who’d picked a random house in a rich neighborhood. A couple of stupid, crazy guys who looked at the house and thought that there must be big money inside, not being all that familiar with checking accounts and American Express. When they got inside and found that there wasn’t much in the way of money, they amused themselves with rape, torture, and murder. That happened, a few times a year, most often in California or on the East Coast; not in Minnesota, though.

  Another problem with that scenario was that the crime-scene people in Wayzata were positing at least three killers, and maybe four. House invasions of the crazy, murderous kind usually involved one or two people: three or four crazy people would be unusual.

  Of course, there was always Charlie Manson to worry about….

  Yet he didn’t like the Manson scenario, even with the bloody “were coming” written on the wall. The murders didn’t seem crazy enough for crazy people. They’d taken too long, there was that apparent progression, and there wasn’t the level of frenzy that you’d expect.

  He was halfway back to the office when a phone call came in. The identifying tag said “City of Northfield.” He answered and a man asked, “Is this Lucas Davenport?”

  “It is.”

  “This is Chuck Waites at Northfield PD. I’m calling about your flyer. You said you’d be interested in ATM robberies, man and a woman, knocking down the victim.”

  “Yeah, I sure am,” Lucas said. “You bust them?”

  “No, no. They picked out one of our college kids taking cash out of a street ATM, robbed him with a gun, knocked him down, and ran off. This happened last night. Kid’s got a broken arm and he’s out eighty bucks.”

  “Man and a woman?”

  “Yeah, it’s like that flyer said: skinny guy, big woman,” Waites said. “Have no idea who they are, but we’ve got a clue for you.”

  “I don’t like the way you said ‘clue,’” Lucas said.

  The other cop laughed. “Well, it might be an identifier.”

  “What is it?”

  “The kid said they smelled like horse shit. Horse shit, specifically. We asked him if he was sure it wasn’t cow shit or sheep shit, but he said, ‘No, sir, it’s horse shit.’ He grew up on a dairy farm, and they ran a couple of riding horses and a few other animals. Sheep, chickens,” Waites said. “He said anybody who grew up on that kind of a place could tell the difference between cow shit, horse shit, sheep shit, and chicken shit. He said they had all those animals, and the people who robbed him smelled like horse shit. Like they’d been shoveling out a stable.”

  “You know any meth addicts who run a riding stable?”

  “Not me personally, but there’re a lot of meth cookers out in the countryside,” Waites said. “If these people are far gone on meth, like your flyer says, I don’t think they could be running a commercial stable. That’s pretty heavy work and takes some ability to concentrate…. If it really was horse shit on them, I’d have to believe that they’re farmhands somewhere.”

  “Huh. That’s interesting,” Lucas said. “It’s weird, but it narrows it down, and shoveling shit is about what I’d expect of those two. You know of any kind of organization that would have a list of stables?”

  “Somebody in the state would, probably-they got a list of everything else,” Waites said. “If I were you, I’d just call the county agents. They’d know all the farms in their county, and maybe who works on them.”

  “Thanks. If this works out, you’ll get the reward,” Lucas said.

  “Really? What is it?”

  “I go around and tell people that Chuck Waites is alert.”

  Waites laughed and said, “And America needs more lerts.”

  Lucas spent the rest of the day at his office, making phone calls and scratching his left arm, under the cast, with the end of a coat hanger. He’d been told not to do that-scratch with a coat hanger-and he’d thought there was some good medical reason for the advice until Weather told him that it was to keep him from cutting himself and infecting the wounds.

  That, Lucas thought, was advice for children. He wasn’t going to cut himself with the coat hanger, and besides, he’d rather cut himself than itch to death.

  So he sat scratching and calling, making trips to the candy machine, interspersed with spasms of note-taking on yellow legal pads.

  Most of it involved the tweekers. The horse shit, he told himself, was actually a pretty interesting clue. Most people-he thought, but didn’t know-would clean up immediately if they’d come in contact with horse shit. But people who were in contact with it all the time might not even know that they smelled. He believed the kid, and his identification of the odor. He himself could tell the difference between the odor of fish slime from a northern pike and fish slime from a crappie.

  A smaller percentage of his time was spent on the murders: he was not the primary investigator there, and the investigation seemed likely to turn into a long, slow grind. If you were intent on locating and knocking down leads, Shaffer could do that as well as anybody. Still, images of the murder scene kept popping up in his mind. He’d seen some bad ones in the past, but this was among the worst. Anything with children…

  He called the DEA and asked about unusual activity in the Minneapolis area. He was told they’d check. He called a dozen people in his private intelligence net, including six Latinos, and asked about anything unusual going on in the underground Latino community.

  He tried to work up another credible story, beyond Mexican dopers and the Charlie Manson scenario. Stories cost nothing but time.

  Not that the BCA would have a lot of time.

  Wayzata, the town where the killings took place, was one of the richer places in the Twin Cities, filled with people who felt entitled to a lot of attention, as befitted their economic status. It was also a place where the news media could get in a hurry, and not have to pay much to do it. Every news outlet in town could send a reporter six times a day to ask the locals, “Is the killer living among you? And what about your children?”

  The investigation would be pressured.

  The BCA had eight people on it: the crime-scene people, plus four agents in the team led by Shaffer. Lucas didn’t count: he was essentially working for himself. Because the agents generally considered themselves equal, and only occasionally worked a case under hard supervision, they mildly resented Shaffer, though they understood the necessity of having a team coordinator.

  Lucas was another matter: he was neither their boss nor their coordinator, and they didn’t like being interrupted by his calls. He called anyway, from time to time, and learned very little. They’d found nothing incriminating at Sunnie Software. They did determine that the house hadn’t been carefully robbed-the crime-scene people found two thousand dollars in a bathroom drawer.

  Shaffer told him that they had one positive indication that something was wrong with the way the Brookses conducted their financial life. A forensic accountant-that’s how he referred to himself, though his colleagues called him “Specs”-said that they didn’t appear to spend any money on small stuff.

  They didn’t take much money from the bank in cash, but they didn’t charge groceries or clothing or gasoline or consumer electronics. In fact, their credit cards were almost unused, except for a few big-ticket items, like airline tickets. They’d once flown to Orlando, spent five days there, possibly at Disney World, and didn’t even show a motel bill.

  Brooks had three cashmere jackets in his closet, al
l newer-looking, probably fifteen hundred dollars each. His wife shopped at Nordstrom and Neiman Marcus, had a closet full of clothes from Barneys in New York. They didn’t have credit cards at either place.

  Shaffer suspected that they were spending cash where a credit card wasn’t mandatory; cash that didn’t show up anywhere else.

  After the first half-day of investigation, that was it. It was way too early to say that the investigation was driving into a ditch, Lucas thought, but it might be true that the passenger-side tires had wandered onto the shoulder.

  Lucas went to lunch at two o’clock, ate a couple of bagel sandwiches, alone, thinking about his murder stories, then went back to his office and found a phone message from the Los Angeles office of the Drug Enforcement Administration. He called back and was hooked up with an agent named Tomas O’Brien.

  “I was told you’re the guy I should talk to,” O’Brien said. “I’ve got a Delta flight out late this afternoon, I’m bringing a couple guys with me. We’d like to look at the books on this Sunnie Software.”

  “I can fix that,” Lucas said. “You know something about Sunnie?”

  “The name has come up a few times, but there’s been nothing specific. Nothing criminal. We took a look, once, even bought some of their software, like Hable Gringo en Treinta Dias. Sorta sucks and it ain’t cheap.”

  “We’ve been wondering if it’s a laundry,” Lucas said.

  “That’s why our guy there in the Cities gave me a ring, after your call,” O’Brien said. “Sunnie buys product from a company here in LA called Los Escritores, which got started with a lot of twenty-dollar bills … or so we’ve been told. The software isn’t very good, but it sells like crazy. We’d like to look at what Sunnie’s been doing with them. Look back down the money chain.”

  “You know the details on the murders?”

  “Your people let our guy walk through,” O’Brien said. “From what he says, it looks like the work of Los Criminales del Norte, one of the cross-border gangs. They do a lot of that revenge-rape stuff. Killing families, sexual mutilation. Chopping off fingers, one joint at a time. They tend to go down shooting.”

  “You definitely think it looks Mexican?”

  “Oh, yeah, absolutely. Don’t see it up here, much, but this would be routine in Mexico,” O’Brien said. “We’d love to get one of their killers alive, if we could. Turn him over to the Federales for questioning.”

  “We plan to do that up here,” Lucas said. “The questioning.”

  “You’d get more answers from the Federales,” O’Brien said, persisting with the thought. “The LCN supposedly caught a Federale undercover cop and skinned him alive. Sent his skin to his boss, by FedEx, with a movie of the guy getting skinned. If we extradite one of these guys, to the right Federales, we will definitely get some answers.”

  “I don’t think we’d want to do that,” Lucas said.

  “Whatever, it’s your call,” O’Brien said. “Anyway, we’re gonna get there a little late. Maybe talk tomorrow?”

  “I’ll fix things up with the lead investigator,” Lucas said. “See you then.”

  Thinking about the ATM robbers, Lucas called a list of county agents, missed a couple who were out of their offices, finally connected with one, and was told that there might be a list of some commercial riding stables, but a lot of stables were run off the books, as side ventures, and coming up with a complete list would be tough.

  An opaque piece of the underground economy, Lucas thought, when he hung up. He ran into it all the time now; small businessmen had told him that government taxation and regulation had become so rapacious that cheating was often the only way they could survive.

  Another step down to a third-world economy.

  Del came back at three o’clock from a surveillance job in Apple Valley, pulled a chair around, and asked, “Why don’t you turn on a light?”

  “Forgot,” Lucas said. “Anything happening with Anderson?”

  “Not on my shift. Maybe he knows we’re watching.”

  Terrill Anderson was suspected of stealing a three-ton Paul Manship bronze art-deco sculpture, Naiads of the North, from the front driveway circle of a home in Sunfish Lake, a town just south of St. Paul. The sculpture depicted three larger-than-life-sized nymphs dancing, flowers in their hair, hands joined overhead, standing in a kind of swirl, or whirlpool, of walleyes.

  The owner of the sculpture, the fifth-generation heir of a railroad family, was massively rich, and had a daughter who chaired the state arts council. He wanted his sculpture back-the estimated worth, as a sculpture, was four million dollars. Looked at another way, three tons of bronze, which was mostly copper, was worth roughly eighteen thousand dollars if it had been in ingot form, or fifteen thousand or so on the scrap metal market.

  The sculpture had been fitted to a granite base with six large steel bolts. Anderson had unbolted the statues and lifted the whole thing onto a flatbed trailer with a trailer-mounted crane, one night while the owner was inspecting a new home in Rio. The operation had been caught on a murky piece of low-res surveillance video from a house across the street-the heir’s own camera lenses had been covered with pink goop before the removal began.

  Phone calls were made, and the hunt for the statues, or, more realistically now, the bronze scrap metal, which had been somewhat desultory, had sharpened. Somewhere, out there, maybe, Anderson was hiding a flatbed trailer and a lot of heavy metal. Del was watching him, waiting for him to go fetch it.

  Lucas yawned, scratched the back of his head. “Hope he didn’t drop it in a lake.”

  “He’s probably already shipped it to China,” Del said. “It’s possible that he had a boxcar waiting, loaded it right off the flatbed, and shipped it out. I’ve been talking to the railroad, but those guys have got no idea where most of their cars are, or what’s in them. Which I guess is a good thing.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. If a terrorist ever wants to blow up New York, he can’t just build a time bomb and put it in a railway car ’cause nobody would have any idea of exactly when it’d get to New York, or how it’d get there,” Del said. “More likely to blow up a cornfield than a city.”

  “Or a riding stable,” Lucas said.

  “What?”

  Lucas told him about the Northfield robbery, and Del said, “Well, you can’t say it’s a horseshit clue.”

  “I thought of that joke about fifteen seconds after the guy called me,” Lucas said. “I was embarrassed just thinking of it, and I never said it out loud.”

  “You’re not going to ask me to look into it, are you? I mean, I got enough boring horseshit-”

  “No, I’m just making phone calls to these county agent guys. See what turns up.”

  “Might be better than watching Anderson,” Del said. “The guy is a slug. Never does anything, goes anywhere. I was sitting out there so long my ass got sore. But then, I read another hundred pages in the Deon Meyer, had four ideas for new iPhone apps, realized I could have had a career in Hollywood as a character actor, and tried to remember all the names of the women I could have slept with but didn’t. How about you?”

  “I slept with all the women I could have slept with,” Lucas said. “Not being a complete fool. You think about the Brooks family?”

  “I tried not to.”

  Lucas filled him in on the investigation, and finished with “… so it’s gonna be slow and methodical. Lots of paperwork.”

  “But a big deal-unlike Anderson and his statue.”

  “Mmm. I called some of the people on my list, put out some lines in the Latino community,” Lucas said. “Haven’t gotten anything back yet. We need to be careful not to step on Shaffer’s toes. We’ll all be talking to the DEA tomorrow, we can figure out who’s doing what.”

  Del stood up and stretched: “So, we go home and eat dinner with the kids?”

  “Nothing wrong with that,” Lucas said. He thought about the bodies in the Brooks house.

  Lucas went home, watched the
Brooks murder coverage on Channel Three; played with his son, Sam, throwing a Nerf ball at a basket; got a smile from his infant daughter, Gabrielle, who was now almost a toddler; and had a long, complicated discussion with his daughter Letty about television news.

  Letty was between her junior and senior years in high school and had worked part-time at a TV station for three years. She’d met a politician that day, in the green room off the studio, who shook her hand and asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up. She said she was thinking about being a TV reporter, and the politician shook his head and said, “The thing about TV is, every single story is wrong. Nothing is ever quite right. If you go into TV work, you’ll spend your life telling lies.”

  “Then what are you doing here?” she’d asked.

  “I’m selling my side,” he’d said. “Television isn’t news-it’s sales. I’m selling my ideas.”

  The conversation had troubled her and she’d expected some reassurance from Lucas. He failed to give it to her. So they talked about that for a while, and then she said, “I dunno. I like it, TV. But…”

  “Don’t tell me you want to be a lawyer,” Lucas said. “And not a cop.”

  “This politician guy, when he came back out, I asked him what I should be. He said, ‘If I were a kid, about to go to college, and was smart, and knew what I know now … I’d study economics.’”

  “I wouldn’t know anything about that,” Lucas confessed. “Sounds kinda … dry. Maybe you oughta talk to your mom.”

  “You know what she thinks,” Letty said. “She’s already writing my essay for medical school. She wants me to take some surgical assistant classes at the VoTech and assist her in some surgeries next summer. She says she can fix it. But I just, uh, I like getting in the truck and running around town.”

  “You like watching surgery.”

  “Yeah, but in a news way,” she said. “I’m not sure I’d be interested in doing it,” she said. “Mom says every case is different, but to me, they all look a lot alike. I can’t see myself doing that for forty years.”