Stolen Prey p-22

by John Sandford

Rivera stepped in and one of the men stood up and smiled and said, “David, good to see you,” in Spanish. He introduced the other three, and they all stood to shake hands, and then Rivera took a chair and a beer while Martinez leaned against the refrigerator.

  The man who greeted Rivera was named Garza, and he said, “So, Miguel here”-he nodded to one of the other men-“talked to this man Flores, who has a cleaning crew and cleans up at the Wee Blue Inn. He saw these three men, and he believes that one or two of them were among those photographs that you put on television.”

  Rivera grunted and said, “Excellent. Now, does he know where they were going?”

  Miguel shook his head. “No. But he recognized the kind they were, narcos. He didn’t want to be around when they were, so he left work. Before he left, he saw their car, which he thinks was rented. It was a new Chevrolet Tahoe, silver. He thinks it had Texas license plates. That’s all he could say.”

  “More than I hoped for,” Rivera said. “I will call home and ask for help-if it was rented at the border, and since we know the type, we might find the number.”

  “What else can we do?” asked one of the other men.

  “The basic thing, we need to find these three men,” Rivera said. “We don’t want anyone to be hurt. So, if you ask, ask gently. People who might see three small Mexicanos driving in a new Chevrolet Tahoe, they’ll remember.”

  The men all looked at each other, and nodded, and then Rivera said to Garza, “So, Tomas, you have four more Garzas since I last saw you,” and the meeting turned into a party, and Garza’s wife brought in some very good mole poblano and roast turkey, and tortillas, and Martinez helped serve it around and then the kids came down and they had a very good evening….

  At the end, when the others had left, and Garza was taking them to the door, Rivera asked him, “Did you-”

  “Yes.” He reached behind a couch table and produced a yellow envelope and handed it to Rivera, who bounced its heft and said, “I am in your debt, Tomas. If you need anything, call me.”

  In the car, Rivera took the pistol out of the sack, checked it, cycled it: a well-used but nice Browning Hi Power, not a modern gun, but one he knew and liked. He put it in his belt and sighed.

  “Ah. I feel right for the first time since I got here.”

  “If the Americans find out…” Martinez began.

  “Fuck them,” Rivera said, as he started the car. “They treat us like children or traitors. So … fuck them.”

  7

  Tres couldn’t stop talking about his conversation with Jesus and the saints, and his continual reflection began to get on the others’ nerves, and finally Dos told him to shut up. Tres smiled and said, “I’m to die soon, why should I listen to you?”

  “Because if you don’t, you will die immediately.” They all laughed at that, and Tres shut up.

  They hung out and watched television until midnight, then carried Pruess’s body out through the side door to the driveway, and heaved it into the back of the Tahoe. They planned to go out far enough that the body, if discovered, wouldn’t bring the police into their neighborhood, and then throw it in a dumpster, and hope that it was hauled away to the dump, or the incinerator, or wherever the yanquis got rid of their trash.

  Nothing worked quite right for them.

  There were dumpsters everywhere, but it was hard to find one where they could safely and discreetly lift the lid and deposit a two-hundred-pound body. Especially since the body, wrapped in its blue tarp, looked more like a dead body than it would have if it’d been in a coffin. Somebody would look at the bundle and say, “Well, there’s the head, and there’s the feet, and that thick part is the butt….”

  Another problem was that the body wasn’t easy to handle: it carried like two hundred pounds of Jell-O. They found an obscure dumpster behind an office building, but after pulling up in the car, realized that none of them were tall enough to lift the lid on the dumpster. That got them laughing, but didn’t make things any smoother.

  They laughed less when they found one short enough that they could lift the lid-barely-and then found they couldn’t both hold the lid up and lift the mushy body high enough to get it inside. They were strong little guys, but it was two hundred pounds of mushy dead weight. They kept looking.

  Eventually they found a shorter dumpster on Upper St. Dennis Road, outside a driveway where a house was being remodeled. After driving past a few times, they quickly hopped out, in the deep dark night, popped open the lid, and threw the body in.

  Five seconds later, they were gone.

  Five hours later, Muffy St. Clair, a dog, stopped just down the street to poop. Her owner, Bonnie St. Clair, picked the poop up in a plastic baggie and carried it over to the dumpster to throw it in. Pruess’s body-bundle was folded into the dumpster, feet and head up, butt down, bent in the middle. It took a few seconds, then Bonnie said, “Jesus fuckin’ Christ, Muffy, it’s a body.”

  She ran home to call the cops, and after a while, a St. Paul homicide cop named Roger Morris called Lucas, who had planned to sleep in late on a Saturday morning.

  “Somebody tore the guy to pieces,” Morris said. “It looks like what happened to those people in Wayzata, if those rumors are true.”

  “Half hour,” Lucas said. “Did you call Bob Shaffer?”

  “Naw, he’s an asshole,” Morris said. “You can call him if you want.”

  “Did the dead guy have any ID on him?”

  “We haven’t completely unwrapped him yet. He’s wrapped in a plastic tarp.”

  “Well, his name is probably Richard Pruess, and he was a vice president for Polaris National Bank over in Minneapolis. He was probably killed because some Mexican narcos think he stole a bunch of money from them.”

  “Huh. So I got nothing left to detect,” Morris said.

  “You could detect where the killers are,” Lucas said. “We have no idea.”

  “Okay. Get your ass over here. And call Shaffer.”

  Lucas did, but Shaffer lived in one of the far north suburbs, and his wife said he was out running. “He left his cell phone here. He doesn’t like to be disturbed,” Shaffer’s wife said.

  “Well, tell him to call me,” Lucas said. “I need to disturb him.”

  Then he called Rivera, who was eating breakfast, and gave him an address, and headed for the shower. Thirty-one minutes after he took the call, he pulled up to the St. Paul crime-scene tape and got out of the Porsche, held his ID up for the rookie who was minding the tape, and went through the line.

  Morris, a fat black guy in a pink dress shirt and black slacks, was looking with discouragement into the dumpster, while a crime-scene guy walked around the area with a video camera. Morris’s partner, who was standing on a nearby front porch, talking to the home owner, raised a hand, and Lucas waved back. Lucas walked up to Morris and said, “I really like you in pink, sweetie.”

  “Fuck you. You don’t look this good in your dreams.” He tipped his head toward the dumpster. The body was still folded inside, but had been partially unwrapped.

  Lucas looked in, winced, turned back to Morris and said, “Same guys.”

  “Yeah, I thought maybe. I saw all that stuff on TV. They cut his fingers off at the joints, and the pieces are rolling around like unchewed chunks of Dubble Bubble gum.”

  “Nice simile,” Lucas said. “Kinda literary.”

  “I’m a literary kind of guy, but … who’re these people?” Morris was looking back over Lucas’s shoulder.

  Lucas turned and saw Rivera and Martinez walking up to the crime-scene line. He shouted down to the cop, “Let them in,” and said to Morris, “Mexican cops. They’re up here to observe, see what they can pick up.”

  Rivera walked up, looking unsettled: a kind of after-sex look, and Lucas glanced at Martinez, who looked a little glassy herself, and thought, Hmm. Rivera had told him he was married to a nice hometown girl.

  Rivera said, “Thank you for the call,” and Lucas introduced him to Morris. Rivera looked i
n the dumpster, then called Martinez up with a crook of his finger, and they both looked in for a moment. Then Martinez turned to Morris and said, “This is the Agua Prieta group. The same people.”

  “Mexicans?” Morris asked.

  Rivera nodded and said, “Yes. We think somebody robbed one of their drug laundries, and they are either trying to get their money back, or are on a punishment mission.”

  “Well, hell. I am definitely nonplussed,” Morris said.

  “As we all are,” Lucas said. “Let’s find a place to sit down, and we’ll fill you in.”

  “One thing,” Morris said. “We found a clue.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. Really. C’mere.” He led the way to his car, opened the door, took out a big plastic bag. “This was inside the wrapper right by the face. It’s a napkin with a smear of blood on it, and what smells like a little dog shit.”

  “Dog shit?” Lucas, Rivera, and Martinez were looking through the transparent plastic.

  “The body was found when a woman opened the dumpster to throw in a bag of dog shit. I guess they all go around picking up dog shit in this neighborhood,” Morris said. “Anyway, she threw it in, and it landed on the head part … but when we unwrapped, we found this. Looks like somebody used it to wipe up some blood or something. It’s a napkin from Zapp’s.”

  Lucas said, “Jesus, it is. It’s like a clue. Like somebody dropped a matchbook from a bar.”

  “Whatever,” Morris said. “Anyway, the crime-scene guys are gonna work this, and I’m gonna run over to Zapp’s. You’re welcome to come, if you want. It’s as much your case as mine.”

  Lucas was in Zapp’s every month or so. He looked at his watch. “Not open yet.”

  “I called John Sappolini, he’s gonna meet us there. He’s calling his crews in.”

  “Let’s go,” Lucas said.

  Morris rode over with Lucas, and Lucas filled him in on the murders in Wayzata. “I’ll send you the book. But it’s the same guys.”

  “I don’t want that shit starting up here,” Morris said.

  “I hear you,” Lucas said.

  Shaffer called, Lucas told him about Pruess, and Shaffer said he’d be down as soon as he could make it. Lucas gave him Morris’s cell phone number, but didn’t mention that he was riding along.

  When he got off, Morris said, “I wish I wasn’t gonna be working with him.”

  “Something personal?”

  “Just style. He’s one of those ball-bearing guys, who goes ricocheting around banging into people,” Morris said. “He’s got no sense of humor. No style.”

  “He’s sort of a cowboy guy,” Lucas said. “He and his wife used to teach line dancing. They came down to the office a few times and gave lessons to guys who wanted them, and their wives. Everybody was wearing cowboy boots.”

  “Now, see, that’s something I didn’t know,” Morris said. “I can’t believe that guy can dance. Not that line dancing is really dancing.”

  “Of course it is, and it’s very romantic,” Lucas said. “I actually got addicted to it, for a while.”

  Morris bit: “Really? I never would’ve thought you were that kind of guy.”

  Lucas nodded. “Got so bad my shrink put me in a two-step program.”

  Morris tried not to laugh, but finally let it out, and they laughed for a block or two, until Lucas’s cell phone rang. He looked at the screen: Virgil Flowers.

  “What’s up?” Lucas asked.

  “Got a minute?”

  “Yeah, I’m just riding around with Roger Morris. He’s wearing a hot-pink short-sleeved dress shirt.”

  “Tell him he looks fabulous,” Flowers said.

  Lucas passed the word, then said, “Roger gives you the sign of the horns, and knowing your second ex-wife, he’s probably right. Anyhow…”

  “I found out that there are roughly a million riding stables out here, or people with horses, anyway,” Flowers said. “Using my quick intellect, I called up everybody I knew, and I’m starting to get some serious vibes from the Waseca area. Horse people there have seen them. Hauling horse shit on an old Ford flatbed.”

  “Man, that’s terrific,” Lucas said. “What’s next?”

  “I’m going over there, talk to the various sheriffs, the county agents, anybody else. I don’t have anything definite, though-I’m basically checking in. Wanted you to know I’m not out fishing, even though it is Saturday, and my day off.”

  “Hey, Virgil-find them for me. Honest to God, I’ll introduce you to one of my old girlfriends.”

  “Thanks anyway,” Flowers said. “But she’d be too old for me. I’ll call you tonight or tomorrow, soon as I get anything.”

  “Too old? What the hell…” Flowers was gone.

  “What’s that?” Morris said, when Lucas rang off.

  “Best news I’ve had all summer,” Lucas said, as they turned into Zapp’s parking lot.

  Zapp’s Pizza was a tightly run ship, with good pizza and bread, a bunch of red-vinyl booths in the back, along with a half dozen tables, and, this early in the morning, an empty salad bar. The owner, John Sappolini, was not happy about the napkin, but had no trouble talking to police. “Half the cops in St. Paul eat here,” he said.

  He’d once told Lucas that he called the place Zapp’s because his Wells Fargo small-business counselor suggested he not call it Sapp’s.

  Sappolini had two crews working eight-hour shifts, from ten o’clock in the morning until two o’clock in the morning, with the restaurant open from eleven o’clock until one. After the call from Morris, he’d called both crews in. He had the first ones brew up a few gallons of coffee, and Lucas and Morris sat at one of the tables and everybody pulled chairs around to talk about the situation; Rivera and Martinez sat out on the edge.

  They’d been talking for fifteen minutes, with late-arriving members of the crew straggling in as they talked. One of the last ones in was a short, wide-shouldered man who listened for one minute and then said, “There was a short Mexican kid in here yesterday afternoon with a gun in his belt. I think.”

  Lucas looked at him and asked, “You think?”

  “Couldn’t see it because he was wearing an iguana shirt,” the man said.

  “Guayabera,” Morris said.

  The guy shook his head. “No, iguana. It’s like a golf shirt, but instead of like that polo pony, you know, it had an iguana on it.”

  “Yes, they sell them in Mexico, on the coast,” Rivera said.

  The pizza guy said, “See?”

  “Si,” Rivera said.

  “So what else about him?” Lucas asked.

  “He was just a kid, and he was looking for a place to pray while he waited for the pizzas, so I sent him down to the cathedral. He went, or at least he said he went, and he said he saw the big windows, and Jesus spoke to him.”

  “Spoke to him,” Lucas repeated.

  “Yeah, he said Jesus spoke to him, and Jesus told him he was going to die soon.”

  Morris looked at Lucas, and they simultaneously shrugged. From the back, Rivera asked, “How many pizzas did he buy?”

  “Two. Extra large.”

  Rivera said, “Enough for three or four.”

  The pizza guy didn’t know whether the kid had arrived on foot or had come by car, but had the impression that he’d been on foot. “I don’t know why, it’s just an impression.”

  Morris: “Is a cold-blooded killer going to church? I don’t think so.”

  “But you’d be wrong,” Rivera said. “Some of these bangers, they go to church every Sunday and pray for their souls. And because their mothers make them go.”

  “Then, if he is one of the guys, they’d be holed up around here somewhere,” Morris said. They all looked out the window.

  “I’ll tell you what,” Lucas said, when they looked back. “We’ve probably got DNA on these guys, we probably have at least one fingerprint and maybe more, they’ve committed at least five torture-murders of the worst kind. If we catch them, they’re
going away forever, so they’ve got nothing to lose by shooting as many cops as they see. They’ve probably got an arsenal with them, and they’ve had lots of practice.”

  Morris said, “Huh. Better talk to SWAT.”

  “Better talk to everybody,” Lucas said. “You don’t want a lot of patrol cops rolling around sticking their noses into everything. If somebody finds them just sort of spontaneously, he’ll probably be killed. I think you put together a good crew, start working the neighborhood, but you gotta be discreet. You don’t want to scare them off, but you don’t want to get anybody killed, either. No impetuosity.”

  “No impetuosity,” Morris repeated.

  When they’d extracted everything they could from the Zapp’s crews, they broke up. Lucas headed over to the BCA, and Morris went back to the murder scene-from there he’d head to police headquarters, which was about five minutes away, to arrange for a careful survey of the neighborhoods around Zapp’s.

  Rivera and Martinez went back to their car, and Rivera dug his pistol out from under the front seat and said to Martinez, “You drive.”

  “To where?”

  “Up and down these streets. If he walked, he is not far. We’ll circle the streets, go out for a kilometer-”

  She said, “This is crazy. We-”

  “We know the car. This neighborhood, most of the cars are on the street,” Rivera said. “I predict that we will find them.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then we will see,” Rivera said.

  “You are too crazy,” Martinez said. She bit her lip, as though she feared she’d gone too far.

  All Rivera said was, “Drive.”

  The neighborhood around Zapp’s Pizza was all old. From north to south, it varied from rich, south of Grand Avenue, to increasingly poor, north of Summit Avenue, to poor, next to I-94. Grand Avenue itself was mostly commercial and apartments.

  Rivera didn’t think the shooters would be in an apartment. Somebody, he thought, had probably arranged a house. The house wouldn’t be on Summit, because those houses were basically mansions. This would be more discreet, in a neighborhood where people might be a bit more reluctant to ask questions.