Stolen Prey

by John Sandford

  “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.”

  “So talk to your pals at Channel Three,” Lucas said. “My feeling is, TV’s like the cops: it’s interesting, but it can get old, and pretty quick.”

  “Maybe I could be an actress,” she suggested.

  “Ohhh … shit.”

  AT TEN O’CLOCK that night, Lucas got a call from a Mexican guy who’d been hassled by St. Paul cops for running an unlicensed, backroom bar out of his house. Lucas heard about it through a friend, one thing led to another, Lucas talked to the cops, and the pressure went away: the Mexican guy knew everybody, and was too valuable to hassle about a little under-the-counter tequila.

  He said, “I talked to a guy today who talks to everybody, like I do, and he said there were some bad people in town from Mexico.”

  “Yeah? Who’s this guy?”

  “His name is Daniel. I think his last name is Castle. Something like that. But he knows the St. Paul police….”

  The caller didn’t know much more than that, so Lucas rang off and called a St. Paul cop named Billy Andrews. “I’m looking for a guy named Daniel Castle, some kind of hustler around town—”

  “That’d be Daniel Castells. What’d he do?”

  “Nothing but talk. But we’re looking around for some bad Mexicans, and he told a friend of mine that there were some bad Mexicans in town. I understand you guys know him.”

  “This about the Brooks case?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Let me check around. You don’t want him spooked.”

  “No. All we want at this point is a quiet chat.”

  “I’ll get back to you. Probably tomorrow morning,” Andrews said.

  LUCAS WENT to bed, thinking about the phone call. A little movement?

  Maybe.

  But he didn’t dream about the killers. He dreamed about the tweekers.

  3

  Weather was always out of the house by six-thirty in the morning. The housekeeper got breakfast for the kids and saw Letty off to summer school. Lucas rolled out a little after eight o’clock, which was early for him.

  He’d put a small flat-panel TV in the bathroom and watched the morning news programs as he cleaned up. There was a story about the DEA coming in on the Brooks murders, and the anchorwoman seemed to think the DEA’s presence meant that everything would be okay.

  He turned off the TV, spent a few minutes choosing a suit, shirt, and tie, had a quick breakfast of oatmeal and orange juice, called the office, found out that he was supposed to be at a nine-o’clock meeting with the DEA. Because he was hoping for a break on the “bad Mexicans,” and might be traveling around town with more than one other person, he left the Porsche in the garage and took his Lexus SUV.

  He got to the meeting only a little late.

  THE THREE DEA agents were smart, bulky guys in sport coats, golf shirts, and cotton slacks. All of them had mustaches. O’Brien was a dark-complected Texan, complete with hand-tooled cowboy boots, shoe-polish-black hair and eyes, apparently of Latino heritage. When Shaffer asked him about his last name, he shrugged and said, “My great-grandfather was Irish. He married my great-grandmother, who was Indio. My grandfather immigrated to Texas, but we kept marrying Mexicans. Lot of Irish in Mexico. The Mexican name, Obregon? It comes from O’Brien.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Shaffer said. “Never heard the name Obregon.”

  “He was a president of Mexico,” O’Brien said. “Got his ass assassinated. Like Lincoln, up here.”

  “Didn’t know that,” Shaffer said. He nodded at Lucas, who’d paused at the doorway to listen.

  Lucas took a chair and said, “Sorry I’m late—had a late night. Where are we?”

  “Getting introduced,” Shaffer said. “I’m going to take them over to the house when we’re done here. We still haven’t moved the bodies. The crime-scene people are going over everything with microscopes.”

  “WE WANT TO LOOK at Sunnie’s books, is the main thing,” O’Brien said. “These two guys”—he nodded at his colleagues—“are accountants. We’d really be interested in seeing what banks the company is using, and who they’re in touch with at the banks.�
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  “We don’t even know that this has anything to do with you guys,” Shaffer said. “Not for sure.”

  “Maybe not for sure,” O’Brien said. “But it looks to us like these folks were killed by the Los Criminales del Norte, the LCN.”

  “Where’d they get that name?” Lucas asked. “Not particularly subtle.”

  O’Brien shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe they gave it to themselves. They usually do.”

  LCN, he said, specialized in the importation of marijuana and cocaine into the U.S., through New Mexico and Texas. Nobody knew what happened to the money they collected, and there was a lot of it. The theory had always been that it went to offshore banks, and from there to Europe or Asia, but nobody knew for sure how it got there.

  “The thing is,” O’Brien said, “when one of their big shots gets killed, he’s always off in the sticks in Coahuila or Tamaulipas. No place near Europe or Asia. So where the money goes and what they do with it is really a mystery. If we could figure that out, and find out which banks are involved, we could hurt them.”

  He said that the LCN had an alliance with growers in Colombia and Venezuela, and may have used some of the South Americans’ financial expertise to move the cash.

  “They are not subordinates of the Colombia guys—they’re independent. The Colombians tried to get them under their thumbs, and a whole bunch of Colombians got their thumbs cut off,” O’Brien said. “Now the Colombians provide the product, and the LCN gets it across the border to their own retailers on this side. But they’ve got the same trouble everybody does who winds up with bales of hundred-dollar bills—how to get the money clean. We don’t know how they do that, either.”

  “We can’t find it at Sunnie,” Shaffer said. “We’ve got an accountant of our own looking at the books and talking to Sunnie’s accountants, and it doesn’t look like much money was running through their accounts.”

  “Maybe we’ll have to look at their accountants,” O’Brien said.

  “They’re a pretty big company, been here a long time, and clean, as far as anybody knows,” Shaffer said. “It’d be hard to believe that they’d take on something as risky as a Mexican gang account.”

  “It’s there somewhere,” one of the other DEA agents said. “Gotta be.”

  Lucas nodded: he’d said the same thing himself.

  LUCAS SAID, “Our big question is, why did they do it this way, this massacre, and turn it into a sensation? Maybe you can get away with that in Mexico, and maybe they do it when somebody needs public disciplining. But this … they’re not taking credit for it, so it wasn’t disciplinary. It looks like they were trying to extract some information from the Brookses, and not getting it.”

  “And if the Brookses were knowingly dealing with these guys, it doesn’t seem likely that they’d be crazy enough to steal from them,” Shaffer said.

  “Or not talk when they showed up,” Lucas added.

  “It’s gotta be money,” O’Brien said. “Maybe they’re killing two birds with one stone—looking for their money and making a point.”

  “What are the chances that it’s a rogue element?” Shaffer asked. “Some smaller group inside the Criminales knew about Brooks, and they came up to hijack the money stream?”

  O’Brien shrugged. “Dunno,” he said. “I guess it’s possible.” His voice said that it wasn’t possible, and that Shaffer should hang his head in shame for having suggested it.

  Shaffer, his face slightly red, began to tap-dance. “Or maybe the Brookses just really pissed them off, or threatened them somehow, and they came up, you know, to shut them down.”

  “But then, why the whole torture scene?” O’Brien asked. “These guys are brutal, but they’re not stupid. They really don’t do crimes of passion. They kill for business reasons. If they just wanted to shut Brooks down, they could have come up here, shot Brooks on the street, and gone back home. You guys would be scratching your heads. Nobody would even suspect anything other than a robbery…. Now, you’re gonna be chasing Mexicans all over town. The DEA gets involved, the Justice Department calls up the Mexican government, and they get more pressure put on them…. They’re not impervious to pressure, you know. They don’t want a battalion of Federales up their ass that might have gone up somebody else’s ass.”

  THEY ALL thought about that for a minute, then Lucas asked O’Brien, “You’re not really here to catch the killers, are you?”

  “We’d certainly like to,” O’Brien said. There was a tentative note in his voice.

  “But basically, you’re here to see if you can find a way to mess with the business,” Lucas said. “From that perspective, the guys who did the actual killing are probably small potatoes. You’re here to look at the books, not to track somebody down in Minneapolis.”

  O’Brien nodded. “Yeah. That’s pretty much the case. We’re not equipped to go chasing after individual murderers. We want to bust up their system. We’d like to find the cash that Brooks stole, and take it away from them. That’ll amount to a bunch of legal writs, freezing bank accounts somewhere. The street stuff—that’s you guys.”

  THE BCA guys all glanced at each other, and Shaffer said, “Well, that’s clear enough. We’ll be glad to cooperate on that.”

  Lucas asked a few more questions, the most critical one, for his immediate future, being “Can these guys pass as Americans?”

  O’Brien said, “Probably not. In the border states, their retailers are mostly Hispanic, recruited out of the prison system in California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. Some of them are native English speakers, grew up in Los Angeles or Phoenix. Some of them hardly speak a word of English, and settle down in the barrios in LA. Up north, here, they use a lot of Anglo prison gangs—just a straight money deal. But their gunmen, their hit men, they almost all come from Mexico. They grow up with the gangs.”

  “So the guys we’re looking for, they’re probably Mexican.”

  O’Brien nodded. “Yeah. If we’ve got this right. If it’s not some kind of … French connection.”

  They talked around for a while, and then Shaffer said he’d put all the accountants together after the DEA agents walked through the murder scene.

  LUCAS WENT back to his office and found a call from Billy Andrews, the St. Paul cop, who said they’d located the guy who knew about bad Mexicans in town. Lucas called Del, who was still in the building, and recruited him to go along for the ride.

  Before he left, he called Virgil Flowers, an agent who worked southern Minnesota, and told him about the horse shit clue to the ATM robbers.

  “Sounds like it’s right up my alley,” Flowers said. “Horseshit.”

  “I’ve been told that we could call around to county agents to see if they might know about riding stables, and who’d have hired hands as cleanup people … or some such. I’d do it myself, but now I’m all tangled up in this Wayzata murder. We’re talking Mexican drug killers.”

  “Lot more eye-catching than horse shit,” Flowers observed.

  “Well, I’m a lot more important than you are,” Lucas said. “So…”

  “I’ll do it, but I’m working on the Partridge Plastics thing, so there’ll be extra hours involved,” Flowers said. “If I get them, I’ll want to work a little undertime in the next couple of weeks.”

  “Just locate them,” Lucas said. “You don’t have to get them. I want to be there for the get. We can talk about the undertime … if you find them.”

  “Oh, I’ll find them,” Flowers said.

  ANDREWS WAS a detective with St. Paul narcotics/vice. He was so large that he was hard to miss: six seven or six eight, maybe 240 pounds, with over-the-ears blond hair and gold-rimmed glasses. He looked like a tight end with a PhD in European literature. He dressed in dark sport coats over black golf shirts because, he thought, they made him look smaller. They didn’t; they made him look like a hole in space. His nose had been broken a couple of times, and maybe his teeth: he had an improbably even white smile.

  They picked h
im up at the St. Paul police headquarters. He got in the backseat of the Lexus and said, “Okay, this guy’s name is Daniel Castells.”

  “Dope dealer?” Del asked.

  “Don’t think so. He just sort of hangs out,” Andrews said. “It’s not real clear where his money comes from. He buys and sells, we hear … maybe, like stuff that’s fallen off a truck. Maybe. If a pound of coke came along, with no strings attached, he might find a place to put it. Or he might put that guy who had the coke with a guy who wanted it. Or maybe he’d run like hell. I dunno. People say he’s a smart guy.”

  “Where is he?”

  “He’s got a booth at McDonald’s, over at Snelling and University,” Andrews said. “Drinks a lot of coffee. Eats French fries. Talks to people on a cell phone. He’s there now. Dan Walker is keeping an eye on him.”

  “Does he know we’re coming?” Lucas asked.

  “We haven’t mentioned it,” Andrews said.

  “Sounds like the guy to know,” Lucas said. “I’m surprised I haven’t heard of him.”

  “Showed up here a couple of years ago, keeps his head down,” Andrews said. “I’ve thought about watching him, to see what he’s got going. I’d like to get some prints, or even some DNA, maybe track him down somewhere else.”

  “Not a bad idea,” Lucas said.

  THEY TOOK ten minutes getting to the McDonald’s, and Andrews called his watchman, Walker, on a handset and confirmed that Castells was still in his booth.

  “He is,” he told Lucas, after he’d rung off. “He’s been talking on his cell phone for the last hour.”

  University and Snelling was a mess because of construction for a light-rail right-of-way, and Lucas had to dodge around traffic barriers to get into the parking lot. When they were parked, they walked across the blacktop to the McDonald’s, past the window where Castells was sitting. He saw them coming, making eye contact with all three of them, one after the other. He looked at his phone and pushed a button, and Lucas nodded to him.