Stolen Prey

by John Sandford

  “Ah, Jesus. But you don’t know that.”

  “No.”

  O’BRIEN AND his accountants were busy with two bank computer-security experts. When O’Brien saw Lucas come in, he broke away and said, “This Bois Brule account is a ghost. The money comes in, but we can’t backtrack it. From here, the money goes out to the Islands, the Caymans, where we’re temporarily bogged down. We won’t get any information from them before tomorrow morning at the earliest.”

  Bone said, “We gotta talk,” and pointed them to a cluster of furniture at the end of the room, and they went over and sat down.

  Lucas: “What’s up?”

  Bone said, “We’ve got a management problem. I don’t care so much about the dope money coming in, or going out, because I understand it now: we were scammed about the source of the money, but all of our systems stayed intact and worked as they’re supposed to. We might figure out some way to do a statistical study of our accounts, to isolate odd behavior, but that’s off in the future. I’m more worried about these hackers—if they attacked one account, they could attack more. We don’t even know for sure that they haven’t. I really need to get them caught.”

  “We’re working on it,” Lucas said.

  “But not so hard. What you’re really interested in are these killers,” Bone said. “In the meantime, the DEA is up to its ass in killers, and they don’t care that much about individual gangbangers who’ll be dead in a year, anyway. What they want to do is break into the gang’s banks. So they want the banks, you want the killers, and I need to stop the hackers. But I’ll tell you, Lucas, if the BCA catches these killers, you personally won’t have much to do with it. Somebody will see them, somebody will rat them out. It’ll be luck or routine, not brains.”

  “Maybe,” Lucas agreed.

  “I’ll make it even simpler,” Bone said. “You’ve got three crimes here. First, you’ve got the dopers laundering their money. The DEA’s covering that. Second, you’ve got the killers murdering people. Shaffer’s got that. Third, you’ve got the thieves who took the money out of the bank. Nobody’s interested. But that’s the most important one—I can’t seem to make that sink in. Somebody has to cover it—I mean, like you.”

  “What am I supposed to do?” Lucas asked.

  “Let the other cops, this Shaffer guy, let them do the routine work,” Bone said. “Let the DEA do the accountancy, you don’t know anything about that anyway. You should be going after the thieves, not the gangbangers.”

  “I don’t know any more about them than I do about the shooters,” Lucas said.

  Bone disagreed. “Sure you do. They’re thieves. They had to have some access inside the bank, so you do whatever it is you do when you’re looking for any thieves. Look for opportunity, motive, all that shit you see on TV. I can tell you a few things about them—I can tell you what they’re doing right now, for one thing.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. Not the small details, but I can probably get close even to that. At some point, after running through five or six banks, the Caymans, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Panama … at some point, they have to get cash or an equivalent. Gold, silver, diamonds, rare stamps or coins. Probably not silver, come to think of it, because it’d be too big to move. But they’re going to have to get something to break the paper trail, and it’ll have some intrinsic value. Can’t be unique—can’t buy a Picasso, because that would have its own kind of trail. So it’s probably gold, in some form. Coins, ingots, something. Or maybe diamonds, if the paper trail ends in Amsterdam or Tel Aviv. And…”

  “And?”

  “And they’re buying it right now,” Bone said. “Whatever it is. They know you’re coming after them, they know the Mexicans are out there. They’re moving as fast as they can. But you can’t buy that much coin that fast without somebody noticing. So find those people. Find the people who are selling. You’re looking for somebody, maybe several somebodies, who are selling a lot of gold or diamonds or stamps or coins. You’ve got no time—no time. Once they finish buying whatever it is, they’ll bury it and go back to their day jobs. Nothing’ll move. Then, in a year or two, they’ll find a way to bring the money back in, probably in some other city or some other country, and we’ll never know. And I won’t know whether they can come back to the bank for another round.”

  Lucas and O’Brien were sitting back, taking it in. When Bone finished, O’Brien turned to Lucas and said, “He’s right. Finding those gangbangers gonna be mostly a matter of luck, if they haven’t already taken off. As far as we know, they’re driving through Kansas City right now. If they’re still here, you won’t get them … unless….”

  He paused, and Lucas prompted him, “Unless…”

  “Unless you find a way to suck them in,” O’Brien said. “They went after Kline. If you’d been there, you could have trapped them. If you could get them to come after somebody, if you were ready for that…”

  Lucas thought, Hell, if I’d left Shrake and Jenkins on Kline …

  Bone said, “Aw, c’mon. He’s not gonna suck them in. They’re not reacting to Lucas—they’re doing what they’re told.”

  Lucas nodded. “Probably.”

  “So work on the thieves,” Bone said. He was leaning toward Lucas, intent with the sales pitch. “It’s really urgent. I’ll give you every scrap of information we come up with at the bank, I’ll make all of our people available to you, anything you want. Anything. If the BCA needs more budget for overtime, I’ll work that out, make a donation to the state. I need these thieves.”

  Lucas said, “I’d really like to get the shooters. But you might be right.”

  “If you get them, these fuckin’ thieves, the next time we play basketball—I’ll throw the game to you,” Bone said.

  “You’ll be a very old man before that could happen,” Lucas said. But he slapped Bone on the knee and said, “Let me think about it.”

  12

  Sam and the baby were asleep when Lucas got home. Letty was reading a fantasy novel involving vampires, and when Lucas tried to talk to her, she gently shooed him away—somebody was about to get kissed. Weather was getting ready for bed: “Anything good?” she asked.

  “Jim got on my case. He’s worried that the people who stole the money might somehow be able to get back in—that there might still be an inside man, and they’ll come back and hit him again.”

  “Is there an inside man?”

  “Probably at least one, and maybe two.” She knew about Kline getting shot, and he told her about the brief conversation in the hospital room. He didn’t mention searching Kline’s cell phone, because she had specific ethical viewpoints regarding the treatment of patients; a covert search of a patient’s personal effects while he was drugged would almost certainly be an occasion for a major confrontation and possibly a reeducation program of the kind meted out by the Communist Chinese to capitalist running dogs during the Great Leap Forward.

  So he kissed her good night and went down to the den and got out his Strathmore sketch pad and began doodling: names, connections, questions, possibilities laid out in boxes connected by dotted lines and arrows.

  One thing that seemed quite clear, and fascinating in its own way, was that information was leaking back to the Criminales. That meant that the gang almost certainly had an observer inside the bank, and the observer was close to the investigators—close enough to pick up clues and tips as to where the investigation was going.

  Lucas began working out some ideas about who that person would be: who inside a bank would have a connection with the Criminales. He (or she) must still be in place, because he (or she) sicced the killers on Kline.

  It seemed likely that the person would be Mexican … wouldn’t he?

  He looked at his watch, went to his cell phone and called Bone’s home phone. Bone’s wife picked up, went to get him. Bone said: “You got them. Good work.”

  “Could be a while yet,” Lucas said. “I have a question for you. Have you had anything weird
happen with any of your people in the last few weeks? Say, people who would have been aware of an investigation of this account, so somebody up fairly high? Some unusual questions, or concerns…?”

  Bone was crunching on something that sounded like a carrot stick. He crunched and said, “What do you mean, weird?”

  “I’m thinking that the Criminales might have been paying somebody to watch for unusual attention to the account—you know, in case the cops came around, or the DEA. I can see two possibilities. The first is somebody with contacts back in Mexico, who got pulled in somehow. Could be a previous association, could be threats to a family. Whatever. The second possibility is that they simply looked at who was working at the bank, picked somebody out, and paid him. So you’d be looking at somebody who might have had a drug problem, somebody who might have had big financial problems. There’d be rumors around…”

  “I don’t know of anything like that personally,” Bone said. “We’ve got a few alcoholics in positions where they might pick up an investigation, but I don’t know of any druggies. If we knew, we’d get rid of them. But let me ask.”

  “How about Mexicans? Or Central Americans?”

  “I’ll check that, too. I’ve already been thinking about that, and I can tell you, we’ve got quite a few people with Hispanic names. I don’t know who’s a Mexican, or whatever … Let me ask around.”

  “Try not to disturb anyone.”

  “Believe me, these guys I don’t want to disturb.”

  “One more thing,” Lucas said. “When you were talking about the fact that they’d have to change the wire transfers, or whatever, into some high-value form, like gold or diamonds … it seems to me that would be pretty much a full-time job. That the thief would have to have accomplices.”

  “Oh, sure,” Bone said. “Getting this done would be a full-time job. You’d have to buy whatever it is, make the payment, secure it…. Every purchase would involve several contacts with the sellers. These aren’t people who will give you a million bucks in gold with the promise of a check in the mail. I imagine it would take a couple of people, or more than that.”

  “Gold or diamonds or stamps…”

  “I thought about that some more when I got home,” Bone said. “I’d be willing to bet it’s gold. If you were trying to sneak out of Nazi Germany and needed to hide a lot of value, you might take a rare stamp or a bunch of stamps and hide it in a shoe or something. But stamps, and diamonds, and rare coins, have to be sold through specialists. Diamonds have to be evaluated, and that all takes time, and multiple contacts. But you could take a stack of American Eagles into any number of places—hundreds of places here in the States, thousands more in Europe or Asia—and walk away with cash. Say you set up a company called International Goober, and take your Eagles to a gold dealer, get a check made to International Goober, and who’s to know what happened there?”

  “So, gold.”

  “That’s what I think.”

  AFTER TALKING with Bone, Lucas turned to the problem of the thieves.

  A reverse directory got him the full names of Ivan and Kristina—Ivan Turicek and Kristina Sanderson. A check with the NCIC showed no criminal history for either one of them. He got photos, ages, addresses, and car tags from the DMV and found that Turicek had used a Lithuanian passport and a Green Card as identification when he got his first Minnesota driver’s license, five years earlier. Sanderson had held Minnesota licenses since she was sixteen, and so probably was a native.

  He called ICE, got her on the first ring, and said, “In the Polaris computer system, you could see the back door they came through, but you couldn’t see the computer system the instructions came from.”

  “That’s right. What they apparently did was set up their back door, then they’d come in and move money, and each time they backed out, they touched off a little program that wiped the incoming addresses,” ICE said. “If we’d had them, we might have been able to nail down which computers they’d been working from, what the IP addresses were, and so on. All that’s gone—but it probably wouldn’t have helped much anyway.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because if they’ve got a brain in their heads, and they do, they would have gone to Best Buy and bought some cheap laptops with cash, and signed on from Starbucks. When they finished, they would have dropped the laptops in the river.”

  “You know Kline was attacked.”

  “Yeah, the DEA guys told me what happened,” she said. “I feel kind of bad about it. Not too bad, because he’s such an asshole.”

  “You kept telling me that he’s too lazy to steal.”

  “He’s pretty lazy,” she agreed.

  “So the question I have is this: From the time he found out he was going to be fired until he walked out the door, would he have had time to program in this back door? Those systems are supposed to be pretty secure.”

  “Hmm. Well, I don’t know their work schedules down there. It’s not something you’d do just casually. Usually, if you’re going to be fired, they don’t let you have access to the systems anymore. They don’t want some pissed-off programmer bombing them out. On the other hand, programmers, by definition, are pretty smart, and would probably know they were going to be fired before they actually were. He might have been proactive, so to speak.”

  “Okay. Now answer me this: Could you get into Polaris’s systems from another bank’s secure systems? Without a back door?”

  There was a long silence, then she said, “Damnit. You know, we didn’t look at that. All the banks’ systems have links between them. If you had the protocols for the target bank, you might be able to get in from a secure link from another bank. You’d need administrator’s status, but, you know, people have ways to get that.”

  “So they could have gotten in without a back door?”

  “But there was a back door,” she said. “I found it.”

  “It just seems to me that if you were coming in from another bank, because you didn’t have a back door…”

  “You’d probably build one,” she finished. “Genius. Yes. That’s what I would have done … if I didn’t have the back door to begin with. Do you have any reason to think that’s what he did?”

  “I’m not sure—it could go either way. I think he planned the theft with two other people he works with, from Hennepin National,” Lucas said. “He knew about the account, but didn’t move to steal from it until he got to Hennepin. He didn’t steal while he was at Polaris, as far as we know, and he didn’t start stealing until he’d been at Hennepin for quite a while. Didn’t even try to steal when he was unemployed, and he was out of work for months, which makes me think he didn’t have the back door then. Then he ran into these other people, at Hennepin. He’s lazy, he’s depressed, but somebody gave him a push.”

  “I’d buy that,” ICE said. “I’ll tell you what—if that’s what happened, there won’t be any sign of it anymore. They’ll have taken everything out.”

  “Shoot. You’re sure?”

  “I would have. It wouldn’t be hard.”

  WHEN HE got off the phone, Lucas spent some time thinking about Bone’s theory that the thieves were buying gold or diamonds—probably gold. If they were, they’d have to send it somewhere to be collected, and that would probably be the Twin Cities, simply because they were based there. They couldn’t just stick it in a suitcase and bring it on a plane. It’d be too heavy, and might bring questions from the TSA.

  He didn’t know how gold was normally delivered, though he’d been told once that the post office would handle it via registered mail. The problem with the post office, from the police point of view, was that you had to jump through your ass to get any information about deliveries—they seemed to delight in making sure every legal technicality was observed before they’d cooperate with the cops.

  But once a package was delivered, all he’d need was a search warrant. If Kline was taking deliveries…

  He thought about that, looked at his watch again. Getting late, but
fuck it, people were being killed. He went to his black book, got the number of Martin Clark, the head of Minneapolis Homicide—Homicide would have covered the Kline shooting—and called him.

  When Clark came up, Lucas asked, “Are you done with the crime scene at the Kline shooting?”

  “Pretty much,” Clark said. “Kline told us the story, and everything we saw jibed with what he said.”

  “Get anything I need to know about?”

  “Wasn’t much to get, other than a bunch of used-up slugs and brass,” Clark said. “From talking to Kline, we know the shooters weren’t in the apartment for more than a minute or two, and he thinks they were wearing gloves. So…”

  “Could I get in there? Tonight?” Lucas asked.

  “Ah, man…”

  “Look, you don’t have to have anything to do with it,” Lucas said. “Get the watch guy downtown to get me the key. You got the key in an evidence locker?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’ll go on down and get it, and you can have a squad meet me at the door,” Lucas said. “The thing is, I talked to Kline, and I don’t like his story. I think he’s involved in the theft of this money from Polaris…. I just want to see the scene.”

  After a moment, Clark said, “I’ll get you the key—but don’t get me in trouble.”

  “I won’t,” Lucas promised. “I’ll be over at Homicide in twenty minutes, and over at Kline’s in forty-five. You get a squad down there, I’ll go in for ten minutes, and I’ll drop the key off when I get finished walking through.”

  “Just leave the key with the uniform,” Clark said.

  “Good with me,” Lucas said.

  LUCAS WAS at Homicide in fifteen minutes and signed for the key. Back on the street, he drove as quickly as he could to an all-night convenience store in North Minneapolis, known for its burglary support services, walked through to the back and got a once-and-future convict named Kevin to make a duplicate key for him.

  “I keep losing mine,” he said.