John Sandford - Stolen Prey

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.

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.”

“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.”