John Sandford - Stolen Prey

“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 him 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.”