John Sandford - Stolen Prey

Rivera was interested.

At the Brooks house, Rivera wandered away from the driveway, to walk slowly around to the back of the house to look out at the lake. “This is very nice. I could retire here, on this lake.”

“You’d freeze in the winter.”

“So, I go to Argentina in the winter.” He looked at Lucas and added, “I speak Spanish.” He looked back at the lake. “In the summer, this would be very pleasant. Sit on the grass with a fishing pole, catch some fish, throw them back. Get a hammock, take a siesta. Drink some Cuba Libres. Many Cuba Libres.”

Lucas let him talk, then followed him back around the house. Martinez, the assistant, was always three steps behind them.

The doors of the house were closed against the summer heat, and when the Wayzata cop pushed the door open to let them in, they were hit by the odor, and by the cold. The odor was purely one of old blood and death, not decomposition-the inside temperature, Lucas thought, must be down in the fifties-but it stank anyway.

The dead looked as though they’d been carved from wax, all the blood having drained to the bottom of the bodies, that blood that wasn’t soaked into the carpet around them. As they stepped inside, Martinez took some tissues from her purse and passed two to Rivera, who held them to his nose. Martinez did the same, and Lucas could smell the thin floral scent of perfumed bathroom tissues.

Rivera and Martinez had some experience of mass murder: neither one of them flinched at the sight of the four dead. Lucas introduced Rivera to Shaffer, who said he was pleased to meet them, and then took the two of them around the room, to the individual bodies, working through the established murder sequence.

When they were done, Rivera asked Martinez, “Criminales?”

She nodded. “Yes, I believe so. That work that they did in Agua Prieta. That looked like this. Very exactly.” She pinched the tissue to her nose.

“What was Agua Prieta?” Shaffer asked.

“Agua Prieta is a city near the border,” she said. “There was another family killed like this. The Criminales learned, or thought they learned, that the family was spotting for another gang, and so they made an example of them.”

“You have any names associated with that?”

Rivera nodded. “Six names, although we think there were only three killers. We think it was three of the six, but we don’t know which three.”

“You have photos? Mug shots?”

“Of four, but we don’t know how many are correct,” Rivera said.

“We’ll take them all, put them on TV,” Lucas said. “If anybody shows up to object, we apologize and deport them.”

“That would be excellent,” Rivera said.

Rivera spent a half hour prowling through the murder scene, and watched when the ME’s people pried the bodies off the floor and bagged them. Martinez turned away from that and went outside. Lucas followed and said, “It’s ugly,” and then, because TV Mexicans usually added it to their affirmative sentences, he added, “No?”

“Yes. I see so much. Inspector Rivera is called to many of these.”

“How long have you worked together?” Lucas asked.

“Well … four years. But we don’t work together. He works, I assist. I am good with the laptop and the iPad. He is the thinker.”

“Are you a policewoman?” Lucas asked.

“Technically. I am a sergeant, mm, how do you say it? First class, I think. But I do not arrest people. I have my iPad and a MacBook.”

“Like a researcher.” Lucas thought of his researcher, Sandy, who had little interest in street work, or becoming a certified cop.

“Yes.”

“Inspector Rivera … sounds like he really has some personal antagonism … for these Criminales.”

“Yes,” she said. She looked as though she might say something more, but then just smiled. Rivera came out the door at that moment and walked over. “I hope my hotel has a dry cleaning. I now smell like yesterday’s blood.”

Lucas walked them back to the truck and walked around to get in, but Shaffer shouted at him and called him back. When Lucas got close, Shaffer asked, “We know anything about the inspector?”

“No. I was going to ask the DEA guys,” Lucas said. “Where’d they go?”

“Conferring. The accountants are going to look at the books, and O’Brien is over at Sunnie,” Shaffer said. He glanced past Lucas at the two Mexicans. “Anyway, you know, you read that half these Mexican cops are owned by the narcos. I’m a little reluctant to pass on any real secrets.”

“I hear you,” Lucas said. “You got any secrets that you’re reluctant about?”

“Not yet,” Shaffer said. “But I will have.”

Rivera was on his cell phone, speaking in Spanish. A moment later he hung up and asked Lucas, “I don’t want to ask too much, but could we go to a Hertz car rental business in downtown St. Paul? Ana has the address and a map on the iPad.”

“Not a problem,” Lucas said. “I live in St. Paul, and our headquarters is there. Where are you staying?”

“In Minneapolis, by the university,” Rivera said. “The St. Paul Hertz has the car we require, with a, ah, autopilot?”

“Navigation system.”

“Yes. We were awake much of the night last night and have traveled all day, so we would like to get the car and then go to our hotel. Agent Shaffer has invited us to a strategy meeting tomorrow at nine o’clock.”

“Good. I’d like to get those names and photos from you, however we do that. I’ll get them out to the television stations.”

“Ana has a USB drive, with files translated into English,” Rivera said.

A moment later, she passed it over the seat-back. Lucas glanced at it and stuck it in his shirt pocket. “Mac or Windows?”

“Both,” Martinez said. “They are in the file called Agua Prieta. The other files, you can look in them, they are what we know about Los Criminales del Norte.”

“Gracias,” Lucas said.

The three Mexican killers were driving an Alamo rental car they’d gotten at El Paso International Airport. They’d driven it hard, two days straight, north out of El Paso, up I-25 through Albuquerque and Santa Fe and Denver, then I-76 to I-80 to Des Moines, and I-35 north, the only car on the highway that never exceeded the speed limit. They’d stopped only for gas and to pee and eat at McDonald’s; they had a trunk full of guns and a couple of spare license plates. If a cop had stopped them and gotten too curious, they’d have killed him and gotten off the highway and changed the plates.

When they got to St. Paul they had intended to stay with a man who came from a village in Sonora, but when they got to the man’s home, the house was dark and locked up. Not knowing the neighborhood, or the level of local police surveillance, they walked away, made some phone calls, and wound up at the Wee Blue Inn.

The next day, they stole a van and switched plates with a similar van, as an extra layer of security, and the day after that, slaughtered the Brooks family. Nothing came of the murders, and they were told to sit tight.

They had been trying to get in touch with the Sonoran, and when they did, he was in Georgia, delivering some workers to a tire-recapping company. He said he’d misunderstood their arrival date. These things happen, hey? He told them a key was hidden under a rock to the right of the front door, and they were welcome to the house. They moved in after dark on their third day in the Twin Cities, the day after they’d slaughtered the Brooks family.

Then they sat and waited for more instructions. Every few hours, they’d go out to the backyard, turn on a satellite phone, and talk to a man they called the Big Voice. The Brooks family, they told the Big Voice from Mexico, hadn’t known where the money went. They were quite certain of that. If the Brookses didn’t know, they were confronted with a mystery. How should they work that out? They weren’t exactly detectives. Big Voice got back to them and said, “Stay out of sight, but be ready. We will send help.”