John Sandford - Stolen Prey

Weather disagreed; Letty did not.

Letty, in her previous life, had been severely neglected. She’d grown up in an isolated house, far out in the countryside in northwestern Minnesota. She had, at times, literally been required to hunt for her dinner. She also had been a fur trapper, a preteen wandering in rubber boots and a Goodwill parka around the muskrat swamps of northwest Minnesota, trying to make a buck. Then her mother was murdered, and she met Lucas, who eventually adopted her; in the course of that case, Letty had shot a cop. On two different occasions-the same crooked cop. She had no regrets or second thoughts whatsoever.

On this afternoon, they got Lucas’s Colt.45 Gold Cup and Beretta 92F, and drove up to the St. Paul police pistol range in Maplewood, where a half dozen guys were going through annual testing. Lucas had a standing arrangement with the department to use the range, and had gotten a quiet okay to bring Letty along.

On the way up, they talked about her school, and about the Wayzata case, and Lucas gave her the details that he had.

“Nothing there for me,” she said, thinking about the possibilities for her television job. “The cop reporters got all that stuff.”

“I talked to Jen, and she said you were working on some Apple computer thing.”

“Yeah, boring, boring,” she said. “I’m doing a review of favorite laptops of the rich and fashionable kids, for the next school year.” She pitched up her voice, “Oh, my God, she’s got only four gigs of RAM.”

“Girls don’t talk like that,” Lucas ventured.

“They do now. Everybody’s got a Mac, an iPhone, and maybe an iPad, and God help you if you show up with a Dell,” Letty said. “Then you’re really socially f-worded.”

“Really.”

At the range, they put on ear and eye protection, got the okay from the range officer, and began working with the.45, and then the Beretta. The Beretta offered more firepower, in terms of sheer number of rounds, but Lucas had sent the.45 to a Kansas gunsmith to be tuned, and it was more accurate. Because of the relatively mild recoil, and smaller grip, Letty had no problem handling it.

“If you’re shooting for real, shoot at the smallest spot you can see clearly,” Lucas said, as he was looking at one of her targets. The bullet holes were scattered in a loose group around the center of the target. “A button is good. The smaller the aiming point, the tighter your group will be, but you still want a substantial target behind the aim point. Like the chest triangle: nipples and navel. An eye is small, and you naturally look at an eye, but the overall target, the head, is small, and it’s always moving. The nipple-navel triangle doesn’t move so much. Whatever you do, you don’t want to just start whaling away, because if you do, you’ll have a whaled-away group.”

“I knew that,” she said. “When I’d kill a rat, I’d always aim at that little white spot in their eye. ’Course, I was using a twenty-two, from two inches. Still like that gun.”

“Lot to like about it,” Lucas agreed. “Saved your life.”

He got into his gun bag and brought out a round red sticker about the size of a dime and stuck it to the center of the target. “Shoot at that. Focus on it. Even try to focus on the middle of the spot, if you can.”

She did, and her group tightened up dramatically. “Interesting,” she said.

“Let’s do it again,” Lucas said. “Then we’ll run through the slap, rack, and fire.”

“Always hurts my hand.”

“You need the training,” he said. “And what’s a little pain?”

Lucas again arrived late for the morning briefing, and found a tense tableau: Shaffer was standing behind his chair, his arms braced on the top bar, his body rigid. Rivera sat across the table from him, half-turned away, but his face was red and he was shaking a chubby finger at Shaffer’s face.

The three DEA guys sat at the far end of the table, looking back and forth between the two as though they were at a tennis match. Four additional BCA agents, part of Shaffer’s team, were scattered around the room, two of them standing with their arms crossed defensively, looking down at Rivera.

Lucas came in behind Rivera, in time to hear him say, “… so I don’t want to hear about Mexicans this and Mexicans that. These people are criminals and they are rats and the United States of America created them with this drug market, and with these guns that you ship across the border to the narcos. Thousands of guns, black rifles that they change one part, and they have machine guns. Huh?” He patted his chest and said, “It’s my people who are dying in hundreds and thousands so your rich people can put this cocaine up their noses and smoke their Colombians, so don’t tell me about Mexicans this and Mexicans that.”

He was shaking with anger. Behind him, Martinez was standing with her back to the wall, holding a briefcase. She glanced at Lucas and tipped her head, as if to apologize.

Shaffer, as angry as Rivera, said, “I wasn’t trying to lecture you. I was trying to point out the obvious. You’ve apparently shipped a batch of insane killers up here from Mexico and they’re butchering children and women.”

“ I didn’t ship them. Mexico didn’t ship them. They came here because this is where the money is. Because of your market. Because you do the money laundry, huh? Why do you think we are here? This Sunnie Software was the Criminales’ bank, huh? It’s a bank . So you provide the market, you provide the bank, you provide the distribution, but it’s the Mexicanos who are at fault for all this? Bullshit.”

Shaffer stuttered, “I–I-I just don’t want to have this debate. We’re all on the same side here. We’re just trying to clear up this murder. At least I am.”

Lucas cleared his throat and said, “Sorry I’m late. Any returns from the TV photos last night?”

Shaffer nodded, grateful for the interruption. He said, “Not yet. Nothing so far.”

Lucas, looking over at the DEA agents, asked, “What about Sunnie’s accountants? What about the bank? Anything there?”

“We’re looking at eight years’ worth of paper, trying to spot where the leak is,” said O’Brien. “Haven’t found it so far. Still interviewing the employees. Whatever Brooks was doing, it was complicated. But that … maybe that’s what we should have expected. It wouldn’t be right out there in the open.”

Another one of the DEA agents, whose name Lucas didn’t remember, said, “Our thinking now is, he was running a computer program that diverts incoming payments, depending on where they’re coming from, to some other place. An automatic diversion. In other words, he’s not actually collecting the money, he’s simply set up a mechanism for collecting it. When it comes through, it carries a … signal of some sort … that simply moves the money elsewhere. If that’s the way it works, and that’s what we’re starting to think, then we won’t find it with an audit. We need a software guy to look at their programming.”

Shaffer asked, “You got one of those?”

“We could probably find one,” O’Brien said.

Lucas said to Shaffer, “We could bring in ICE. We really need to get on top of this. We don’t need to wait a week for somebody to show up.”

Shaffer: “She’s pretty expensive.”

“But she’d find it,” Lucas said.

O’Brien asked, “Who’s this ICE?”

Lucas: “Ingrid Caroline Eccols. She was one of the people who worked with me when I was running a software company, back in the nineties. Programmer, hacker, gamer, really smart. If she’s not doing much, we could probably get her for two hundred.”

“If you guys say she’s good, I think the federal government could come up with a couple hundred bucks,” O’Brien said.