John Sandford - Stolen Prey

“Yeah, some marginal engagement,” she said. “Candace Brooks was going to run for something, sooner or later. Probably the state senate, next year, if Hoffman retires. The Brookses maxed out contributions for the major offices last few elections, and they’re strong out here in the local party … but, it’s not any big political thing.”

“So it won’t make any difference if we find out that they were running a drug-money laundry, and giving cash to the local Democrats?”

She shrugged, a political sophisticate: “It’d hurt for about four minutes. Then, not. But, you know, they were our people.” She meant Democrats.

Del asked, “So what are you going to tell the media?”

She looked him up and down, raised her eyebrows, and said, “Jesus, Del, you look like you just fell out of a boxcar.”

“Professional dress,” Del said. “Around home, I wear Ralph Lauren chinos and Tiger Woods golf shirts.”

She made a rude noise and turned to look down toward the end of the street, where the media was stacked up, out of sight. “I’ll tell them the truth, just not all of it-four brutal murders, motive unknown. That we’ve got lots of leads and expect to make an arrest fairly quickly.”

“That’d scare the shit out of me, that promise, if anybody had an attention span longer than two seconds,” Lucas said.

“That’s what we’re working with,” Roux said. “Though I have to say as the state’s chief law enforcement official, I do expect you to catch them.” She poked Lucas in the chest. “You.”

Lucas walked halfway down the block and watched from a distance as Rose Marie spoke to the media. She gave them the basics, and nothing more. She stood in a neighbor’s lush green yard, a mansion in the background, with the media in the street. She used the word brutal , and refused to enlarge upon that.

That was accurate but, in the eyes of the reporters, inadequate.

One of them knew a cop who was working the roadblock, and Channel Eleven headlined his comments: rape, torture, murder. Finger joints, eyeballs, castration, throats cut with razors. The message on the wall. “We’re coming”-the producer supplied the missing apostrophe on the phonied-up blue-screened graphic behind the anchorwoman.

The Channel Eleven report set off a media firestorm, which intensified when another station “confirmed rumors from earlier today….”

The media was large in the Twin Cities. A juicy murder would go viral in seconds.

Rumors of the massacre at the Brookses’ house swept through Sunnie Software minutes after the bodies were discovered. Patrick Brooks had been scheduled to meet with marketing and development and hadn’t shown up. Neither he nor anyone else answered the home phone, and his cell phone rang and was never picked up.

The vice president for sales, named Bell, had had a bad feeling about it. A lawyer friend of Bell’s lived near the Brooks home, and Bell had asked the lawyer to call his wife, who ran over and found the front door cracked open.

Nobody answered her call, so she’d pushed the door open with a fingernail and peeked inside….

Started screaming.

As she ran back down the street, she called 911, and then her husband, who called back to Sunnie with a garbled story of blood and murder.

The cops came, and then the BCA.

Then the media, ambushing employees in the street.

“This is really fucked,” said one of the account managers, a young man with hair to the middle of his back. “Who are they going to suspect, huh? The guy with the hair…”

“Rob, stop thinking about yourself,” one of the women said. “They’re all dead.”

“But who are they gonna think did it?” Rob cried.

Several of them told him to shut up, and guiltily gave thanks for their neatly coiffed hair.

The murder story caught Ivan Turicek and Kristina Sanderson at work in the systems security area at Hennepin National Bank. Sanderson was getting ready to go home: she worked the six-to-two shift, while Turicek came in at noon and took it until eight. They were alone, with a bank of computers. Turicek had seen a fragment of a story on a television in the Skyway, and now had one of the computers set to catch the Web broadcast from Channel Eleven.

Channel Eleven was the one with the source: rape, torture, murder, eyeballs, castration … “We’re coming” with an apostrophe.

“Oh my God, what have we done?” Sanderson blurted, staring at the screen. A thin schizophrenic with blond, frizzy hair and a fine white smile, when she used it, she was pale as a sheet of printer paper, one hand to her mouth.

Turicek shook his head: “Not us.”

“Ivan, I don’t want to be bullshitted,” Sanderson said, as she looked down at the flat panel. “This was us and you know it.”

They were alone in the security area, but cameras peered down at them from the end of the work bay. They supposedly didn’t record sound, but Turicek was an immigrant from Russia, and never believed anything anybody said about limits of surveillance. In his experience, somebody was always listening.

He said, “Shh.” Then, after a moment, “We need to call Jacob. Or you should go see him. He’s probably still asleep, doesn’t know about this.”

She looked at her watch: two o’clock. Nodded. Jacob Kline normally worked an eight-to-four shift, but was out, sick, again. “Yes. I should probably go see him.”

“And it wasn’t us,” Turicek said again. He turned to her, worried. Sanderson suffered from a range of mild psychological disorders, and he considered her fragile. She didn’t use meds, and the bank put up with her occasional acting-out because she was also obsessive-compulsive when it came to the neatness of numbers. If a number was out of place, Sanderson could sense it and push it back where it belonged.

That made her an excellent programmer and an asset for a bank. But still, she was a head case, and, at times, delicate. “One thing I learned in Russia is, if you didn’t do it, you didn’t do it,” Turicek said, pressing the case. “You’re not responsible for what other people do. You can’t be. If you are, there’s no end to the chain of responsibility, so then nobody winds up being responsible.”

“I don’t need a philosophical disquisition. I was a philosophy major for three semesters,” Sanderson snapped.

“We need to be calm,” Turicek said. “We keep working, we keep our heads down. We know nothing. We know nothing. ”

“What about the ‘We’re coming’? If they get to us? Eyeballs gouged out and cut throats? No thank you. No thank you !”

Turicek dropped his voice. “Twenty million,” he said. “Twenty million dollars.”

That stopped her. Her eyes narrowed, and she said, “More like twenty-two, now. We need to call Edie: it’s time to get out.”

“How much more is in the system?” Turicek asked.

“Two million. Not enough to risk moving. Time to finish the harvest,” she said.

“I agree. You go see Jacob, I’ll call Edie.”

Edie Albitis freaked when she heard. She was standing on the Vegas strip, outside Treasure Island; it was 105 degrees and an obscenely fat woman was rolling down the sidewalk toward her, carrying a small dog and wearing what looked like a tutu. “I’m the one who’s dangling in the wind out here,” she said into her cell phone, one eye on the fat woman. She didn’t want to get run down. “The banks have about a million pictures of me.”

“But they don’t know it,” Turicek said in his most comforting tone. “In every one, you look like the Sultaness of Istanbul.”

Albitis was wearing a hijab , a traditional Arabic woman’s robe, and, though even most conservative Arab states allowed an uncovered face, she also wore a niqab , or veil. These were somewhat culturally uncomfortable for a woman who’d danced both topless and bottomless, sometimes simultaneously, in both Moscow and New York; whose parents were Jews now living in Tel Aviv, which was where she picked up her Arabic; and who was blond, to boot. But, if you were doing major money laundering through America’s finest banks, it was best to show as little skin as possible when you were setting up the accounts.