John Sandford - Stolen Prey

“Yeah.” Richie was the sheriff.

“We’re going to take a look at the farm,” Virgil said. “Talk to some people around there. There might be something else going on.”

“Virgil, goddamnit, all I want to do is bust these two. I don’t need a fuckin’ Shakespeare festival.”

“Yeah, well, that’s because you’ve got something to occupy your time up there. I’m just trying to drum up a little business, and Richie’s got to run for reelection this fall.”

“Just get on with it, okay?”

“Maybe,” Flowers said. “I’ll call you. Sometime.”

Lucas heard about Turicek five minutes later, when, still brooding over Flowers’s insubordination, he got a call from the duty officer at the BCA. “We got a woman who’s trying to reach you. She says her name is Kristina Sanderson and it’s an emergency. Sounds like she’s freaking out.”

Lucas thought, Ah , with some satisfaction. She was cracking. He had the call switched through and then Sanderson was screaming at him, “They took Ivan, they, I think he’s going to die, I think, he’s oh, God, he looks like, oh God, he looks like a … like a … a stewed tomato.”

Turicek had been taken to Regions Hospital, the major St. Paul public hospital. The cops who’d followed the ambulance didn’t find a wallet, but did find his cell phone. His last call had been to a blocked number out of state, and when they called it, they got a ring but no answer.

The next number had been Sanderson’s.

She’d driven herself across town to Regions, found that Turicek was in surgery, but had been walked into the OR, and identified him behind the tangle of breathing equipment. When she asked the surgeon how bad he was, the surgeon had said, “You’ll have to leave now.”

She followed the circulating nurse out of the room, and the St. Paul cops asked her if she knew what had happened, and she’d started blubbering. All she’d seen of Turicek was his head, which looked like an oversized raw turnip and was shaped all wrong, and a large patch on the abdominal covering, which showed a lot of blood and what she assumed was guts.

She told the cops, “The Mexicans, the Mexicans,” and they said, “The Mexicans?” and she’d nodded and said, “There was a police officer, and agent, from the state…”

One of the cops said, “Davenport?” and she nodded again, and the cop said, “Let’s give them a ring.”

About that time, the surgeon walked out of the emergency OR, pulling off his bloody gloves, and one of the cops, looking past her, said, “Uh-oh.”

Before heading down to Regions, Lucas called Shaffer to fill him in. He’d parked and was walking toward the emergency room entrance when he saw Shaffer pulling into the parking area, and he slowed and waited until the other agent caught up.

“What the fuck happened?” Shaffer demanded. “Shrake and Jenkins take the day off? They were supposed to be all over him.”

“Take it easy,” Lucas snapped. “The guy knew we were there, and he bolted. He knew where he was going. We could have had a whole team on him and he would have lost them.”

“Wouldn’t have lost my team,” Shaffer said. “For God’s sakes, this was our big chance. We knew the Mexicans were looking for him.”

“Having a little trouble finding the Mexicans, Bob? Don’t lay it on us, that was your job.”

They snarled at each other some more on the way to the ER; too much media, too much attention, too many people watching. Tempers were going to flare….

“What about Turicek?” Shaffer asked.

“Last I heard, he was still breathing,” Lucas said.

They pushed through the door and saw a woman in a surgeon’s gown with blood at her waist, talking to Sanderson, one hand on Sanderson’s shoulder, and Sanderson was sobbing, and Lucas said, “Maybe that changed.”

Two St. Paul homicide cops told them the story, and they went outside, where the driver of the Ford pickup had been stashed, waiting, in his truck. His name was Robert Johnson, and he was with his girlfriend, whose name was Betty Johnson, no relation, yet, and Robert Johnson said, “I couldn’t help it.”

One of the St. Paul detectives said, “We understand that, Mr. Johnson. We believe it was a kidnapping. If you could just tell the agents what you saw.”

The two Johnsons took turns: they’d just taken a left onto the freeway ramp at Snelling Avenue, not going fast at all-they agreed on that-and pulled up behind a white car that was accelerating even more slowly than they were. They were a truck length or two behind the white car when the trunk popped open and a man came flying out. He landed on the pavement directly in front of them, and Robert, who was at the wheel, swerved, but said that he didn’t know if he hit the brakes before or after they hit the man.

“It sounded like we’d hit a watermelon, or a basketball, there was this awful whump sound,” Betty said. “I knew we hit his head….”

The white car sped away while the two Johnsons jumped out of their truck and found Turicek half under it, about halfway down the length of the truck. He had a tire track on his pants, and the Johnsons said they’d probably run over his body, just at the hips.

They’d stopped traffic and called 911 on Robert’s cell phone. The ambulance had been there in five minutes, right behind a cop car. The ambulance attendants had pulled Turicek out from under the truck, and it seemed like he was dead, except that he kept blowing blood bubbles. They threw him on a gurney and rushed him back to the hospital. It was then, the responding St. Paul uniform said, that they saw that his arms were taped behind him.

Lucas turned to Shaffer and asked, “How’d they know where to find him? How did they know that?”

Shaffer shook his head: “Has to be a leak inside the bank. I mean, my team didn’t even know he’d run, and if it was only you and Jenkins and Shrake and…”

They turned and looked at Sanderson. She said, “Not me. I didn’t tell anybody.” Then she remembered the phone call, put her fingers to her lips, and said, “Oh … wait.”

Shaffer: “What?”

“Somebody called me and asked where he was. I told them he went jogging,” she said.

Lucas said to Shaffer, “That was Jenkins.”

“Who else did you mention it to?” Shaffer asked her.

“Nobody. Nobody else,” she said. “Not a single person called me, except that one person, after he went jogging. Who cares if somebody goes jogging?”

Lucas: “Did he ever go jogging before?”

“No. No. He showed up with some bags from Macy’s, went into the men’s room, changed, and said he was going jogging. He’d never jogged before.”

Shaffer looked at Lucas and conceded, “Okay. He knew.”

Lucas looked at Sanderson for another long minute, then said, “Miz Sanderson, I need to talk privately with Agent Shaffer for a few seconds, then I need to speak privately with you.”

She said, nervously, “Okay.”

Lucas and Shaffer walked down the sidewalk and Lucas said, “Why don’t you take off? You don’t want to witness this.”

“What’re you going to do?”

“Push her around,” Lucas said.

Shaffer said, “I’ll see you at the meeting tomorrow.”

Lucas took Sanderson to an empty hospital room, pointed her at a chair, then stood over her, and too close.

“You’re going to prison for life.”

“No…”

“Yes, I think so. I’m almost sure of it. The fact is, you’ve been withholding information from us, and that information could have led to the arrest of these Mexican killers. That makes you complicit in a whole series of first-degree murders. They have a source of information inside your bank, and you could probably tell us who it is. Instead, you keep passing along this bullshit about how you know nothing, it was all Turicek. Well, I don’t believe it, and neither will a jury. I am going to arrest you. Just a matter of time, Kristina. It’s a matter of time.”