John Sandford - Stolen Prey

Brooks had three cashmere jackets in his closet, all newer-looking, probably fifteen hundred dollars each. His wife shopped at Nordstrom and Neiman Marcus, had a closet full of clothes from Barneys in New York. They didn’t have credit cards at either place.

Shaffer suspected that they were spending cash where a credit card wasn’t mandatory; cash that didn’t show up anywhere else.

After the first half-day of investigation, that was it. It was way too early to say that the investigation was driving into a ditch, Lucas thought, but it might be true that the passenger-side tires had wandered onto the shoulder.

Lucas went to lunch at two o’clock, ate a couple of bagel sandwiches, alone, thinking about his murder stories, then went back to his office and found a phone message from the Los Angeles office of the Drug Enforcement Administration. He called back and was hooked up with an agent named Tomas O’Brien.

“I was told you’re the guy I should talk to,” O’Brien said. “I’ve got a Delta flight out late this afternoon, I’m bringing a couple guys with me. We’d like to look at the books on this Sunnie Software.”

“I can fix that,” Lucas said. “You know something about Sunnie?”

“The name has come up a few times, but there’s been nothing specific. Nothing criminal. We took a look, once, even bought some of their software, like Hable Gringo en Treinta Dias. Sorta sucks and it ain’t cheap.”

“We’ve been wondering if it’s a laundry,” Lucas said.

“That’s why our guy there in the Cities gave me a ring, after your call,” O’Brien said. “Sunnie buys product from a company here in LA called Los Escritores, which got started with a lot of twenty-dollar bills … or so we’ve been told. The software isn’t very good, but it sells like crazy. We’d like to look at what Sunnie’s been doing with them. Look back down the money chain.”

“You know the details on the murders?”

“Your people let our guy walk through,” O’Brien said. “From what he says, it looks like the work of Los Criminales del Norte, one of the cross-border gangs. They do a lot of that revenge-rape stuff. Killing families, sexual mutilation. Chopping off fingers, one joint at a time. They tend to go down shooting.”

“You definitely think it looks Mexican?”

“Oh, yeah, absolutely. Don’t see it up here, much, but this would be routine in Mexico,” O’Brien said. “We’d love to get one of their killers alive, if we could. Turn him over to the Federales for questioning.”

“We plan to do that up here,” Lucas said. “The questioning.”

“You’d get more answers from the Federales,” O’Brien said, persisting with the thought. “The LCN supposedly caught a Federale undercover cop and skinned him alive. Sent his skin to his boss, by FedEx, with a movie of the guy getting skinned. If we extradite one of these guys, to the right Federales, we will definitely get some answers.”

“I don’t think we’d want to do that,” Lucas said.

“Whatever, it’s your call,” O’Brien said. “Anyway, we’re gonna get there a little late. Maybe talk tomorrow?”

“I’ll fix things up with the lead investigator,” Lucas said. “See you then.”

Thinking about the ATM robbers, Lucas called a list of county agents, missed a couple who were out of their offices, finally connected with one, and was told that there might be a list of some commercial riding stables, but a lot of stables were run off the books, as side ventures, and coming up with a complete list would be tough.

An opaque piece of the underground economy, Lucas thought, when he hung up. He ran into it all the time now; small businessmen had told him that government taxation and regulation had become so rapacious that cheating was often the only way they could survive.

Another step down to a third-world economy.

Del came back at three o’clock from a surveillance job in Apple Valley, pulled a chair around, and asked, “Why don’t you turn on a light?”

“Forgot,” Lucas said. “Anything happening with Anderson?”

“Not on my shift. Maybe he knows we’re watching.”

Terrill Anderson was suspected of stealing a three-ton Paul Manship bronze art-deco sculpture, Naiads of the North , from the front driveway circle of a home in Sunfish Lake, a town just south of St. Paul. The sculpture depicted three larger-than-life-sized nymphs dancing, flowers in their hair, hands joined overhead, standing in a kind of swirl, or whirlpool, of walleyes.

The owner of the sculpture, the fifth-generation heir of a railroad family, was massively rich, and had a daughter who chaired the state arts council. He wanted his sculpture back-the estimated worth, as a sculpture, was four million dollars. Looked at another way, three tons of bronze, which was mostly copper, was worth roughly eighteen thousand dollars if it had been in ingot form, or fifteen thousand or so on the scrap metal market.

The sculpture had been fitted to a granite base with six large steel bolts. Anderson had unbolted the statues and lifted the whole thing onto a flatbed trailer with a trailer-mounted crane, one night while the owner was inspecting a new home in Rio. The operation had been caught on a murky piece of low-res surveillance video from a house across the street-the heir’s own camera lenses had been covered with pink goop before the removal began.

Phone calls were made, and the hunt for the statues, or, more realistically now, the bronze scrap metal, which had been somewhat desultory, had sharpened. Somewhere, out there, maybe, Anderson was hiding a flatbed trailer and a lot of heavy metal. Del was watching him, waiting for him to go fetch it.

Lucas yawned, scratched the back of his head. “Hope he didn’t drop it in a lake.”

“He’s probably already shipped it to China,” Del said. “It’s possible that he had a boxcar waiting, loaded it right off the flatbed, and shipped it out. I’ve been talking to the railroad, but those guys have got no idea where most of their cars are, or what’s in them. Which I guess is a good thing.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. If a terrorist ever wants to blow up New York, he can’t just build a time bomb and put it in a railway car ’cause nobody would have any idea of exactly when it’d get to New York, or how it’d get there,” Del said. “More likely to blow up a cornfield than a city.”

“Or a riding stable,” Lucas said.

“What?”

Lucas told him about the Northfield robbery, and Del said, “Well, you can’t say it’s a horseshit clue.”

“I thought of that joke about fifteen seconds after the guy called me,” Lucas said. “I was embarrassed just thinking of it, and I never said it out loud.”

“You’re not going to ask me to look into it, are you? I mean, I got enough boring horseshit-”

“No, I’m just making phone calls to these county agent guys. See what turns up.”

“Might be better than watching Anderson,” Del said. “The guy is a slug. Never does anything, goes anywhere. I was sitting out there so long my ass got sore. But then, I read another hundred pages in the Deon Meyer, had four ideas for new iPhone apps, realized I could have had a career in Hollywood as a character actor, and tried to remember all the names of the women I could have slept with but didn’t. How about you?”

“I slept with all the women I could have slept with,” Lucas said. “Not being a complete fool. You think about the Brooks family?”

“I tried not to.”

Lucas filled him in on the investigation, and finished with “… so it’s gonna be slow and methodical. Lots of paperwork.”

“But a big deal-unlike Anderson and his statue.”

“Mmm. I called some of the people on my list, put out some lines in the Latino community,” Lucas said. “Haven’t gotten anything back yet. We need to be careful not to step on Shaffer’s toes. We’ll all be talking to the DEA tomorrow, we can figure out who’s doing what.”