Stolen Prey

A side benefit to the construction of the intel network was that he had time to look for the robbers who’d taken his five hundred dollars and broken his wrist. He quickly found out that he’d been right about one thing: they’d done it before.

They’d done it four times on the south side of the Twin Cities and its suburbs, and a half dozen more times trailing down I-35 to the south, which made Lucas think they lived down that way.

As he pulled together his intelligence nodes south of town, he asked about them-thin shaky guy, big rough woman, up to their eyebrows in meth.

He hadn’t yet found them when, in August, the peace and quiet ended.

The BCA Superintendent, who didn’t particularly like Lucas, but found him to be a valuable foil when it came to dealing with political issues, called him at home as Lucas was working his way through the Times and a bowl of steel-cut oatmeal, which his wife and daughter said was good for something-it was organic and saved the whales, or lowered his cholesterol, one of those things. He yearned for a simple glazed doughnut, but not if it doomed Mother Earth.

His cell phone began ringing, and simultaneously rattling like a snake, on the table next to his hand.

“Really big trouble,” the superintendent said. “There’s gonna be a lot of media. Shaffer and his crew are on the way. You’d better get out there, too, so you’re up to speed. I’m trying to find Rose Marie to tell her about it.”

Murder, he said. An entire family slaughtered.

Lucas backed the Porsche out of his garage and found a gray sky and a cool day going cold; rain coming, disturbing the summer, hinting at what all Minnesotans knew in their bones: winter always comes.

The death house sat down a leafy blacktopped lane, a stone, brick, and white-board lakeside palace where the Great Gatsby might have lived, made for summer soirees with mimosas and mint juleps. The deep-green summer trees grew in close and dense, so thick that even nearby noises seemed muffled and distant, and a perfect lawn dropped down a gentle slope to Lake Minnetonka. A floating dock stuck into the lake like a finger; a fast fiberglass cruiser was tied to one side of the dock, an oversized pontoon boat to the other, ready to party.

The scene was dead quiet, except for the moaning wind in the trees. The incoming clouds were so gray and low, the house so touched with a cool decorator chic, a tightness, a foreboding, that a Hollywood camera corkscrewing down the lane to the front door would have automatically hinted at horrors to be found behind the well-scrubbed window glass. A crazy housewife with poison, a husband with a meat cleaver in his hand, a couple of robotic kids with a long-barreled revolver and blank gray eyes…

None of which would have done justice to the real horror behind the door.

Lucas got to the house at a little after eleven o’clock in the morning, and walked back out on the front porch five minutes later, looking for a breath of fresh air and maybe a place to spit, to get the taste of death out of his mouth.

He was a tall, hard, very rich man with broad shoulders and a hawkish nose, wearing a two-hundred-dollar white shirt and a dark blue Purple Label suit with a red Hermes necktie, the necktie twisted and pulled loose behind the knot. His face was tanned, and the thin white line of a scar dropped across one eyebrow onto his cheek; another white scar showed in the pit of his neck, where a young girl, barely into her teens, had shot him with a street pistol that he hadn’t seen coming.

He rubbed his face with the fingers of his left hand, which protruded from a slightly dirty-looking cast. Del Capslock followed him out onto the porch. Del looked back over his shoulder and said, “I don’t think I’ve ever been to a crime scene this quiet.”

“Whatta you gonna say?” Lucas asked. He sniffed at the cast. Nasty. He needed to wash it again.

“You know what freaked me out?” Del asked. “It wasn’t the kids. It was the dogs. The dogs couldn’t tell us anything. They weren’t witnesses. They weren’t attack dogs. Two miniature poodles and a golden retriever? They killed them anyway. Hunted them down. They were killing everything, because they liked it.”

“I don’t know. There’s a lot going on in there,” Lucas said. “Maybe they killed the dogs first, to extort information. Went around and shot them just to prove that they’d do it. Then the boy, then the wife and daughter, then the guy. They wanted something from the guy.”

“We don’t know they did it that way,” Del said. Del was too thin-grizzled, some would say-unshaven, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt and Nike cross-trainers. The T-shirt said Menard’s, which was a local building supply chain. His comment reflected an ingrained skepticism about any unsupported assertion: he wanted facts.

“I feel like they did,” Lucas said. He was more comfortable with assumption and speculation than Del. He looked up and down the street, past the cluster of official cars and vans. He could see pieces of two houses, one in each direction. There were more along the way, but out of sight. “The thing is, they shot the dogs, that’s three shots. They shot the boy three or four times. That’s a lot of gunshots. Even in a neighborhood like this, with the doors closed and the air conditioners going, and boats … that’s a lot of shots. Makes me think they had silencers, makes me think they were pros, here for a reason. Then the guy, they go to work with a knife. They started out terrorizing him, ended up torturing him.”

“Drugs?”

“Gotta be. Gotta be, here in the Twin Cities. Too calculated for anything else. Shaffer says the guy ran a software place that peddles Spanish-language software down in Mexico. It looks custom-made as a money laundry,” Lucas said. He looked back into the house, though he couldn’t see anything from the porch.

Del said, “Here’s something.”

Lucas turned back to see a lone patrolman jogging back down the street. He was overweight, and his stomach jiggled as he ran. The patrolman cut across the lawn.

“The neighbors,” he said to Lucas. He was red-faced and seemed to run out of words, tried to catch his breath.

“Yeah?”

“The neighbors, the Merriams, they’re three houses down.” The cop pointed down the street. “The husband, Dave, saw a van parked in the driveway yesterday afternoon. He saw it three times, coming home, going out, and coming back from town. There for a couple hours, at least. He says it was a blue van, a Chevy, and he says the first three letters of the plate were S-K-Y. He thinks it stuck with him because of sky-blue. Sky on the plate and blue on the van.”

Lucas nodded. “Okay, that’s good stuff.” He turned and yelled back into the house, “Shaffer? Shaffer?” He said to the cop, “Go tell that to Shaffer. We need to run that right now.”

The cop went inside and Del asked, “What are we going to do?”

Lucas shrugged: “Call everybody. Look for blue vans. Push the DNA on the wife and daughter … I wouldn’t bet on semen. If they were professionals, they were probably wearing rubbers. We might pick up some blood or something, maybe one of them scratched or bit somebody.”

Del nodded. “You look around the house, around the neighborhood, and it’s screaming rich. Could have been a couple of crazy dopers thinking they kept a lot of money in the house.”

Lucas said, “Nah.”

Del scratched an ear and then said, “All right.”

“They were looking for something,” Lucas said. “It looks like drugs. It looks like that stuff in Mexico. So harsh. So cruel.”

“Maybe they’ll pop right up in the DNA bank,” Del said.

“Fat chance.”

“Yeah.” Del looked up in the sky. “It’s gonna rain.”

“We need it,” Lucas said. “Been hot for a long time. First cool day in a while.”

“Fall’s coming,” Del said.

They went back inside, where an agent named Bob Shaffer was talking to the patrolman. When he saw Lucas, he said, “Maybe a break.”