Stolen Prey

talk to you.” Weather held out his phone.

“Uhh…”

“Man, you sound like you’re dead,” ICE said.

“Just asleep. What happened?”

“You better come over here and interview a couple guys,” ICE said.

“You figure it out?” Lucas asked.

“I’m still working through the software,” ICE said. “This, I got with chitchat. Come over here and talk with these guys.”

“Who?”

“The pizza guy and one of the computer security guys. I’m serious, you need to talk to them. They’re waiting for you.”

“Ah, Jesus.”

“C’mon. Skip the mascara, just rinse off your face and run on over here,” ICE said.

He took the time to stand in the shower for three minutes, put on jeans and a T-shirt and a jacket to cover the Beretta, headed downstairs, unshaven. Weather got some coffee going, and Lucas made himself an egg sandwich, two eggs fried hard inside two slices of white Wonder bread. He borrowed one of Weather’s travel cups for the coffee, and was out of the house five minutes later.

The day was cool, though the cold front that had come with the initial killings had blown through, and it looked like the day would be sunny and reasonably warm. He took Mississippi River Boulevard north to the point where it leaked onto Cretin Avenue, by the St. Thomas University stadium, took Cretin to I-94, drove across the river and into downtown Minneapolis.

ICE was sitting on a granite post outside the bank, smoking a cigarette. When she saw him coming, she flagged him down, walked around to the passenger side, and got in the Porsche. “This is pure detective work on my part,” she said. “What happened was, it’s six o’clock and I’m stoned on speed and caffeine and I’m starving to death, so we order out for pizzas at the bank guys’ regular place, and the pizza guy comes by.”

“The bank guys work on Sunday morning?”

“This Sunday they do. Anyway…”

The pizza guy brought in a load of pies, she said as Lucas parked the Porsche, and she and the pizza guy and one of the computer guys started chatting, and the computer guy said that he hardly saw the pizza guys anymore after this guy named Jacob quit. And they said, yeah, he was more of a pizza eater than anyone else, came from all those years as a midnight writer … meaning a hacker.

“So I say, ‘Jacob who?’ This overnight computer guy, Jon, says, ‘Jacob Kline,’ and I say, ‘Holy shit, there’s your leak, right there. There’s your money.’ That’s when we decided I better get you out of bed.”

In the secure area, the pizza guy, who wore a little white paper hat like the ones that U.S. Marines called cunt hats, said, “Dude,” and a computer guy turned from his terminal and asked, “You Lucas?”

“So tell me,” Lucas said, taking a chair.

The pizza guy said, “Jacob was like this total stoner, slacker, bullshit artist, I don’t know how he kept the job.”

“Good programmer,” ICE said. “Smart.”

“But messed up,” said the computer guy named Jon. “He was depressed. I mean, like mentally ill, not like bummed out.”

“Okay,” Lucas said.

“And he wouldn’t take his meds, even when he was going down. He’d just sit there and get worse,” Jon said. “Said he couldn’t program when he was taking his meds, said it screwed up his head.”

“His head was totally screwed up,” said the pizza guy.

“So why does that make you think…?” Lucas let the question hang.

“He used to talk about making a killing with some computer app and then getting out, so he wouldn’t have to work,” Jon said. “He said work was what was killing him. It was so boring. So stupid. He couldn’t stand it. He said he went out to Silicon Valley one time, thinking it might be better, but it was worse, they treated people like robots. Anyway, he got fired for non-performance. He knew it was coming … and this stuff that ICE has been looking at, it feels like his work. It works and all, but it’s got these little flourishes….”

ICE nodded. “I know him from gamer work. He’s both fucked up and good. I don’t know his style well enough to pick it out, but I believe Jon when he says he can.”

“Like a writing style,” Lucas said. “Like a book-writing style.”

“Exactly,” said ICE. “The other thing that we didn’t think about long enough … whoever stole this money knew a lot about banking and how to set up accounts. So it had to be inside, right? But if it was inside, why did they set up this back door to get in? It’d be easier and less visible if they moved the money from in here. You wouldn’t have this doily to untangle.”

“But that would pin it down to somebody here,” Lucas said. “If you were in here, and you built a back door, it’d look like it was done by an outsider. The back door could function as a decoy.”

“True, I didn’t think of that,” ICE said. She looked at Jon. “I guess you’re fucked.”

“Not recently,” he said, and waggled his eyebrows at her.

“In your dreams,” she said.

“Okay, kids, calm down,” Lucas said. “You’re saying the main reason that Jacob did it is, he’s messed up.”

“Not exactly,” Jon said. “Because this almost has to be an inside job, which has everybody worried. But the people working here now are the straightest, most-insured, most 401k’d, middle-class…” He paused, then pointed at ICE. “She’s the biggest criminal who’s ever been in here. Except for Jacob. What I’m saying is, Jacob would do this. Nobody else would.”

“I agree except for one thing,” the pizza guy said. “He’s the laziest motherfucker in the world. He’s too lazy to steal. He’s too lazy to learn how to drive a car-he used to order pizzas at the end of his shift because he knew the store was down near where he lives, and he’d bum a ride home. That’s what I don’t see: he doesn’t give a shit, not enough to steal a billion dollars or whatever it is.”

“Also true,” ICE said. “And it’s not because he’s depressed. He’s just fuckin’ lazy.”

Jon and ICE said that whoever had built the back door had, in fact, created a little group of booby traps and alarms, but they were taking them out and should be done by the middle of the day. “I never did finish over at Sunnie, so after we’re done here, I’m gonna go home and get a few hours of sleep, then get some sliders and go back to Sunnie. When I get done with that, I’m going to Paris.”

“Where do I find this Jacob guy?” Lucas asked.

“I know the answer to that,” Jon said.

When Lucas left the bank, it was still before eight o’clock, and there was no reason to expect that Del would be awake. But there was no reason to expect that Lucas would be awake, either, and there was no reason that he should have to suffer alone, so he called Del, got his wife, and told her that he was on his way and to pull Del out of bed.

Del was not happy when Lucas arrived: “There’s a nuclear weapon somewhere in the Twin Cities and we only have a half hour to find it,” he said. He was sitting on his bed, pulling on his socks.

“No, there’s a guy named Jacob in an apartment off Lyndale who may have stolen twenty-two million dollars, and we have to shake it out of him,” Lucas said.

Del: “Jesus, couldn’t you have gotten a flunky to go with you?”

“Uh, Del…”

“I know, I am a flunky.” He got a pistol from under the bed, already in a holster, and stuck it in his belt. “I’m good.”

Del lived in St. Paul. Lucas filled him in as they drove back to Minneapolis, then turned south.

“What you’re telling me,” Del said, “is that we got nothing but what some pizza guy suspects.”

“No. We’ve got solid judgments from two computer people that the work looks like Kline’s, and that he has