little gig. I heard you were a cop. Okay, I want to get really clear with you. A: I didn’t do it. Didn’t build a back door, didn’t take any money out. B: I don’t know who did it, but I find it hard to believe that it was one of my former associates, may their treacherous little souls burn in hell, anyway. C: I really need to light up a fatty, so if you guys are done…”
“I understand you’ve been a little depressed, from time to time,” Lucas said.
“No, I’ve been a lot depressed,” Kline snapped. “It’s not what you think it is. It’s not being bummed out. It’s…”
“I know what it is,” Lucas said.
“Ah.” Something softened in Kline’s face. “Well then, you know like Snoop says, I need my medicine.”
They worked him for a while, recycling the same questions, looking for holes, pushing him on other suspects. “So where’re you working now?” Lucas eventually asked.
Kline said, “Same ol’ same ol’. Hennepin National Bank, doing the same old shit.”
“They took you after you were fired by Polaris?” Lucas asked, surprised.
“I wasn’t fired. I resigned, with a good recommendation,” Kline said.
“And if they hadn’t let you do that, you would have shit in their revolving door,” Del said.
Kline smiled. “So you heard that, huh? I thought it was colorful.”
Twenty minutes later, they were back out on the street, walking past the mystery bookstore. Del said, “The guy is unhinged. But I think he might know something about the money.”
“Yeah. He was a little too unconfused about the questions,” Lucas said. “I’m gonna get Jenkins and Shrake over here. Keep an eye on him for a few hours. Let’s just sit for a while, see if he moves.”
They found a no-parking zone where they could watch both of the building’s exits. They were still watching, an hour and a half later, when Jenkins and Shrake pulled up behind them. Lucas got out of the Porsche and went and sat in Jenkins’s backseat.
“We got a photo, but we can’t find a car,” Shrake said. “He must either borrow one, or get around on buses. So what are we looking for, other than time and a half?”
Lucas told them, and gave them a thorough description to go with the photo: “Figure out where he goes, if anywhere. We need to know who he talks to, and where. You’ve got the camera?”
“Yeah.” Jenkins held up a compact camera with a super-telephoto.
“If he meets somebody, when they split, make sure you get the other guy’s license tag or take him home, or something. If Kline is on foot, maybe one of you can follow him on foot.”
“We can do that,” Jenkins said. “By the way, Shaffer says he’s calling his whole crew in. They’ll be meeting in a bit. You’re invited.”
When Lucas and Del got to the BCA, the meeting was over. Lucas stopped at Shaffer’s office, intending to fill him in on the morning’s developments, and was told by another cop that Shaffer had gone to Sunnie Software, where the DEA accountants were still at work, and planned to go to Polaris after that.
Lucas walked back to his office and found Martinez sitting outside the door. Shaffer had told her that Lucas was on his way in, and she’d decided to wait. “I hoped to speak with you.”
“Sure, but I’ve got to make a phone call. Come on in.”
She took a visitor’s chair, and he settled behind his desk, got Shaffer’s phone number, and when Shaffer came on, filled him in. At the end, he said, “It could be a wild-goose chase, but Shrake and Jenkins weren’t doing much anyway, they’re not real churchy, so they’ll tag him around for a while.”
“That’s fine,” Shaffer said. “And you think Kline knows something that we don’t?”
“Yeah, I do. I don’t know what, or how much,” Lucas said. “It’s also possible that he suspects a particular person, and maybe’s gonna ask for a piece of the action. I was told that he’s too lazy to steal, so … take it for what it’s worth.”
When he got off, Martinez said, “My superior wishes that I stay here until we can send David’s body back to Mexico, and to come to the meetings in his place so I can relay the news back home. If that is okay. I am a certified police officer.”
“I don’t think anybody will have a problem with that,” Lucas said.
“You have been making progress, but I understand from this morning’s meeting that Agent Shaffer has not,” she said.
She already knew about the back door at Polaris, but not about Kline. He filled in what she hadn’t overheard in the phone conversation, then said, “It could be a complete waste of time. This guy is a slacker…. You know slacker…?”
“Yes, I know this,” she said.
“He’s a slacker and a depressive and he apparently smokes a lot of dope and doesn’t care who knows about it. He says this theft is way too ambitious for him, and I halfway believe him. But he’s all we’ve got, at the moment.”
“Okay,” she said, and stood up. “So now I go see your medical inspector, and they will tell me about the autopsy. You will call me if something happens?”
“Absolutely,” Lucas said.
He called ICE, who told him she couldn’t talk for a couple minutes. “I’m right in the middle of something. Call you back in three minutes.”
He looked at his watch, and again five minutes later when she called. “What I was right in the middle of, was a bunch of bank systems security people. The thing is, we cleared out the problems in the main system, and now that they’ve seen it, the security people can take care of the backups.”
“So you’re done there?”
“Pretty much. But you’ve got these accountants here, the DEA people?”
“What about them?” Lucas asked.
“Once we broke through on the back door, and the booby traps, I let the Polaris security people take it, and I started looking around the system. The thing is, I isolated at least some of the wire numbers where the thieves sent the money. The last of it went out three days ago, and it went to four different accounts in four different banks, all of it to either the east or west coasts, the big cities, LA, New York, Philadelphia. I don’t know where it went from there.”
“So get the DEA guys on it.”
“I told them, but that’s not what they’re here for,” ICE said. “They’re hot on the trail of this drug money, the big money, and they don’t give a rat’s ass about your twenty-two million. They say they do, but they don’t. You need to get your own people over here, or Bone’s people, or somebody, if you want to start running down where this money went, and who’s got it, and who’s going to get killed next.”
“Yes,” Lucas said. “That’s what I need to do.”
He called Shaffer, and Shaffer exploded and said, “Those fuckin’ feds … All right, I’ll get somebody there. I’ll get Specs over there.”
“Tell him to talk to Bone. Bone will help.”
“Listen, I heard two minutes ago-I swear to God, two minutes-the Roseville cops got the shooters’ SUV up at the Rosedale parking lot. I don’t think they’re shopping, I think they went there to get a new ride. I’m going up there. What about you? Heard anything back from Shrake and Jenkins?”
“No. They’re pretty good about updating me, so I suspect Kline is still holed up in his apartment.”
“Okay. I’m outa here,” Shaffer said. But just before he hung up, he said, “Things are moving.”
“Yeah, they are,” Lucas said.
Martinez talked to the Big Voice a few minutes after she left Lucas’s office. She had known him when she was a child, and though his name was Sebastian, she’d always called him Sebas as a kid, and still did. “I think the money is gone,” she told him.
“Tell me why,” he said.
She explained about the DEA accountants and the two teams, one following the shooters and the stolen money, the other going after the main accounts where they’d been sending money for three years. “They know it is
