numbers of different passwords, but just a couple of passwords, with perhaps variations.
So instead of plugging in all the anime characters, he started with plain “rattata,” and worked from 0rattata0 through 9rattata9, and was shaken off with each of them.
“Goddamnit.”
He looked at the pictures again, then pulled the closest one off the wall. Forty minutes later, working from the names on the picture, he typed in “5pikachu5”-and he was in.
“Excellent,” he said to himself.
He went to the Spotlight feature and typed in “Gold,” and got dozens of hits. He said, “Gotcha,” and then, a minute later, “Don’t gotcha.”
As he started working through the hits, he found that most of them were document and online files that included the word
When he shut down the computer an hour later, he had a list of twelve dealers on the west and east coasts.
Too late to do anything about it, he thought.
Somewhere along the line, it occurred to him that he hadn’t spoken to Virgil Flowers. He’d probably taken the day off, and knowing Flowers, he’d done it in a boat. The thing about Flowers was, in Lucas’s humble opinion, you could send him out for a loaf of bread and he’d find an illegal bread cartel smuggling in heroin-saturated wheat from Afghanistan. Either that, or he’d be fishing in a muskie tournament, on government time. You had to keep an eye on him.
In bed that night, he spent little time thinking about the tweekers-Flowers would get them-and more time thinking about the gold. The gold was interesting because it tied everything together. He also thought about Shaffer: the problem with Shaffer was that he was straight. Very straight. He had little sense of humor when it came to things like illegal searches, using unknowing innocent people as decoys, and so on.
He would have to use some finesse, he decided.
The next morning, before he left for work, he called Sandy, the researcher, and said, “I need to find the biggest gold dealers in the country. Maybe, like, the top one hundred.”
“Do you have any idea how I’m supposed to figure that out?” she asked.
“No, I don’t,” he said. “I need the list this morning. Also, I have three phone numbers. I’d like to know who the subscribers are.”
“Well, that part’ll be easy enough,” she said.
Outside, he found that Letty had parked the Lexus behind the Porsche, and instead of shuffling cars, he took the truck and headed downtown. They met at nine o’clock, the whole murder crew, and Shaffer reported that they had enough evidence to convict anybody they managed to arrest, with fingerprints and DNA from three suspects. “We’ve got everybody in the metro area on board, every single cop has the photos and the Identi-Kits, and we think we may have a line on the car they’re driving. It’s a green Subaru Forester owned by a pretzel seller named Ferat Chakkour, who disappeared after he left his job at the Rosedale mall an hour or so after the shoot-out in St. Paul. He usually parked in the same lot where we found the Texas truck. We think they picked him up, probably killed him, dumped him somewhere, and are driving his car. This is confidential information-we’ve asked everybody to hold it close, make sure it doesn’t get out to the media. We’ve talked to all the highway patrols all the way to the Mexican border.”
“Gonna leak pretty quick,” Lucas said. “This guy got any family?”
“He’s got a housemate, another student, we’ve asked him to keep his mouth shut, but he’s already been talking to Chakkour’s parents in Cairo. Chakkour’s from Egypt. The roommate’s already talked to some classmates … but we’re hoping to keep it close for a day or two, maybe pick up the car before it breaks out.”
They’d already had four separate alerts, from cops who thought they might have spotted the suspects, but nothing had panned out; still, it kept them jumping.
The DEA, O’Brien said, was working the offshore banks but hadn’t gotten anything yet. “Probably get it later today-we’re talking to the state department and our own people, squeezing as hard as we can. It’s not usually as hard to get it if we say it’s drug money. The problem is, every time the IRS goes after some corporation for tax evasion, they start out by saying it’s drug money, so the banks don’t always believe us anymore.”
Shaffer wrote a note and pushed it to another BCA agent while O’Brien was talking; Shaffer didn’t care about the banks.
Lucas told them about his conversations with Kline and Bone, and his conclusions from those conversations: that the thieves who’d hijacked the bank account were probably buying gold, and that there were probably several of them. He mentioned that he was having a researcher get together a list of gold dealers who could be checked for suspicious gold sales. He also suggested that the Criminales must have had a contact at the bank who tipped them to the suspicions about Kline.
“So you keep doing that, working on the thieves, and we’ll keep pushing people on the shooters,” Shaffer said. “If anything comes up, for anybody, call us.”
“The thing is, Kline’s the best lead we’ve got for the thieves, and the Criminales apparently think the same thing. I’d love to find something we could use to serve a search warrant on his young ass,” Lucas said. “If anybody thinks of anything…”
O’Brien asked, “Say, anybody seen Ana Martinez?”
Shaffer shrugged. “I know she was making arrangements to take Rivera’s body back to Mexico. I talked to her last night. I thought she’d be here. I called her, but she didn’t answer her phone.”
Lucas said, “That’s a little worrisome. I’ll check on her.”
As they were breaking up, O’Brien took a call, listened for a minute, then said, “We’ll be right over. We’re just leaving here, about twenty minutes.”
He hung up and said, “That was ICE. She found the shadow books at Sunnie. She said they’ve been there right from the start, when the system was first put together.”
“Bingo,” Shaffer said. “That’s large. I’m coming with you. Lucas?”
“I’ll be around.”
13
Lucas was sitting at his desk when Martin Clark, the Minneapolis homicide detective, called and demanded, “What the hell did you do in Kline’s apartment last night?”
Lucas, confused, said, “What?”
“What’d you do to the computer?”
“I didn’t do anything to the computer,” Lucas said. “Your guy was there the whole time. What happened to it?”
“Somebody cracked it open and took the disk drive.”
“Ah, shit … Marty, I didn’t touch the goddamn computer. I was just sitting here trying to think of a way to get a search warrant…. Wait a minute, could I put you on hold for a minute? Or call you right back?”
Martinez stepped to the doorway, looked in; her face was drawn, her eyes puffy. Lucas held up a finger. Clark said, “Yeah, okay. What’s going on?”
“Tell you in one minute,” Lucas said. Then, “Wait, wait, was the door forced? It wasn’t, was it?”
“No, the door’s fine.”
“I’ll get right back to you,” Lucas said.
He hung up and pointed Martinez at a chair, said, “Ana, glad to see you. I was a little worried. I’ve been trying to get in touch.”
“My phone was off,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
