“Gotta make a call.” Lucas called Hennepin Medical Center, was put through to the surgical intensive care ward, identified himself, and asked the nurse, “I really need to know if Mr. Kline had any visitors this morning…. Yeah, I’ll hold.”
When he was on hold, he said to Martinez, “Trying to get a line on the thieves…”
A woman came on the phone and identified herself as the charge nurse. Lucas told her that they were worried about possible interference with Kline, and asked if he’d had any visitors. She said that he had, apparently a coworker, a tall thin man with a sandy beard and a foreign accent-she thought he might be Russian. He’d visited very early, before seven o’clock, saying he was on his way to work.
Lucas thought: Ivan Turicek.
“Did you get a name?”
“No, I didn’t ask. Mr. Kline knew him,” the nurse said. “They were friendly. At least, when I was there.”
“Is Mr. Kline awake?”
“Yes, for the time being. They’ll be taking some drains out of his legs this morning, and he’ll go to the OR for that. He’ll be sleepy for a while.” That, she said, would happen whenever the doc was ready for him-there were three patients in front of Kline, all getting minor procedures.
Lucas said, “If that man shows up again, could you not allow him into Mr. Kline’s space by himself? It might be important to our investigation.”
She said she would keep an eye on him.
Lucas got back on the phone to Clark.
“You know why these shooters hit Kline? Because we, and they, think Kline had something to do with hijacking the drug money account.”
“I know that,” Clark said.
“I don’t know this for sure, but I think one of his accomplices is a coworker named Ivan Turicek. They work together at Hennepin National. Anyway, if they’re the ones who did it, they got in through a computer … and Turicek visited Kline at the hospital, early this morning.”
“Ah, man.”
“Yeah. I talked to Kline yesterday, and the drawer was open on his bedside table. His keys were in there. Kline’s going into the OR this morning. If you could have somebody go over and maybe just peek in that drawer while he’s in the OR…”
“That would be legally questionable,” Clark said.
“But morally correct,” Lucas said. “Besides, maybe the drawer is still open … like it was yesterday.”
“All right, you talked me into it,” Clark said. “I’ll send Potach over. He’s a moral guy.”
“Sneaky, too,” Lucas said. “Good choice.”
“If we dust the keyboard, we won’t find any Davenport prints?”
“You will not,” Lucas said, happy about the fact that he’d worn gloves the night before. “You might find some from Ivan Turicek. That would be useful. And he’s an immigrant, so the feds will have his prints.”
“Talk to you,” Clark said.
Lucas turned to Martinez, who said, “It will be another two days before I can send David’s ashes home. Your medical examiner has to complete some forms that I do not understand, and then we will cremate. In the meantime, my superiors wish to have reports on the progress of the investigation.”
“As for the progress, we have every cop in the Twin Cities looking for the shooters, and there is reason to believe we know what kind of a car they’re driving,” Lucas said.
He told her about the disappearance of Ferat Chakkour, and about the interview with Kline, and about Bone’s belief that the money was being converted to gold coin, about ICE’s discovery of the shadow books at Sunnie, about the DEA’s tracing of the Criminales’ bank accounts through the Cayman Islands. He told her about everything except his search of Kline’s apartment and the phone numbers from Kline’s phone.
“So, you are questioning these people? These computer thieves?”
“Not yet-everything I’ve told you is conjecture … guesswork. Right now, we’re trying to find out who’s buying the gold, and where they’re putting it.”
“So somewhere, there is a thief with a large pile of gold.”
“That’s what I think. And the shooters are somewhere. And the drug money is somewhere, but we don’t know where any of those things are.”
“Very complicated,” she said. She stood and said, “I am no David Rivera, I cannot help you with this investigation as he did. But if you can keep me, mmm, informed, this will be much appreciated by my superiors.”
“I will keep you informed,” Lucas promised.
Lucas called for Shrake and Jenkins, and got them pulled off some bullshit that involved the theft of ATM machines from convenience stores. They showed up together, Jenkins wearing a straw cowboy hat and western boots, which made him about six-eight.
Lucas explained Kline and Turicek, and said, “If Turicek’s getting gold from somewhere, it would be nice to know where he’s putting it, and where it’s coming from.”
When they were gone, he got his jacket, planning to head for Minneapolis: he wanted to talk to Kline again, and then to Bone. He opened his office door and saw Sandy, the researcher, coming down the hall. She was a tall woman, thin, introverted, bespectacled, a latter-day hippie in paisley dresses with an improbable talent for tracking crooks through her computer systems. Everybody in the BCA abused her talent, when they could, and Lucas and Virgil Flowers led the pack. She said, “I’ve got your list. I can’t guarantee that they’re exactly the top one hundred, but they’re big.”
Lucas said, “All right. Sit in Cheryl’s chair.” He pointed her to a chair where his secretary normally worked. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
“Wait,” she said. “I also checked those three phone numbers-they’re all to prepaid cell phones. No credit cards attached to them. Sold through Walmart. So you’re outa luck, unless you actually find one of the phones.”
He went back in his office, closed the door, got out the list of gold dealers he’d found in Kline’s computer, and compared his list to Sandy’s. All twelve of Kline’s shops were on the list.
He made check marks next to the dealers he’d found in Kline’s computer, put his list away, and carried Sandy’s back to her.
“I want you to call the top twenty-five, plus the ones I’ve checked. Everybody should know about these killings, what’s going on here. You can imply that we’re calling because of that investigation.”
“Are we?”
“Yeah-but we’re chasing the people who took the money, not the killers,” Lucas said.
“I’d like to get the killers,” she said.
“So would I, but we do what we can.”
“So what are we looking for?”
“We want physical descriptions of people who are making big buys, of gold coins, not bars with serial numbers. We only want people who started last month and have come back repeatedly. They want physical delivery of the coins, and they want fast delivery. We’re talking buys in the hundreds of thousands of dollars…. Tell the dealers we don’t necessarily need names, but we need the physical descriptions. If you find somebody making really big buys, at a lot of shops, somebody who sounds like the same guy, then call all one hundred dealers and see if you can figure out how much gold the guy is taking and anything else you can get-name, bank, whatever.”
“That’ll take me all day,” she said.
“Probably.” He put his jacket on. “Better get to work.”
Martinez did not call the Big Voice immediately. Instead, she drove back to the St. Paul Hotel, lay on her bed, and thought about her next move. Twenty-two million dollars, or a large part of that, was sitting out there in gold. She was paid quite well by the Criminales, but the compensation was nothing like a million a year. Not even a tenth of that. Twenty-two million…
