Stolen Prey

She considered several possibilities:

She might try to go for the gold herself. If Davenport would keep filling her in on the investigation, and if she could get to one of the thieves first, with Uno under control, she would find out where the gold was: Uno was the designated torturer. Then, if something happened to Uno, she would be there with the gold. If she weren’t greedy, and took only part of it-say, five million-and let the police find the remainder, who would know, or be able to figure out, what happened to the rest?

Or, she could recover all the gold for the Criminales and suggest to the powers that she deserved a cut for her actions. They’d probably give her something-not five million, but something. Five percent? One million? Maybe. It wouldn’t cost them much, compared to what they got back, and would demonstrate their generosity toward loyal employees.

Or, she could recommend that they cut the cord, with everybody pulling back to Mexico. That, she thought, was a problem for one big reason: she, Uno, and Tres weren’t important enough to save, compared to the value of the gold. They’d want her to risk everything in going for it-and if she lost, and was killed or imprisoned … well, she just wasn’t that big a deal, to them.

She considered the possibilities and decided that whatever she eventually did, she didn’t have to make a decision immediately.

So she called the Big Voice and filled him in: told him about the discovery of the shadow books at Sunnie, about Lucas’s focus on Kline and Turicek, about the DEA: “I hope you have all the money out of the pipeline. The DEA is now in the Caymans and they have the account numbers.”

“Don’t be concerned about that-all the proper people know,” the Big Voice said. “We are now more interested in the possibilities with this gold. Do you need help there? Is there anything to be done?”

“Mmm, the police have now put surveillance on this Turicek, and Kline is protected by more policemen at the hospital. Davenport believes there is at least one more accomplice, the person who does the buying. I cannot think of how to find that person. Turicek and Kline work in the computer department of another bank. If we could find a friend of theirs at the bank … we might learn something from the friend, but how do I find the friend?”

Big Voice said, “Let me see what I can do. Maybe we can find something online, in Facebook perhaps. Perhaps we can find a directory for this Hennepin National. We will call you.”

“I will be waiting.”

Turicek was moving fast.

After talking with Kline early in the morning, he and Kline together had erased Kline’s phone messages and phone log, and Turicek said, “Christ, you can’t keep this stuff on here, this message from Kristina. It ties us all together.”

Kline told him there was even more on his home computer, gave Turicek his key, and a list of files that needed to be erased.

“You don’t have any cloud files?” Turicek asked.

“I’m not suicidal.”

Turicek had driven straight to Kline’s apartment, peeled off the police seal, which appeared to have already been tampered with, and let himself inside. He had no intention of erasing selected files: instead, he’d cracked the computer case and yanked out the two disk drives, and fled.

Back at his apartment, he used a ball-peen hammer to crack open the drive cases, removed the disks, beat the disks into fragments, and flushed them down the toilet.

At the rental office, where they took the gold deliveries, he’d waited until the morning packages came in. When Sanderson showed up, they talked for a couple minutes, then he passed the gold on to her and went to work.

He was picked up there by Jenkins and Shrake, who had his license tag and a description of his car.

Jenkins and Shrake had determined that he wasn’t at work by calling and asking for him. They were told that he was working the afternoon shift, and would be in at one o’clock. He rolled into the parking garage at ten minutes to one, and when he was inside the bank, Shrake said, “Piece-of-shit old Chevy. We could crack it, no problem.”

“No problem as long as we don’t get caught,” Jenkins said.

“But if we crack it and find a pile of gold, and tell Lucas, he’ll find a way to do a search, and then we’re … gold. If there’s nothing in it, we’re still cool.”

“Okay, I’m bored,” Jenkins said. “Let’s do it.”

They got in quickly enough. Jenkins blocked, standing by the car’s trunk while Shrake slid his slim jim down the window and popped the door. The car was clean, and, when he popped the trunk latch, so was the trunk.

“Life is hard and then you die,” Shrake said.

They closed up Turicek’s car, went back to their own vehicle, and started the surveillance: doing it the hard way.

When Sanderson met Turicek at the rental office, she’d said, “We have to stop this. Jacob’s in the hospital, they could be coming for us.”

“Which they?” Turicek asked.

Sanderson shuddered: “Better the police than this crazy drug gang. My God, I can’t believe we’re doing this.”

“Well, we can’t stop now,” Turicek said. “There are more packages in the air, and if they just get dropped here, and nobody picks them up, sooner or later somebody will get curious and open them…. If they find a big bunch of gold, and go to the cops…”

“We should tell Edie to stop. It’s just too dangerous. If she stops, we pick up the last packages, and we’re done.”

“I’ll talk to her,” Turicek said. “There’s only three more million to go…. I’d hate to cut it off, but I will if I have to.”

“Ivan, the police are already on to Jacob. What more do you need?”

“I’ll talk to Edie about it,” Turicek said.

Sanderson got four more packages that afternoon, unwrapped the gold, repacked it, and took it to her mom’s home and hid it in a concealed closet where her daddy-now long gone-had hidden his gun safe. The gun safe was still there, though all the long guns had gone shortly after Daddy died, sold to his hunting buddies. A couple of handguns remained, which she hadn’t bothered to get rid of.

Since she and her mom didn’t share a last name, and her mother wouldn’t have remembered her last name if asked, the gold was safe enough, at least for a while.

Standing in front of the safe, looking at the now substantial stacks of coin-fifteen million worth? eighteen million? — and the two guns, Sanderson, though a gentle person, couldn’t help thinking:

If something happened to the other three, then she’d have it all….

When Lucas got to Minneapolis, he stopped first at Polaris, and went up to Bone’s office. Bone was in a meeting, but came out to talk: “What do you need?”

“Do you know anybody who’d do you a favor at Hennepin National?”

“Sure. I know the boss, Bob McCollum,” Bone said. “You’re still looking at this Kline guy?”

“I think … I’m not sure … that another guy in the computer department might be in on it. I need to talk to somebody nice and quietly who knows the people in their systems department. All of the people. Somebody who can keep his mouth shut.”

Bone tipped his head down the hall toward his office: “Come on. I’ll call Bob.”

Hennepin was only three or four blocks from Polaris, and Lucas walked over, went up to McCollum’s office. McCollum was not particularly happy to see him, and less happy when Lucas finished outlining the problem.

“You think they’ve figured out a way to get into Polaris’s systems from here?”

“I think it’s a possibility. I’m most interested in Kline, Turicek, and Sanderson, but there might be others,”