Lucas said. “Is there somebody outside the department who’d know them all?”
McCollum scratched his head, then picked up his phone, pushed a button, and said, “Babs, could you come in here?” To Lucas, he said, “My assistant.”
A woman stuck her head in a moment later and said, “Sir?” She was an older woman, with steel-gray hair; she did not, Lucas thought, look like a Babs.
“Come in and talk to this guy. This is Lucas Davenport, he’s with the BCA.”
Babs nodded. “I know the name.”
“So tell her,” McCollum said.
Lucas outlined the problem, and the woman thought for a moment and said, “Dave Duncan would be your best possibility. He’s in HR and he vets all the computer people. He had systems management courses in college, he knows that language.”
“Get him up here,” McCollum said.
McCollum excused himself to go to his private bathroom, and Lucas sat and read a
Lucas told him the story. Duncan rubbed his fingers together as he listened, looked away from Lucas out through office windows, across town toward the Polaris Tower, where, as far as Lucas knew, Bone might be staring back.
When Lucas finished, Duncan didn’t say anything until McCollum grunted, “Well?”
“Turicek may be a criminal,” he said. “There was a party once, a karaoke party over at the Raven, and he and Doris Abernathy got loaded and I think she may have gone home with him. May have continued to see him for a while. Anyway, Doris told me later that he’d get drunk and tell the most outrageous stories about himself, about the old days in computer school in Russia, or Lithuania. About hacking and so on. I did some careful research on him, but there was nothing to be found.”
“What about Kline?” Lucas asked.
“He came with a good recommendation from Polaris, but he’s not really a satisfactory employee. He’s sick too often, and we believe he’s faking it, but there’s no question that he’s been under treatment for depression. Firing him … becomes complicated. In any case, he’s not really a satisfactory employee, though he’s smart enough.”
“Sanderson?”
“Quiet, but a little nutty? Nothing out of control, but, you know … a former girl nerd, so to speak, smart, does her work. The kind of person who, after a few years, might open a candle store.”
“Any other potential criminals down there?” McCollum asked.
“I wouldn’t call Sanderson a potential criminal. She’s very quiet, and reclusive,” Duncan said. “The other two … I just don’t know well enough to say. Turicek, maybe, but Kline … he doesn’t seem to have enough of an executive mind to run a big theft.”
“Executive mind?” McCollum asked, drily.
“Able to make a plan, then execute it,” Duncan said.
“If Turicek and Kline were going into another bank’s computer system, using your system here, how many of the systems people here would have to know about it?” Lucas asked.
Duncan shook his head. “Hard to say. I don’t know enough about computer programming, for one thing. Everything depends on the details of what you’re doing. Normally, if you had a complicated piece of programming to do, you could do it all off-site, and then bring it in and load it. But our systems have protections against that kind of thing-of rogue programs being loaded without a lot of checks and warnings. So it’d probably have to be done here … and it would take a while.”
“I know this is complicated, but make it as simple as possible for me: If this was being done in Systems, would everybody have to know about it?”
Duncan thought for a moment, then said, “Nooo … I don’t think so. But probably all the full-time programmers would. They’d be the only ones who could do it, in the first place, and they’re working there side by side, and their schedules are always overlapping. If somebody was doing some heavy programming, and working into another system from ours, they’d see it.”
“And that would be who?” Lucas asked.
“Just who you’re asking about-Kline, Turicek, and Sanderson. There’s another man, Ken Gleason, a supervisor, who could cover for any of them, but he’s actually in a different office. They could do this without him knowing.”
“Have any of them been taking days off lately? Traveling?”
“I’d have to call downstairs and ask. Take me a minute,” Duncan said.
Lucas: “If you could do that.”
Duncan did; they sat watching him talk into his phone, and as he said, it took only a moment. He hung up and said, “Kline is gone, obviously, and Sanderson has been coming in early to cover his shift. Turicek has been coming in later to cover his shift and part of Sanderson’s. There’s a gap around noon, so they aren’t overlapping at the moment. They’re both working a little overtime right now, because Kline’s out.”
Lucas said, “Huh,” and McCollum said, “Doesn’t exactly fit your model.”
Lucas disagreed: “It could. There’s always somebody here, but there’s always somebody not here. It’s what they’re doing when they’re not here that interests me right now.”
When he’d gotten as much as they knew, Lucas warned all of them not to talk. “This is a dangerous situation, and it’s possible that this drug gang has people working for the banks. Watch the news: talking about this investigation could get people killed.”
He took the elevator down with Duncan, went to Duncan’s office, and got a printout of Turicek’s and Sanderson’s addresses. As he handed them over, Duncan said, “I have an observation, if you’d be interested.”
“I’m always interested in observations,” Lucas said.
“If I were a police officer, and if I wanted to shake one of these people by questioning them … I’d go after Kristina. She doesn’t strike me either as the criminal type, or as a strong person. If she’s involved, and she was pushed, she’d fall apart very quickly.”
Lucas nodded and said, “I’ll think about that.”
Back on the street, he got a call from Shrake: “What’re you doing here?”
“Talking to the bank president. Where’re you guys?”
“Jenkins is in the Skyway, watching the elevators there. I’m in the garage across the street-I can see both ground-floor exits from up here, and his car’s on the other side of the floor.”
“His car, huh?”
“We’re pretty sure a guy like that wouldn’t put anything incriminating in his car,” Shrake said.
Lucas said, “I trust your remarkable insight into the criminal mind.”
“Into the criminal glove compartment, too,” Shrake said. “Anyhoo … we’re here.”
Lucas knew where Turicek was, so he drove the Lexus south and west out of downtown, to Sanderson’s place. On the way, he called in to the BCA duty officer and got the make and model of her car and the license tags, and, as a bonus, her home and cell phone numbers.
Sanderson lived in a small, yellow-brick apartment complex a short walk east of Lake Calhoun. The apartment had underground parking, with a gated entrance ramp, and he had no way into it. The place looked nice enough, without being rich-exactly the kind of place an orderly, intelligent, well-employed single woman would pick.
He sat for five minutes, working out the possibilities, then called her home phone number. It rang seven times, then clicked over to the answering service, and he hung up.
He was considering the possibility of trying to get into the building when his phone rang. Sandy. “Yeah?”
“Okay, I’ve been calling the gold dealers, and I think we’ve got a hit.”
“Excellent. Who is it?”
“There’s a woman who says she’s Syrian, has been showing up at a lot of gold dealers, both on the left and
