right coasts, and buying gold coins, fifty, seventy, a hundred thousand dollars at a time. She says her family is Christian and is getting out of Syria, and they don’t think anything is safe but gold. That’s what she tells them. She’s gone to
“Have they got a passport, a name, a description, a photograph, an address…?”
“They’ve got a cheap business card, the kind you print on your home computer, with an address in Damascus, in English, and some Arabic writing that nobody understands but looks like the same address. That’s it-we don’t even have a description, because she wears one of those veils. All they’ve seen is her eyes….”
As she was talking, two men walked down the sidewalk on the other side of the street. They were coming from up the block behind him, and he didn’t notice them until they passed his car. He glanced at them, went back to Sandy, said, “I can’t believe…” then trailed off, frowned, and looked at the men as they approached the sidewalk that led to the entrance of the apartment.
Two short men, slender, wearing baseball caps and T-shirts. Dark hair, athletic. Lucas said, “Holy shit,” and Sandy said, “What?” and Lucas said, “I’ll call you back,” and he punched in 911 and watched as the men walked up to the apartment entrance. They were planning to do wrong, he thought, because they had that wary, check-it-out attitude, looking here and there, while pretending not to.
When the 911 operator came up he identified himself and half-shouted the address and said, “The two Mexican shooters, I think they’re here. They’re going into the apartment building where one of our suspects lives. I need help here, fast as you can get it. These guys are shooters. I need people with vests and shotguns, I need them flooded in here.”
He was dealing with Minneapolis and expected a fast response, and a few seconds later the operator said, “We’ve got a car two minutes away. We’ve got another car five minutes out, we’ll route them in there. What are you doing-?”
Lucas was shouting back at him, “They’re on foot, five-seven, five-eight, dark hair, jeans and running shoes, red T-shirt, blue T-shirt, worn outside their pants. I’m afraid they’ll take somebody down…. If they get in, I’m going after them. Tell everybody I’m in there….”
“Do you think-”
The two men disappeared behind the glass doors at the front of the apartment building, but he could see them behind the glass, apparently waiting to get through an inner door, and Lucas shouted over the operator, “They’re inside, but they’re stuck behind the inner door. Call that apartment if you can, tell them not to answer the-Shit, they’re inside, I can see them going in. I’m going, I’m going.”
He was fifty yards up the street and he gunned the car down the block, stopped just short of the sidewalk, and jumped out, pulling his Beretta as he did it. He couldn’t see the Mexicans inside, in the outer lobby, so he ran up the four wide steps to the front door, staying to one side, remembering Rivera, peeked at the door, saw nothing, peeked again, then pushed through.
Inside the door was a fifteen-foot-square lobby with mailboxes and an intercom, and he saw a button labeled Management and he leaned on it, and leaned on it some more, and nothing happened, nobody answered, and he leaned on it some more, and finally took a look at the door.
The door was wooden, but had a long, narrow glass window down the middle. He looked through the glass and could see an empty atrium and an intersecting hallway, and the bottom of a curving stairway. He thought the chances of kicking the door in were remote-it was a solid chunk of wood with heavy brass hardware. Kicking it would make too much noise, anyway.
He leaned on the management doorbell again, got no answer, then took the end of his gun, pressed it against the glass in the door, and pressed it until the glass cracked and finally fell away, inside. He broke out more glass until he could reach through to the inside handle, and popped the door open.
Sanderson’s address said apartment 344, so she’d be up two flights. He ran up the first flight, looked both ways, and then a voice said, “Hey,” and he turned and saw a square-faced woman, red glasses, dishwater-blond hair, who saw the gun and said, “No, no,” and turned as though to run.
Lucas said, sharply but quietly, “I’m a cop. Did you just see two Mexican-looking guys come through, going to Kristina Sanderson’s?”
“Yes, I just … Oh, my God, are they…?” She looked up the stairs.
“Which way to her apartment?” Lucas asked. “Which way?”
“Top of the stairs, to the left.” She pointed.
“Did they go in?”
“They were just going to knock…. I left them when they were walking down the hall.”
“You’re the manager?”
“Yes. I’m Pat.”
Lucas went up the stairs, saying, as he went, “There are more cops on the way. Let them in.”
He took the stairs in five seconds, peeked down the hall to the left. Nothing. He looked right. Nothing. Had they gone in? Was Sanderson home, maybe not answering her phone?
He hurried down the hall, checking off the numbers on the doors, got to 344. The door was closed, no sign that it had been forced. The door across the hall was also pristine. He continued down the hall, to an exit sign, went through a fire door, looked down the stairwell, heard and saw nothing at all.
He went back: Where had they gone? If they were in the apartment, they might be torturing her … although the place didn’t look substantial enough to smother a scream….
At the door, he stood quietly for just a second, then pressed his ear to it. He got back an almost unearthly silence. The whole building was quiet.
Kick the door? He looked at the door, and again, as with the door below, he doubted his ability to get through it. The door looked like it was metal, set in what was probably a concrete block wall.
He was still looking at it when he heard some scuffling on the stairway, and he padded back down the hall, and a cop peeked around the corner at him. Lucas held up a finger and continued that way and said, quietly, “Davenport, BCA,” and the cop said, “I know you. They in there?”
Lucas recognized him, but didn’t remember his name. “I don’t know. I kind of … I’m just not sure.”
“What do you want to do? We’ve got more guys on the way.”
“Set up and wait five minutes, until we’ve got the place blocked off, and then knock and see what happens.”
That’s what they did. A SWAT team showed up, and Lucas was talking to the commander when Pat, the manager, said, “Kristina’s out on the sidewalk. Do you want to talk to her?”
“Yes, I do,” Lucas said. To the SWAT commander, he said, “If she didn’t let them in, and if they didn’t have a key … then they left. We missed them. We gotta check, but I think we’re wasting our time.”
“We’ll get a key and check it,” the SWAT guy said.
“I’ll be outside,” Lucas said. “Goddamnit, anyway.”
14
Kristina Sanderson had left her car down the block and walked to the apartment, to see why the cops had blocked it off. But in her heart, she knew. “I live here,” she told one of the uniformed cops, who’d used their squad cars to block the street. “What’s happening?”
“We’re looking for a couple of people,” a cop said. “You’ll have to wait awhile. If you have some shopping to do…”
Instead of shopping, she drifted to the side of the street with a cluster of other rubberneckers, including two that she recognized as other residents of the apartment building. They nodded to each other, agreed that they hadn’t heard anything. The manager, Pat, walked out the front door with a police officer and talked to him for a moment. At one point, Pat looked across the street and saw them, and Kristina waved and Pat raised a hand, then held up a finger-one minute? — and went back inside.
A minute or two later, a tall, well-dressed man came out with Pat, looked across the street at them, and then started toward them. He could be a police officer, she thought, but he didn’t look the part. She’d known a number of
