Stolen Prey

16

Lucas began by calling Shaffer, taking a certain amount of satisfaction at the thought of blowing him out of bed. Shaffer answered the phone on the second ring and sounded unnaturally alert, saying, “Yeah? What’s up?”

“You’ve been up for two hours and you’ve already done your yoga exercises and now you’re drinking fresh- squeezed orange juice, aren’t you?” Lucas asked.

“Carrot juice,” Shaffer said. “Getting ready to run. You’re calling for juice advice?”

“No. I need to meet with you at eight o’clock instead of nine, and out of sight. You drink coffee?”

“You broke something?”

“Maybe.”

“Tell me where.”

Del was not quite as alert. “Jesus. Is the sun up?”

“I need to talk to your brother-in-law, the real estate guy,” Lucas said. “I need to talk to him right now.”

“We’re not an early-up family,” Del said.

“Well, you’re up, so why shouldn’t your brother-in-law be up?” Lucas asked.

“That’s a point. I’ll call him,” Del said.

When he got off the phone, Lucas went to his study and got out a yellow pad and started making a list. When he finished, after some thought, the list had only three items.

— Rivera choreography.

— Sanderson apartment.

— Insider information.

He worked through it all again and was convinced. He wasn’t sure Shaffer would be.

Del’s brother-in-law called. His name was Dominic and he worked the east side of St. Paul. “Dom, I need an empty east side house, a little run-down, not occupied. I can get you a thousand dollars for three days, starting today. You got somebody?”

“This for a sting?”

“Yeah.”

“Let me call around.”

Lucas and Shaffer met at an east side coffee shop. They got a couple of cups of something that looked and tasted like Folgers, and found a corner where they could talk. Lucas pulled a legal pad out of his briefcase, pushed it across the table, and said, “I’m going to walk you through it.” He used a pen to draw a sketch of the entry area of the house where Rivera had been shot to death.

“Here’s the steps, here’s the couch where the one Mexican was shot,” he said, tapping his pen on the outline drawing. “Now, Rivera kicks the door, presumably having done a peek so he knows where the Mexicans are. Now, if you saw one out of three, or two out of three, when you peeked, would you kick the door? Or would you call for backup?”

“I’d call for backup under any conditions,” Shaffer said. “If he’d called for backup, we’d have taken them all and he’d still be alive. He should have done what you did down at Sanderson’s apartment.”

“But he’s got the macho gene, he’s hot, he hates these guys,” Lucas said. “They literally skinned one of his fellow agents alive, then mailed the guy’s skin to his boss. So he sees two of them. Does he kick the door or not?”

Shaffer considered, then shook his head. “He’s gonna have trouble just with the two of them, unless he went in planning to kill them. If there’s a third one, that he can’t see, he’s got a serious problem.”

“The crime-scene guys say there was a shooter game plugged into the TV, with two consoles. Both were turned on. Probably two guys on the couch, one of them shot to death,” Lucas said, tapping the sketch. “The third guy, they thought, was probably by this window, may have seen Rivera coming, at the last minute, and had his gun out. Maybe heard Rivera on the step or something. Rivera kicks the door, gets two shots off, and the guy by the window shoots him. Then the two who are still alive run for it.”

Shaffer said, “Yup.”

“But I’m saying, if he could only see two out of three, he probably wouldn’t have kicked it,” Lucas said. “But, just for argument’s sake, let’s say he’s super-macho, so maybe he does kick it. Now you’ve done this. You’ve got a target off to the right that you know about. So you kick the door, your gun goes right, but you glance to the left, just an instant, to clear the rest of the room, and then you come back to the gun’s sights. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Now, he got off two aimed shots, but he apparently never looked left, never suspected anybody was to his left, and he apparently never saw the other guy coming. The other guy put the gun so close to Rivera’s head that he burned his hair, tattooed his scalp,” Lucas said. “To do that, he would have had to hold the gun out at arm’s length and crank his hand to the left, to make that shot. And not be seen while he did it. The bullet went in at the right- side base of Rivera’s skull, and came out of the top of his skull, above his left eye, having gone all the way through his brain.”

“The guy couldn’t have been by the window to his right because the door would be in the way,” Shaffer said. Then, “Okay, I see what you’re saying.”

“Do you?”

“Yeah.” Shaffer grimaced and shook his head. “You’re saying he was probably shot by somebody standing behind him to the right, shorter than he was, or somebody standing one step down, somebody that he knew was there and maybe trusted.”

Lucas nodded, and Shaffer continued: “You’re saying that Martinez shot him in the back of the head.”

“Attaboy,” Lucas said.

“Sonofabitch. I knew you couldn’t trust those people.” Shaffer, agitated, got up and walked around a couple of tables, then came back and sat down again.

“You could trust Rivera. You couldn’t trust Martinez,” Lucas said. “It all depends on the individual. The goddamn gang planted her on him, knew every move he was making. She could do her ‘research’ and point him at other gangs, but tip off the Criminales if he ever went after them. I’m pretty sure she was sleeping with him. She was sleeping with him and when the time came, she swatted him like a fly. If I’m right.”

Shaffer stared at the yellow pad, wiping his tongue across his bottom lip, and then, “I’m buying it, but it’d be nice if there was something else.”

“There is,” Lucas said. “I’m down at Sanderson’s apartment, looking for Sanderson, and what happens? Two of the Mexicans come walking down the sidewalk. I can’t believe it. For one thing, how’d they know so fast? How’d they figure that out? They go up to the front door and go inside, and I pull the car out and across the street, jump out and run up the steps,” Lucas said. “I wasn’t more than a minute behind them, going through the front door. I punch out the door panel, get inside. I know what her apartment number is, I run up the steps. They can’t have gotten to her apartment as fast as I did-for one thing, they had to talk with the manager, at least for a second or two. So I run up the steps, and they’re gone. Gone. Vanished. Nobody ever saw them again. Why is that?”

“Tell me,” Shaffer said.

“First, because I semi-fucked up. We were always dealing with the idea of three Mexican men. One was dead, here were the other two. Why would I worry about another one? But, the thing is, I’d given Rivera and Martinez a ride in the Lexus. She knew the car. And guess what? She’d driven them over there, and was waiting up the street, behind me. I never saw her. That’s where they were walking from. Her car. She saw the Lexus, saw me jump out, and she called them on their cell phones. They ran out the back way and around the building, and she picked them up and they were out of there. It’s the only thing that works.”

Shaffer thought about it for a minute, then said, “I’m buying that, too.”

“Third,” Lucas said. “We’ve known we had a leak. They weren’t one step ahead of us or behind us-they were exactly in step with us. We thought it was in the bank-but why would a leak in the Polaris bank know about