Stolen Prey

“Do you regret any of them?”

“Some of them,” Lucas said. “Sometimes they were just … crazy. You get into a situation like that, and what can you do? Like, you remember Alyssa? She was simply insane. Killing people. When we figured that out, we wound up in a confrontation. What happened was her call. She called it, and the whole situation went a certain way. I had no way to … to disarm her or anything. Either she died, or I did. I regret it because she was insane-she was ill. She might have been treatable…. I don’t know. It would have been nice to find out.”

“Were any not like that? Where you had a choice and went for … the death?”

“Did I set anything up, you mean?”

“Yeah.”

Lucas was silent for a moment, then said, “Twice.”

“Tell me…”

“One guy-I never talk about this, by the way, so if you open your trap…”

“I don’t talk,” she said.

“One guy was a lawyer, and a serial killer, and he would have gotten away with everything. Then, sooner or later, because he enjoyed it, because it was the main thing in his life, he would have started killing again. That was more than a decade ago. Now I look back on it and think maybe, maybe there was something else I could have done. But back then … no.”

“Judge, jury, executioner. Like that?”

“Back then, yeah,” he said. “Now I wonder if I wasn’t too hasty, if I couldn’t have done something more complicated. Couldn’t have figured another way to get him. But … it’s done.”

“What about the other one?”

“That was different. That was a hostage thing. You know about that one-the one where Weather was the hostage. I gave the orders to our sniper to take him. Shoot to kill, the instant he had an opening. As it happened, your mom had pretty much convinced him to give up, and he was about to do that, when we killed him. Maybe I could have done something different, but your mom’s life was on the line. Or seemed to be.”

“I talked to Mom a little about that one,” Letty said. “It tore her up, you know.”

“I know.”

There was a silence, and then Letty looked up at Lucas, her eyes clear, and said, “I’m okay.”

“At least as okay as I am,” Lucas said.

“Yep. Anyway, I’m not worried about me,” Letty said. “I’m worried about Mom.”

“She’ll deal with it,” Lucas said.

“Then we’re good,” Letty said. “If she really can.”

“We are good,” Lucas agreed. “She really can.”

Lucas and Shaffer interviewed Albitis, but Albitis couldn’t remember anything after sometime in May, in Tel Aviv. The very last thing she remembered was being on the beach, and the feeling of hot sand between her toes, and the smell of the hot oil from a beach falafel stand.

“You don’t remember anything about the gold?” Shaffer asked. They’d gotten a lot of gold back, but the accountants thought it might be a little short.

“Gold?” she said. “Turicek? What’s a Turicek?”

They were persistent, they returned three times, and then they gave it up.

By that time, Albitis was hobbling around the physical therapy ward, a hemispherical plaster cast, punctured by a metal rack screwed into her skull, covering most of the top of her head. Everyone was encouraged by the speed of her recovery. The extent of her brain damage, however, might not be known for years, the doctors told the cops.

Lucas took away one thing from their interviews: that English speakers called falafel “feel-awful,” because that’s the way you felt when you ate them from a beach stand.

Del came into Lucas’s office one morning, three weeks after the shoot-out, and asked, “Have you ever heard of an artist named Callahan Pitt?”

Lucas did not frequent the art world. “No. Who is he?”

“British guy. Painting, photography, sculpture, installations,” Del said. “Everything. He’s got a big show over at the Walker, goes on for three months. Anyway, he bought the Naiads of the North sculpture.”

“What?”

“The bronze one, that got all cut up,” Del said. “The one we got back from Anderson. He bought it from the insurance company.”

“Oh, yeah? He bought the scrap?”

“For a million bucks, is what I’m told,” Del said. “The thing is, Anderson cut the sculpture up in big chunks, you know, hands, heads, tits, feet, butts … so this guy has already started welding them back together. He’s putting the pieces back in a kind of random order, you know, tits welded to butts, hands to the tops of the heads. Like, modern art. He welds them around the rims of the cuts, so you can see both the inside and outside. He’s calling it Rim Job, and this chick over at the Walker says he’s already priced it at six mil.”

“What?”

Terrill Anderson, who’d stolen the sculpture and cut it up, would eventually get a year in prison; his two accomplices agreed to testify against him, and walked.

Duane Bird and Bernice Waters, the two tweekers who’d robbed Lucas, pled guilty to armed robbery. Waters was sent back to the women’s prison immediately, on the parole violation, and was returned to her job in the cafeteria. She did well with it, and was content. Bird was held in the Ramsey County jail pending sentencing, with a recommended sentence of six years. Waters would get a similar amount of time tacked onto her original sentence.

Sanderson and Kline met at a Caribou Coffee in downtown Minneapolis.

“The attorney says we’re good. They’re not going to prosecute,” Kline said, as they huddled over their table. “He thinks we ought to sue the cops for putting those Mexicans on me. If it wasn’t for the cops, I never would have gotten shot.”

Sanderson said, “Are you crazy? You get into court, you’d have to perjure yourself, you’d have to-”

“I told him I wasn’t interested. I just want to get away from everything,” Kline said. “I told him I want to travel, maybe get a job on the West Coast.”

“Good,” Sanderson said. “You think we’re safe?”

“The cops say the Mexicans aren’t interested anymore. The government’s got the gold.”

Sanderson thought about it for a moment, then said, “We’ll have to go to the farm sooner or later. When the cops are sure that we don’t have anything.”

“That’ll be weeks. Maybe months,” Kline said.

“Nobody’s touched the place for years. We should be fine.”

“What about Edie?” Kline asked.

“If she really has no memory, then I guess we split her share,” Sanderson said. “But if she gets her memory back, we cut it three ways, and she gets a million and a third.”

“I hated giving back all that gold,” Kline said. “Maybe we should have kept three million each.”

“They wouldn’t have bought that,” Sanderson said. “I was worried they wouldn’t buy eighteen million,” Sanderson said. “And giving it back killed any motive they had to keep looking for it.”

“Yeah. Still. We were almost really rich.”

Albitis’s father bought a plane ticket that would take his daughter back to Tel Aviv. She got out of the hospital, spent three days in a downtown hotel, making sure she was well enough to fly.