Stolen Prey

she would have been hard to see from any of the houses. The place was picked.”
    “What about the call to nine-one-one?”
    “Woman caller, gave the exact location, sounded freaked out. The call came from a no-name phone. Didn’t find a phone with Albitis, so it may have been her own phone.”
    “Shoot.”
    After thinking about it, Lucas called the dispatch center and had them play the 911 call for him. He couldn’t have proven it, not in a court, but he recognized the trembling panic of the caller. “That fuckin’ Sanderson. Kristina Sanderson,” he said aloud, and he went to find her.
    A FTER DROPPING Albitis and making the call to 911, Sanderson wiped the phone with a Kleenex and dropped it out the window onto the freeway, where it was run over several hundred times in the next hour or so, before the biggest chunk of the finely ground remnant made it to the shoulder.
    She was worried about Albitis, but was now more focused on the gold. Albitis, she thought, really couldn’t turn her in, without implicating herself. So, however that turned out, it was something for the future. For now, she had to take care of the gold, which was the only remaining reason for doing any of this.
    B ACK AT THE HOUSE , she threw the boxes of gold back in the car. Since she’d already moved them once, by the time she was finished, she’d moved seventeen hundred pounds of heavy metal, almost as though she’d been stacking car batteries all day.
    When the gold was loaded, she went out to Albitis’s car and found more gold in the trunk. She backed Albitis’s car up to the garage and transferred the gold to her car. Then she got a bunch of garbage bags from under the kitchen sink, a spade, and a blue plastic tarp from the garage, put them in her car, and pulled out to the street. Albitis’s car went into the garage: she’d move it later.
    With all that done, she headed out into the countryside. Out to the farm.
    She’d never really expected to have the money to buy the place, but she’d visited it a dozen times, touring her dream. Dog kennels over here, a stable over there. Chicken coops to the right.
    The drive south took a bit more than an hour, into the Cannon River Valley south of Farmington. The farm was barely a farm anymore—forty acres were planted with a ragged cornfield, but the other forty were nothing but weeds and a scattering of saplings sprouted from windblown seed. A line of taller timber marked the north side, where the land started to fold as it dropped down to the river. The acreage didn’t border on the river itself, but was close. She could walk to a bridge….
    She got to the farm as the sun was hovering above the horizon, turning the overhead clouds a gorgeous lavender-and-salmon. She pulled open the gate—the owner of the land had told her shecould stop by anytime—and pulled in, closed the gate behind herself, and drove slowly along a thin track toward the timber.
    She dug carefully, throwing the dirt onto the blue tarp. By the time she finished, it was nearly dark, the sun long gone; she put one of the plastic bags in the hole, filled it with boxes of gold, then cinched up the bag so it would be as waterproof as possible, then did the same with a second bag. She refilled the hole, replaced a few pieces of sod by flashlight, then threw her equipment back in the car. If anybody were to come by before the next rain, they might find themselves some gold. But that was unlikely: one in a million.
    When she was done, she examined the site one last time with the flashlight, then drove carefully back across the field to the gate, drove through, replaced the gate, and drove home.
    She missed Lucas by ten minutes.

19
    T he dimensions of the problem were now clear.
    Lucas went back to the BCA offices, spoke briefly with Shaffer, who was directing a regional search for Martínez and the third shooter, talking to DEA officials and Mexican Federales, all of whom would love to get their hands on her. Shaffer could plainly see that if he got the bust, he’d be hero of the week; and even if he didn’t, he was getting the credit for breaking her out, and he was taking it.
    Lucas no longer cared about her: now it was a matter of locating her, and whatever happened would happen. Most likely, he thought, it’d be a couple highway patrolmen, in their funny blue hats, chasing them down in rural Kansas, after they were spotted at a gas station. Lucas had his differences with various state highway patrols, based