Stolen Prey

all of these people sitting here, they all say they get paid, we know they pay rent on the office space … It’d be a hell of a conspiracy.”
    “We’ve got a killing that looks like it’s dope-related, we’ve got people peddling untraceable software in Mexico. It’s gotta be here somewhere,” Lucas said.
    Jones shrugged. “You’re welcome to look. I’ll tell you one thing. If it’s a laundry, and they were stealing money, it wasn’t worth it.” Jones had been to the murder house and had seen the damage.
    “No, it wasn’t,” Lucas agreed.
    “So … Dick and Andi are in the back, doing the interviews,” Jones said. “You want to sit in?”
    “Maybe … but you’re done with the office manager?”
    “For the time being.”
    “Let me talk to her,” Lucas said.
    B ARBARA P HILLIPS was a heavyset blonde in her late forties or early fifties, with an elaborate hairdo, low-cut silky tan blouse,and seven-inch cleavage. She’d been crying, and had mascara running down her face, with wipe lines trailing off toward her ears. She’d been sitting in her office with two other employees when Jones stuck his head in: “We have another agent who’d like to chat with you,” he said to Phillips.
    She nodded and said, “You guys be careful,” to the other employees, and they all shook their heads and trooped out of the room. When Lucas stepped in, Phillips asked, “You think the killers are looking for us?”
    Lucas took a chair and said, “I doubt it … unless there’s some reason you think they might be.”
    “Mr. Chang, Agent Chang, said they thought maybe a Mexican drug gang did it. What does that have to do with us?”
    Lucas shrugged. “I don’t know. Can you think of anything at all?”
    Tears started running down her face, and she sniffed and wiped the tears away, and said, “Our business is with Mexicans. We
like
Mexicans. Half the people working here are Mexicans, or Panamanians.”
    “Liking Mexicans doesn’t mean much to these people, if they’re actually a drug gang,” Lucas said. “Most of the people they murder are Mexicans.”
    “Well, I don’t know,” she said, her voice rising almost to a wail.
    Lucas sat and watched her for a moment, and she gathered herself together and said, “Those poor kids. God, those poor kids. I just hope they didn’t suffer.”
    L UCAS DIDN’T know how to respond to that, given the truth of the matter, so he said, “Tell me one thing that would let thisbusiness…” He paused, then continued, “What am I asking here?” He scratched his chin. “Tell me one thing that would allow a drug gang to use this business for their own purposes. I’m not asking if they did, just make something up. One possibility.”
    She peered at him for a moment, confused, and then sat up, looked at a wall calendar as if it might explain something to her, then looked back and said, “There isn’t any. Not that I can think of. We don’t buy or sell any physical product, so you can’t use us to smuggle anything. There aren’t any trucks, nobody crosses any border. We don’t make that much in profit … and all of our income is recorded because it’s all done with credit cards. So, I don’t know.”
    “Is there any way they could use your computer systems for communications of some kind?” Lucas asked. “Or anything like that?”
    “Why would they?” she asked.
    “I don’t know. I’m just trying to think of anything that might help,” Lucas said.
    Phillips said, “Listen, if they want to communicate, they can buy an encryption package, for a few dollars, that the CIA couldn’t break, and just send e-mails. Why would they go through us?”
    Lucas turned his palms up. “Don’t know. Maybe they didn’t. But somewhere, there’s a reason they were killed. Possibly in this company. Did Mr. Brooks speak Spanish?”
    “Oh, yes. He was fluent. So was his wife,” Phillips said. “They lived in Argentina for five years, and that’s where Pat got the idea for the company. Everybody’s got computers down there, but it’shard to get good software in Spanish. His idea was, get some of these really good, inexpensive, second-level software packages—business software, games, whatever—and translate them into Spanish. That’s what we did. We’d buy the rights, get a contractor to recode in Spanish, and put it online.”
    “Then the customers would download it and that’d be the end of it,” Lucas said.
    “That’s it,” she said.
    “But