Stolen Prey

Turicek’s passport photo and said, “This man?”
    Ibriz looked at it for a moment, then said, “What has he done?”
    “Do you know him?” Lucas asked.
    “Not as this Ivan,” he said. Ibriz turned and went back to his desk and pulled out a long card file, looked down a list, then pulled out a card. “I rented an office near I-35E to a man named Carl Schmitz, a German, who is this man. This Turicek. This is the only time I see him.”
    “When was this?” Lucas asked.
    Ibriz looked back at the card. “July seventh. A one-year lease.”
    “Do you have a key?” Lucas asked.
    “Maybe I should have a warrant,” Ibriz said.
    Lucas shook his head. “Turicek is dead. Murdered. His office may be a crime scene, so we don’t need a warrant.”
    Ibriz nodded. “Okay. So I have a key. I’ll come with you.”
    T HEY TOOK Del’s car, and followed Ibriz in his Mercedes north out of downtown on I-35E for five minutes. The office was in a long, low white-painted concrete block building with fake-stone accents, and perhaps ten offices. Each office had a big window covered with a white blind, all fronting on a narrow parking lot. There were a half dozen angled parking spaces for each office, but no more than a dozen cars in the entire lot: a start-up office complex, for start-up businesses.
    Turicek paid nine hundred dollars a month in rent, Ibriz said, and had paid first and last, as well as a one-thousand-dollar deposit.
    Ibriz unlocked the door and stood back: inside, they found a desk, an office chair, a computer that went back to the nineties, a big TV older than the computer, and some other miscellaneous junk. Everything looked spotless, and smelled of Windex.
    “It’s been wiped,” Del said.
    There was a door to the back: they looked into a back room, which was empty. There were two more doors, a bathroom and a coat closet, Ibriz said. Lucas looked in the bathroom, and then Del, who looked in the closet, said, “Here’s something … boxes.”
    Inside the closet, dozens of small boxes were stacked nearly waist high. Lucas reached out with one hand to pull a box forward, but fumbled it because of the weight: it hit the floor with a solid
thunk
.
    “What?” Del asked.
    Lucas picked up another box, held it against his stomach, and asked, “You got a knife?”
    Del had a switchblade and flicked it open and cut the packaging tape. Lucas reached inside and pulled out a translucent soft-plastic tube stuffed with yellow coins the size of poker chips.
    “It’s the gold,” he said. “It’s the fucking gold.”

21
    L ucas backed away from the pile of boxes and said, “Okay, this could be big trouble. We need to get some guys here, we need Shaffer, we need an accountant. We need the DEA.”
    “Gold,” Del said, with a gleam in his eye.
    Ibriz said, “To find this, this is a gift from Allah.” He looked at Lucas and Del with anticipation.
    “We need a lot of guys,” Lucas said. “We need witnesses.”
    Ibriz groaned, but Lucas said, “Forget about it.”
    T HE PROBLEM WAS , Lucas thought, that if you found twenty-two million dollars’ worth of gold in a closet, and you were a cop, there were going to be questions about whether all of it made it back to headquarters. He wasn’t exactly sure what the price of gold was, but it was something around sixteen hundred dollars an ounce. Each plastic sleeve, of twenty coins, would be worth something like thirty-two thousand dollars. There appeared to be hundreds of sleeves.
    Del made the call, while Ibriz went into mourning. They were ten minutes, normal driving, from the BCA building, and Lucas,without timing it, suspected that Shaffer and his team made it in six minutes. Shaffer burst into the office and cried, “You got it?”
    Lucas pointed at the boxes, and handed the open one to Shaffer. Shaffer fumbled out a couple of the plastic tubes, and one popped open, and gold coins tumbled to the carpet. “My God, look at this. It’s gold,” Shaffer said. He started to laugh, uncontrollably, and everybody stood back and looked at him.
    The DEA guys were next in. O’Brien looked at the boxes and shook his head. “You guys want to be careful,” he said. “You know what the assholes are going to say. That some of it stuck to your fingers.”
    “That’s why we’ve got everybody here,” Lucas said. He nodded at the other two DEA agents. “They’re accountants. Let’s get them to count it.”
    They were talking about that when Shaffer said to Lucas,