Stolen Prey

couldn’t a drug gang be somehow using the…” He faltered, then said, “But why do it that way, when they could do it with an encrypted e-mail?”
    “I can’t think of why,” she said.
    “Who does the books?”
    “Merit-Champlain, they’re an accounting company over in North St. Paul.”
    “I know them,” Lucas said. He’d used the same outfit when he was running his computer company in the mid-nineties. As far as he knew, they were straight. “Did Brooks finance the company himself?” he asked.
    “As far as I know, yes. He used to work for 3M, he made very good money,” Phillips said. “He had savings, and he borrowed money from his 401K. I think his brother chipped in. When we started, there were only three of us, full-time, Pat and me and Bob Farmer, who was the computer expert. Candy would come in after the kids were at school, and she’d stay until it was time to pick them up. Everything else, we’d farm out. Contract work.”
    “Pretty much a success right from the start?”
    “Not hardly,” Phillips said, shaking her head. “It was two yearsbefore Pat took his first paycheck. After that it came on pretty good, and we’re still growing. Well, we were still growing … I don’t know what’ll happen now.”
    “Are Brooks’s parents still alive?” Lucas asked.
    “Yes. Nice folks. They live out in Stillwater. Agent Chang—”
    “Dick,” Lucas said.
    “Yes, Dick said they were being contacted.”
    “They’d probably inherit,” Lucas said.
    “Unless it’s his brother,” Phillips said. “I really don’t know. Nobody thought … this could happen. That they’d all be gone. Never in a million years.”
    L UCAS WORKED her a bit more, got the name and address of Brooks’s brother, but had the feeling he was pushing on a string. He thanked her and left her in the office. Chang was standing in the hallway with a water-machine paper cup in his hand, and Lucas nodded and asked, “Anything?”
    Chang shook his head. “Lot of Mexicans here, but I’m not seeing anything. They’re all confused as hell. The confusion feels real.”
    “I wish they were making more money,” Lucas said. “I’m not seeing how they could be running a laundry. Maybe the accountants will have something.”
    “Maybe,” Chang said. There was doubt in his voice. “You want to talk to anyone else?”
    “Should I?”
    Chang shrugged. “Well … no. If there’s some kind of secret deal going on, I don’t think they’re all in on it. Probably onlyone of them … and he’ll lie about it. Just talking to them won’t help much.”
    L UCAS HEADED back to his office, a nice quiet space where he could brood. In a complicated investigation, he found it useful to take whatever pieces he had and concoct a story around them. Even if the story was far-fetched, it gave him a starting place, and angles to work.
    On the drive from Wayzata to downtown Minneapolis, his lead story had been “Money Laundry”: that the Brookses had been killed by a drug gang, after doing something fancy with the gang’s money. Chipping off an extra piece.
    Other kinds of organized crime, where you might see the same level of violence, didn’t need the same level of money laundering, because they didn’t operate with huge numbers of small bills. Their violence was usually aimed at eliminating competition.
    Sunnie would have been perfect for a drug gang, with small payments coming in from all over Latin America, consolidated, and moved to a bank. Except, if Phillips and the books were telling the truth, the money wasn’t large enough.
    That one little fact was hard to get around. If it was a laundry, where was the money?
    The other problem, and it could probably be checked, was that the business had been shaky at the start. If it had been set up as a laundry, it shouldn’t have been. Perhaps, he thought, it had been set up as a legitimate business, and had only later been spotted by the gang as a potential laundry.
    H IS OTHER STORY —but it was far back, number ten on his list of two—was Del’s suggestion, that the murders had been the result of a home invasion by a couple of crazy killers, who’d picked a random house in a rich neighborhood. A couple of stupid, crazy guys who looked at the house and thought that there must be big money inside, not being all that familiar with checking accounts and American Express. When they got inside and found that there wasn’t much in the way of money, they amused themselves with