Stolen Prey

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 havegotten 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.”
    L UCAS AND S HAFFER 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.
    D EL 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?”
    T ERRILL A NDERSON , 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