Stolen Prey

banks, and from there to Europe or Asia, but nobody knew for sure how it got there.
    “The thing is,” O’Brien said, “when one of their big shots gets killed, he’s always off in the sticks in Coahuila or Tamaulipas. No place near Europe or Asia. So where the money goes and what they do with it is really a mystery. If we could figure that out, and find out which banks are involved, we could hurt them.”
    He said that the LCN had an alliance with growers in Colombia and Venezuela, and may have used some of the South Americans’ financial expertise to move the cash.
    “They are not subordinates of the Colombia guys—they’re independent. The Colombians tried to get them under their thumbs, and a whole bunch of Colombians got their thumbs cut off,” O’Brien said. “Now the Colombians provide the product, and the LCN gets it across the border to their own retailers on this side. But they’ve got the same trouble everybody does who winds up with bales of hundred-dollar bills—how to get the money clean. We don’t know how they do that, either.”
    “We can’t find it at Sunnie,” Shaffer said. “We’ve got an accountant of our own looking at the books and talking to Sunnie’s accountants, and it doesn’t look like much money was running through their accounts.”
    “Maybe we’ll have to look at their accountants,” O’Brien said.
    “They’re a pretty big company, been here a long time, and clean, as far as anybody knows,” Shaffer said. “It’d be hard to believe that they’d take on something as risky as a Mexican gang account.”
    “It’s there somewhere,” one of the other DEA agents said. “Gotta be.”
    Lucas nodded: he’d said the same thing himself.
    L UCAS SAID , “Our big question is, why did they do it this way, this massacre, and turn it into a sensation? Maybe you can get away with that in Mexico, and maybe they do it when somebody needs public disciplining. But this … they’re not taking credit for it, so it wasn’t disciplinary. It looks like they were trying to extract some information from the Brookses, and not getting it.”
    “And if the Brookses were knowingly dealing with these guys, it doesn’t seem likely that they’d be crazy enough to steal from them,” Shaffer said.
    “Or not talk when they showed up,” Lucas added.
    “It’s gotta be money,” O’Brien said. “Maybe they’re killing two birds with one stone—looking for their money and making a point.”
    “What are the chances that it’s a rogue element?” Shaffer asked.“Some smaller group inside the Criminales knew about Brooks, and they came up to hijack the money stream?”
    O’Brien shrugged. “Dunno,” he said. “I guess it’s possible.” His voice said that it wasn’t possible, and that Shaffer should hang his head in shame for having suggested it.
    Shaffer, his face slightly red, began to tap-dance. “Or maybe the Brookses just really pissed them off, or threatened them somehow, and they came up, you know, to shut them down.”
    “But then, why the whole torture scene?” O’Brien asked. “These guys are brutal, but they’re not stupid. They really don’t do crimes of passion. They kill for business reasons. If they just wanted to shut Brooks down, they could have come up here, shot Brooks on the street, and gone back home. You guys would be scratching your heads. Nobody would even suspect anything other than a robbery…. Now, you’re gonna be chasing Mexicans all over town. The DEA gets involved, the Justice Department calls up the Mexican government, and they get more pressure put on them…. They’re not impervious to pressure, you know. They don’t want a battalion of Federales up their ass that might have gone up somebody else’s ass.”
    T HEY ALL thought about that for a minute, then Lucas asked O’Brien, “You’re not really here to catch the killers, are you?”
    “We’d certainly like to,” O’Brien said. There was a tentative note in his voice.
    “But basically, you’re here to see if you can find a way to mess with the business,” Lucas said. “From that perspective, the guys who did the actual killing are probably small potatoes. You’rehere to look at the books, not to track somebody down in Minneapolis.”
    O’Brien nodded. “Yeah. That’s pretty much the case. We’re not equipped to go chasing after individual murderers. We want to bust up their
system
. We’d like to find the cash that Brooks stole, and take it away from them.