Stolen Prey

over at Sunnie. They must have separate books out in a cloud somewhere. They use their system to take the money in, and kick it back out.”
    “We’ve got ICE looking at it,” Lucas said. “If it’s there, she’ll find it.”
    O’Brien asked Brown, “Doesn’t somebody have to direct the dispersal of the funds? Don’t you deal with somebody from Bois Brule? I mean, who was that?”
    Brown looked into a file folder, a bunch of paper torn from yellow legal pads. “A person named Sandor Gutierrez, who apparently has been in to the bank only once, to set up the account, through Pruess,” he said. He was sweating, Lucas thought. “Since then, he’s operated on the basis of encrypted instructions sent via the Internet, along with a code word as verification. This was all very routine.”
    “And profitable, for you,” Shaffer said.
    Bone jumped in: “Of course—we’ve made several tens of thousands of dollars on the account every year. We’ve made about as much on the account as we drop around the cash register every day.”
    “You’re saying that the money was no big deal,” O’Brien offered.
    “It wasn’t a big deal. Not for us. It’s chicken feed,” Bone said. “The fact is, we were used. We’ll cooperate with any law enforcement agency that wants in. We will press charges against anyone involved, and we will cover any loss claims.”
    The attorney nodded, and added, “We don’t expect to see any of this in the media. We won’t, will we?”
    “Not from us,” Shaffer said.
    “I ’D LIKE to see a loss claim,” Rivera said, picking up on Bone’s comment. “A loss claim would be very interesting—but I can promise, this is one claim you won’t see.”
    Shaffer asked Brown, “Wasn’t this all very unusual? Didn’t you flag…?”
    Brown was shaking his head. “Looking at it the way we did—the way we do—it was simply a successful business, processing bills. Pruess was supposed to have vetted him, and after that, it ran on autopilot. Bois Brule would accept credit charges, would run them through us, money would come in, and at the end of the month, they’d move their money out.”
    “And it’s not nearly the biggest account we do that for,” Bone said. “Best Buy runs more money through here in a day than Bois Brule did in a month.”
    The long-haired man, who’d been introduced as Ron Vaughn, held up a finger. Everybody looked at him, and he said, “We’re tearing the system down now. Like Mr. Bone said, Pruess sold the account, but he had no access to it. As far as we know, anyway. They may have trusted him with the dispersal codes, of course, which would explain just about everything—”
    “Everything except why they didn’t snatch him
first
,” Shaffer said. “If you’ve got a guy handling the money for you, and the money disappears, wouldn’t you talk to him first?”
    Lucas: “We don’t know the details. We just don’t know. Maybe they called Pruess to ask what the hell was going on, and heconvinced them it had to be the Brookses. Maybe the Brookses passed it back to him … we just don’t know, and there’s no real way to find out.”
    “And if you were handling the money, and you knew that the Brookses had been slaughtered, maybe you’d just run,” O’Brien said. “Maybe Pruess is on his way to Italy.”
    “No. Not Italy, anyway,” said Bone. “When we had his partner look for him, he called back to say that Pruess’s wallet and car keys were in his bedside table, along with a money clip. I asked his partner to look, and Pruess had two hundred in the clip, and four hundred in the wallet. He didn’t take his cash card, either, his debit card, and he has sixteen thousand in his account. He also said that Pruess’s passport was there. So not Italy.”
    “Is sixteen thousand a lot, for a vice president?” Shaffer asked.
    Bone shook his head. “No, I wouldn’t think so. He had an account that allowed you to move money around online, and most of it was in a cash investment account, the rest in what was a bill-paying account. It looked okay … at least, superficially.”
    “Let me go back to this guy,” Lucas said, pointing at Vaughn, the systems manager. “Were you about to say that whatever happened, it had to go through your computer system?”
    “Yes. And Pruess didn’t have that kind of access—the access needed to move that money directly.”
    “Who did?”
    Vaughn chewed his upper lip for a moment, like men do when they’ve