Stolen Prey

with Jesus and the saints, and his continual reflection began to get on the others’ nerves, and finally Dos told him to shut up. Tres smiled and said, “I’m to die soon, why should I listen to you?”
    “Because if you don’t, you will die immediately.” They all laughed at that, and Tres shut up.
    They hung out and watched television until midnight, then carried Pruess’s body out through the side door to the driveway, and heaved it into the back of the Tahoe. They planned to go out far enough that the body, if discovered, wouldn’t bring the police into their neighborhood, and then throw it in a dumpster, and hope that it was hauled away to the dump, or the incinerator, or wherever the
yanquis
got rid of their trash.
    Nothing worked quite right for them.
    There were dumpsters everywhere, but it was hard to find one where they could safely and discreetly lift the lid and deposit a two-hundred-pound body. Especially since the body, wrapped in its blue tarp, looked more like a dead body than it would have if it’d been in a coffin. Somebody would look at the bundle and say, “Well, there’s the head, and there’s the feet, and that thick part is the butt….”
    Another problem was that the body wasn’t easy to handle: it carried like two hundred pounds of Jell-O. They found an obscure dumpster behind an office building, but after pulling up in the car, realized that none of them were tall enough to lift the lid on the dumpster. That got them laughing, but didn’t make things any smoother.
    They laughed less when they found one short enough that they could lift the lid—barely—and then found they couldn’t both hold the lid up and lift the mushy body high enough to get it inside. They were strong little guys, but it was two hundred pounds of mushy dead weight. They kept looking.
    Eventually they found a shorter dumpster on Upper St. Dennis Road, outside a driveway where a house was being remodeled. After driving past a few times, they quickly hopped out, in the deep dark night, popped open the lid, and threw the body in.
    Five seconds later, they were gone.
    F IVE HOURS LATER , Muffy St. Clair, a dog, stopped just down the street to poop. Her owner, Bonnie St. Clair, picked the poop up in a plastic baggie and carried it over to the dumpster to throw it in. Pruess’s body-bundle was folded into the dumpster, feet and head up, butt down, bent in the middle. It took a few seconds, then Bonnie said, “Jesus fuckin’ Christ, Muffy, it’s a body.”
    She ran home to call the cops, and after a while, a St. Paul homicide cop named Roger Morris called Lucas, who had planned to sleep in late on a Saturday morning.
    “Somebody tore the guy to pieces,” Morris said. “It looks like what happened to those people in Wayzata, if those rumors are true.”
    “Half hour,” Lucas said. “Did you call Bob Shaffer?”
    “Naw, he’s an asshole,” Morris said. “You can call him if you want.”
    “Did the dead guy have any ID on him?”
    “We haven’t completely unwrapped him yet. He’s wrapped in a plastic tarp.”
    “Well, his name is probably Richard Pruess, and he was a vice president for Polaris National Bank over in Minneapolis. He was probably killed because some Mexican narcos think he stole a bunch of money from them.”
    “Huh. So I got nothing left to detect,” Morris said.
    “You could detect where the killers are,” Lucas said. “We have no idea.”
    “Okay. Get your ass over here. And call Shaffer.”
    L UCAS DID , but Shaffer lived in one of the far north suburbs, and his wife said he was out running. “He left his cell phone here. He doesn’t like to be disturbed,” Shaffer’s wife said.
    “Well, tell him to call me,” Lucas said. “I need to disturb him.”
    Then he called Rivera, who was eating breakfast, and gave him an address, and headed for the shower. Thirty-one minutes after he took the call, he pulled up to the St. Paul crime-scene tape and got out of the Porsche, held his ID up for the rookie who was minding the tape, and went through the line.
    Morris, a fat black guy in a pink dress shirt and black slacks, was looking with discouragement into the dumpster, while a crime-scene guy walked around the area with a video camera. Morris’s partner, who was standing on a nearby front porch, talkingto the home owner, raised a hand, and Lucas waved back. Lucas walked up to Morris and said, “I really like you in pink, sweetie.”
    “Fuck you. You don’t look this good