Stolen Prey

to Lucas, “He is gone. I was waiting for this. I rehearsed this, sitting talking to the investigators, saying, ‘David is gone.’”
    T HEY WORKED through the details. Halfway through, she began to sob, and asked where they could find a bathroom. She didn’t want to go back in the death house, so they walked her down to a neighbor’s place, and asked, and the neighbor said she’d be welcome to use the bathroom.
    She was in there for ten minutes, and Morris said, “Jesus, wonder what’s going on in there.”
    “Crying out of sight,” Lucas said. “She’s got her pride.”
    When she finally came back out, they went back to the porch and walked her through the details: how they’d found the shooters’ car, the meeting the night before. She said Rivera had gotten some information about the shooters’ car from his friends, but she didn’t know exactly what that information was.
    “But he didn’t tell you?” Lucas asked.
    “He might have told me, but I don’t remember. The name, I don’t remember—but he said it was a silver SUV, and it was. I don’t know cars. My job was to drive slowly up the streets, and his job was to look for the car.”
    “Why didn’t he tell us?” Lucas asked.
    She shrugged. “He might have told
you
, but this Shaffer … Shaffer runs this investigation, and David does not like how he is treated, like he is a stupid brown man up here in the white state. You know what I mean?”
    “I got a small feel for that,” said Morris.
    “Yes, a Negro, yes, I suppose,” she said, unself-consciously. “So this is how he is treated, and he told me that when he learned about the truck, and then this morning, with the Zapp’s place … he thought they must be close, and that if we drove around…”
    “You found them,” Lucas said.
    “It took a long time,” she said. “Three hours.”
    “Hell of a lot better than we did,” Morris said. “We hardly got started in three hours.”
    M ORRIS’S PARTNER showed up, and leaned against the banister with Lucas, and they walked through it all over again. When they were finished, Morris and Lucas walked off a bit and Morris said, “You know what the British say, this ‘fuck-all’ thing that they say? ‘You don’t know fuck-all about whatever’?”
    “Sure,” Lucas said.
    Morris looked back at Martínez sitting on the porch, still talking with his partner. “That’s what we got from her,” he said. “We got fuck-all.”
    “I’m gonna go find this Latino guy he talked to last night,” Lucas said. “You want to come?”
    “Let me talk to Larry, I’ll be right with you,” Morris said. Larry was his partner. While Morris was doing that, Lucas went backup the porch steps and looked at Rivera’s body. Martínez said he’d done this before, but Lucas thought that it didn’t look like he’d done it before. Why he thought that, he couldn’t say: but he thought it.
    He walked back out to Martínez and said, “We have to notify the Mexican police. Can you do that informally, and then we could follow up? We need to know the official contact. Preferably somebody who speaks English.”
    She nodded: “I will arrange that.”
    And he asked, “Did David bring that pistol with him? On the plane?”
    She shook her head. “No, he got it last night. If he hadn’t gotten it, he would be alive now.”
    She’d driven to the meeting the night before, and the address was still on the car’s GPS. Lucas took it down and then said, “I’m sorry. I’m really, really sorry.”
    Red-eyed, she started snuffling into another Kleenex, and he went to get Morris.
    M ORRIS DROVE a city sedan so bland that Lucas could barely see it, even when he was sitting inside it.
    “Better than the death trap you’re driving around in,” Morris said.
    T OMAS G ARZA lived south of downtown St. Paul, just off one of the main commercial streets, amid a clutter of food, shoe, and auto franchises, mom-and-pop restaurants, carpet stores,remodeling contractors, and a couple of big box stores and supermarkets.
    He wasn’t home, but his wife was, and worried when they showed her their IDs. “He is gone. I don’t know when he’ll be back,” she said.
    “We don’t have anything to do with immigration,” Lucas said. “We need to talk to him about David Rivera. We need to talk to him right away.”
    Morris played the bad guy: “If we don’t find him right away, we’ll have to ask the immigration people to get involved. They’ve got more sources