Stolen Prey

others. We did not see this possibility, though the death of Rivera had been expected for some time. But not by our hand.”
    “A decision was required,” Martínez said. “I felt for some timethat I was coming to the end with David. He had much guilt about me, and about his wife.”
    “If it was going to end, then, better to have saved the children,” Big Voice said. “So: we will consult, and I will call back.”
    When she hung up, she worried: Big Voice had not been approving. Had, in fact, seemed a bit chilly. Had she miscalculated? She had felt that she was coming to an end with Rivera. Was she coming to an end with the Criminales, as well?
    I VAN T URICEK drove to St. Paul, turned north on I-35E, then exited to an office that he’d rented in St. Paul under a phony name. He’d been willing to do that because he never expected to see the landlord a second time, and he planned to sterilize the place when he left it. It was a package drop, pure and simple. A dozen deliveries were coming that morning, another dozen in the afternoon.
    There’d been no questions at the bank, nobody snooping around, but the cops were moving. Kristina had friends at Polaris, and on Friday afternoon had arranged to bump into them at their regular lunch spot, sat with them, and all the talk was of accountants looking at the computer system.
    So the cops had gotten that far. Taking the step to Hennepin would be difficult, but not impossible. In the meantime, the gold harvest was under way.
    T HE INSTRUCTIONS on the FedEx boxes simply said to leave the boxes outside the door if there was no answer. There’d be noanswer, but Turicek would be waiting behind the door for the FedEx man to leave. Four of the boxes were coming in First Overnight, eight more Priority Overnight.
    Twelve more should arrive in the afternoon on Standard Overnight, Saturday delivery. Albitis was shipping them with a variety of priorities, hoping that they’d be delivered by different FedEx men, in separate vans, to confuse the issue of how many boxes were suddenly arriving at a place that had never before gotten any. None of them would require a signature.
    Turicek was moving early in the day because he didn’t know where he’d fall on the FedEx delivery list. At the office complex, he parked in the lot, down a bit from the office, and spent a few minutes watching. The only activity was at a carpet place, where a couple of people came and went. Turicek sighed, got out of the car with his briefcase, and walked over to the office and let himself in. Waiting for the handcuffs, but they never came.
    T HE OFFICE smelled like carpet cleaner and contained a cheap wooden desk, three inexpensive chairs, an old computer with a keyboard that Turicek got at a rehab store, and a TV set that sat on a built-in bookcase shelf. Whiteboards hung on two walls, with phony scrawled appointments they changed every time somebody was able to stop by. That was usually at night to avoid contact with other tenants.
    There was no telephone.
    Turicek locked the door, pulled on a pair of cotton gloves, and took a seat at the computer. The computer contained no files,but it was hooked into the Internet, paid through the same dead-end account that paid the condo rent. Turicek signed on and began looking for news on the murders in Wayzata: there was a lot of it, but everything he found he’d already seen. The cops were still focusing on Sunnie Software.
    Killing time…
    T HE FIRST spate of the FedEx packages arrived an hour later. Turicek had been pacing back and forth between the front window blinds and the computer, saw the truck pull in. The driver knocked, perfunctorily, and started dropping the packages outside the door. He made two trips, and when he put his truck in gear after the last one, Turicek opened the door and scooped up the packages.
    The biggest of the boxes looked like it might contain books, but was too light—it was a cube eighteen inches or so on each side, and weighed 9.6 pounds, according to the label. Everybody knew that gold was heavy, so they wanted boxes that felt light. Turicek took a box cutter out of his pocket and slashed the box open. Inside were wads of newspaper—the
Los Angeles Times
—and six rolls of American Eagle gold coins wrapped in flexible plastic tubes, taped on the ends.
    He shook the coins out of one of the taped tubes onto the desktop. Twenty coins in each roll, each an ounce of gold, one hundred twenty coins in all. That morning, each