Stolen Prey

Mexico.
    “See if you can get a license tag for him. Call Atlanta, see if they can find him.”
    “I wouldn’t hold my breath,” she said. He could hear her typing on her keyboard. “Atlanta’s got … uh, better’n five million people in the metro area.”
    “So we need to get lucky,” Lucas said.
    He had little faith in luck.
    A S R IVERA’S BODY was wheeled out of the house, strapped to a gurney, inside a black plastic body bag, the crime-scene bosswalked over to say to Lucas and Morris, “We got something in the basement.”
    “Like what?” Morris asked.
    “We think it’s blood.”
    They followed him inside and down the stairs into what amounted to a hollow concrete cube with gray-painted walls. A furnace and water heater stood in one corner, with a stack of furnace filters and a circle of dusty hoses. The basement was almost too clean, particularly the floor. “Bernie noticed how clean the floor was, so we started looking around. We think we’ve got blood here.” He pointed at a dark speck on one of the walls. “And over here, on the water heater. You can see the color of it against the white.”
    Lucas squatted to look at the water heater. The spatters, if that’s what they were, were small: smaller than a black ant, close to the size and color of a flea.
    “Looks like blood to me,” Lucas said. He looked at the opposite wall, which was eight or ten feet away. “If blood was getting spattered that far … I bet it was Pruess. I bet they brought him down here and went to work on him.”
    “We oughta know, ninety percent, in an hour or so,” the crime-scene boss said.
    “It was him,” Lucas said. “Goddamnit, I’d like to get my hands on those little fuckers.”
    “We know that they’re little?”
    “That’s what I was told,” Lucas said. “Three of them. Two now.”
    “At least he got one,” Morris said.
    Lucas nodded but said, “One-for-one isn’t the kind of ratio we want. We’ve really got to be careful with these guys.”
    B ACK UPSTAIRS , he looked at the entryway, where Rivera had gone down, and shook his head. Something was nagging at him, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on it….
    He was still trying to figure it out when Bone, the banker, called: “This ICE you sent over, she thinks she’s found a back door into our computer system, but she’s afraid it’s booby-trapped.”
    “I’ll be there,” Lucas said.
    He’d told Morris about the DEA accountants and the possibility of pulling information out of the bank computers, and Morris had asked to be kept current: “But I don’t know shit about computers. I’ll leave it to you guys.”
    So Lucas told him he was leaving, and why, and drove across town, in heavy afternoon traffic, and into Minneapolis’s loop. He found a space in the bank’s parking structure and took the elevator to the systems center. A guard took his ID, made a call, and let him in.
    ICE was sitting on an office chair in one corner, with six regular employees scattered around the room, peering at oversized computer screens. Her feet were up on a desk. She was talking on her cell phone when Lucas walked in, said something in it, and rang off. “I heard about the Rivera guy,” she said.
    ICE was somewhere in her early thirties, slender, medium height with long legs, blond short-cut hair, tight but not spiky, and the finest pale Scandinavian complexion. Lucas had known her since she was seventeen or eighteen, a girl geek at what was then called the Institute of Technology at the Universityof Minnesota; he’d hired her to do some programming at his newly launched Davenport Simulations, the company that made him rich.
    “A complete goddamn disaster,” Lucas said, about Rivera. He pulled an office chair around to face her, and asked, “Where’s Bone? And what’d you get?”
    “He said he’d be down when you got here,” she said. She turned back to her desk and tapped a few keys on a keyboard. The computer screen, which had been dark, came up, showing a palm-sized patch of neatly ranked numbers.
    “Since you don’t know anything about computers…”
    “Though I sold my computer company for eighteen million bucks,” Lucas said.
    “Blind luck and perfect timing,” ICE said. “But you never did know shit about computers, so what I’ll say is, see this bunch of green gobbledygook right here?”
    “Yeah.”
    “What that is, is the beginning of a little programmer’s doily, which, among other things, I think, would allow