Stolen Prey

was no reason to expect that Lucas would be awake, either, and there was no reason that he should have to suffer alone, so he called Del, got his wife, and told her that he was on his way and to pull Del out of bed.
    Del was not happy when Lucas arrived: “There’s a nuclear weapon somewhere in the Twin Cities and we only have a half hour to find it,” he said. He was sitting on his bed, pulling on his socks.
    “No, there’s a guy named Jacob in an apartment off Lyndale who may have stolen twenty-two million dollars, and we have to shake it out of him,” Lucas said.
    Del: “Jesus, couldn’t you have gotten a flunky to go with you?”
    “Uh, Del…”
    “I know, I
am
a flunky.” He got a pistol from under the bed, already in a holster, and stuck it in his belt. “I’m good.”
    D EL LIVED in St. Paul. Lucas filled him in as they drove back to Minneapolis, then turned south.
    “What you’re telling me,” Del said, “is that we got nothing but what some pizza guy suspects.”
    “No. We’ve got solid judgments from two computer people that the work looks like Kline’s, and that he has voiced some inclination to make a killing, somehow. And that he was fired,and he was pissed about it. According to the Polaris computer guy, when they fired him, he threatened to shit in their revolving door.”
    “Another Dillinger, no doubt about it,” Del said.
    T HEY WERE at the apartment by eight-thirty. Most of the parking around Kline’s apartment was on-street, but they found a space without much trouble. They walked around a corner past a basement-level mystery bookstore, and Del asked, “You read that stuff?”
    Lucas nodded. “Sure. We’ve got a bunch of detective novels up at the cabin. I read them on rainy days. They’re mostly full of shit.”
    “That’s because they have to combine Hollywood and the cops. An author told me that,” Del said. “He said if a book described what the cops really do, everybody would fall asleep. So they have to stick in some Hollywood. Maybe a lot of Hollywood.”
    “What about true-crime books? Those sell pretty well.”
    “Yeah, but … those aren’t about the cops,” Del said. “Those are about the criminals, and what they do. The bloodier the better.”
    “You ever read that book about Ted Bundy?” Lucas asked, as they waited by the door to the apartment.
    “No, but I saw the movie. He was cute as a button, Ted was.”
    A guy came out of the apartment and Del hooked the door while it was open. The guy turned and looked at Del, frowned and asked, “Do you live here?”
    “Would I be going in if I didn’t?” Del asked.
    Lucas pulled his ID and said, “It’s okay, we’re cops.”
    The guy nodded and took another look at Del, and went on his way.
    “People are just too goddamn suspicious,” Del said.
    A CCORDING TO the building directory, Kline was in 204. They took one flight of steps, turned right, and were looking at the door, one of twenty or thirty running down a long dim hallway. Lucas knocked. They waited. No response, so he knocked louder. No response, so he knocked louder yet, and they heard what sounded like a groan from the apartment, and heard somebody call, “I’m coming.”
    They could tell before he got to the door that he was barefoot, from the soft footfalls. A chain rattled on the back of the door, and the man opened it. He was as tall as Lucas, or maybe an inch taller, white, with a curly black semi-Afro. He had thin, wispy whiskers on a face that probably wouldn’t need much shaving. He was wearing a pair of jockey shorts and nothing else. He said, “I don’t want any.”
    “We’re with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension,” Lucas began.
    “I don’t want any of that, either,” the man said.
    “Are you Mr. Kline?” Del asked.
    “Yeah. I think so. I was last night.” He pulled on the top of his underpants, peered into the opening, then looked up and said, “Yep. Still am. What do you want?”
    “We need to talk to you,” Lucas said.
    “Oh, right,” Kline said. “I let you in, you toss my apartment, take my stash.”
    “Not interested in your stash,” Del said. “We don’t have asearch warrant, so we won’t toss the apartment. We just need to talk to you about a problem at Polaris National.”
    Kline snorted, “They got more than one problem.”
    A young blond woman came out of her apartment down the hall, wearing what might have been a churchgoing dress, and as she pulled her door closed she called,