Stolen Prey

asleep.
    The doc said, “He’ll be gone for a while. You get what you wanted?”
    Lucas looked down at Kline, then shook his head. “There wasn’t much. They crashed his door, he got them to put him in the toilet, and he started screaming…. Hell of a thing, but he doesn’t know anything.”
    “Well … want somebody to call you when he wakes up?”
    Lucas shook his head. “If you don’t mind, I’m just going to sit here with him for a minute, until I’m sure he’s not going to wake up.”
    “He won’t.”
    “If you don’t mind.”
    “I don’t mind, but you’re wasting your time.”
    N OT REALLY , Lucas thought, as the doc moved on. He sat looking at Kline for a couple minutes, then peeked out of the room at the nurses’ station. There were four or five people there, all busy with paperwork. In the other direction, the hall was empty. Lucas walked around the bed, around the monitoring equipment and the drip-bag rack, and pulled open the top drawer of the bedside table.
    The first thing he saw was Kline’s wallet, and next to that, his cell phone. Excellent. He picked up the cell phone and carried it back around the bed to the chair he’d been sitting in, got out his notebook, turned the phone on, and started going through the call log.
    He got an instant hit: starting the day of the murders, there were two dozen phone calls from a Kristina and just as many from an Ivan; there were other calls from a Kristina and Ivan before the murders, but only a couple. The murders, he thought, had caused a ripple.
    He took down the phone numbers of Kristina and Ivan, went looking for their last names, and failed to find them.
    Going back into the call log, he looked for more telltale contacts, but nothing jumped out at him. He moved to the contact directory, touched Kristina, went to History, found a list of messages, and clicked to them.
    All very short:
    Call me. Urgent. Urgent.
    Jacob, call me.
    Jacob, look at TV news. Call Ivan.
    Jacob, you need to take an office shift tomorrow. Call me.
    N OT MUCH information, but he’d learned that Kristina knew Ivan. There were no outgoing messages to Kristina, but Kline had made calls in response to a couple of them. He made one in response to the “office shift.”
    He got a break with Ivan. His messages were also short and cryptic, but one said,
See you at the office.
    Lucas thought:
Ah. They all work with him
.
    The phone might have more information, but he didn’t know how to get at it—Kline listed dozens of contacts, far too many to copy in a short time, but listed no information other than names and phone numbers.
    He checked the apps, looking for photos, found none. He also found a password vault, and it was operational, but he had no idea what the password might be.
    Lucas closed down the phone, slipped it back in the drawer.
    He listened, heard only distant chatter from the nurses. He took Kline’s wallet out of the drawer, went through it quickly. He found only one thing of interest: a card from Sirius satellite radio, and on the back, an apparent password, 6rattata6.
    He noted it and replaced the wallet.
    There was not much chance that the Sirius password also would be the password for the vault. Most vaults, Lucas knew, gave you a prescribed number of chances to enter the password. If you got it wrong, it would then warn you about the number of remaining chances before it scrambled the contents. If he tried entering a password and it didn’t work, then Kline would know that somebody had been working on his phone.
    Not worth it, he thought.
    He looked down at Kline, now sleeping deeply, said, “Huh,” and headed for the door.
    ICE HAD LEFT Polaris National after she and the security people cleaned the booby traps out of the computer system, and she’d gone back to Sunnie to see if she could find the incoming system.
    In the meantime, the DEA agents were trying to track money that, in earlier months and years, had been shipped out of the Bois Brule account … and to find out how it got to Bois Brule.
    Not much for Lucas to do but let them work. Still, he was right there, at the hospital, two blocks away…
    Lucas walked over to the bank, identified himself to the guard, and got him to call O’Brien in the systems center. Bone actually came to collect him.
    “Working late, for a Sunday,” Lucas said, as they went through the big glass doors to the elevator.
    “I’m having trouble getting across how serious this is,” Bone said. “We’ll