Stolen Prey

he?
    He looked at his watch, went to his cell phone and called Bone’s home phone. Bone’s wife picked up, went to get him. Bone said: “You got them. Good work.”
    “Could be a while yet,” Lucas said. “I have a question for you. Have you had anything weird happen with any of your people in the last few weeks? Say, people who would have been aware of an investigation of this account, so somebody up fairly high? Some unusual questions, or concerns…?”
    Bone was crunching on something that sounded like a carrot stick. He crunched and said, “What do you mean, weird?”
    “I’m thinking that the Criminales might have been paying somebody to watch for unusual attention to the account—you know, in case the cops came around, or the DEA. I can see two possibilities. The first is somebody with contacts back in Mexico, who got pulled in somehow. Could be a previous association,could be threats to a family. Whatever. The second possibility is that they simply looked at who was working at the bank, picked somebody out, and paid him. So you’d be looking at somebody who might have had a drug problem, somebody who might have had big financial problems. There’d be rumors around…”
    “I don’t know of anything like that personally,” Bone said. “We’ve got a few alcoholics in positions where they might pick up an investigation, but I don’t know of any druggies. If we knew, we’d get rid of them. But let me ask.”
    “How about Mexicans? Or Central Americans?”
    “I’ll check that, too. I’ve already been thinking about that, and I can tell you, we’ve got quite a few people with Hispanic names. I don’t know who’s a Mexican, or whatever … Let me ask around.”
    “Try not to disturb anyone.”
    “Believe me, these guys I don’t want to disturb.”
    “One more thing,” Lucas said. “When you were talking about the fact that they’d have to change the wire transfers, or whatever, into some high-value form, like gold or diamonds … it seems to me that would be pretty much a full-time job. That the thief would have to have accomplices.”
    “Oh, sure,” Bone said. “Getting this done would be a full-time job. You’d have to buy whatever it is, make the payment, secure it…. Every purchase would involve several contacts with the sellers. These aren’t people who will give you a million bucks in gold with the promise of a check in the mail. I imagine it would take a couple of people, or more than that.”
    “Gold or diamonds or stamps…”
    “I thought about that some more when I got home,” Bone said.“I’d be willing to bet it’s gold. If you were trying to sneak out of Nazi Germany and needed to hide a lot of value, you might take a rare stamp or a bunch of stamps and hide it in a shoe or something. But stamps, and diamonds, and rare coins, have to be sold through specialists. Diamonds have to be evaluated, and that all takes time, and multiple contacts. But you could take a stack of American Eagles into any number of places—hundreds of places here in the States, thousands more in Europe or Asia—and walk away with cash. Say you set up a company called International Goober, and take your Eagles to a gold dealer, get a check made to International Goober, and who’s to know what happened there?”
    “So, gold.”
    “That’s what I think.”
    A FTER TALKING with Bone, Lucas turned to the problem of the thieves.
    A reverse directory got him the full names of Ivan and Kristina—Ivan Turicek and Kristina Sanderson. A check with the NCIC showed no criminal history for either one of them. He got photos, ages, addresses, and car tags from the DMV and found that Turicek had used a Lithuanian passport and a Green Card as identification when he got his first Minnesota driver’s license, five years earlier. Sanderson had held Minnesota licenses since she was sixteen, and so probably was a native.
    He called ICE, got her on the first ring, and said, “In the Polaris computer system, you could see the back door they came through, but you couldn’t see the computer system the instructions came from.”
    “That’s right. What they apparently did was set up their back door, then they’d come in and move money, and each time they backed out, they touched off a little program that wiped the incoming addresses,” ICE said. “If we’d had them, we might have been able to nail down which computers they’d been working from, what the IP addresses were, and so on. All that’s