Stolen Prey

asked for a password. He took out his notebook and looked up the password he’d found on the back of the Sirius Satellite Radio card, and typed it in: 6rattata6.
    The computer shook him off, and he closed it down and turned away from the desk for a last look around the place.
    There were two big framed posters on the wall opposite the desk, each showing multiple images of Japanese cartoon characters. He hadn’t looked behind them, so he looked behind them and found the back side of posters. When he was straightening the second one, his eye caught a caption with the word
Rattata
.
    He looked closer. The posters were composites of favorite cartoon characters, if
anime
meant “cartoon.” There were a couple dozen of them, and if Kline was taking his passwords from anime characters…
    He went back to the computer and brought it up and it occurred to him that most people didn’t have large numbers of different passwords, but just a couple of passwords, with perhaps variations.
    So instead of plugging in all the anime characters, he started with plain “rattata,” and worked from 0rattata0 through 9rattata9, and was shaken off with each of them.
    “Goddamnit.”
    He looked at the pictures again, then pulled the closest one off the wall. Forty minutes later, working from the names on the picture, he typed in “5pikachu5”—and he was in.
    “Excellent,” he said to himself.
    He went to the Spotlight feature and typed in “Gold,” and gotdozens of hits. He said, “Gotcha,” and then, a minute later, “Don’t gotcha.”
    As he started working through the hits, he found that most of them were document and online files that included the word
Gold
, as in one place, Golden Artist Colors, and in another, WhatsUp Gold, some kind of network monitoring software. Then, as he was growing discouraged, he found Donleavy Precious Metals, and a website for a Chicago dealer in gold, silver, and platinum. A few minutes more got him a link to Las Vegas Numismatics, and he said, “Now I’ve gotcha.”
    When he shut down the computer an hour later, he had a list of twelve dealers on the west and east coasts.
    Too late to do anything about it, he thought.
    Somewhere along the line, it occurred to him that he hadn’t spoken to Virgil Flowers. He’d probably taken the day off, and knowing Flowers, he’d done it in a boat. The thing about Flowers was, in Lucas’s humble opinion, you could send him out for a loaf of bread and he’d find an illegal bread cartel smuggling in heroin-saturated wheat from Afghanistan. Either that, or he’d be fishing in a muskie tournament, on government time. You had to keep an eye on him.
    In bed that night, he spent little time thinking about the tweekers—Flowers would get them—and more time thinking about the gold. The gold was interesting because it tied everything together. He also thought about Shaffer: the problem with Shaffer was that he was straight. Very straight. He had little sense of humor when it came to things like illegal searches, using unknowing innocent people as decoys, and so on.
    He would have to use some finesse, he decided.
    T HE NEXT MORNING , before he left for work, he called Sandy, the researcher, and said, “I need to find the biggest gold dealers in the country. Maybe, like, the top one hundred.”
    “Do you have any idea how I’m supposed to figure that out?” she asked.
    “No, I don’t,” he said. “I need the list this morning. Also, I have three phone numbers. I’d like to know who the subscribers are.”
    “Well, that part’ll be easy enough,” she said.
    O UTSIDE , he found that Letty had parked the Lexus behind the Porsche, and instead of shuffling cars, he took the truck and headed downtown. They met at nine o’clock, the whole murder crew, and Shaffer reported that they had enough evidence to convict anybody they managed to arrest, with fingerprints and DNA from three suspects. “We’ve got everybody in the metro area on board, every single cop has the photos and the Identi-Kits, and we think we may have a line on the car they’re driving. It’s a green Subaru Forester owned by a pretzel seller named Ferat Chakkour, who disappeared after he left his job at the Rosedale mall an hour or so after the shoot-out in St. Paul. He usually parked in the same lot where we found the Texas truck. We think they picked him up, probably killed him, dumped him somewhere, and are driving his car. This is confidential information—we’ve asked