Stolen Prey

everybody to hold it close, make sure it doesn’t get out to the media. We’ve talked to all the highway patrols all the way to the Mexican border.”
    “Gonna leak pretty quick,” Lucas said. “This guy got any family?”
    “He’s got a housemate, another student, we’ve asked him to keep his mouth shut, but he’s already been talking to Chakkour’s parents in Cairo. Chakkour’s from Egypt. The roommate’s already talked to some classmates … but we’re hoping to keep it close for a day or two, maybe pick up the car before it breaks out.”
    They’d already had four separate alerts, from cops who thought they might have spotted the suspects, but nothing had panned out; still, it kept them jumping.
    The DEA, O’Brien said, was working the offshore banks but hadn’t gotten anything yet. “Probably get it later today—we’re talking to the state department and our own people, squeezing as hard as we can. It’s not usually as hard to get it if we say it’s drug money. The problem is, every time the IRS goes after some corporation for tax evasion, they start out by saying it’s drug money, so the banks don’t always believe us anymore.”
    Shaffer wrote a note and pushed it to another BCA agent while O’Brien was talking; Shaffer didn’t care about the banks.
    Lucas told them about his conversations with Kline and Bone, and his conclusions from those conversations: that the thieves who’d hijacked the bank account were probably buying gold, and that there were probably several of them. He mentioned that he was having a researcher get together a list of gold dealers who could be checked for suspicious gold sales. He also suggested that the Criminales must have had a contact at the bank who tipped them to the suspicions about Kline.
    “So you keep doing that, working on the thieves, and we’llkeep pushing people on the shooters,” Shaffer said. “If anything comes up, for anybody, call us.”
    “The thing is, Kline’s the best lead we’ve got for the thieves, and the Criminales apparently think the same thing. I’d love to find something we could use to serve a search warrant on his young ass,” Lucas said. “If anybody thinks of anything…”
    O’Brien asked, “Say, anybody seen Ana Martínez?”
    Shaffer shrugged. “I know she was making arrangements to take Rivera’s body back to Mexico. I talked to her last night. I thought she’d be here. I called her, but she didn’t answer her phone.”
    Lucas said, “That’s a little worrisome. I’ll check on her.”
    As they were breaking up, O’Brien took a call, listened for a minute, then said, “We’ll be right over. We’re just leaving here, about twenty minutes.”
    He hung up and said, “That was ICE. She found the shadow books at Sunnie. She said they’ve been there right from the start, when the system was first put together.”
    “Bingo,” Shaffer said. “That’s large. I’m coming with you. Lucas?”
    “I’ll be around.”

13
    L ucas was sitting at his desk when Martin Clark, the Minneapolis homicide detective, called and demanded, “What the hell did you do in Kline’s apartment last night?”
    Lucas, confused, said, “What?”
    “What’d you do to the computer?”
    “I didn’t do anything to the computer,” Lucas said. “Your guy was there the whole time. What happened to it?”
    “Somebody cracked it open and took the disk drive.”
    “Ah, shit … Marty, I didn’t touch the goddamn computer. I was just sitting here trying to think of a way to get a search warrant…. Wait a minute, could I put you on hold for a minute? Or call you right back?”
    Martínez stepped to the doorway, looked in; her face was drawn, her eyes puffy. Lucas held up a finger. Clark said, “Yeah, okay. What’s going on?”
    “Tell you in one minute,” Lucas said. Then, “Wait, wait, was the door forced? It wasn’t, was it?”
    “No, the door’s fine.”
    “I’ll get right back to you,” Lucas said.
    He hung up and pointed Martínez at a chair, said, “Ana, glad to see you. I was a little worried. I’ve been trying to get in touch.”
    “My phone was off,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
    “Gotta make a call.” Lucas called Hennepin Medical Center, was put through to the surgical intensive care ward, identified himself, and asked the nurse, “I really need to know if Mr. Kline had any visitors this morning…. Yeah, I’ll hold.”
    When he was on hold, he said to Martínez, “Trying to get a line on the