Stolen Prey

would be nice to know where he’s putting it, and where it’s coming from.”
    When they were gone, he got his jacket, planning to head for Minneapolis: he wanted to talk to Kline again, and then to Bone. He opened his office door and saw Sandy, the researcher, coming down the hall. She was a tall woman, thin, introverted, bespectacled, a latter-day hippie in paisley dresses with an improbable talent for tracking crooks through her computer systems. Everybody in the BCA abused her talent, when they could, and Lucas and Virgil Flowers led the pack. She said, “I’ve got your list. I can’t guarantee that they’re exactly the top one hundred, but they’re big.”
    Lucas said, “All right. Sit in Cheryl’s chair.” He pointed her to a chair where his secretary normally worked. “I’ll be back in a minute.”
    “Wait,” she said. “I also checked those three phone numbers—they’re all to prepaid cell phones. No credit cards attached tothem. Sold through Walmart. So you’re outa luck, unless you actually find one of the phones.”
    He went back in his office, closed the door, got out the list of gold dealers he’d found in Kline’s computer, and compared his list to Sandy’s. All twelve of Kline’s shops were on the list.
    He made check marks next to the dealers he’d found in Kline’s computer, put his list away, and carried Sandy’s back to her.
    “I want you to call the top twenty-five, plus the ones I’ve checked. Everybody should know about these killings, what’s going on here. You can imply that we’re calling because of that investigation.”
    “Are we?”
    “Yeah—but we’re chasing the people who took the money, not the killers,” Lucas said.
    “I’d like to get the killers,” she said.
    “So would I, but we do what we can.”
    “So what are we looking for?”
    “We want physical descriptions of people who are making big buys, of gold coins, not bars with serial numbers. We only want people who started last month and have come back repeatedly. They want physical delivery of the coins, and they want fast delivery. We’re talking buys in the hundreds of thousands of dollars…. Tell the dealers we don’t necessarily need names, but we need the physical descriptions. If you find somebody making really big buys, at a lot of shops, somebody who sounds like the same guy, then call all one hundred dealers and see if you can figure out how much gold the guy is taking and anything else you can get—name, bank, whatever.”
    “That’ll take me all day,” she said.
    “Probably.” He put his jacket on. “Better get to work.”
    M ARTÍNEZ DID NOT call the Big Voice immediately. Instead, she drove back to the St. Paul Hotel, lay on her bed, and thought about her next move. Twenty-two million dollars, or a large part of that, was sitting out there in gold. She was paid quite well by the Criminales, but the compensation was nothing like a million a year. Not even a tenth of that. Twenty-two million…
    She considered several possibilities:
    She might try to go for the gold herself. If Davenport would keep filling her in on the investigation, and if she could get to one of the thieves first, with Uno under control, she
would
find out where the gold was: Uno was the designated torturer. Then, if something happened to Uno, she would be there with the gold. If she weren’t greedy, and took only part of it—say, five million—and let the police find the remainder, who would know, or be able to figure out, what happened to the rest?
    Or, she could recover all the gold for the Criminales and suggest to the powers that she deserved a cut for her actions. They’d probably give her something—not five million, but something. Five percent? One million? Maybe. It wouldn’t cost them much, compared to what they got back, and would demonstrate their generosity toward loyal employees.
    Or, she could recommend that they cut the cord, with everybody pulling back to Mexico. That, she thought, was a problem for one big reason: she, Uno, and Tres weren’t important enough to save, compared to the value of the gold. They’d want her to risk everything in going for it—and if she lost, and was killed or imprisoned … well, she just wasn’t that big a deal, to them.
    She considered the possibilities and decided that whatever she eventually did, she didn’t have to make a decision immediately.
    So she called the Big Voice and filled him in: told him about the discovery of the shadow books