Stolen Prey

gone—had hidden his gun safe. The gun safe was still there, though all the long guns had gone shortly after Daddy died, sold to his hunting buddies. A couple of handguns remained, which she hadn’t bothered to get rid of.
    Since she and her mom didn’t share a last name, and her mother wouldn’t have remembered her last name if asked, the gold was safe enough, at least for a while.
    Standing in front of the safe, looking at the now substantial stacks of coin—fifteen million worth? eighteen million?—and the two guns, Sanderson, though a gentle person, couldn’t help thinking:
    If something happened to the other three, then she’d have it all….
    W HEN L UCAS got to Minneapolis, he stopped first at Polaris, and went up to Bone’s office. Bone was in a meeting, but came out to talk: “What do you need?”
    “Do you know anybody who’d do you a favor at Hennepin National?”
    “Sure. I know the boss, Bob McCollum,” Bone said. “You’re still looking at this Kline guy?”
    “I think … I’m not sure … that another guy in the computer department might be in on it. I need to talk to somebody nice and quietly who knows the people in their systemsdepartment. All of the people. Somebody who can keep his mouth shut.”
    Bone tipped his head down the hall toward his office: “Come on. I’ll call Bob.”
    H ENNEPIN WAS only three or four blocks from Polaris, and Lucas walked over, went up to McCollum’s office. McCollum was not particularly happy to see him, and less happy when Lucas finished outlining the problem.
    “You think they’ve figured out a way to get into Polaris’s systems from here?”
    “I think it’s a possibility. I’m most interested in Kline, Turicek, and Sanderson, but there might be others,” Lucas said. “Is there somebody outside the department who’d know them all?”
    McCollum scratched his head, then picked up his phone, pushed a button, and said, “Babs, could you come in here?” To Lucas, he said, “My assistant.”
    A woman stuck her head in a moment later and said, “Sir?” She was an older woman, with steel-gray hair; she did not, Lucas thought, look like a Babs.
    “Come in and talk to this guy. This is Lucas Davenport, he’s with the BCA.”
    Babs nodded. “I know the name.”
    “So tell her,” McCollum said.
    Lucas outlined the problem, and the woman thought for a moment and said, “Dave Duncan would be your best possibility. He’s in HR and he vets all the computer people. He had systems management courses in college, he knows that language.”
    “Get him up here,” McCollum said.
    M C C OLLUM EXCUSED himself to go to his private bathroom, and Lucas sat and read a
Cowboys & Indians
magazine, and decided he needed some cowboy boots. McCollum came back, his face and hair damp, and a minute later Babs escorted Duncan through the door. Duncan was a nervous, narrow-shouldered man in a gray suit, some indeterminate age between twenty-eight and forty, Lucas thought; one of those men who looked like they’d never quite grown up, and didn’t know what to do about it.
    Lucas told him the story. Duncan rubbed his fingers together as he listened, looked away from Lucas out through office windows, across town toward the Polaris Tower, where, as far as Lucas knew, Bone might be staring back.
    When Lucas finished, Duncan didn’t say anything until McCollum grunted, “Well?”
    “Turicek may be a criminal,” he said. “There was a party once, a karaoke party over at the Raven, and he and Doris Abernathy got loaded and I think she may have gone home with him. May have continued to see him for a while. Anyway, Doris told me later that he’d get drunk and tell the most outrageous stories about himself, about the old days in computer school in Russia, or Lithuania. About hacking and so on. I did some careful research on him, but there was nothing to be found.”
    “What about Kline?” Lucas asked.
    “He came with a good recommendation from Polaris, but he’s not really a satisfactory employee. He’s sick too often, and we believe he’s faking it, but there’s no question that he’s been undertreatment for depression. Firing him … becomes complicated. In any case, he’s not really a satisfactory employee, though he’s smart enough.”
    “Sanderson?”
    “Quiet, but a little nutty? Nothing out of control, but, you know … a former girl nerd, so to speak, smart, does her work. The kind of person who, after a few years, might open a candle