Stolen Prey

watermelon, or a basketball, there was this awful
whump
sound,” Betty said. “I knew we hit his head….”
    The white car sped away while the two Johnsons jumped out of their truck and found Turicek half under it, about halfway down the length of the truck. He had a tire track on his pants, and the Johnsons said they’d probably run over his body, just at the hips.
    They’d stopped traffic and called 911 on Robert’s cell phone. The ambulance had been there in five minutes, right behind a cop car.The ambulance attendants had pulled Turicek out from under the truck, and it seemed like he was dead, except that he kept blowing blood bubbles. They threw him on a gurney and rushed him back to the hospital. It was then, the responding St. Paul uniform said, that they saw that his arms were taped behind him.
    Lucas turned to Shaffer and asked, “How’d they know where to find him? How did they know that?”
    Shaffer shook his head: “Has to be a leak inside the bank. I mean, my team didn’t even know he’d run, and if it was only you and Jenkins and Shrake and…”
    They turned and looked at Sanderson. She said, “Not me. I didn’t tell anybody.” Then she remembered the phone call, put her fingers to her lips, and said, “Oh … wait.”
    Shaffer: “What?”
    “Somebody called me and asked where he was. I told them he went jogging,” she said.
    Lucas said to Shaffer, “That was Jenkins.”
    “Who else did you mention it to?” Shaffer asked her.
    “Nobody. Nobody else,” she said. “Not a single person called me, except that one person, after he went jogging. Who cares if somebody goes jogging?”
    Lucas: “Did he ever go jogging before?”
    “No. No. He showed up with some bags from Macy’s, went into the men’s room, changed, and said he was going jogging. He’d never jogged before.”
    Shaffer looked at Lucas and conceded, “Okay. He knew.”
    Lucas looked at Sanderson for another long minute, then said, “Miz Sanderson, I need to talk privately with Agent Shaffer for a few seconds, then I need to speak privately with you.”
    She said, nervously, “Okay.”
    Lucas and Shaffer walked down the sidewalk and Lucas said, “Why don’t you take off? You don’t want to witness this.”
    “What’re you going to do?”
    “Push her around,” Lucas said.
    Shaffer said, “I’ll see you at the meeting tomorrow.”
    L UCAS TOOK S ANDERSON to an empty hospital room, pointed her at a chair, then stood over her, and too close.
    “You’re going to prison for life.”
    “No…”
    “Yes, I think so. I’m almost sure of it. The fact is, you’ve been withholding information from us, and that information could have led to the arrest of these Mexican killers. That makes you complicit in a whole series of first-degree murders. They have a source of information inside your bank, and you could probably tell us who it is. Instead, you keep passing along this bullshit about how you know nothing, it was all Turicek. Well, I don’t believe it, and neither will a jury. I am going to arrest you. Just a matter of time, Kristina. It’s a matter of time.”
    “But I don’t know anything,” she wailed. “I’ve tried to tell you everything—”
    “You’re going to prison,” Lucas repeated. “But before I come over and arrest you, I want to tell you in some detail what they did to the Brooks children before they killed them.”
    And he did, telling her about the throat-cutting, the knuckle amputations, the rape of the little girl and the mother while their father was bound on the floor beside them, about the puddles ofblood and the bluebottle flies and the finger stumps used to write the bloody message on the wall.
    Sanderson’s head went down, her hands between her thighs, pressed together, her forehead nearly on her thumbs. “This is what you guys did, bringing these killers into town,” Lucas said.
    “It was all Ivan. It had to be,” she said. “I didn’t know.”
    Lucas got up, sighed, and said, “Well. Be seeing you. Take care of yourself, these people are crazy.”
    Now her head came up and she shouted at him, spittle flying across the room: “I know they’re crazy. You don’t have to tell me. They almost killed that poor Jacob, who wouldn’t hurt a fly, and they murdered Ivan, and they missed me just because I got lucky, and you know who brought them around to us? You police! You police dragged them in on top of us. That’s why they’re coming for us. You did this!”
    “See