Stolen Prey

and I pull the car out and across the street, jump out and run up the steps,” Lucas said. “I wasn’t more than a minute behind them, going through the front door. I punch out the door panel, get inside. I know what her apartment number is, I run up the steps. They can’t have gotten to her apartment as fast as I did—for one thing, they had to talk with the manager, at least for a second or two. So I run up the steps, and they’re gone.
Gone
. Vanished. Nobody ever saw them again. Why is that?”
    “Tell me,” Shaffer said.
    “First, because I semi-fucked up. We were always dealing withthe idea of three Mexican men. One was dead, here were the other two. Why would I worry about another one? But, the thing is, I’d given Rivera and Martínez a ride in the Lexus.
She knew the car.
And guess what? She’d driven them over there, and was waiting up the street, behind me. I never saw her. That’s where they were walking from. Her car. She saw the Lexus, saw me jump out, and she called them on their cell phones. They ran out the back way and around the building, and she picked them up and they were out of there. It’s the only thing that works.”
    Shaffer thought about it for a minute, then said, “I’m buying that, too.”
    “Third,” Lucas said. “We’ve known we had a leak. They weren’t one step ahead of us or behind us—they were exactly in step with us. We thought it was in the bank—but why would a leak in the Polaris bank know about Sanderson over at Hennepin? At least, know that fast? But when we
suspected
Kline or Sanderson had something to do with the theft, with no proof at all, we couldn’t do anything about it. We just had to keep looking. But
they
could do something about it. They were right there, ready to go. They were all over Kline right after we told her about him.”
    “So what are we going to do about it?” Shaffer asked.
    “We’re gonna set them up,” Lucas said. “I’m already moving on it. But I’m going to need you to do some acting.”
    Shaffer scratched his head. “I can do that.”
    L UCAS LAID OUT the rest of his plan, and when he finished, Shaffer said, “It bothers me that we don’t tell the rest of the crew until later.”
    “Somebody will give it away,” Lucas said. “I’ll tell you what, Bob, she’s both a major crook and a kind of a cop—she’s worked both sides, and if she smells a rat, she’s outa here. She’ll just take Rivera’s ashes and go home. So we don’t tell anybody what we’re doing. The whole discussion will be real, instead of phony.”
    “Some of the guys will be pissed,” Shaffer said.
    “Hey, a little rain, you know? Apologize later,” Lucas said. “What worries me more is that some of them are going to argue that it’s really stupid not to cover the house from the get-go. We gotta go with the idea that we just don’t have the guys, and we don’t have anything for a warrant. We say we’re gonna put two on Kline, we’re gonna put two on Sanderson, we’re gonna put four out at the airport, wait for the plane and then follow her.”
    “What’s her name? The chick we’re following?”
    “Martha … something?”
    “Martha White,” Shaffer said. “Like the biscuit mix.”
    “Good. So you want to do this?” Lucas asked.
    “Got nothing to lose,” Shaffer said. “If you’re wrong, we pay some overtime. But if you’re right, we get three killers.”
    L UCAS GOT a call back from Dom, the brother-in-law, who’d found a house off East Margaret Street, owned by an absentee landlord who’d be happy to take a thousand dollars for three days, plus costs, if the cops did any damage. Lucas okayed the deal, Dom gave him the number for the realtor’s lockbox on the front door and said he’d pull the F OR S ALE sign.
    “You could do the landlord a favor and fire a few shots throughthe roof,” Dom said. “The place really needs a new roof before he can sell it.”
    “We’ll do that for sure. You can count on it,” Lucas said.
    T HEY WERE out of the coffee shop by eight-thirty, and since the house was not too far from the BCA, they went that way. The key was in the lockbox, as Dom had said, and they cracked the door and walked through. The house was probably eighty years old, Lucas thought, and thoroughly scuffed up, two stories, fifteen hundred square feet or so, with gritty hardwood floors and a refrigerator-stove combination that came from the fifties. It smelled like plaster, nicotine, and old rugs. There