Stolen Prey

were three outside doors.
    “You want to use it as a dummy, or do you want to put a couple of guys in here?” Shaffer asked.
    “I don’t have anybody to spare, but if we could get a couple of guys from the SWAT, that’d work,” Lucas said.
    O’B RIEN FROM the DEA was at the morning meeting, along with Shaffer and three members of his team, Lucas and Del, and Martínez. She arrived carrying her five-pound briefcase, pulled out several report books that appeared to run to a hundred pages or more, each, and said, “I spent last night printing these. This is a report from our central headquarters on known and suspected gang connections in St. Paul. We thought it might provide some information on where the fugitives have hidden themselves.”
    She handed a copy to Lucas, slid one across the table toO’Brien, walked around the table and passed one to Shaffer, and left another one in the middle of the table. Lucas, Shaffer, and O’Brien spent a few seconds flipping through the reports, which were in English, then Lucas put his copy aside and said, “That’s gonna take some reading time.”
    “Why are they in English?” Shaffer asked.
    “Because they are prepared with a DEA task force. They are both English and Spanish.”
    “Any specific contacts for the Criminales?” Lucas asked.
    “Two possibilities, but we are not sure. They might be worthy of surveillance,” Martínez said.
    “We’ve had a break,” Shaffer said, setting his copy aside, as Lucas had. “Lucas, do you want to tell us about it?”
    Lucas nodded and said, “We know when the money was taken from Polaris. We know when they stopped. We know that they will have to break the chain of checks and formal money transfers, which we are now tracing. Both the DEA and the bankers involved agreed that they would probably use the stolen money to buy gold coins, which would break the identification chain. They’d have to buy a lot of gold—twenty-two million dollars’ worth. We figured they’d have to go to several major dealers, so I assigned my research assistant to track down all the major dealers in the U.S. She found a Syrian woman….”
    The woman had disguised herself by wearing a veil, and nobody had seen her face. Purely by coincidence, he said, one of the dealers had seen Delta airline tickets in her shoulder bag, and she’d said that she was in a hurry to get to the airport.
    “We checked Delta flights around that time, out of Los Angeles to several major destinations, but there weren’t many: onewas to here. We got the names for all the female passengers on that trip and ran them against the other major gold sellers, in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Denver, New York, Philadelphia, Miami, and so on. A Martha White shows up right after a purchase in each of those cities.”
    “So you got her,” one of the agents said.
    “Sort of,” Lucas said. “The problem is, she looks nothing like an Arab woman. She was born here, and though she has a passport, it doesn’t show her traveling to anywhere in the Middle East. She has no connection with either of the banks involved in this. She’s got a house not far from here.”
    He looked at his notebook and read off the Margaret Street address. “That’s a block or two south of East Seventh. It’s a rental. She’s had it for three months. We think … and I emphasize
think
, or
suspect
… that she’s sending the gold back here, probably by FedEx or UPS or even registered mail, then flies back here to receive it. It’s possible that it’s in her house. But. We can’t get a warrant. Our attorney says we’re not even close. We need to show some connection between her and the other suspects—Kline, Sanderson, anything that would help. If we can build a solid enough case, without her knowing it, we can hit the house.”
    One of Shaffer’s agents asked, “So we’re surveilling the house?”
    Lucas said, “Not yet. Not enough people, is what it comes to. She’s coming into the airport today. In fact”—he looked at his watch—“she ought to be getting up in the air right now, out of Phoenix. We’re putting six people on her, we’ll keep her in a moving box. Once we ID her car, we’ll get a tech to put a GPS on it. At the same time, with her coming in, we’re going to have acouple guys each on Sanderson and Kline. Kline’s getting out today. He’s still screwed up, but he’s getting out. If we’re watching the house, and they meet somewhere … I mean, maybe we’re wrong