Criminal Enterprise (7 page)

T
OMLIN DROVE
T
RICIA
to her apartment and parked at the curb. He shut off the engine and took out the thick stack of hundred-dollar bills. Then he sat back in his seat. “Jesus Christ. That just happened.”

Tricia cocked her head. “It happened. You cool?”

“Cool?” He looked at her. “We just sold a kilo of coke to that guy. We just pulled off a drug deal. We’re drug dealers. Are
you
cool?”

Tricia shrugged. “Yeah, I’m cool. We’re fifteen grand up.”

“And that’s that.”

She looked at him. “Yeah,” she said. “That’s that. We walked in there with product. We walked out with cash. It’s not such a big deal, boss. Roll with it.”

He laughed and shook his head. “Roll with it,” he said. He counted out her take, seventy-five hundred, and handed it over. “To be honest, I thought we’d make more.”

“Whatever,” she said, slipping the money into her purse. “It’s seven grand more than I had this morning. So what now?”

What now?
Tomlin thought. “Now you go inside,” he told her. “I go home to my wife and forget this ever happened.”

Tricia shook her head. “I don’t think so.”

“What?”

“This is exciting,” she said, a smile in her eyes. “Let’s keep going. What other secrets are you hiding?”

He couldn’t hold her gaze. “I don’t have any secrets.”

“The drugs,” she said. “Where’d you get them? And don’t try and bullshit me with that dumpster crap, because you know I’m not buying.”

“It’s found money,” said Tomlin. “Who cares where it comes from?”

“It matters because I want to know what you’re into,” she said. “I saw the cash in that drawer of yours. You can’t tell me that’s all from doing taxes for grandmothers.”

Tomlin started the car. “Nothing’s going on. End of story.”

Tricia leaned forward. The top of her blouse fell open, and if he’d wanted, he could have had a good look at the tops of her breasts. He had a funny feeling she knew just what she was doing. “All right.” She smiled at him. “Let’s play a game.”

“I’d rather not,” Tomlin said.

“Too bad,” she said. “Let’s say, hypothetically, that a man asked his secretary to help him unload some cocaine. A lot of cocaine. How about that?”

Tomlin stared at her. “What the hell are you getting at?”

Tricia held up her hand. “Let’s say the secretary told the hypothetical man’s wife all about what had happened. With the cocaine and everything. Maybe she even hinted about an affair. What do you think would happen?”

“Don’t go there,” Tomlin told her. “Don’t even joke.”

“Who’s joking, boss?”

Tomlin pulled the pistol from his waistband. Held it to her face. “Don’t talk to my family,” he said. “Don’t go there. Understand?”

Tricia didn’t blink. “Just tell me what you’re into. You want to do more drug deals with Javier?” She studied his face. “Or maybe you want to make even more money. I can help you.”

Tomlin stared at her until Tricia pushed the pistol away. “Tell me where the drugs came from,” she said. “Then we can talk about what we’re going to do next.”

Tomlin looked from her eyes to the pistol. Then he lowered the gun. “I robbed a guy,” he said finally. “I needed a weapon, and he had one. The drugs were just extra.”

“You couldn’t just buy a gun?”

“Not for my purposes.”

“Your purposes.” She kept her eyes on him. “What do you mean?”

He wanted to impress her, he realized. He wanted her to see that he was more than some shitty accountant in some shitty office, that he was someone with power. He wanted to scare her a little. “Bank robbery,” he said. “I needed a gun to rob banks.”

Tricia sat straight up in her seat. “I fucking
knew
it,” she said. “I fucking
knew
you had secrets. How many?”

“Banks?” Tomlin shrugged. “Five or six.”

“Alone?”

He nodded. “I don’t know many bank robbers.”

“And you make decent money.”

“The money’s okay,” he said. Then he caught himself. “It’s pretty damn good, actually. Pays your wages, doesn’t it?”

She smiled, wide. “Badass.”

For a moment, neither of them said anything. Tomlin stared out at her ugly apartment complex, the rusted hulks in the parking lot. Then Tricia turned to him again. “You ever think of expanding?”

Tomlin frowned. “What do you mean?”

Her eyes were wide and excited. “You could do a lot better with a couple more people,” she said. “If you had enough guns, I mean.”

Expansion. She was talking about a crew. A professional gang, the kind the FBI couldn’t catch. He realized he’d been waiting for this kind of chance. “I have enough guns,” he told her.

She cocked her eye at him. “Big guns?”

“Big enough.”

“So okay.” She twisted in her seat to face him. “What if we made a little expansion?”

Tomlin frowned. “We?”

“You and me,” she said. “If you’re into it, I know a guy.”

Tomlin sat back in his seat and said nothing. They’d make more money, enough to take care of Becca and the girls for a while. Enough to buy time to get his little business on its feet. Hell, he already had the firepower.

He pretended to think about it. The way Tricia was looking at him, though, he knew he couldn’t say no.

W
INDERMERE STOOD
IN
Agent Harris’s office with Bob Doughty beside her, Doughty glaring at her like she’d just killed his dog. Harris leveled his gaze at her. “Agent Windermere,” he said. “Agent Doughty came to me with a complaint about your behavior. What’s the story?”

Windermere held the SAC’s gaze. “Sir, all respect to Agent Doughty, but I have a lead on our Eat Street bank robbery. I’d like to check it out before it goes cold.”

Harris studied her face. He was a few years older than Doughty but looked younger. Trim and well dressed, handsome in an aging college athlete kind of way. He was a fair boss, Windermere figured. She got along with him most of the time.

Now, though, he was looking at her like the principal looks at a problem student. “Agent Doughty is senior agent in this investigation,” he said.

Windermere nodded. “Yes, sir.”

“And he asked you to report to CID this morning for briefing. You drove to Saint Paul instead.”

Windermere could feel Doughty’s immense self-regard like a heat lamp. “I was halfway to Saint Paul already. As I communicated to Agent Doughty on the phone, I had a viable lead that I felt warranted investigation.”

“So you disregarded his instructions.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You’ve been here two years now, Agent Windermere, but you still act like an outsider.”

I could be at Carter Tomlin’s house now,
Windermere thought. She swallowed her frustration. “Yes, sir.”

“You keep to yourself. You haven’t made any friends. You charge into investigations without regard for protocol or your other team members. You solved one high-profile case, and that’s great, but this is a team game, Agent Windermere. You’re still flying solo.”

God damn it.
“Yes, sir.”

Harris stared at her for a long time. “What did you find?” he said finally.

Windermere blinked. “Pardon?”

“In Saint Paul, Agent Windermere. What did you find?”

Windermere glanced at Doughty. “I’m pretty sure our Eat Street ringleader has pulled solo jobs in the past,” she told Harris. “I have a bunch of bank jobs around Minneapolis that match his MO.”

“An earlier MO,” said Doughty. “There’s nothing in any of those cases about a team storming a bank with assault rifles and shotguns.”

“No.” Windermere nodded. “This is the first. I think he’s getting braver—”

“Or he’s a whole different person and your robberies aren’t related.”

Windermere gritted her teeth and focused on Harris. “Sir, I have enough information to make a link between the Eat Street robbery and these earlier scores, including a heist in a Bank of America branch in Midway last November. My suspect wrote his demand note on a receipt from the Saint Paul E-Z Park, and I’ve traced that receipt back to a man named Carter Tomlin.”

Harris glanced at Doughty. Doughty took the cue. “I have credible information of my own,” he said. “My contacts through Minneapolis PD tell me these guys are Eat Street local.”

Harris nodded. “You have names?”

“Working on it.”

Harris looked at Windermere again. “Carter Tomlin. Who is he?”

I could be finding that out right now,
Windermere thought. “I was going to check him out before Doughty called me in. The guy lives in Saint Paul, has a Summit Avenue address.”

Doughty laughed. “Summit Avenue. So he’s got a million-dollar home and he’s out robbing banks.”

“Could be a credit card issue,” Windermere told Harris. “Or our suspect got his hands on the receipt somehow. I thought I should talk to Tomlin, see if he could tell us anything.”

“Agent Hill already worked the Midway case,” said Doughty. “She didn’t find much. These guys are lowlifes from the south. We knock on enough doors and we’ll find them.”

“You keep knocking on doors,” said Windermere. “See where it gets you. I have six previous robberies to dig through. And I have Tomlin.”

“You have a tattered receipt, Carla. It’s not exactly the smoking gun.”

“Enough.”
Harris waited until Windermere and Doughty turned to face him. “You guys are partners,” he said, his features drawn tight. “I expect a certain degree of professionalism.”

Doughty nodded. “Yes, sir.”

Windermere said nothing.

“Agent Doughty, you’re running this case,” Harris continued. “If you’re sold on the southern angle, you keep working it. Ride those city cops and keep knocking on doors. Agent Windermere, I expect you to work with Agent Doughty, not against him.”

Windermere stared at him. “And Carter Tomlin?”

“Tomlin’s your baby,” said Harris. “If you think you’ve got something, you follow it up on your own. But you make damn sure you respect Agent Doughty’s seniority. If he asks you for help, his request takes priority. Understood?”

Windermere could see the end in sight. “Yes, sir,” she said.

Harris nodded. “Dismissed.”

O
NE DAY
AFTER
meeting with Ernie Saint Louis in the federal pen in Waseca, Kirk Stevens packed up his Cherokee, kissed his wife good-bye, and drove the three hundred miles north to International Falls on the Canadian border. He checked himself into an empty motel alongside Route 53, and then drove to the town courthouse, where he found a young sheriff’s deputy waiting.

The deputy’s name was Waters, and he shivered as he climbed out of his vehicle, a county Chevy Suburban with two snowmobiles strapped to the trailer behind. He pulled his coat tight around him and looked sideways at Stevens. “Would be a lot easier if you wanted to wait for the thaw.”

Stevens surveyed the parking lot. It was cold, barely ten degrees, and the wind seemed to cut right through his heavy goose-down parka. The town was bleak, grim, and gray, and Stevens knew the woods would be worse. In a couple months, though, the weather would warm and the snow would melt away, making the Thunderbird a hell of a lot easier to find.

Still, Stevens thought, there would be black flies.

In his head, he pictured Sylvia Danzer’s photograph. The wry smile. He knew he didn’t want to wait a couple of months to see if Saint Louis’s sugar-high lead panned out. He cinched his coat tighter and looked at Waters. “We do this quick enough, we get back before the Timberwolves tip off.”

Waters looked at him for a beat. Then he shrugged and turned back to the Suburban. “Your call.”

—

W
ATERS DROVE WEST
out of town on Route 71, running parallel to the Rainy River and the Canadian border. Stevens rode shotgun and stared down at the crude map Saint Louis had drawn, then out into the desolate bush. He looked over at Waters. “You get many people trying to hop the border, this part of the world?”

Waters glanced at him and shrugged. “Who knows?” he said. “Not like we can stop them when the river freezes over.”

Stevens nodded. “Sure.”

“Don’t know where you’d go if you did cross,” Waters said. He looked at Stevens again. “It’s as empty over there as it is over here.”

Waters drove west a while longer, over the top of the Smokey Bear State Forest, the highway almost at the riverbank now. On the other side, Canada was a formless mass of trees, deep-green and black where the land wasn’t covered in snow. Waters pulled the truck over at the head of a narrow snowbound road. “Guess this is as far as we get with the truck.”

They unloaded the snowmobiles from the trailer. Waters gave Stevens a helmet and a quick tutorial, and then climbed on his own machine, revved the engine, and sped off down the trail. Stevens watched him disappear, the snow like a rooster tail behind the machine. Then he gunned his own engine and started in pursuit.

The cold was unreal. Stevens gripped the handlebars tight and bent low, the bitter wind buffeting him through his parka, his borrowed ski pants covered in ice and slush. Waters rode fast as the road wound through the bush, and Stevens pushed hard to keep up. After a half hour or so of hard riding, Stevens rounded a corner and found Waters pulled to a stop by the tree line.

The road had narrowed into more of a trail now, the ground beneath the snow rocky and uneven, the naked trees encroaching. Waters flipped up his helmet and gestured farther. “Used to be a logging road,” he said. “Nobody uses it but hunters and four-wheelers anymore.”

And fugitives,
Stevens thought. He flipped up his own helmet and sucked in the cold air. He realized he was sweating.

Waters gave it a moment. Then he flipped his helmet down and was off again, his snowmobile revving high-pitched and hysterical as he took off down the slim path. Stevens caught his breath and then bent down to his machine again.

The bush had taken over the terrain here. The trees seemed to close in on him over the trail, their loose branches clawing at his helmet and his parka as he sped between them after Waters. There was no room for any vehicle larger than an ATV, certainly not enough space for a T-Bird.

Twenty minutes through the trees and the trail started to widen again. Gradual, imperceptible, until it was probably wide enough to slide a Jeep through. Waters slowed his snowmobile to a stop, and Stevens stopped behind. His legs ached when he stood; he was thirsty. The woods were silent around them.

Waters took off his helmet and ran his hand through his hair. Looked at Stevens, and then around the forest. “I’m guessing this is the general area,” he said. “Going to take some searching, though.”

Stevens pulled Saint Louis’s map from his pocket. “A fork in the road,” he said. “Just after the trail opens up again.”

Waters pointed. “Just down there.”

They walked down the trail about a hundred yards. Stevens peered in through the trees as they walked, searching for red paint. The forest was dense, inscrutable. Anything beyond ten or fifteen feet would be invisible.

A hundred yards down, and the trail joined with another bearing from the northeast. Stevens walked to the fork and peered up the new trail. A wall of trees, impassable. Still, as he walked forward, his boots sinking deep in the snow, Stevens could see something half-lodged in the tree line, a snow-covered hulk hidden around a brief corner.

He walked closer. The hulk was buried in snow. It looked angular, though, geometric and unnatural. Stevens looked back to where Waters waited at the fork and then pressed forward, his heart starting to pound.

It was a car. He could see that from about ten feet away. It lay wedged between two young birch trees, as though the driver had tried to force her way through. Stevens covered the last distance quickly. He brushed the snow from the rear bumper and stared down at rust and red paint. A Ford logo.

He looked back at Waters again. Saint Louis wasn’t lying. A red Thunderbird, lost in the woods. Now, where the hell was the driver?