"Mortal Prey" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sandford John)

4

THEY HAD DINNER TOGETHER, AND caught up with their separate lives. Lucas poked at Malone's new relationship with the Sheetrocker, despite Mallard's efforts to warn him away. Malone had almost nothing to say about her friend, except that he had terrific shoulders from lifting the Sheetrock.

Mallard mentioned that his office had been renamed. It was now called the Special Studies Group, and the last big case had involved the destruction of a bank robbery gang operating out of Toronto, Canada.

"They never did a thing in Canada," Mallard said. "They were completely law-abiding truck drivers and auto-parts guys. Then, about once every two months, they'd come down south and hit a bank."

"How'd you bust them?"

"Computers. They always hit the same kinds of banks at the same times of day with the same techniques, which told us that we were working with one gang. So we got all of the robberies with that signature, and plotted them with a geographical information system. The computer took a while, but one of the statistical clusters it turned up was a drive-time thing-all of the robberies were within a couple hours of border crossings. Different border crossings. Anyway, we ran the dates of the robberies against the names of people coming in, which didn't turn up anything, because they kept switching IDs. But then we ran the incoming license plates, and we found them. Two trucks, going through one after the other, the day before each of the robberies. Once we had that, we figured out who they were, and then we watched them move, watched them scout the bank, cleared out the bank a half hour before they were due to come in, and when they came in… there we were."

They talked about it for a while, and then Lucas gave them details on a case involving an art professor, on which Mallard's office had provided help. "Marcy Sherrill said your information was so generic that it made her brain hurt," he said.

"Fuck her if she can't take a joke," Mallard said.

"Louis," Lucas said, "the language."