Nash said, “Shut up. Keep your mouth shut. We want an attorney. You don’t want to say another fuckin’ word, believe me. We can settle this.”

Young dropped his head, and said, “Okay.”

Booker, still peering at the computer: “If they were working through this file by file, they already got a lot. We need a major investigation here. We need to know what they’ve already taken out. We need to know who they were taking it out for.”

“Attorney,” Nash said.

“You’ll get an attorney,” Virgil said.

“You’re gonna need more than an attorney,” Booker shouted at Nash. “You’re gonna need a fuckin’ miracle. You’re going to prison, you got that? So are the guys you’re selling this to. You’re all going to jail, you motherfucker!”

Virgil said, “Easy, there,” and he squatted and looked in the black bag. A Sony video camera was sitting on top of some bubble wrap, a GoPro, and some other gear.

“That’s private property,” Nash said.

“It’s burglary equipment,” Virgil said. “But I’m not going to mess with it. Because, you know, your prints are all over it. I wouldn’t want to smudge any of them.”

“We need to know what’s in the camera,” Booker said.

“We will,” Virgil said. “Not right now, though. We’ll turn this stuff over to the Eagan cops, let them transport these two to the Dakota County Jail and get with the prosecutors tomorrow. We have a lot of business with Mr. Nash. We’ll need you to come and look at the photos. I’ll call you in the morning after we know what we’re doing, let you know what time we can get together.”

“My whole life is in that camera,” Booker said. “These two need to go to prison. Forever.”

Young whined, “Mr. Booker . . .”

“Shut up,” Nash said.

Virgil smiled at Booker. “I even think we might have a cooperating witness.” He slapped Young on the back. “We’ll take care of you, Al. Don’t pay any attention to Boyd. He can’t help you. But we can.”

* * *

—

The Eagan cops came up. The cop in charge, a sergeant, looked at the two cuffed men, and then Virgil, and said, “Tell me everything.”

CHAPTER

TWENTY-ONE

   When the Eagan cops had taken Nash and Young away, Virgil said to Jenkins, “We’ve got to go back to Nash’s place. We need to see if there’s anybody there. We need to grab his home computers and any paper we can find that might tie him to Quill. We’ll probably have to sleep in the cars until we can get a search warrant.”

Booker asked, “Who’s Quill?”

“He might have been another one of Nash’s targets,” Virgil said.

“What about my place?”

“We’ll look for that, too. We’ll see if we can spot who the buyer was, if he already had one. If we see anything that looks right, we’ll call you for identification,” Virgil said. “What you should do now is go home and go back to bed.”

“I won’t sleep,” Booker said. “You don’t know how bad this is.”

“Try to sleep. I’ll set us up with the Dakota County Attorney’s Office tomorrow morning. They’ll want to talk to you and you’ll want to be sharp,” Virgil said. “Nash might be prepared for something like this, might have a lawyer ready to launch.”

“I’ll call my legal guys tonight, we’ll all be there tomorrow,” Booker said. “Anytime you say. I’ll lock this place down before you leave. I’ll call the security company and have them send some guys over here to patrol the parking lot.”

As they were leaving, Virgil asked Booker, “How’d he get into your computers? Don’t you have them protected?”

“That’s one thing we need to find out right away,” Booker said. “They all have passwords, of course, that are supposed to be restricted to the engineers. The one he was on wasn’t assigned to one guy; it’s used by people like me who come through here but don’t actually work in this office. While we change the passwords every month, several people have the password for that particular computer.”

“Then you might have another leak. Besides the guard.”

Booker thought about that for a moment, then shook his head. “Probably not. If it was an engineer, he could have worked a little late—which is common enough—loaded all the information onto one flash drive, and carried it out. Since Nash had to be here, I suspect somebody like Allen was standing in the corner with his cell phone in his hand, set to video, recording keystrokes when somebody signed on to the computer.”

“I will check with Allen,” Virgil said. “About that thumb drive thing: that sounds a lot easier than taking pictures of a video screen with a camera. Why didn’t Nash do that?”

“Because when you plug a thumb drive in, there’s an on-screen prompt that asks for some ID information, which is different for each engineer. Couldn’t make movies of that unless you were standing right behind the guy who was inputting.”

* * *

—

   Virgil and Jenkins drove back to Nash’s, parked in the driveway, leaned on the doorbell. No answer.

Virgil called the Edina police, asked for help. The duty officer said they could cruise the house every half hour or so, but they were working a bad pedestrian accident and didn’t have a lot of flexibility. Virgil told them there’d be two cars in the driveway and maybe somebody asleep on the front porch.

“Who’s going to sleep on the front porch?” Jenkins asked when Virgil was off the phone.

“One of us,” Virgil said. “We can’t let this get away. I’m going to slap crime scene tape on all the doors, then you can have a sleeping bag and air mattress and sleep on the porch or a yoga mat and Army blanket and sleep in the back of my truck. Your choice.”

* * *

—

Jenkins took the sleeping bag and air mattress and porch. Virgil slapped crime scene tape on the doors and crawled into the back of the truck, got a solid four hours, before his phone/alarm rang at seven-thirty. He called Trane.

“Gimme a break, I don’t wake up for a half hour,” Trane said. Then: “Something happen?”

He told her about the arrest from the night before and that he’d been sleeping in the driveway at Nash’s house. “We need a search warrant quick as we can get it, I mean, like, right now. You’d know better how to get one fast outta Hennepin County. I’ll give you the details.”