Hidden prey

Chapter 14

After his experience with the cops in Virginia, Lucas decided not to take a chance on the Hibbing police. Instead, he called the head of the BCA's northern office in Bemidji, asked him to be the intermediary, waited ten minutes, then took the call from the Hibbing chief of police.

"We've got a situation," he told the chief. "The FBI's involved, counterintelligence people, and the whole thing is way too complicated to talk about over the phone, but what it is, is, I need somebody to run out to the Greyhound Museum to look around. If you have a Greyhound museum."

"We've got one," the chief said. He sounded sleepy, but cooperative. "I can get a car up there in five minutes. Are my boys going to run into anything?"

"Tell them to take care," Lucas said. "We're talking about a killer. He's done two people that we know of, that Russian over in Duluth and the old lady a few days later."

"Holy smokes, I been reading about it. All right, I'll get somebody up there-hell, I'll get my pants on and go up there with them. Can I call you back?"

"I'll be sitting here," Lucas said. "Call no matter what."

Weather said, "I want to know how this comes out, but I've got to go to bed. I'm working early."

"Be up as soon as I can," Lucas said. "Whatever happens, we won't go back to Duluth tonight. It's too late, and there'd be nothing to do."

"I am very worried," Nadya said.

Lucas raised his eyebrows and said, "Well… you guys didn't have to have a shadow. We told you that."

"A shadow was convenient for everybody," Nadya said. "If all this trouble was an artifact of the past, we could leave it. If not, we could settle it with your FBI, informally. The shadow could act in ways that you, perhaps, could not, with your TV and newspapers…"

"I'll leave you two to work it out," Weather said. She yawned, kissed Lucas on the forehead, and disappeared back up the stairs.

The Hibbing chief, Roy Hopper, called back twenty minutes later. "We found a running back from the high-school football team in the backseat of his dad's car with his girlfriend. The boy didn't have his pants entirely on. Hope this doesn't turn out to be a distraction."

"Distract from what?" Lucas asked.

"He's rushing for better than a hundred yards a game so far this season…"

"Chief…"

"… and we found an empty car, doors unlocked, nothing inside but a cell phone on a charging cord. We ran the plates. It's a rental from Avis at Duluth International. Checked out a week and a half ago to a Martin Johnson."

"Hang on," Lucas said.

He repeated the information to Nadya, who said, "That is surely the car, do you think? I don't know the name. Is this policeman near the cell phone?"

Lucas to Hopper: "Where's the cell phone?"

"Still here, in the car."

"Tell him, I will call," Nadya said. She ran upstairs, got a calendar, ran back down, and punched a number into Lucas's cell phone. A minute later, the chief said, "It's ringing."

"Oh my god," Nadya said. "I must call in. I must call."

"Better treat that area as a crime scene, Chief," Lucas said. "We'll be back up there at the crack of dawn, or nine o'clock, whichever is later."

When Lucas got off the phone, he said to Nadya, "Call in, and then get a few hours of sleep. I've got an Ambien if you need one. I'll get you up at five-thirty, we'll get out of here at six."

Nadya nodded and started dialing. Lucas was at the bottom of the stairs, headed up, when she called after him, "I'm thinking I'm not liking this Minnesota too much."

"It ain't Minnesota," Lucas said. "Minnesota's just fine."

Lucas was up at five forty-five, groggy until he got out of the shower, which he shared with Weather; she got his blood moving, anyway. Weather didn't have to shave, so she was dressed and downstairs first, having stopped to knock on Nadya's door.

When Lucas got downstairs, Weather said, "Nadya's up. She's repacking. I'll put some coffee in a thermos. You want some peanut-butter toast?"

"That'd be great. I'm sorry about the quick turnaround. Gotta make a couple of calls." He called Andreno, talked with him for a moment; then called Andy Harmon, who sounded as though he'd been up for hours, and filled him in on the shadow.

"Interesting," Harmon said. "We'll get back to you."

Nadya came in, rubbing the back of her head. She had her carry-on bag, which she'd used as an overnighter, in her hand. "Are we ready?"

"You want something to eat? Cereal, or peanut-butter toast?"

She shook her head. "I just want to go."

At six fifteen, they were in the car. Nadya kept yawning, couldn't stop. "I have no sleep at all," she said as they backed out the driveway. She yawned and blinked. "I should have taken the pill."

Lucas braked, put the car in park, said, "Hang on," and ran into the house. A minute later, he was back and handed Nadya a sleeping mask. "We're three hours away. Crank the seat back, see if you can doze off. Any little bit will help."

She was gone before they got out of the Cities.

The day was brilliant and warm, with a gusty wind from the south. Lucas didn't want to disturb Nadya with the radio, so they rode in silence, running just over the speed limit in light traffic.

Time to think: but not much to think about. The case was all in pieces. Andreno was keeping an eye on Spivak, though he couldn't do a full surveillance. Nevertheless, when Lucas shook Andreno out of bed at six o'clock, he said he'd taken Spivak home at one o'clock in the morning, and had seen him, off and on, in the tavern during the day and all during the evening. The only place he'd gone all day was to a hardware store, this just before noon, where he'd bought two fluorescent lightbulbs, and to a Wal-Mart, at seven twenty.

"He went inside, and I lost him for a minute or so and then I found him back in the DVDs. He got one, and then he trailed around the store some more and I got the impression he was looking for a tail, but he wasn't very good at it. So I stayed back a little and let him run, and just before he walked out, he made a phone call from the public phones. He wasn't on for more than a minute."

"That sounds like something. I'll have the feds see if they can do anything with it."

"Okay. We might be getting a little tangled up here, though," Andreno said. "The cops already got a call about my van. The chief short-stopped it, but somebody along the main drag here is getting suspicious."

"Get a different vehicle," Lucas said. "Get Spivak in the bar during the day, and trade that one in for another one. I can make a call, get you the right one."

"Do that. But don't call me back until about ten o'clock, which is when I'm going to get up."

Whoever had met with the shadow, it wasn't Spivak. What else? The laptop was a possibility. He should hear something from the FBI during the day. The street person, the woman who called him: Was there any way to hook into her? She almost certainly had a criminal record. If they could get a single print off anything in that shack, they should be able to get a name and a mug shot and maybe some idea of where she was. He made a mental note to call Reasons and push the Duluth crime-scene people to take the shack apart. There had to be one print… And Marcy would talk to the attorney for Larry the Fence, see if they could squeeze an ID out of him. Whoever the woman was, she'd hooked into Larry in a hurry, so maybe they had a history.

Two hours out, Lucas got off I-35 at Cloquet, finished the rest of the coffee from the thermos, and pushed on north, as Nadya continued to sleep. Lucas understood exactly: she hadn't been able to sleep all night in a good bed because she felt like she should be doing something. The next day, when she was actually doing something-heading north-she could sleep like a baby. He was the same way…

Thirty miles north of Cloquet his phone rang.

"Lucas… Andy Harmon."

Lucas glanced at Nadya. "Yeah," he said quietly "I'm in my car, heading north to Hibbing. Nadya's with me. She's sleeping, I think."

"Okay. First, Spivak got a call yesterday evening. I can read you what he said."

"He's tapped?"

"Well… yeah. What the caller said was, 'Is Tom White there?' And Spivak said, 'This is Spivak's Tap. We don't have no Tom White here.' I'm reading from a transcript."

"Okay, but so what?"

"So then the caller says, 'Is this two two zero, six seven nine, seven six eight zero?" And Spivak said, "Nope. You misdialed.' Then he hung up."

Lucas waited through the pregnant pause.

After a few seconds, Harmon said, "That was almost certainly a call code. There is no two-two-zero area code. What Spivak does is add or subtract some unknown number, and comes up with a callback. He makes the callback from a clean phone, probably to another public phone somewhere."

"You said, 'Yesterday evening,' " Lucas said. "What time yesterday evening?"

"Seven twenty."

"Huh. I have reason to believe that Spivak went running out of his bar at seven twenty, drove to a Wal-Mart and bought nothing special, but made a phone call from a pay phone."

"We can check that," Harmon said. "We can check all the calls made out of the place between seven fifteen and what, eight o'clock?"

"More like seven fifteen and seven forty. My guy was pretty specific. Let me know. What happened with the laptop?"

"The laptop. There were no usable fingerpints at all. Most of the files are not encrypted, but they appear to be innocent. Tour guides and maps and so on. There are a couple of dozen encrypted files and nothing that looks like a key, so that doesn't help us. We're still going through it. There's a lot of stuff."

"All right. Check on Wal-Mart. Is there any possibility of getting a couple of FBI thugs to lean on Spivak? Maybe he isn't scared enough, because the only people talking to him are locals."

"We can send somebody around. This thing about the shadow has us worried. From what Nadya told you, about the wife dying and the child, we think it's a guy named Piotr Nikitin. He was supposed to be a middle-level guy in their Commercial Affairs Section, but everybody figured he was Intelligence."

"Why worried?"

"Well, he's a nice guy, you know? Everybody knows him. His father-in-law bought him a place out in Virginia, and he'd have a big to-do out there every May Day, you know, for the community. He called it the Dirty Rotten Commie Fest."

"The community?"

"Yes. You know, the community."

"He tried to hang Spivak, for Christ's sake," Lucas said, exasperated.

"That was just part of the job," Harmon said. "You can understand that."

Lucas couldn't. He got off the phone, breathing hard for a few minutes, backed off the gas. When he got pissed, the speed tended to go up, and he got speeding tickets. Nadya stirred twenty minutes after he talked with Harmon. Stirred, then twitched, moaned softly, and pushed herself up. "What time is it?"

"Nine o'clock," Lucas said. "We're almost there."

"Really?" Her face was slack with sleep. She cranked her seat upright, said, "My mouth is terrible, I have to brush it."

"McDonald's in ten minutes," Lucas said. "You can do it there. Then we'll go see if we can find Piotr."

The name didn't faze her: "I hope to," she said. "This would be well regarded in Moscow."

Lucas talked to Chief Hopper, who was at the bus museum, and got directions through town. The museum was actually out of town a bit, and looked exactly the way a bus museum should look, a triumph of function over form: a low concrete building painted red, white, and blue, with no style whatever, except perhaps existential garage.

There were three cop cars in the parking lot, and beyond them, six men on their hands and knees, crawling up the parking lot; two more men stood chatting, watching the crawlers. Lucas rolled in next to the cars, and he and Nadya got out. One of the two standing men, a square-faced forty-year-old in a ball cap, walked over and said, "Are you Davenport?"

"Yes, and Nadya Kalin, a police officer from Russia. She's here as an observer."

"Pleased to meet you," the chief said. "I'm Roy." And then to Nadya: "You look just like Miz Wedig, a third-grade teacher here in town. You could be sisters."

"But I'm a spy," Nadya said solemnly. "Mr. Davenport will tell you so."

"Well, I'm sure every big country needs spies," Hopper said cheerfully. He turned to Lucas, his smile fading. "We may have some bad news. One of the boys was scuffing around and he found some blood over there on the other side of the car. We covered it, and the sheriff's people came over and took some samples. I put my guys to crawling the lot, inch by inch. So far…" He dug in his pocket and pulled out a transparent plastic bag and handed it to Lucas. "… this is what we found."

A nine-millimeter shell was inside the bag; it was shiny, new.

"Nine millimeter," Lucas said to Nadya.

"But not from the same group of cartridges as the one that killed Oleshev," she said. "The others were tarnished, and even had some, mmm, I don't know the English, green coloring on the brass."

"That'd be your verdigris," Hopper said.

"We can tell by the firing-pin mark whether it was the same gun," Lucas said. He handed the bag back to the sheriff: "If you could have that shipped right away down to the BCA crime lab, I'd appreciate it. They could get back to us overnight on the firing-pin mark."

"Good as done," Hopper said. "You want to see where the blood was?"

They walked over to look; there wasn't much but a clean spot on the blacktop. "How much blood, you think?" Lucas asked. "Bad wound?"

"I'd say pretty bad. I'd say the guy was down at least a quart."

"Shoot." Lucas looked around. "I'll tell you what. There'd be no reason to take the body except to delay the discovery. You might find it around pretty close. I imagine that they'd want to get rid of it."

"There are a few thousand square miles of woods and swamps around here, to say nothing of the pits," Hopper said. "I wouldn't hold your breath."

Nadya had been staring morosely at the clean spot on the blacktop; now she said, abruptly, "Is this all?"

"That's about all, ma'am," Hopper said.

"I will call," she said, and she walked away from them.

"She sure does look like Sally Wedig," Hopper marveled, looking after her.

Nadya came back. "They are very upset in Washington."

"So am I," Lucas said. "I don't mean to… get on your case when one of your countrymen has been killed, but the whole bunch of you are playing games. It's gotta stop. It's getting people killed. You need to tell me everything you know, everything they know in Moscow, and maybe I can stop it. And I don't give a shit about this spy stuff…"

"I don't make that decision," Nadya said. She stepped closer to him and looked up and said, "When Weather and I were shopping, she said you were a brilliant policeman because you made things happen. Make something happen."

"Like what?" Lucas asked; he was both irritated and flattered.

"Something. I don't know."

Lucas checked again with Andy Harmon. "I got the Duluth FBI guys going. They should be in Virginia by now. They'll lean on Spivak," Harmon said.

"Okay. I've got some news about your friend Piotr Nikitin. He's probably dead."

Silence, for five seconds. "You're positive?"

Lucas told him about the nine-millimeter shell, the blood, the car and the cell phone. "Probably too early to light a candle, but you might look around for a matchbook."

"Huh. I'll pass the word on. Keep me informed."

Lucas decided: "Look. Have one of the FBI guys call me on this phone when they're done with Spivak. I'm gonna give him an hour to think about it, assuming he doesn't crack, and then I'm going to bust his ass."

"On what charge?"

"Accessory to murder," Lucas said. "I don't know how long I can make it stick, but I can keep him inside for a couple of days and out of touch. That might stir up whoever else is involved with this thing."

"We must have a bad connection," Harmon said. "I missed most of what you just said. Talk to you later." And he was gone.

"What'd he say?" Nadya asked.

"He said I'm on my own," Lucas answered.

"Ah, yes, we have this formula also in Russia," she said. "If you fail, you are on your own. If you succeed, then you were not on your own, you were helped by the entire secretariat."

"Exactly," Lucas said.

Lucas called Rose Marie at the Department of Public Safety in St. Paul, and asked her to fix an arrest warrant with a state judge in Virginia, and to arrange to have a sheriff's car meet them at the bar to transport Spivak after the arrest.

"I want to take him down to Duluth, so he'll be away from home and it'll be harder for his family to see him. I'm trying to isolate him as much as I can…"

When he was done with Rose Marie, he called Andreno and told him to hold off on changing vans. "I'm gonna bust Spivak on accessory to murder. See if anything happens."

"What do you want me to do?"

"Watch the son. He seems to do the talking for the family. Spivak's old lady is a little too shaky for anything important. I want to know about phone calls. Exact times. The feds can figure out where they're going."

"I'm on it."

"You're making something happen?" Nadya asked. "I'm desperate," Lucas said. "I'm jumping off a cliff." They had time to kill, and not much to do. They toured the bus museum, which was more exciting than Lucas expected but, overall, not exciting; they did encounter a tour group that had gathered from around the Midwest to make the trip to Hibbing, and an intense young man in an American-flag T-shirt pointed at an antique blue-and-white bus and whispered to Nadya, "Nineteen thirty-six Super Coach. Perfect condition."

She nodded just like she knew what the fuck he was talking about. In the parking lot, the chief was sending his patrolmen back to work. "Nothing more," he told Lucas. "Just the one shell."

One of the Duluth FBI agents called and said, "Harmon said we should call you. We're on the way out of town. The guy has dropped into a routine: he just sits there and shakes his head and doesn't offer a thing. Hard to move him."

"You think he was coached?"

"I don't know what to think. He's pretty effective in resisting. He just doesn't venture anything. He just sits there and shakes his head and acts confused and mumbles. Doesn't wise-ass you, doesn't argue."

"He's at the bar?"

"He was when we left."

Hibbing was about twenty-five miles southwest of Virginia, and the trip north took about half an hour. They took two more calls en route. The first came from Harmon, who said the feds had come up dry on the computer. "He might have had some good stuff in there, but it's encrypted. Plain old over-the-counter encryption, but we're stuck without the key, and he probably had the key in his head. There were also some travel-related files, some expenses that he didn't bother to encrypt. Couple other things… I can put it on a CD if you want to see it."

"Yeah, do that. Drop it at the Radisson."

And Nadya took a call, listened for a moment, said, "Da," hung up and turned in her seat to face Lucas.

"In Washington they tell me to explain one of our problems."

"All right."

"The SVR is our foreign-intelligence service. This is the successor to the KGB that you know about, where Oleshev once worked. So. Inside the SVR, the rumors say, there is an informal group that goes back to the KGB and which does not share all the goals of the new SVR. This group is called the Circle or the Ring or, sometimes, the Zero, and it is not known if there is a specific leadership and direction, or only sympathies. We think that the Circle illegally shares information with, mmm, nongovernmental organizations, perhaps, or with other sympathizers in the military and the Foreign Ministry and industry. These are not traitors, you understand. They are like, mmm, a Republican administration hires people for your Defense Department or your State Department, and these people bore into the woodwork. Then when a Democratic president is elected, these people may continue to provide sensitive information to their old Republican friends. Do you see how I mean this?"

"Yes. Goes on all the time. Some people think it's the only thing that makes government work."

"Yes, I have heard that argument. Oleshev was believed to be in contact with the Circle. Whether he was an active agent, this is not known. But this is the reason we are both so anxious and so ignorant-the Circle has resources that we do not have now. Perhaps just… memories. Memories that are not in files anywhere. We need to know more about the Circle, we would like to know about these memories. But we can't help, not much. Because we just don't know."

"Okay."

She frowned at him: "You know what I was saying?"

"Yes. Years ago, I was asked to consult on an investigation in New York City. A group of police officers had taken it upon itself to clean up the city by killing criminals. Murdering them, really. The circle of cops went very close to the top of the police department, and had a lot of sympathy. And it was working; they probably saved lives, and certainly wiped out a lot of potential misery. But it was still murder, and we had to stop it."

"Okay," she said. "This is it. This is what we deal with."

Spivak was sitting, head down, at the end of the bar, eating a hot dog with sauerkraut when Lucas, Nadya, and two St. Louis County deputies walked in. A bartender was behind the bar, wiping glasses, and said, "Here we go." Spivak lifted his head, chewed twice, swallowed, and said, "Oh, boy, what now? I just talked to the FBI."

"We've probably got another dead man," Lucas said. "This is the third killing."

"Who?" Spivak asked. He still had bandages around his neck.

"The guy who tried to hang you, in fact. We have to stop this. We want to give you one last chance to tell us who was at the meeting with you. If you don't, I'm going to arrest you for accessory to first-degree murder. The penalty is the same as for first degree: thirty years without chance of parole. You'll never get out of Stillwater alive."

"But I don't know who they were," Spivak said, his voice rising. A piece of sauerkraut flew across the bar.

"I think we can prove that you do," Lucas said. "I'm not sure we can prove that you wanted the murders committed, but I think we can prove that you knew the people who were involved and refused to name them. That's at least obstruction of justice, and probably accessory to murder."

Spivak put his head down and stuffed the rest of the hot dog into his mouth. He chewed and chewed and finally said, "I want a lawyer."

"You can certainly have one," Lucas said. He'd gotten the arrest warrant from one of the deputies before they walked into the bar; now he took it out of his pocket and said, "Last chance."

"Lawyer."

Lucas nodded and said to one of the deputies, "Cuff him. Take the warrant with you. I want him isolated." To Spivak: "You're under arrest. You have the right to remain silent…"

Lucas recited the rest of the Miranda warning, asked Spivak if he understood, and Spivak said to one of the deputies, "Jesus Christ, Clark, this is just like a bunch of fuckin' Nazis or something. You've known me all your life."

"Just doing what the man says," Clark said. The other deputy said to Lucas, "We'll take him right down… we'll have him there in an hour."

"Can I close the bar?" Spivak asked. "Let me count the cash drawer."

"Have your bartender call your kid," Lucas said. "Starting now, you don't get any favors."