Hidden prey

Chapter 25

Lucas and Nadya made their statements, and signed them. No perjury was committed, although an observer from Mars might have observed that not all possible questions had been asked.

There had been no way, the city attorney said, to completely avoid the question of a relationship between Nadya and Reasons, but the relationship had been disposed of with two questions and two short answers, which had dismissed the possibility that a personal relationship had in any way contributed to the murder.

Reasons, the attorney concluded, had been killed on the job when a professional assassin, armed with a silenced pistol, had gone to Nadya's room to kill her, and instead, had encountered Reasons, who'd died protecting Nadya. Several throats were cleared, briefcases were stuffed, and the lights turned out.

Andreno called from Hibbing, said there was no action at Walther's house, and Lucas ordered him back to Duluth to stay with Nadya overnight.

Kelly, the cop originally assigned to the murder of Mary Wheaton, stopped to chat with Lucas on the way out the door after the statements were given. Lucas mentioned that he was looking for a drunk named Roger Walther, but that Walther had never been arrested, and was no longer living at the house listed on his driver's license.

"I'll ask around," Kelly said. "Know anything else about him?"

"Not much… whacked his wife a couple times, no charges. He was the local hockey hero in Hibbing, played with UMD…"

"Well, shit, I know a guy named Reggie Carpenter who knows every single asshole who ever got ice time up there… He might be able to help you out."

"Where's he live?"

"Actually, he plays piano at T-Bone Logan's Lakeside Lumber Emporium and Saloon. He oughta be there now."

"Place with a name like that, you wouldn't see many tourists," Lucas suggested.

Kelly snorted: "There never was a T-Bone Logan, it's not on the lakeside, it was built six years ago by a doctor's group from Chicago outa fake logs, never had anything to do with lumber, and they charge nine bucks for a martini which, when they bring it to you, turns out to be purple, or maroon, or some fuckin' thing. What do you think?"

A gentle drizzle was falling as they drove.

"Feel the winter coming," Kelly said.

"This isn't it, though," Lucas said. "Not yet." Sometime in September, a bone-crunching cold front usually came through, pointing at snow, if not actually delivering any. This drizzle still contained a hint of warmth.

"You ski?"

"Ah, every once in a while. I've got a place over in Sawyer County, Hayward, I got a couple of sleds…"

They talked snow and cabins and snowmobiles until they pulled into the bar.

T-Bone Logan's was as Kelly said, a tourist trap with log walls and, inside, axes and saws and kerosene lanterns mounted overhead, and big photos of lumberjacks in old-timey logging camps. The tabletops were made out of split pine logs with clear finishes; the place smelled of wet-sauce ribs and beans.

Carpenter, the piano player, was a Dagwood-looking man, pale, slender, balding, with cheap false teeth that tended to clack when he talked, and a sprinkling of dandruff on his black sport coat. Lucas and Kelly got beer from the bar and carried it over to the piano and waited while Carpenter finished wending his way through an overfruited version of "Stardust," Carpenter signaling his friendship to Kelly with his eyebrows.

When he finished the song, he slid over to the side of the piano bench and said, "How's it going, Officer Kelly?"

"How many telephones you got now, Reggie?"

"Just the one cell phone," Carpenter said. "Don't even have one in my house."

"You're sure?"

"Absolutely," Carpenter said, beaming at Kelly.

Kelly said to Lucas, "Reggie used to take the occasional bet."

"Ah."

"In the month of November nineteen ninety-nine, he took bets on one thousand seven hundred and fifty-six occasions," Kelly continued.

"I never would have suspected," Lucas said.

"I was just… a little thoughtless," Carpenter said. "So what's going on?"

"UMD hockey," Kelly said. "Do you remember a guy named Roger Walther? Would have been a second-stringer, maybe… what? Twenty-some years ago?"

Carpenter frowned, tinkled the high C key a few times, then nodded, "Yeah… I do. He played forward, but he was a little slow with the stick, and about six feet short getting down the ice. But he could play. What'd he do?"

"Have you seen him?" Lucas asked.

"No, not for years. I think-I think, but I'm not sure-that he once was selling cars at Landry's, but that would have been years ago."

"Not since."

"Nope. What'd he do?"

"What's he like, physically?" Lucas asked. "Fast? Big? Wide? Strong?"

"About like you," Carpenter said to Lucas. "Maybe an inch shorter, a couple of pounds heavier."

"You think he might be a runner?" Lucas asked. "Like to jog, and so on?"

"I don't know. He was a college-level jock. So probably. What'd he do, anyway?"

"Thanks for your help," Kelly said. "Stick with the one phone, huh?"

They had a few drinks, and Lucas eventually got back to the hotel and slept like a rock.

The next morning, he was in the shower, feeling a little rocky from the alcohol, when the first call came in, from John Terry, the Virginia police chief.

"We got a line on Roger Walther. He's living with a woman named Kelly Harbinson just out west of town. I got an address…"

Lucas took the address and said, "Thanks. I'll check it out."

Andreno and Nadya came over for breakfast. The rain was still falling, and they all looked out over the lake as he told them about the call; there were no boats visible at all, and no separation between lake and sky. "I'm getting pretty damned tired of driving back and forth," Lucas said. "Everything is up on the Range-I'm gonna check out of here tomorrow morning and find a place up there."

"Me also," Nadya said. "This process feels like it is coming to an end."

Andreno nodded. "Roger'll give us something. Has to. Did you see the paper this morning?"

"The Star Tribune," Lucas said.

"The local paper has a story from Spivak's lawyer. You're gonna take some pressure at the preliminary hearing."

"We've got enough for the preliminary," Lucas said.

"Be a pretty fucked-up trial, though," Andreno said.

"Somebody'll crack before we get to trial. I hope."

With the focus on Roger Walther, they all rode to Virginia together. Lucas and Andreno chatted about another case they'd worked on, in St. Louis, and they compared promotion and salary practices with Nadya. Nadya's salary was small by American standards, but she paid almost nothing for housing, medical care, insurance, or any of the other dozens of possibilities that Americans dealt with. The one problem, she said, was food. "We don't eat so much in restaurants as you do; and the food in restaurants that I can afford is not so good anyway."

"And you don't have so many signs," Lucas said.

She laughed, the first time Lucas had heard her laugh since Reasons was killed. "You are ridiculous here. When we stopped to buy gasoline, on one pump, there were twenty-two signs. On one pump!"

"I saw you counting," Lucas said.

"Stickers," Andreno said. "They're called stickers."

"But they were signs. Only, small ones."

The rain had stopped, but everything was still damp and dripping when they arrived at Kelly Harbinson's place outside Virginia.

"What a dump," Andreno said from the backseat. He'd taken his revolver out of its holster, and he put it in his jacket pocket. "Looks like something from a cotton plantation."

"Yeah, well… his ex-wife said he was like one step off the street," Lucas said.

"Wish we had vests," Andreno said.

They got out, and like Andreno, Lucas put his.45 in his jacket pocket, held it in his hand. They told Nadya to wait back off the porch, and then Lucas and Andreno trooped across the wooden stoop and knocked on the screen door. The knock, Lucas thought, might have been inaudible inside: the wood was so wet and old that the knock was more of a soggy pup-pup-pup. There was no sound or movement from inside, and Lucas pulled the screen door open and knocked on the inside door, a little harder.

No sound, no movement. A car went by on the road, and they looked after it, but the driver was a woman and she never looked back at them.

Lucas knocked again. Nothing. "Damnit," he said.

"Let me walk around back," Andreno said.

Lucas nodded, sure that there was nobody inside. The door was solid, without an inset window, so as Andreno squished on the wet shaggy lawn around to the back, Lucas stepped over to the front window and tried to peer in. The window was dirty enough that there was a lot of reflection, and he couldn't see much-what he could see looked like a messy house, which, given the outside appearance, wasn't surprising.

Andreno came back around. "I looked in the back door, couldn't see shit."

Lucas stepped back out to the car, took his phone out, and called John Terry. "We're out at Kelly Harbinson's place. There's nobody here. You know where she works?"

"No, but I might be able to find out. Let me get back to you. Give me fifteen minutes."

They spent the fifteen minutes filling Nadya in on American search rules. "We could go in and if it became necessary, lie about it," Nadya said.

Lucas said, "That has been done, but… usually, when only the one investigator is around."

Andreno agreed: "As long as you got defense attorneys, better to play by the law. When you don't see an upside."

"What is this upside?"

They explained the upside to her, and she said, "Capitalism."

John Terry called back and said, "I had my girl call around to Harbinsons, and she found her parents. She works at Reeves' Wine and Spirits. About ten to one, that's where she met Walther."

"Okay. You got a number?"

Lucas called the liquor store, identified himself to the owner, Jack Reeves, and asked for Harbinson.

"I don't know where she is," Reeves said. "We're a little worried. She was supposed to be here at eight. She drinks a little, but she's pretty reliable."

"This hasn't happened before?"

"No, not really. She's been here four years… I mean, she's been late, but you know, it snowed and she was late six minutes. If she didn't come in soon, I was going to drive out to her place and knock on the door."

"Nobody here… we're out there now," Lucas said.

Off the phone, Lucas looked at the house and said, "Let's check all the windows. See what we can see."

"Maybe they took off," Andreno said.

"That's what I'm afraid of."

They walked around the left side of the house; most of the windows had Venetian blinds, and they could see through the string holes in the sides, and the corners where the blinds weren't quite straight. They saw nothing useful until they'd circled the house. From there, a blind looked into the bedroom, and they could see a pile of clothes on the floor by what must have been a closet, and more strewn in the hallway beyond.

"Goddamnit," Lucas said.

Andreno tried the front door. "It's unlocked," he said.

"Let me do this," Lucas said. He pushed the door open and called, "Hello? Anybody home?"

No answer. He pushed the door open another foot. The place was messy inside, and smelled like tomato soup and nicotine, but there was no law against any of that.

There wasn't room on the porch for Nadya, but Andreno had moved up behind Lucas and he said, "There's a butcher knife on the floor."

"Where?"

"Right there in front of the TV" There was nothing in front of the TV except an oval braided rug.

"I better check the place," Lucas said. He stepped inside, again called, "Hello?" Nothing. He went through the living room, looked into the kitchen, checked a bedroom, which was empty, the bath, empty but in disarray, then the second bedroom, where the pile of clothes sat in front of the closet.

He almost didn't see her-nothing was visible but her head. The rest of her body was buried under a pile of clothes that had been thrown across the bed. Lucas took another step: her forehead had a hole in it.

Lucas retreated, went into the kitchen, took a tissue from a box on the counter, picked up a butcher knife, dropped it on the floor in front of the television, and went back to the porch.

Andreno looked at his face and said, "What?"

"She's in there," Lucas said.

"She's dead," Nadya said.

"Yes. Shot in the forehead."

"This is nuts," Andreno said.

Lucas called Terry back: "We got a problem out here, Chief. Who covers this area?"

"St. Louis County sheriff. What do you got?"

Lucas told him, and Terry said, "Jesus Christ, Davenport, you're some kind of death angel."

"Yeah, yeah…"

"I'll get the sheriff started, and we'll get a couple cars out there-we got a mutual aid pact. Ten minutes."

Lucas hung up and Andreno said, "Roger Walther."

"Didn't take her with him," Lucas said. "I hope somebody has a picture."

"His wife…"

Lucas said to Nadya: "Okay. We've got a lot of stuff to do now. We've got to put out a bulletin on this guy, and since he might have been working with somebody from Russia, we'll have to make it international. Can you call your embassy…"

They were making up a list of must-do tasks when they heard the first siren coming in: Lucas turned toward the siren, then back to the other two.

"We'll hit Janet Walther first, ask if she's seen him. Then hit the old man again-Nadya thinks he might have been fucking with us with the Alzheimer's act. Start the cops looking either for his car, or Harbinson's. Check the state registrations for both of them, get the tag numbers out to the highway patrol and everybody else. Get the name to the security people at the airports…"

"If these cells were set up to move people, then he could be hard to locate," Nadya said. "They would have protected routes out."

"I don't know-all I know is what we can do," Lucas said. He turned and looked toward the incoming cop car, and then back to Nadya. "There's something not quite right with this whole thing. You say the group wasn't active as far as you know… if they were active, would somebody have told you? Warned you off?"

"Yes. And nobody did. There would be some indication that while they wanted enthusiasm, they did not want success. I never got that. It was the other way around-that I should learn what is happening, and we should not spare ourselves. That is why Piotr is dead."

Lucas said, "I'm just not sure how far I can trust you."

"That's for you to decide," she said. "But-we are breaking this case. We will join you in the hunt for Roger Walther, and if he is running to us, we will tell you."

"You will give him back?"

She shrugged. "That's not for me to decide. He did murder a popular diplomat."

He looked at her for a long moment, and then as the cop car turned into the yard, and he saw John Terry's face in the window, he nodded and said, "Okay. For now, anyway."