Hidden prey

Chapter 28

Lucas stuck the light on the roof, and they took off. Nadya, one hand braced against the dashboard, excited, face flushed, said, "This could be the end."

"Whatever it is, it's gonna be complicated," Lucas said.

"Big question: Was it a shooting, or a gunfight?" Andreno asked.

"Only two shots; doesn't sound like much of a fight," Lucas said. "Ought to know soon now."

With Lucas running hard, passing everything on the road and blowing through stoplights, the trip to Hibbing took sixteen minutes. When they got to Walther's house, there were six cop cars outside, all their lights going. A group of gawkers stood down the street, every one of the women with their arms crossed. Jan Walther stood directly across the street with a cop.

Lucas pulled up and they all piled out and Janet Walther shouted, "What did you do to them?"

Lucas ignored her and they tramped across the small yard, nodding at cops. Roy Hopper stood in the doorway and said, "Looks like a murder-suicide. Looks like Burt shot Melodie and then himself."

Lucas was shocked: "Ah, shit. You're sure?"

"Not positive, of course, but our guy was right outside, and he says nobody came or went. He was inside in ten seconds, and found everything just like it is now. And-we think they made a movie of it. Here, step careful."

The three of them crowded inside behind him. The bodies were on the floor, uncovered, Melodie still in her chair with a spray of blood on the wall behind her, Burt facedown on the rug, a puddle of blood around his ruined head. The air in the house was suffused with the coppery odor of blood and raw meat. Hopper pointed at a camera that was aimed at the two bodies.

"Jimmy said it was still running when he came in. He let it run, and we just decided to turn it off a couple minutes ago. We were afraid something might happen and it might erase itself."

"Nobody looked at the tape?" Andreno asked.

"Not yet. We've got a crime-scene guy coming, and we want him to check the camera for prints… and the tape too, I guess. Goddamnit. What a mess. Oh. Forgot. Burt called his lawyer just before he did it, told him what he was going to do. The lawyer called nine one one, but by that time, Jimmy was already inside."

"We need to see the tape," Lucas said. "Get your guy to bag it, and make a copy of it, before he tries to lift any prints. I don't want him putting anything on the tape, or doing the Super Glue trick, or anything that might fuck it up."

"I'll tell him."

Nadya touched Lucas on the shoulder and said, "This tape will tell us."

"I hope."

Nothing to do except get out of the way. Lucas gave Hopper his cell-phone number, asked him to call when they could move the camera, and they went back to the truck, ignoring Janet Walther, who called to them from across the street.

In five minutes, they were in a downtown cafe, drinking coffee, eating hamburgers and fries, not much to say.

"Is this a good time to get back home?" Lucas asked Nadya.

"You mean, weather? I think this is the best time, the early autumn. We still have the daylight, the trees begin to color. Do you think I'll go?"

"Something will come out of the tape," Lucas said. "Walther completely bullshitted me the first time, and the second time, he was the tough guy. Now this, with the camera. There'll be something."

"Maybe you oughta defect," Andreno said to Nadya.

She laughed, said, "No, I don't think. I am happy to get back."

"Too many signs here?"

Now she frowned, looking at her sandwich: "You know, it seems very hard here. Harsh. All the time, work, work, work, money, money, money." She turned to Andreno. "You are retired, no? You have this pension. Yet, you travel hundreds of kilometers to work on a job with no future. Why is this?"

"Better than sitting on my ass," Andreno said.

She nodded. "This is the thing. In the rest of the world-maybe not Japan, I have not been there-people enjoy sitting on their asses and talking, dancing, playing games. Here, there is no time. You are all too busy making signs."

Then Hopper called and said, "Our technical guy has popped the tape and bagged it. We're going to take it downtown and look at it."

"See you there."

The police station was five minutes away. They watched the tape in the chief's office, ten people crowded inside, standing, the tape running on an aging Panasonic TV out of an equally aged VCR. "This is a copy," the tech said. "I made a quick copy so there wouldn't be any screw-ups with the original, and we can run it back and forth. I watched it. It's nasty. You don't want to be here if you don't have a strong stomach." Nobody moved, and he started the tape.

Lucas had been shocked when Hopper told him about the suicide: the tape dragged him further down, and he flinched away from the killing of Melodie, and Nadya dug her fingers into his arm and pressed her forehead into it, not looking, and jumped at the sound of the shot that killed her. Half the people in the room said, "Oh, Jesus," or "Ah, shit," and one woman hurried out of the room.

When Walther killed himself, Lucas watched-did Walther have a small amused smile on his face?-then closed his eyes as the body flung itself to the floor. He felt the air leaking out of him, out of the case.

The tech said, "Anybody want anything run back?"

There was a chorus of "nos" except Lucas: "Let me see the lawyer part again. When he's talking on the phone."

They watched the lawyer portion again, and then shut down the machine.

Lucas said to Hopper, "Keep the house sealed. Nobody in, nobody out, at least until I talk it over with the feds."

"Okay. What else?"

"I don't know. There might not be much more."

"What about the tape? We can't just give it to Burt's lawyer-I mean, he's a good guy, and all, but I don't see…"

"Hang on to it. Just hang on to it. Make him take you to court to get it-that'll take awhile, and by the time he gets it, it won't be of so much interest."

"Oh, bullshit," Andreno said. "That tape'll be hot two years from now. Fox would give its left nut to get its hands on it."

"Okay," Lucas said. "It won't be so hot for us."

"Ah. Now that you 'splain it that way…" Hopper said.

Nadya was still unsure about American jurisprudence, and Lucas and Andreno took a couple of minutes to explain some of the pragmatic aspects of it.

"Every serious criminal charge here winds up in front of a jury, if the defendant wants one," Lucas told her. "Even if we don't believe what Burt Walther said on the tape, even if he had some paid assassin from somewhere else, we have nothing from the shootings that would prove it. And the defense has the tape in which Walther not only takes responsibility, but also gives a credible explanation of who did the shooting. By committing suicide, he not only removes himself from the possibility of interrogation and cross-examination, he seems to… mmm… demonstrate the sincerity of his statement."

"Which is the big deal," Andreno said. "Here, a guy is absolutely assumed to be innocent until he's proven to be guilty beyond any reasonable doubt. What Walther did was drop a huge reasonable doubt on almost anything we could take to court."

Lucas concluded: "So unless something really radical shows up… there's no point in continuing the investigation. We'd never get anybody else into court."

Nadya understood perfectly: "For me, anything that would upset this tape would be unwelcome. We have now an explanation for everything. We can take this to Maksim Oleshev and say this and this and this, one-two-three, is how your son came to die. This is all that is wanted."

"So we're good," Andreno said. To Lucas: "I can hang around if you want, but I don't know what I'd do."

"Take off," Lucas said. "You can probably get a flight out tomorrow morning."

Lucas borrowed an empty office from Hopper and started by calling the boss, Rose Marie Roux. They were on the phone for fifteen minutes.

At the end of the conversation, she said, "Okay. Let me talk to the governor, but I'd say that you're done. Turn it over to the feds, and to the local people, and come on back."

When he got off the phone with Roux, he called Harmon, spent another fifteen minutes filling him in. Harmon said, when Lucas was finished, "All right. The house is sealed, I'm going straight to Washington to get a crew out here. They really can't ignore it. Who knows what they'll find in that place? Who knows who went through there?"

"You should know that I'm not quite right with it," Lucas said. "If you find Roger anywhere-if you find him in Russia-I'd like to see him. I'd like to talk with him. I'd like to run around the block with him."

"I don't know what that means," Harmon said. "Is that cop talk? I don't know the jargon."

"What?" Lucas was puzzled.

" 'Run around the block…' "

"No, no. I mean, I'd really, actually like to run around a block with him. Or once around a track. That's what I meant."

Roux called back: "Where are you? In Duluth or on the Range?"

"Still in Hibbing."

"Good. The governor wants to see you, and it turns out he's in Eveleth tonight at seven o'clock. Can you get there?"

"No problem. Just up the way."

"He's at a dance at some hall up there… one of the ones with all the initials and you never know what they mean… I'll find it here somewhere…"

Nadya had made reservations: "I leave for Minneapolis and then Washington tomorrow at three o'clock. Micky goes at two o'clock and says he will ride me to the airport. What do you do?"

"Probably go home tonight. I've got to hang around here for a while, though. The governor wants to talk to me about something. Want to meet a governor?"

"Mmm. Well, yes." A thin line appeared on her forehead. "Do you think he will take a picture with me? With my camera?"

"Sure. He loves that kind of thing."

They watched the tape again, and Lucas and Nadya made a statement for an assistant county attorney about their contacts with Burt Walther. At five o'clock, they caught the local evening news. The news was spectacular. Somebody had a good source with the Hibbing cops, and the on-the-scene reporter was standing outside of the yellow-taped Walther house. He ran down the whole story: the first killing at the harbor, the Russian agent at the bus depot, Reasons, Harbinson, and finally, the Walther murder-suicide.

An interview with Jan Walther: "I don't know what is happening. I don't know what is going on. My ex-husband is gone, and I hear these rumors… All of this is crazy, and the police don't tell me anything…"

There was more from the neighbors in the street. One guy, who didn't seem to know much about the Walthers, tried to float the line about the Walthers being loners who stayed to themselves. He was immediately and thoroughly contradicted by all the Walthers' neighbors and Burt Walthers' fellow union members, who testified that he and Melodie were good people and that Burt was a stand-up guy. "All of this, the final echoes of the fall of the Soviet Union, and a spy ring, in our midst here in Minnesota, for almost seventy years," the reporter finished portentously.

Nadya said, "This is, how do you say…"

"Bullshit," Lucas said.

"Mostly."

They had time to kill. When the news was over, they checked out with Hopper and drove to Virginia, which was only a few miles from the dance the governor was attending. They rode north in comfortable quiet, chatting about this or that aspect of the case. Nadya said that if Walther were spotted anywhere within the Soviet sphere, she would personally see that Lucas was notified.

"But I think he will not be. There is no sign that he speaks Russian, yes? I would think he would run to Canada. Maybe in the west, in the mountains, where there is not so much TV Perhaps Alaska. With a prepared identity, he would be hard to find."

"But what's he gonna do, be a drunk?" Lucas asked. "He's got no real skills that we know of. He was a car salesman for about six months…"

"There are no car stores in Alaska?" Nadya asked.

Andreno leaned in from the backseat. "Wal-Mart, man. Home Depot. There are all these places that hire and fire hundreds of people every day. They don't know who the fuck they are. Half of Mexico used to work for Wal-Mart."

"All right, he can get a job."

Nobody was hungry, but they stopped in Virginia for coffee, and helped Nadya buy two pounds of magazines for her flight to Washington. At seven o'clock, they drove to Eveleth, got lost, drove around aimlessly for a while, and eventually found the place by a process of elimination.

The dance was an AFL-CIO affair with a polka band and an acre of sheet cake and Jell-O molds, a cash bar, and balloons on the ceilings. The polka band was hot, and the governor not only liked to dance, he was good at it.

Elmer Henderson was a willowy man, narrow shouldered, with short blond hair going gray at the temples, a man who wore handmade suits and shoes and a different Hermes tie each day. His clan was one of Minnesota's richest, and Elmer was a typical product of money: conservative, mild, polite.

But he could dance a polka about as well as anybody Lucas had seen, and when he got going, the other dancers fell back into a circle and clapped with the band, and Lucas and Nadya laughed out loud.

He was dancing with a very fat lady-also a good dancer-when he spotted Lucas and waved. Lucas waved back and a man who'd come up behind him said, "Don't interrupt him. I've got six photographers shooting their ass off for the next campaign."

Lucas turned and found Neil Mitford, the governor's chief political operator. "Heck of a dancer," Lucas said.

"Hard to believe, huh? Look at the motherfucker go…"

A while later, the governor got loose and said, "Let's find a spot." They found a spot and Lucas introduced Nadya and Andreno, and the governor nodded and said, "Rose Marie briefed me, and I see it's leaked onto TV Is there anything in it? For us?"

Lucas shook his head. "You should stay clear on this one. If that tape gets out-and it may, there's a whole question of probate, because he made it his last will-you can't help feeling sorry for the old guy. I'd say, take the credit for doing the feds' job for them, but then say it's up to them to carry the ball the rest of the way."

"How about the Russians?" the governor asked Nadya. "You okay with this?"

"Yes. Thank you very much. I go back home tomorrow, I will ask them to send you an official thank-you for Minnesota's help."

"Excellent. Always happy to help."

Nadya held up her camera. "Is it permitted to get a picture of you? With me?"

"Absolutely."

Lucas took the picture, one of Henderson and Nadya shaking hands, and one of Henderson with his arm around her shoulder, giving her a little hug.

"Like old comrades," Lucas said.

Mitford said, nervously, "Not comrades, for Christ's sake."

"I've got to get back to the dance," Henderson said. He leaned into them, his head between Lucas and Nadya and said, "I really like to dance with the big fat ones. Even if I look like Jack Spratt. Not only that, Neil says you can tell that I like it, when you see it on TV Did you know that twenty-two point four percent of Minnesota women of voting age are officially obese?"

"Plus-sized," Mitford said.

"That's what I meant." Henderson beamed. "Plus-sized."

He left them, and Nadya looked at Lucas and said, "What is this Jack Spratt?"

"Just a guy," Lucas said.

"Who could eat no fat," said Mitford.

"And his wife could eat no lean," Lucas continued.

When they were done, she said, "You are joking me again."

When she'd gone to the ladies' room, Mitford looked after her and asked, "You getting any of that?"

"No, I am not. I am a happily married man," he said, thinking of Jerry Reasons. If he'd been an unhappily married man, like Reasons, he might be dead.

"Looks pretty good."

"She is pretty good. If you put her on your staff, she'd fit right in. She'd be one of your top guys in a week."

Mitford squinted at Lucas: "What you're saying is, you wouldn't trust her any further than you could spit a rat."

"Did I say that?"

At eight o'clock, they were on their way back to Duluth when Lucas's cell phone rang. Weather, he thought.

He picked it up, said hello, and found a switchboard operator from the BCA headquarters in St. Paul. "A woman called for you. She says it's urgent, life-and-death. She said she's tried your hotel room in Duluth three times, but you're never there. She's calling from public phones… she says she's the laptop lady."

"Ah, Jesus, is she gonna call back?"

"I told her we could probably get in touch with you, and she said she'd call back in half an hour."

"Give her this number, but tell her I'll just be getting back to Duluth and there are some cell-phone dead spots. Tell her I'll be in my hotel by nine o'clock at the latest, or she can call me here on this phone any time after about eight forty-five."

"Okay."

"Trace the call, just in case."

Lucas hung up and Andreno said from the backseat, "What?"

"The laptop lady," Lucas said. "Life-and-death."

"Jesus. Maybe she knows where Roger went."

"How?"

"Then what the fuck is life-and-death?"