Hidden prey

Chapter 5

Nadya was looking good.

She'd changed into a dark blue suit that went well with her blond hair and showed off her figure; she'd added a touch of lipstick and small diamond-chip earrings. Her hair, worn short, and still damp from the shower, looked artlessly windblown. As they got in the elevator to go back down, Reasons muttered to Lucas, "Christ, she wouldn't even need any training."

"What?" She'd heard part of it.

"How'd the prints go? When will you find out?" Lucas asked.

She said, "He's Oleshev," she said. "The fingerprints, they've already checked, there is no doubt. There wasn't much before."

"What does his father do?" Reasons asked. Distracting her from the training comment. "We've heard he's a big shot."

She was nodding. "His father is important in oil. Very important. Not so much oil itself, as, em, support machinery."

"Pumps?" Reasons suggested.

"Maybe pumps," she said. "But bigger than that. Pipelines, refineries. Systems. There is so much oil in some places in Russia, you can get it out of the ground with a stick. Getting it from the stick to Europe… that is the problem."

"Okay."

But she expanded: "So you see, Maksim Oleshev not only controls money, he controls workers-jobs in factories, jobs in pipeline construction. These are votes. Some people think his power could be destabilizing."

"So what's his son doing in Duluth?" Lucas asked.

"The son went his own way," she said. "He was a government official before his father came to power in oil."

"He was in the KGB," Lucas said.

She nodded. "Yes. Of course. Then in the merchant marine."

"That seems like an unlikely job change, from spy to sailor," Lucas said dryly.

She looked up at him and said, "First, he was not a spy. He was an analyst and an, mmm, I don't know the English. An arranger. Second, you were not in Russia in the nineties. People had no jobs. The government collapsed. The intelligence services collapsed. High, important men were selling shoes in the markets. If somebody said, 'Here is a job,' you took it. Oleshev, we think, had contacts in the merchant marine through his covert service, from being an arranger. Perhaps he… knew something about some of them. Anyway, he got a job. He was good at it, the crew says. He started as a third officer, which is nothing, and would have had his own ship soon."

"Really," Lucas said.

"Really. It's true." Her eyes were opaque, giving away nothing, but she smiled sweetly. "In fact… I will tell you some things, but if they appear on paper and I am asked, I will deny them."

"Between us, then," Lucas said.

"Yes. One line of speculation in Moscow is that Oleshev was a courier for his father, perhaps working toward some unknown agreement with American oil service companies. The Moscow government would oppose this, if they knew about it. You see, the best oil service companies are American, but the Moscow government wishes, understandably, that Russian companies begin to develop the capacity to provide these services. But how can this be done if all the contracts go to America?"

Lucas said, "But then… the obvious agency to kill Oleshev would be your Moscow government. The American companies wouldn't do it-they'd want Oleshev to succeed. His father wouldn't do it. And our government would probably like to see American companies get the business. So it'd be you guys. What do they call it? The SVR?"

She shook her head. The mention of the SVR didn't faze her: "Ah. But I can tell you, from the highest sources, that the SVR knows nothing. They would like to know something, because there are many people shouting at them, but they do not. And Maksim Oleshev claims that there was nothing to know; that he had no business dealings with his son. Therefore, the problem must be here."

"You believe that? He had no dealings with his son?"

She cocked her head to the side, pushed out a lip. Then, "I don't know. In Russia, the family is important. If your father has a billion dollars, why cover yourself with dirt in some old ship? But that is what Maksim says."

"So what's the Moscow speculation on the kind of problem it might be?" Lucas asked.

She ticked them off on her fingers: "One: An American thug sees a man in the dark and kills him in course of a robbery. Two: Rodion Oleshev is dealing with the Russian criminal underground, perhaps as a courier of drugs or financial instruments. There is a falling-out, and they kill him, or a rival gang kills him. Maybe Russian, maybe American. That's my favorite. Three: Maksim Oleshev is lying, and his son was working for him. Four: Something else. What, we don't know."

Reasons said, "You can probably scratch the American thug. That's a terrible place for a strong-arm robbery, down by the docks. You can't see a thing in the dark, there's no way to get out of there in a hurry, nobody has much money, and a lot of the people you might try to rob are meaner'n shit themselves."

"And he was probably shot with a silenced pistol," Lucas said. "In my whole career, I've seen about three silencers that would actually work. They're rare, here. This wasn't a street robbery."

"I agree," Nadya said. "I think, one way or another, that he was a courier, a contact person, and criminality was involved."

"The crew didn't have much to say about him," Reasons said.

Nadya frowned. "The Potemkin has stopped in Quebec, so that our investigators can speak to the crew members. I'll get summaries of the interrogations and give them to you."

Reasons nodded: "Okay."

Nadya said, "I would like to speak to the man who saw the killer, the American."

"So would I," said Lucas. "But he's fishing. He has a shift this afternoon. He's due in at three o'clock. He knows we'll be coming."

Duluth police headquarters were in City Hall, a stone building that looked like a 1930s WPA post office. Along with the federal building and the St. Louis County Courthouse, it made up the civic center a block from the Radisson. They walked over, a nice afternoon, sunshine slanting down over the hill, a maple tree down the street showing a flame of autumn orange.

The detective bureau was like fifty others that Lucas had been in over his career, an undistinguished beige-painted room with a counter near the entrance, a bulletin board full of FBI "Wanted" posters, a couple of short rows of desks separated by low partitions, a twenty-four-hour wall clock, a few computers, a lot of paper. A single detective sat hunched over a newspaper, eating a sandwich from a brown paper sack. He looked up when they came in, and went back to his sandwich as Reasons led them into a side room.

"The lieutenant's gone, he's down in St. Paul at murder school. We can use his office," Reasons said. He pointed them at chairs around a conference table, and added, "I'll be right back."

He was back in a minute with a file folder, which he gave to Nadya. "Anything you want, we'll Xerox. Can I get you some coffee?"

"A cup would be good," she said. She looked at the file: "Thin."

"Not much to work with," Reasons agreed. "You've probably already seen most of it."

"Well." She flipped through the file. "Maybe I'll get some sleep tonight."

Lucas settled into an unused desk, paging through a copy of Trailer Boat magazine that had been sitting under a telephone. Reasons took a cup of coffee into Nadya, and he could hear them talking, and Reasons laughed once. Reasons came out, put his hands on the edge of a desk, backed his feet away, and did fifty quick push-ups. The sandwich-eating detective said, "If your feet ever slip out when you're doing that, you're gonna break your teeth on the edge of the desk."

"I'm quicker'n that," Reasons said.

"Okay. Your problem, as long as it's not my desk," said the other man. "I don't want any tooth marks on it."

Ten minutes after Nadya started reading, another detective wandered in, carrying a briefcase. He stopped when he saw Lucas.

Reasons said, "Davenport. BCA."

Lucas said, "Your desk? Sorry, we're just waiting."

He stood up and moved to the guest chair next to Reasons, and the second detective ambled over to his desk, said, "Take the magazine if you want, I'm all done with it." Then he sat down, sighed and said, "What a day."

"Talk to a bum?" asked Reasons.

"Talked to fifteen of them," the detective said. "Nobody knows what happened. They kept asking me if somebody was killing bums."

"We gonna lose it?"

"I don't know. Probably."

"Better you than me," Reasons said.

The detective nodded toward the lieutenant's office. "Is that the…"

"Russian. Yeah."

The detective whistled and said, "I thought they all wore them things like my ma. You know, the babushkas."

"She's probably got one hidden somewhere," Reasons said.

"What's happening with the old lady?" Lucas asked. "I saw the story in the paper."

"If you read the paper, you probably know more than I do, 'cause I haven't read it yet," the detective said. "But…"

He dipped into his briefcase and took out a manila file and passed it to Lucas. Inside was a sheaf of photos of the crime scene and the dead woman. The detective turned back to Reasons. "By the way, Chick Daniels is looking for you. He knows all about the Russian and the BCA guy… Davenport?"

"Davenport," Lucas said. "Who is Chick Daniels?"

"Reporter for the News Tribune."

"Mmm." Lucas looked at one of the photos and then held it up to the detective. "Is this the way she looked? Is that neck right?"

"That's the way she looked. Almost cut her head off."

"I've never seen that before," Lucas said. "The cut goes all the way around."

"Sliced right through the whole front half of her neck, arteries, veins, and all."

"Maybe you got a nut," Lucas said.

The two detectives regarded Lucas for a moment, then the no-name detective said, "That's what I'm afraid of. We got a nut and he's gonna do it again." Pause. "Fuck."

Nadya wound up Xeroxing a half dozen sheets from the Oleshev murder file, then she and Lucas headed for the port. Reasons opted to go home: "I already talked to the guy three times. If you get anything new, call me up."

Nadya settled into the Acura, lifted an eyebrow at the video screen on the dashboard, but left it without comment; Lucas followed the onscreen map through the maze of streets around I-35, and made it down to Garfield Avenue. At the TDX terminal, they found the entrance, a tiny white door in the otherwise faceless tower. Inside, they found a small two-man office, everything with a patina of dust. A man sat with his back to them, typing on a manual typewriter that sat on a government-style gray metal desk with a broken leg set on a two-by-four block. Lucas hadn't seen a typewriter like it in twenty years. The man didn't turn when they came in. He said, "Chris called, he wants you to call back."

"Wrong guys," Lucas said.

Then man turned from the typewriter: "Ah… you must be the state police guy."

Lucas nodded, introduced himself and Nadya. "Are you Harry Kellogg?"

"No, no, Harry doesn't work here, he works for the port. He's supposed to be here to meet you…" They heard a truck outside and the guy said, "That's probably him."

They went back outside, and found a portly, red-faced man in a yellow hard hat, just climbed out of his red-and-black GMC pickup. He shook hands with Lucas, and nodded at Nadya.

"I didn't see much. I just finished filling the number-two hold and I walked out to the bow to have a cigarette-can't have one right by the hold because there's dust in the air, and you could have an explosion," Kellogg said. "So I light up and I look over the bow. I wasn't sure what I was seeing, because… I don't know, I haven't seen that many dead people, and I didn't expect to see one there. I mean, it took a few seconds. Then I saw this other guy, not exactly running, but he was in a hurry, moving off into the dark. Into the weeds way back there… and I realized the guy on the ground was probably dead, or maybe unconscious. I yelled and the one guy started running away, and that's the last I saw of him. The dead guy was just layin' there. I ran down to the gangway and down to my truck and got my baseball bat and ran down to the dead guy. I used my cell phone and I called the ambulance…"

"The guy who ran away… you didn't see him shoot the dead man, you didn't see a gun?"

"No. And the thing is, I never even heard the shots, even though we were on deck not more than a couple of hundred feet away. There was some noise, you know, but it's not loud, the hold filling up. The cops, the police, said there were a bunch of shots, but I didn't hear a thing. Neither did the crew."

"So then what?"

"So then nothin'. The cops came and looked all over the place, and picked up the dead guy, and took a statement from me. Looked around in the weeds."

"You didn't see anybody in the weeds."

"No, I never did. The thing is, I had a couple of cigarettes-I had one about fifteen minutes before, and I went up to the bow and there was nobody in sight. The whole thing happened in that fifteen minutes. Then…" He glanced at Nadya and colored a bit.

"What?" Lucas asked.

"The Russian guys… this was years ago, mostly, we don't see many Russians anymore. The thing is, it used to be that every time a Russian boat came in, you'd see carloads of girls coming out here. They'd go on the boat and you know, take care of the guys. Sometimes, when we were loading, and there was a lot of dust and guys banging around, they'd get a blanket and go out in the weeds. I don't think there were any women aboard, but… there might have been some guys down in the weeds earlier in the night."

"Did you see any women at all?"

"No, I didn't. I just thought, with the weeds all crushed down… sometimes you'd see that. But that was years ago."

"Okay," Lucas said.

"How many of the crew did you see? Up on the deck?" Nadya asked.

"Just the captain and the loader, the guy who was helping with the loading. The rest of them were all asleep."

"So you don't think somebody from the crew might have met Oleshev on the dock…"

Kellogg was shaking his head: "No. The guy I saw ran away, and there was no way to get back past me on the boat. As soon as the cops got here, they sealed off the boat so nobody could come or go. I was here all that time, and pretty soon, all of the crew was up, when they heard the commotion, the sirens and all. The captain did a head count, and they were all accounted for. Nobody came or went. Besides, the guy I saw didn't look like a Russian."

" 'Didn't look like a Russian,' " Nadya repeated.

Kellogg shook his head. "The crew are blue-collar guys. Beefy, strong guys. Gorillas. The guy I saw was small. I think he was small. He looked… you know, thin. He had on that long coat and the Russian guys, you never saw them in long coats. They wore jackets. Leather jackets, or just regular cloth jackets, or rain suits, but I never saw one in a long coat. This looked… old-fashioned."

They talked a few minutes more, but Kellogg had nothing else that was relevant. They said good-bye and walked down to the end of the slip where Lucas had parked the Acura.

"Where was this weeds place, where Jerry thought there was a chase?" Nadya asked.

"Over here…" Lucas took her out into the weeds. "Right around here. From the lake, back this far. He said you could see what looked like pathways crushed into the weeds… You can see where we walked this morning. Same thing."

"Mmm." She looked around. "This does not look like so good a place for sex."

"Depends on how bad you want the sex," Lucas said. "I suppose."

The ground underfoot was rough, as though it had been dug over a few times, rutted by heavy equipment and trucks. Here and there were piles of broken concrete. Nadya tramped through the weeds for a few more minutes, and then said, "If there was a chase over here, who got chased? Why was Oleshev in the middle of this big concrete? He couldn't run after he was shot, that's for sure. He was shot in the heart and the head… Does it make any sense?"

Lucas was looking at the remnants of a broken wine bottle. He picked it up and read the label: Holiday Arbor, and below that, a price tag: $2.99. He rubbed his face and Nadya said again, "Does it make any sense?"

Lucas thought about the pictures of the old woman in the police file, and the shot of her on the street that he'd seen in the newspaper. In the police pictures, she'd been lying on her back, her arms flung out to the side, a long coat beneath her, like a black puddle in the camera's strobe light. In the newspaper pictures, she looked small, round-shouldered.

"What?" Nadya asked, her hands on her hips.

Lucas looked at the bottle. Two ninety-nine. Mary Wheaton had been a street person. Street people wore long coats on warm nights in the summer, and they drank cheap. She'd been killed in a way he'd never seen on the street, but he had seen. He'd been wrong when he told the Duluth cops that he'd never seen it before. He'd seen it in the movies, when the Navy SEAL sneaks up on a lazy sentry and zut-the neck is cut. Was it a spy thing, a military technique? He'd assumed it was simply dramatic bullshit…

He looked back at the fragment of wine bottle. Holiday Arbor, $2.99. The paper label on the bottle looked new, as though it hadn't been long in the weeds.

"Come on," he said to Nadya. He started walking fast toward the elevator.

"To where?" She jogged along behind him.

"Back to the morgue. The medical examiner's."

"You have an idea?" She was looking at the chunk of glass in his hand. He carried it by the sharp edges.

"Maybe," Lucas said. "We need one."

Dr. Chu had gone home, but the night man in pathology called the campus cops, who came with the keys, and when Lucas explained what he wanted, the night man called Dr. Chu, who gave the go-ahead.

"Everything's here," the night man said. He put a box of clothing on the counter. Much of it was soaked in now-black and dried blood. "I'll get it out for you, if you want."

"That'd be good…"

The night man slipped on plastic gloves and took Mary Wheaton's clothing out of the box piece by piece. At the bottom was an olive-green military-style coat with a red-white-and-blue patch on the shoulder. The night man held it up and said, "That what you want to see?"

"Long green coat," Nadya said. "With a Czechoslovakian flag on the shoulder."

"Is that what that is?" Lucas looked at the coat for another minute, and then said, "I think we better call Reasons."

Reasons came down, looked at the coat. "Could be," he said. He didn't sound skeptical; he sounded neutral. "What do you want to do?"

"See if we can get some prints off the piece of bottle I found, see if the prints match the old lady's. See if we can find more bottle. Try to figure out what she might have been doing over there."

"I might be able to tell you what she was doing," Reasons said. "There's a Goodwill store maybe two blocks from there. It's just about the only thing around, I mean, that's not a warehouse. This coat, this looks like something from Goodwill."

"But it wouldn't have been open in the middle of the night," Lucas said.

"No…"

"Is the place still open? Now?"

Reasons looked at his watch: "I think so. Let me make a call."

Twenty minutes later, Maxine Just, the manager at the Goodwill, led them back through the store to a clothing rack, where three Czech Army coats hung from wire hangers. "We had about five of them. A surplus place up in town, caters to college kids, got a bunch of them a couple of years ago. They couldn't sell them all, and finally gave them to us. Tax write-off. We put them up for eight dollars each."

"So you sold two."

"Two or three, yeah. We got five or six."

"Do you know who you sold them to?"

Just shrugged. "People who wanted long wool coats. The wool's pretty good. Some people buy them to make rugs-they dye the wool, do these folky kind of rugs for people's cabins. College students used to buy them, when grunge was big, but they went out of style… I suppose they mostly went to people who couldn't afford better. Most of our clientele."

"But you wouldn't know specifically."

"No. I could ask some of our cashiers, maybe somebody would remember."

Reasons asked her to contact the cashiers, and they agreed that he would stop by in the morning to talk with them. They talked for a couple of more minutes, then said thanks to Just, and wandered back outside. The Goodwill store was a long walk from the city center, Lucas thought-he pointed it out to Reasons and asked, "How would she get down here?"

"Bus, probably. Cheap ride, by bus. I'll have the guys check with the drivers."

They were drifting back toward the cars when a dark-complected young man with a Latino accent stepped outside and called, "Excuse."

Reasons called back, "Yeah?" The young man walked across the parking lot. He was wearing worn jeans, an Iowa Wrestling sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off at the biceps, and pointed-toe black dress shoes caked with mud. He had a sterling-silver earring in his left earlobe and a small black mustache.

"Mrs. Just said you were looking for the lady with the coat?"

"Yeah."

He pointed across the street. "I see her every day, catch the bus there."

They all looked at the bus stop.

"Every morning, she get on, every night, she get off. I think she lived around there somewhere. I see her in the Dumpster in the back. When she see me, she run across the street into the bushes." He said booshes.

"Where would she live?" Lucas asked. But they were all looking at a small cube-shape shed across the street. "You think in the shed?"

The man shrugged. "I don't know. But every morning, every night, I see her. All summer."

"Wearing the coat."

"Two or three days only, in the coat," he said. "We only get the coats one month ago mostly."

"Could I get your name?" Reasons said. "Where do you live?"

As Reasons talked to the man, Lucas and Nadya walked across the street and through a ring of knee-high weeds to the shed. The place was a plywood cube, with boarded-over windows on two sides, a windowless, padlocked door at the front. An abandoned storage shed, Lucas thought, probably for the railroad.

"How do we look in?" Nadya asked.

"Have to talk to Reasons," Lucas said. Reasons and the Latino man were walking toward them, and when Lucas asked about breaking in the shed, Reasons said, "Let me make a call."

He stepped away again. The Latino man said, "She goes around back. I never see her open this door."

Lucas and Nadya walked around to the back of the shed and found a blank wall-but the weeds next to one part of the cinder-block foundation were worn and scuffed, almost like an animal trail that went nowhere, ending at the foundation. Lucas stooped, pushed on a block, and it moved. A few seconds later, he'd pulled out four blocks, and kneeling, and cranking his head around, he could see a man-sized hole in the floor.

"Somebody's been going in and out," he said.

"You want me to go in?" asked the Latino.

"No, no-let's do it right." He pushed the block back into place.

Reasons came back with his cell phone and said, "The city engineer says it's been condemned as an eyesore. The railroad's agreed to tear it down, but just hasn't gotten around to it yet. Bacon-the city engineer-he's calling the railroad guy who knows about it, to get the okay to go inside. There's something around back?"

"Yeah, somebody's been going in and out," Lucas said. He explained about the foundation.

Reasons went around to look and then went back to his phone. When he got off, they stood around looking at the shed, and at the port, and Lucas started talking to the Latino man about Mexico, and Reasons started bullshitting Nadya about dating in Russia, and then Reasons's phone rang. He listened, nodded, and said, "Thanks."

"We can go in. If we can get in." A patrol car was rolling down the street toward them. "I called for a hammer," he said.

The patrol car pulled to the curb. A uniformed cop got out of the car, lifted a hand to Reasons, went around to the trunk, popped it, and lifted out a sledge. "What do you need broke?" he asked.

The cop took three swings to break the padlocked latch off the door; even then, the door was jammed shut. The cop went back to his car, dug around in the trunk, and returned with an eighteen-inch-long screwdriver. "When I started on the force, they called all that shit 'burglar's tools,' " Reasons said.

"Yeah, but that was a hundred years ago," the cop said.

He worked the blade of the screwdriver around the edge of the door, grunted, "Warped," and Reasons said, "Well, Jesus, don't baby it-they're gonna tear the fucking thing down."

Then the door popped, and they all clustered together and peered inside. They could see what looked like the remains of a camp: and a briefcase with paper scattered around.

"Think we can go in?" Reasons asked.

"I'm going," Lucas said. "Fuck a bunch of crime-scene weenies."

The interior had an animal smell about it: the place had been inhabited, and recently, by somebody not fastidious. A flat pad made of bubble wrap was pushed against one wall, with an army blanket on top of it. A bed, Lucas thought.

Peeking from under the briefcase, he could see one half of what looked like a wallet. He stooped, took a pencil out of his pocket, and used the pencil to drag the wallet into the open.

"What do you see?" Nadya called.

Lucas got down on his knees and pushed his face close to the wallet. "A wallet. A bunch of cards in Russian and an ID card in English that says, 'Oleg Moshalov.' "

"Sonofabitch," Reasons said.