Hidden prey

Chapter 6

When Reasons said, "Sonofabitch," Lucas stood up and backed out of the shed, slapped his hands together to get rid of the dust, and said, "Better call your crime-scene guys."

Crime-scene investigation had somehow become the flavor-of-the-month on TV shows, but Lucas could not remember the last time that crime-scene guys had actually broken a case. They gathered evidence-blood, semen, hair, fingerprints, firearms and shells, tool marks, clothing fibers-that could be used to pin a suspect after the cops found him, but the cops had to find him first.

In the one major case in which the crime-scene people were dominant, and in which Lucas had participated, if only from the sidelines, a hot assistant county attorney and her crime-scene buddies had proven beyond doubt, from crime-scene evidence alone, that a dope dealer named Rashid al-Balah had killed a gambler named Trick Bentoin. The evidence showed that Bentoin's body had been dumped in a peat bog in the Carlos Avery state wildlife-management area north of Minneapolis.

They'd had witnesses who recounted tension between Bentoin and al-Balah over a gambling debt, and threats made by al-Balah. They had blood from the trunk of al-Balah's car, they had seeds and soil from plants that grew nowhere else but Carlos Avery, and when it was all done, they put their man away.

Then, a year or so later, the dead man showed up. He'd been in Panama, playing high-stakes gin rummy. As the Russians would say, gavno; and as Lucas's pal Del had wondered, "Who did Rashid kill and throw in a peat bog? Had to be somebody."

The crime-scene crew arrived half an hour after Reasons called in.

Fifteen minutes before they got there, Chick Daniels from the News-Tribune hopped out of his car in the parking lot of the Goodwill store and Reasons said, "Here comes the press," and walked toward him. They met in the middle of the street, talked for a few minutes, then Reasons walked him across to the shed and said, "We're gonna let him have a look inside, but deny we did it."

Lucas nodded, and the reporter, a twenties-something guy with long brown hair and Labrador retriever eyes, stuck his head in the door of the shed, looked at the litter inside for a minute, then backed away and said, "Can I look at this foundation thing?" Reasons walked him around back; they looked at the foundation. Lucas heard his name mentioned and then Nadya's, mentioned and spelled.

Nadya said, "You always talk to the news before you know anything?"

Lucas nodded. "Always. Especially before we know anything."

"That seems operationally unsound." She was very serious.

"It might be," Lucas said cheerfully. "But see this way, we get our pictures on television."

"This is good?"

"Sure. It proves we exist."

She still looked solemn, and a bit uncertain, so Lucas said, "I'm pulling your leg. With this kind of thing, we've found that talking to the news media, especially the newspapers, doesn't hurt much. Especially if the reporter's decent. The news is gonna get out anyway, and it's better to have it accurate, than a bunch of rumors."

"What is this leg-pulling?" she asked.

After the walk around, the reporter went back to the other side of the street and got on his cell phone. "I told him he's gotta stay over there," Reasons said. "He's a pretty good guy. TV'll be here in a couple of minutes."

Ten minutes before the crime-scene crew arrived, as Lucas was looking at the sole of his shoe, wondering about the brown stuff stuck on it, the no-name detective arrived, wearing knee shorts and a golf shirt. He was carrying a black milled-aluminum flashlight.

"Great knees," Lucas said.

No-name was not in a mood for repartee. "Fuck you. Let me look."

He stood in the door of the shack and shined the flashlight across the floor. "Somebody was living here, all right. You sure it was Wheaton?"

"I don't know. Sounds like her. We got a guy saw her every day. He's over there…" Reasons pointed across the street, where the Latino man was sitting on the hood of an eighties Plymouth. "And for Christ's sake, don't ask for a green card until we've deposed him."

The no-name detective glanced at the Latino, then continued playing his flashlight across the interior of the shed, methodically sweeping the dirty floor and walls. Now he said, "Look at this," and he stepped inside.

Lucas looked. Eight inches to the side of the door, at head height, a nail stuck out of the wood. In the light from the flash, Lucas could see a tiny swatch of fiber hanging from the head of the nail, like hair, or short, bristly spiderwebs.

"Green. Green wool, I think," no-name said. "That fuckin' army coat. That's weird."

"What's weird?" Lucas asked.

"We know where she lived. We already turned the place over. What the hell was she doing down here?"

Five minutes before the crime-scene guys arrived, two TV trucks pulled up. Reasons went across the street and pushed them back fifty yards; and then, with a show of reluctance, made an on-air statement. "See? He gets on TV," Lucas told Nadya.

Then the crime-scene crew showed, two guys in golf shirts and jeans. Reasons walked over and asked, "Where in the hell have you been? Playing golf?"

"Got here fast as we could," one of the guys said. He counterattacked. "None of you went inside, did you?"

"Of course not," Reasons said.

Lucas and no-name shook their heads. "We were waiting for you."

When the photography was done, the crime-scene people began picking up the litter-with Lucas's urging, they started with the small paper, picking up each piece with forceps, bagging it, and passing it out the door. Most of it was cards, most of it in Russian.

There were several items of interest: an American Express platinum card under the name Zbigniew Riscin, a New York driver's license under the same name, and a receipt from the National car-rental agency at the Duluth airport for a car rented to Zbigniew Riscin. The car had been driven a hundred and seventy-five miles and returned the same day it was rented-the day that Oleshev had been murdered.

They also found a receipt, paid with the platinum card, for $145 from Spivak's Tap, in Virginia, Minnesota.

"It's about an hour up to Virginia," Reasons said. "If he went up and back, did a little driving around, it'd be about right."

"I wonder what is the Spivak's Tap?" asked Nadya.

"A tap's a bar," Reasons said. "I'll check." He got his phone out.

Next out was a Targus retractable reel with six feet of telephone cable on it; it was used to connect laptops to motel telephones, and Lucas had one just like it. There were also three different white plastic-bodied electric wall-plug adapters for U.S. and European outlets. Nadya looked at them and said, "He had a laptop."

"No laptop in here," said a crime-scene guy.

"I'd like to find a laptop," Lucas said to Nadya.

Nadya said, "Greatly," and then, "I will check with the Potemkin, to see if he left one in his cabin."

All the material from the hut was bagged. One of the crime-scene guys stepped to the door and said, "Look at this." He had, in his forceps, a money band, printed "$100."

"Took some money off him," Lucas said. "How many bills in this?"

The crime-scene guy said, "Five thousand, I think."

"So she got five grand, at least. Where is it?" no-name asked. "Nothing at her place. Didn't look like she was eating any better."

"Got a Kotex here," one of the crime-scene guys said from the interior. "Unused."

Lucas said, "How old was Wheaton?"

"Fifty-eight," said no-name.

"We got a problem," Lucas said. He looked across the street at the Latino perched on the car. "I think we better haul Raul up to the medical examiner's."

They did that.

On the way, Nadya said, "So I am thinking, this woman did not kill Oleshev, but she was first to find his body. She robbed him and when the man on the boat saw her, she ran away. So we have nobody who saw the killer."

"I am thinking that, too," Lucas said, falling into her syntax. "If it was Wheat on. But they sold more coats out of that store. It might have been another woman…"

At the medical examiner's, they rolled Wheaton out and peeled back the body bag. Unlike Nadya, Raul didn't flinch when the body was exposed. He looked at Wheaton's face, at her open eyes, and shook his head. "Not her. This one I saw was a younger chick, man. This one I saw was maybe… I don't know. Wash her up, maybe forty."

"Goddamnit," said Reasons. He looked at Raul: "Can I see your green card?"

"How'd you figure this out, man?" no-name asked Lucas.

Lucas explained, the whole line of indications starting from the chase through the weeds, which didn't make any sense in terms of the dead man; the small figure in a long coat, seen running away from the body; the photographs of the small street woman in the long coat, murdered the night before; the cheap wine bottle in the area of the chase through the weeds. And luck: Reasons's idea about the Goodwill store, and Raul.

"You know, it's like detective work or something," no-name marveled.

"It's time," Lucas said. "To have a beer and think it over."

"Are we breaking the investigation?" Nadya asked.

Lucas had to think for a minute: "I have to talk to you about your slang. But no, not exactly."

"More like the investigation is breaking us," Reasons said.

"If you want to have a beer and think it over, I can tell you where to have the beer," no-name said. He took out a fat cell phone, which was also a PDA, looked up a name, and pressed the button. "Barbara, babe: we need to talk. Where are you?" He listened for a few seconds, then said, "How about we meet at Duke's? Okay."

They sent Raul back to the Goodwill store, where he'd left his car, with a campus cop, and fifteen minutes later filed into Duke's Lounge, a lump of brown brick in a wilderness of on-ramps, at the south end of the city.

The place was full of neon beer signs and dark wood, with a coin-op shuffleboard game in the back. Four guys in backwards ball caps sat talking at the bar; the bartender himself sat on a stool and leaned back toward an aged Schlitz sign with a hole in it, so he could read a book in the light coming through the hole.

When they all walked in, the guys at the bar stopped talking and looked at no-name's shorts, and the bartender said, "Barb's in the back booth." At the same time, a woman in a black leather jacket stood up and said, "Here," and the guys at the bar started talking again.

Lucas, Nadya, Reasons, and no-name, who'd finally introduced himself as Larry Kelly, trooped to the back, clunking along the wooden floor. Lucas stopped to look at an old Budweiser-made print of Custer being wiped out by the Sioux at Little Bighorn.

Nadya stopped at his elbow, took in the print, and said, "Why do Americans celebrate defeats?"

Lucas shrugged. "Like what?"

"Bunker Hill, the Alamo, Custer, Pearl Harbor, the Chosin Reservoir, September eleventh-I have even seen this movie Blackhawk Down. It seems strange."

"You know a lot about our history," Lucas said.

"I studied it, of course. But this is not so much history as psychology."

Lucas looked at the picture for a few more seconds; in the lower right corner, an Indian was peeling the scalp off a dead cavalryman. "I don't know why we do it," he said. "But we do, don't we?"

They went on to the back, where Kelly introduced Barbara Langersham, a woman in her early forties, dark haired, dark eyed, broken nosed. A white scar, a match for the one on Lucas's forehead, disappeared up into her hairline.

"Barbara knows all the street people," he said. "She works for Catholic Charities."

"Doesn't have a hell of a lot of Catholic charity, though," Reasons grumbled.

"It all depends on what you want, doesn't it Jerry?" Langersham said, and Lucas thought, Oops.

Only four of them could fit in the booth, so Reasons and Lucas pulled up chairs and they all ordered beer, and Kelly said, "Barbara: Mary Wheaton, you've read about it."

"Yes." She poured her beer expertly into a pilsner glass, so the head came just over the top, not too thick. "I heard her head was almost cut off."

"Yeah. Now-we think there's a possibility that whoever killed her was the same guy who killed the Russian last week. But they got the wrong woman. Was there another woman street person around here, who walked around in a long green army coat?"

"Ah… shoot." She thought for a moment. "I don't remember one. But I think Mary only had that coat for a day or two. I only saw her with it once. Like she just got it. I remember thinking it was too hot."

"We're looking for a woman who might have lived across the street from the Goodwill store," Lucas said. "Might have been a redhead, or sort of reddish hair, maybe forty."

"Somebody saw her?"

"Yeah, but not somebody who could give us any information," Reasons said. "He just saw her."

Langersham licked a bit of foam off her upper lip, then said, to Reasons, "You know I don't like to talk to cops."

"But you do, when you need something," Reasons said. "The fact is, this other woman is in trouble. If the killer knows he got the wrong woman…"

They didn't have to draw a picture. Langersham said, "There was another woman. I think her name was Trey, but I don't know her last name. She wasn't forty-she was more like early thirties. I suppose, when she had a little dirt on her, she could go for forty. I saw her, I don't know, a couple of weeks ago, panhandling up at Miller Hill Mall. I haven't seen her since. I did see her, earlier this summer, a couple of times, maybe three times, on the Garfield Avenue bus. This was at night, I saw the bus going by, so she might have been going out Garfield. Toward the Goodwill."

"Tray, like ashtray," Kelly said.

"I think it was Trey, like a three-card," Langersham said. "I don't think she interacted too much with the cops, or anybody, for that matter. She pretty much stayed to herself."

"Anything else?" Lucas asked. "You know if she was ever arrested…?"

Langersham shook her head. "I just don't know. She was well-spoken, like she'd had some schooling. I mean, she wasn't a dropout, or anything. I think she probably took a lot of dope sometime or other; she knew all the words, and she had that doper sense of humor. She was very good at picking out guys who'd cough up a buck."

"We can look through arrest reports; try to look her up in the nickname file," Reasons said.

They sat and talked and ate potato chips for a half hour, much of the conversation between Nadya and Langersham as the men sat back and listened. Nadya was fascinated by the underage-hooker world that Langersham worked: "We have the same problems in Moscow, but we don't even know how to start with it," she said.

"Look to your religious people," Langersham said. "Cops won't work, because they're in the crime life. The only thing that attracts these kids is the belief that somebody actually cares about them."

"But not police," Nadya said.

"Not police. You can't pretend to care about them. You've actually got to care. About them, personally, one-on-one. So-recruit the religious. It'll give them something worthwhile to do, instead of shaking their beads at some bishop. You got bishops in Russia?"

"Everywhere," Nadya said. "More than anyone could need."

Langersham nodded: "That's a problem. You've got to get your religious people away from the bishops. Get them out in the streets. If everybody saved just one person… we'd all be saved. And it'd do wonders for both sides."

They sat in silence for a minute, and then Reasons said, "Right on. Pass the joint."

"Fuck you, Jerry," Langersham said; but she was smiling when she said it. "Your turn to buy a round."