Hidden prey

Chapter 8

Lucas woke with a start.

There was a noise somewhere, in the room. The room was dimly lit, the light coming from cracks at the sides of the blackout curtain, so it must be after dawn. He glanced at the illuminated face of the bedside clock: eight in the morning. The sound wasn't threatening, there was no intruder in the room, but what…?

He groped until he found the bedside light, turned it on. The sound was coming from the telephone: not a ring, but a low, strangled jingle, as if somebody had punched the phone in the solar plexus and it hadn't gotten its voice back.

He picked it up. "Yeah?" His voice sounded like a rusty coffin hinge in a horror movie.

"You told me to call," Reasons said. "I'm just leaving my house."

He stifled the impulse to moan. "Is there any air outside?"

"What?"

"Never mind. I'll be down in the lobby in twenty minutes. Did you call Nadya?"

"Yup. She sounds like she's been up for a while."

"I have been too, I've been up for hours," Lucas said. He yawned. He'd never been an early riser. "I was doing my push-ups."

"Twenty minutes," Reasons said.

Lucas cleaned up, put on a fresh shirt and sport coat, got a bottle of Diet Coke from the machine down the hall, and found Nadya and Reasons standing opposite the elevator doors in the lobby.

"Breakfast?" Reasons asked, looking at the Coke.

"Of champions," Lucas said. Then he had to explain to Nadya. "See, there was this cereal, there still is this cereal…"

When he was finished explaining, she didn't see why it was funny.

"Well, it wasn't, very."

"Give it up," Reasons said.

Lucas asked Nadya, "Did you hear anything about the computer?"

"No. The question is traveling through the bureaucracy."

The Range is the remnant of both an ancient sea and an ancient mountain range, more or less an hour northwest of Duluth; it's the largest iron-ore lode in the U.S. The Range runs from northeast to southwest, and sitting atop it is a string of small iron-mining cities-Virginia, Chisholm, Eveleth, Biwabik, Hibbing. The cities are cold, hardworking, blue-collar, economically depressed, and addicted to hockey.

The town of Virginia was straight up Highway 53 from Duluth, across gently rolling countryside covered with birch and aspen-some of the aspen just beginning to turn yellow-interspersed with blue-and-green-colored fir, spruce, tamarack, and occasional rigidly ordered stands of plantation pine. Lucas drove and Reasons played with the navigation system for a while, and finally said, "So what?"

"It works when you're trying to find an address," Lucas said. "Out on the open highway, it doesn't do much. Tells you what direction you're traveling."

"Does this cost extra?" Nadya asked.

"A little bit," Lucas said.

"A lot," Reasons said.

"If it doesn't help, why do you have it?"

"It looks neat," Reasons said.

Nadya yawned, and went back to the New York Times, while working methodically through three bottles of spring water. She'd gotten a teensy bit in the bag the night before, drinking two vodka martinis without any rest after the trip. "Help me sleep," she'd muttered as Reasons and Lucas steered her out of the elevator down to her door.

She'd complained of dehydration as they were leaving Duluth, so they stopped for the water and the newspapers, and both Reasons, with the Star Tribune, and Nadya, with the Times, took turns reading bits and pieces to Lucas. When they were finished with the paper, Reasons and Nadya began a kind of teasing chatter.

Lucas, looking between them, thought, Hmmm.

Virginia's downtown section was made up of five long blocks of 1900-era red-and-yellow-brick two- and three-story buildings. Inside the five blocks, as Lucas remembered them, you could find anything you needed and most of what you wanted: you could eat American or Mexican, get drunk, acquire a tattoo, wreck your car, get busted, hire a lawyer, and get your car fixed without going off the street. You could get saved by Jesus on a Wednesday evening and then walk a hundred feet across the way and get a dirty magazine; you could buy a Jenn-Air range or a Sub-Zero refrigerator or a used paperback, a homemade quilt or a doughnut, a chain saw or an ice-cream cone or a pack of Gitanes or Players. There was an ample supply of bars, ranging from places where you'd take your aged Aunt Sally to outright dives.

Lucas had always thought it might be the best main drag in Minnesota, and maybe the whole Midwest. He'd visited the place a dozen times between eighth grade and his senior year in high school, as a hockey player, and remembered with some fondness the brutally cold nights after the games when he and a half dozen friends went out looking for underage beer and hot women. They'd never gone home dry, and, as far as Lucas knew, nobody had ever gotten laid, despite expansive and ingenious lies about close calls, about barmaids and Virginia cheerleaders.

They arrived a little before ten o'clock in the morning. He was happy to see the street was still intact.

Spivak's Tap was halfway down the ranks from cocktail lounge to dive. They parked in front, and got out, the sun hot on their backs despite the cool air, and Nadya said, "More signs."

"What's this thing you've got for signs?" Reasons asked.

"I have nothing for signs, but there are so many," she said. "Most people here, most men, have signs on their shirts. Why do you need so many signs?"

Reasons said, "Beats the hell out of me."

Lucas looked up at the front of the bar. "This guy-his name is Spivak?"

Reasons had called the owner the night before, and told him that they were coming, but not the purpose of the visit. He said, "Right. Anthony Spivak."

Nadya asked, "He will have a toilet here, yes?" and Lucas said, "Yes," and they followed Reasons inside.

Spivak's was an unembarrassed beer joint, with clunky plank floors, a long mahogany bar, jars of pickled eggs and pigs' feet, two dozen booths with high backs upholstered in red leatherette, an area near a jukebox where you could dance, if you were so inclined, a couple of stuffed muskies, and an old, six-foot-long painting of a plump pink nude woman behind the bar, holding a strategically placed white ostrich feather. Lucas remembered both the painting and the feather.

Spivak was sitting at the end of the bar with a spiral notebook, a calculator, and a beer. He was a broad, short man, with a square pink face, square yellow teeth, and white hair growing out of his head, ears, and nose. He had a fat nose that looked as though it had been broken a couple of times. A blond woman with tired eyes stood behind the bar, taking glasses out of a stainless-steel sink, wiping them dry with a bar towel. Two guys in ball caps and plaid shirts sat in one of the booths, talking over their beers.

When they walked in, Spivak looked up, closed the spiral notebook, and asked, "Are you the folks from Duluth?"

"Yeah." Reasons nodded. He introduced Lucas and Nadya. Lucas raised a hand and Nadya nodded.

"Come on in the back," Spivak said. They followed him past the rest rooms, which had signs that said setters and pointers, and which had to be explained to Nadya, who then disappeared into Setters; and then into the back, where four long tables were scattered among sixteen chairs in a party room. They took a table and Spivak cleared some chairs and said, "Could I get you something-on the house?"

"Ah, no, thanks," Reasons said. "We needed to talk to you about something that happened up here last week, but we've got to wait until Nadya gets back."

"She's got an accent," Spivak said, as they settled in at the table. "Where she from?"

"Russia."

"Russia." The corners of his mouth turned down as his eyebrows went up. "Huh. She's not a cop?"

"Yeah, she is," said Lucas. "She's part of this whole… We'll tell you about it in a minute." He looked around: "I used to come here as a kid-it hasn't changed much. Did the can always say Setters and Pointers?"

Spivak said, "A long time ago, it used to say Bucks and Does, but then in the seventies, some Indian guys said 'Bucks' was racist, so my dad changed it."

"But bucks means… deer bucks, right?"

"Well, yeah, but, you know, it was the seventies, Jane Fonda, all that," Spivak said. "And we used to get quite a few guys from Nett Lake in here drinking, they worked in the mines…"

"Nett Lake is an Indian reservation," Reasons told Lucas, who said, "I know."

Spivak asked Lucas, "You used to come in here?"

"Yeah, playing hockey. We were always going around looking for beer afterwards."

"You probably got a few here," Spivak said. "Dad always thought that if you were old enough to skate, a little beer wouldn't hurt you. When was this?"

"Late seventies."

Spivak nodded. "I would've missed you-I was the sixties. Things were different back then… So are the Wild gonna do anything this year?"

They talked hockey for a couple of minutes, until Nadya came back, and when she was seated, Reasons said to Spivak, using his formal cop explanatory voice, "About fifteen days ago, a Russian guy came in here and apparently got together with some people at a meeting here in your bar. We'd like to know what you remember about that."

Spivak frowned. "A Russian? I don't remember a Russian specifically."

"He was a tough-looking guy in a leather jacket, heavy five-o'clock shadow, big square head like a milk carton," Lucas said. "Looked like a mean sonofabitch."

"You were sure he was here?" Spivak asked uncertainly.

"We got an American Express card receipt from here," Reasons said. "For a hundred and forty-five dollars."

"Ohhh…" Spivak's eyebrows went up again, but his eyes slid away. "Yeah. Okay. In fact, they were sitting right here. There must have been five or six guys. I didn't know the guy was Russian, though."

"What'd they do?"

Spivak shrugged: "Drank. Talked. In English, not Russian. What I remember was, when they were finished, they all tossed some money in a pot and the one guy, he must've been your Russian, collected the money, and then paid with his Amex. I mean, I was thinking it was sort of a scam, somebody would get stuck with an expense account when all the guys paid for themselves."

"We need specifics," Lucas said. "Did you know any of them?"

"No. Didn't know a single one." He frowned. "That's a little unusual. This is mostly a town joint. But it happens. We get tourists, whatever. Fishermen on their way north to Canada, sometimes they meet up here."

"They were Americans," Nadya said.

"Yeah, I guess. They spoke English. They looked like they were from around here."

"Were they talking about their families, or their business, or what?" Lucas asked.

"I don't know, I didn't pay any attention. Let me think." He leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes, and tipped his head back. After a moment, he opened his eyes and said, slowly, "Okay. When I was in here, most of the time it was the Russian guy and another guy who were doing the talking. The guy in the leather jacket. The other guy was like a big lumberjack-looking guy, plaid shirt, big shoulders, red hair. The other guys, I don't know-they looked like guys. One of them had a Green Bay hat."

"What is this?" Nadya asked Lucas.

"Sports team hat," Lucas said, watching Spivak, his eyes, listening to his voice. Spivak was lying to them for some reason.

They pressed him, but the barkeep gave them nothing more. The people at the meeting were, he said, "just a bunch of guys. Didn't disturb anybody, didn't get drunk, came, drank, paid, and left. I wish I had more of them like that."

Lucas asked, "Who all was working that night. Could we get a list?"

"Well, I guess. I'd have to go back and look," he said reluctantly. "We don't use everybody every night…"

He checked his time cards and put together a list of phone numbers and addresses, and as he did, said, "You guys scared the shit out of me. I thought you were up here, I mean, I thought somebody had done something in the bar, that I didn't know about. You know, raped somebody out back in the parking lot, or felt somebody up in the rest room. I thought I was gonna get sued."

They left him standing at the end of the bar next to his calculator and spiral notebook, and headed out.

"Well, that was weird," Lucas said, as they stood blinking in the sunshine.

"I think we are not through with Mr. Spivak," Nadya said, looking up at him.

"You guys, uh…" Reasons smiled, turned his hands palms up. "I missed something, right?"

"Unless he asked you while I was in the Setters," Nadya said. To Lucas: "Did he ask you what the Russian had done?"

Lucas shook his head. "No. He never did."

"Maybe he was, em, reticent," Nadya said. "But I think not."

"I think not also," Lucas said.

"Well, if you both think not, then I think not," Reasons said. He looked back at the bar door. "Want to go ask him why he didn't ask?"

"Leave it for a while," Lucas said. "Let's go talk to the rest of the employees. Maybe there'll be something else."

Spivak had given them a list of four employees who'd worked that night. They spent two hours tracking them down, and eventually found all four-three of them working at their day jobs, a fourth at home. The first three didn't work the back room, didn't specifically remember the group. The fourth one remembered.

Maisy Reynolds lived in a single-wide trailer on a country lot, what Lucas thought was probably forty acres, ten miles outside of Virginia. The lot had been cut over perhaps ten years earlier, and now showed a few fir trees spotted through new-growth aspen on the rim of the lot. The trailer sat on a concrete foundation a hundred feet back from the road; behind it was a twenty- or thirty-acre pasture with a marshy creek running along the back edge. A metal stable stood behind the trailer; a white plastic fence, made to look like a white board fence, surrounded the stable and part of the pasture. Three horses were grazing the pasture. "Horses don't like me," Reasons said.

"Do you think that could be a question of character?" Nadya asked. She was teasing him again, Lucas thought.

The stoop outside the trailer door was simply four concrete blocks set in the ground. Lucas stepped up on them, knocked, and then stepped back when he heard somebody inside coming toward the door. Reynolds, a fortyish, weathered blonde in a plaid shirt, jeans, and green gum boots, opened the inside door and looked out at them.

"You don't look like Witnesses," she said. She was chewing on a carrot and her house smelled, pleasantly enough, of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom Soup, horse shit, and straw.

Lucas showed her his ID, told her what they wanted, and she said, "I remember the people in the back, but I don't know what they were talking about. I don't remember a Russian. What'd they do?"

"The Russian was killed down in Duluth," Lucas said. "We're trying to figure out what he did earlier in the day that might have caused… something to happen."

She was wide-eyed, and poked the carrot at Lucas: "I remember that from the paper. That was the guy? The paper said he was executed."

"That's the guy," Reasons said.

"My lord," she said. "I didn't see anything that would have led to that. You want a carrot? No? There weren't any arguments or anything, just a bunch of guys talking…"

"The people in the group," Nadya said. "Anything…?"

Reynolds stepped outside, onto the stoop, thinking about it, crunching the carrot. "I remember one guy was really old. I mean, really old. Ninety. Jeez-maybe a hundred. He got around okay… I don't remember the Russian. I wasn't waiting on them, Anton was."

"Mr. Spivak?" Reasons asked. "Anthony?"

"Anton. Not Anthony. Yeah, he took care of them. Must've been special, he doesn't wait on people. Have you talked to him?"

"Did he know them?"

She paused, then said, "Listen, I don't want to get in trouble with Anton, I sorta need the job."

"All this is confidential," Lucas said.

Out in the field, a horse whinnied, and took off in a little romp, followed by a second one. Reynolds smiled, nodding at them, then turned back to Lucas, still a bit wary. "I only saw them together for a couple of minutes, but he was talking with them. I don't know if he knew them, but they were talking along. What'd he tell you?"

"He said they were just some people passing through, they came, they drank, they paid, and they left. He said he had no idea who they were."

"Hmmm," she said. Her eyes clicked to the left and she tilted her head, as if listening to music. Then, "Maybe I got the wrong impression."

"But you don't think so."

"Listen…"

"The guy was executed," Lucas said. He looked up at her, on the stoop.

She pursed her lips, tilted her head, and then said, "I got the impression that Anton knew them better than that."

"A lot better?"

"Better," she said. "Yeah. Better."

They talked for a few more minutes, but Reynolds had nothing specific about the group. In the car again, Reasons said, "So we go and talk to Spivak again."

From the backseat, Nadya said, "Perhaps we should wait one day. If I can get to my room, I can do some research, to see if we know him. You could do some research also."

Reasons exhaled thoughtfully, then said to Lucas, "Between you, me, and the FBI guys, we oughta be able to put a book together. If the guy was in the army, if he was ever in trouble anywhere…"

Lucas was waiting for a car to pass, and then pulled out onto the road; in his rearview mirror he saw Reynolds go back inside her trailer, and hoped she wouldn't call Spivak. Before they left, she'd said she wouldn't.

"I'm a little worried about the Wheaton thing," he said. "It's not a sure thing that they're connected, but it feels like a sure thing."

"They are connected," Nadya said. "This killing of the old woman, this wire, this is a military technique. Very well known in the Spetsnaz, in the U.S. Special Forces, in the Special Air Service, et cetera. It does not seem to me something you would find with ordinary criminals."

"I wondered about that," Lucas said. "I saw it in the movies…" He turned, his arm on the back of the seat. "You think a Russian did it?"

She looked out the window, then back and said, "No. I am almost certain."

"Why?"

"Because the only reason to kill the old woman would be to silence her as a witness. The only reason to silence her would be to prevent her identification of the killer. The only way she could identify the killer is if he's still here. If a Russian had done the killing, already he would be exfiltrated and this identification would not be a problem."

A tidy line of logic. "I knew that," Reasons said.

"So we do research," Lucas said.

They did research.

Nadya worked from her room, Lucas and Reasons from the detective bureau.

Spivak had been arrested twice for drunken driving, once in 1960 and once in 1961. He had been in two automobile accidents, fifteen years apart, and hadn't been charged in either. He'd been sued twice in accidents involving people who had been drinking at his bar, lost one and had the suit paid by his insurance company. He'd been sued twice more for nonpayment of suppliers' bills, although a law clerk who pulled the records at the St. Louis County Courthouse said that both times, Spivak had had a countercomplaint against the supplier, and both suits had eventually been settled.

He'd been born in St. Louis County, in 1944; his wife was also from St. Louis County, born in 1945. Spivak's father had owned the bar before him. His father and mother had both been born in Mahnomen County, his father in 1912 and his mother in 1914; Mahnomen didn't have a regular vital-records registration at the time, and the birth certificates came from a Catholic hospital, which had since burned down.

Spivak had served with the Eighth U.S. Army in peacetime Korea, from 1962 to 1964. He had been honorably discharged, though he'd received two article fifteens-administrative punishment-for drunkenness. He'd had money withheld from his paycheck in both cases, as fines.

"Ain't shit," Reasons said, when they were done. "Nothing with NCIC, nothing with the sheriff. He did a little tearing around when he was a kid, went in the army, got out, got married and had kids, and runs a bar."

"Maybe Nadya got something…"

She hadn't: "We can't even find his phone number," she said. She was sitting in a high-backed chair looking at her laptop. Out the window, they could see a sailboat heading north into the lake. "He is delisted."

"Unlisted," said Reasons.

"We need phone books in Russia," she said. "Your phone books are outstanding in the whole world. Your Yellow Pages. I would cry to have Yellow Pages like this in Russia."

Was she doing a tap dance, Lucas wondered, watching her eyes, or was this all there was? "So tomorrow, we go push on Spivak."

They'd been together all day, and nobody mentioned dinner. After they agreed to meet in the morning, Lucas took the elevator down to his room, said good-bye to Reasons, and called home and talked to Weather and Sam.

Weather said that the new garage door matched the other two perfectly, and that if he looked on page two of the Pioneer Press, he would see that the governor's daughter's boyfriend had been arrested for possession of a controlled substance after a party the two of them attended together, and there was a rumor around the university that the kid was taking the fall for the girl.

"Probably wind up as the highway commissioner," Lucas said.

"I just don't want you to get involved. I don't want you to have anything to do with it," Weather said. "I don't want you fixing anything."

He promised he wouldn't.

After he got off the phone, he went down to the lobby, bought both the St. Paul and Minneapolis newspapers, rode back up, and read them as he watched the evening news. Then, restless, he called Nadya's room to see if she wanted to get a bite. No answer.

He cleaned up a bit, went back down, drove out to the mall, and spent an hour browsing through a bookstore, and then, with a half dozen magazines under his arm, did a walk around to see what was in the place, crossed the highway to an outdoor-sports shop, where he looked at guns and fishing equipment, and finally headed back to the hotel.

He was suffering from the nothing-to-do, out-of-town blues. If there was nothing from Spivak the next day, he thought, and nothing obvious to do in the afternoon, he might zip back home for dinner. He could be back in two hours…

He was watching a Seinfeld rerun and reading a Gray's Sporting Journal when his cell phone buzzed at him:

"Lucas?" A male voice, hushed but intense.

"Yeah?"

"Listen, man, there's something weird going on here, and I don't know what the fuck to do," the words tumbling over each other. "I'm watching the guy's car, waiting for the bar to close, and it closes but he doesn't come out. All the lights go out except one in the back, and nothing's moving. So I get a plastic garbage can and I carry it over to the window and I stand on it and peek in, and the guy is standing on a six-pack of beer, bottles, with a rope around his neck and there's somebody in there with him. The guy's legs are shaking like crazy but the place has got a big fucking metal door on the back and there's no way I can kick it and if I go in through the front it'll be too late and I don't have a gun, it's back in my car…"

"You mean right now?" Lucas asked.

"I mean right fuckin' now. I'm still standing on this fuckin' trash can and I can see the guy standing there."

"Don't move," Lucas said. "Just hang on, I'm going on the other phone."

He had no phone numbers. He dialed 911 and when the operator came up, said, trying to remain calm and authoritative, "I'm Lucas Davenport. I'm an agent with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. I've got an emergency up in Virginia, and I need the telephone number of the Virginia cops right now…"

The operator said, "Please slow down, sir. You need the emergency number for Virginia? Can you describe the nature…?"

"Give me the fuckin' number," Lucas shouted. "The emergency number for Virginia…"

The woman tried to calm him again and he shouted her down and she transferred him to a supervisor, while, in his other ear, the male voice was saying, "What's going on, man? You got something coming?" and then the supervisor came up and said, "Can I help you?"

In the end, he thought, it took him only a minute to get through to the Virginia cops: "I am an agent with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, my name is Lucas Davenport. Anthony Spivak at Spivak's Bar is being hanged in the back room of the bar and you have to get a couple of cars there RIGHT NOW."

"Sir, tell me again who you are…"

The cops got something going, and ten seconds later, in the cell phone, the male voice said, "He's out, there's a guy out the back and let me see, ah holy, I'm running…" Then the voice went away, but Lucas could hear a clunking, wrestling sound, and the male voice shouting something, then the cell phone apparently hit the floor, and Lucas got back on the other phone and shouted, "I've got a man in the bar, I've got a man in the bar, be careful with him, he's not armed, he's my man."

The cell phone went out. Lucas dialed it, but got no answer. On the hotel phone, he shouted at the Virginia cop, "What's going on? I've lost my guy."

"We're on the scene now, sir. Can you tell me your location? You said your name is Louis?"

"Lucas Davenport. I'm in Duluth." He was trying to shout calmly. "I will be there in one hour. Call Rose Marie Roux, the commissioner of Public Safety. I will give you her home phone number and she will fill you in. I will be on my cell phone on the way up-here's the number…"

When he was off the phone, he tried his man's cell phone again, got nothing. He thought about calling Nadya, decided against it, didn't have time to pick up Reasons. He'd call him from the road. He clipped on his.45, picked up a jacket, and was at the door when the phone rang. "Shit." He went back, picked it up.

A woman's high-pitched voice asked, "Is this Lucas Davenport?"

"Yes. What is it?" He assumed it was the front desk, and he had no time for it.

"Mary Wheaton, the lady who was murdered… she told me about it. She told me she saw the other man murder the Russian man, the story that was in the newspaper."

The words confused him for a moment: Who the hell was this, and why was she bothering him? "What?"

"She saw the murder of the Russian man. She told me about it, and I thought I should call."

"Who is this?" A crank, he thought-but then, maybe not. There had been a second woman.

"I'm not going to tell you. For one thing, you sound mean."

"I'm in a hurry," Lucas said. "Just tell me what she told you."

"You really sound mean…"

The woman was frightened and, Lucas thought, he did sound mean. He took a breath, and said, "I'm sorry. You caught me at a really bad moment. What did Mrs. Wheaton tell you?"

"She said she was down by the grain elevators, in some weeds, right by the lake. Watching the lake. She was drinking, she had a bottle, and she heard a man walking toward her so she stayed hidden. The men down there can be really tough. So she was hiding down there in the weeds, and she heard some shots. She thought they were shots, but they were quiet…"

"She was probably right, the gun may have had a sound suppressor on it," Lucas said, as softly as he could, trying to be agreeable. He was still burning off the adrenaline from the cell-phone call. "What did she see?"

"She said one man shot the other man, and she made a noise. When she made the noise, the man with the gun saw her, and she ran away, and he chased her. She thinks he shot his gun at her and missed, and then she fell down and he caught her, and he pointed his gun and tried to shoot her, but the gun didn't work. She had a knife and she slashed at him because she was afraid that he might try to strangle her or something. He ran away and got in his car and drove off."

"Where was his car?"

There was a second of calculation, Lucas thought, and then: "She said it was over by the street, over by the Goodwill store."

"Do you know what she was drinking? What kind of bottle it was?"

More calculation: "No, she didn't say, but I imagine it was an inexpensive wine. She didn't drink so much hard liquor."

"I didn't even know she drank," Lucas said. "I thought she was more of a schizophrenic. I didn't think she had an alcohol problem."

"Oh, she drank," the woman said. "Wine, mostly. Sometimes, when she was on her meds, it made her crazy. Crazier."

"Did she tell you what the man looked like? The man with the gun?"

"He looked like a college boy, but he might have been older than that. It was dark, and she couldn't see him that well. He was blond and not really tall, but a little tall. Six feet. Strong-looking. She thought he was an American because before she cut him, he said, 'Shit,' in English, just like an American would."

"She cut him," Lucas said. "Was she sure?"

"Pretty sure. Not positive."

"Blond, strong, American. You didn't see the car, see what make it was?"

"No, uh, she didn't say anything about that."

"Anything that you can think of that she said, that might be of more use? Anything about the guy? It's really important, because he's still out there and we think he's nuts."

"She didn't say too much… just that thing about how the shots weren't too loud."

"Did she say what she took off the body?"

"Nothing like that," the woman said, and Lucas heard the lie in her voice.

"How did you find me?"

"I thought about where a state policeman would stay in Duluth, and called, and they switched me up to your room."

Smart enough, Lucas thought. He took the shot: "Listen, miss. We know that Mary Wheaton was killed by mistake. We know there was another woman down there. I mean, we know it was you. We would really like to talk to you. For your own protection. We found the place you were staying…"

She said, frightened, "I'm going to hang up now."

"No, no, no, wait, wait, wait. Tell me one thing. Please. Did you-did she-shit, however you want to say it, did somebody recover a computer from the dead man? And what happened to it? It could be critical."

Another pause, then: "She gave it to me. She was afraid to sell it in Duluth, because it was full of Russian. So I took it down to Minneapolis and I sold it. I needed money to get back to Los Angeles."

"Who did you sell it to?"

"A man, a young man, a student, maybe, at the university."

"What'd you do, just walk around asking people? Did you have a contact?"

"I had a contact. This is a man who… buys things."

"Okay. Tell me this, then. Please. I'm really not mean, I'm just anxious, I don't want you to hang up before I can ask these questions…"

"You sound mean," she said again. She said, "I'm outa here. I'm going to LA. Don't bother to look for me."

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry," Lucas said urgently. "Tell me, this young man, do you have a name? Can you tell me what he looks like?"

"His name is George. He is blond and he's good-looking. He has a square jaw and blue eyes and a short haircut; he puts gel in his hair. He was wearing one of those football jackets, you know, the kind that is wool with leather sleeves, red wool with white leather sleeves."

"When did you sell the computer? How long has he had it?"

"Two days… I sold it to him the night before last."

"Where?"

"At Moos Tower, the medical building. There's a cafeteria in the basement. He had a table. There are two or three guys who buy stuff there. Stolen stuff. In Moos Tower."

"Can you…?"

"I'm going to hang up now. I'm afraid you're tracing this call."

"No, no, please…"

But she was gone. And maybe, he thought, to LA, where they'd never find her.

"Ah, boy…"

Hoping she'd call back, Lucas left the room phone open, got on his cell phone and called the duty man at BCA offices in St. Paul. "The call would have gone into the main desk, and they transferred it up to my room: see if you can pin it down. Where it came from-we need the number."

Then he made another call, and a woman answered. "Marcy? Lucas."

She was happy to hear from him. "Hey, man, you haven't called for weeks. What's going on?"

Lieutenant Marcy Sherrill was head of the Intelligence Unit for the Minneapolis police, and a protege. He sketched in quickly what had happened, and said, "So I've got a problem. Is there any chance that you could put somebody over at the U, and see if you can figure out who this guy is? I'll come down and get him, but I need to get something started."

"I'll put somebody over there right now-it's a little late, there may not be too many people to talk to, but I can have somebody there in twenty minutes."

"Thanks, sweetie. How's the love life?"

"We gotta talk. Do you know Don Cary?"

"Yeah-but he was married the last time I checked." Lucas looked at his watch. Time was running…

"Not anymore," Marcy said. "His wife, you know, was a computer freak. She said, 'Fuck Minnesota,' and took off for California. He wasn't invited. The divorce was final last week."

"You might be moving on him a little too quick."

"Actually, he started mooning around here two months ago, and we've gone out for a lunch a few times. He was pretty much over her before she left… The marriage had been in trouble since about week one. He'd like to have a kid or two."

"He's a pretty good guy, for a lawyer. He plays a mean game of lawyer-league basketball," Lucas said. "Marcy, we gotta talk, and I gotta run, right now. I gotta."

"Keep your ass down; I'll get back."

He hung up, looked at the phone for five seconds, ten seconds, willing a call from the witness woman. Nothing; he tossed his keys up in the air, caught them, and took off, listening for the ring of the telephone until the door banged shut behind him.