Hidden Prey

Chapter 20

The hours after a cop is killed are always a nightmare: telling the family, figuring out what went wrong, deciding if some living person is to blame-and Nadya was taking a hit on the last item.

She insisted that Reasons had initiated the relationship, telling her that his marriage was essentially over. Her argument was good enough, and detailed enough, that it made the Duluth cops angrier than ever. To have one of their own killed, and thus automatically qualified for sainthood-nobody liked to see a dead cop, but on the other hand, it never hurt the budgetary process if you lost the occasional flatfoot-and to have all of that tarnished by a Russian and maybe even a Commie…

Lucas took some of the heat off in a quick, illegal, and private meeting with the police chief, where everybody agreed that Lucas hadn't actually been stopped, shot at, or really handcuffed while he was pursuing the killer… that wouldn't have been good for the budget.

There was also a general agreement that it wouldn't be necessary to mention the sexual liaison to the press. Reasons had actually been guarding Nadya when he was murdered-he had given his life to save hers.

Lucas got back to Weather, late, waking her, telling her what had happened. Nadya had moved to a new room, and Weather said she would call her.

"I can tell you she ain't asleep," Lucas said.

While all that was going on, so was the chase: Duluth cops went to every pizza place in town, trying to see who might have bought the pizza. They knew it was a fresh one-Nadya said she could smell it, even after the shooting.

"Must have been a hungry sonofabitch, hanging on to the pizza when you're chasing him all over the fuckin' hill," Kelly said.

"Weird shit happens," Lucas said.

Several pizza places had customers who might have fit the vague description they had of the killer: thin, blond, blackjacket or white shirt. None of those had any more details.

The women at the hotel's front desk had seen nothing but the back of the pizza-man's head.

In any case, nobody found anything: the killer was gone.

In the morning, Andreno, calling upstate from Virginia, asked, "What the fuck happened down there?"

Lucas told him, and Andreno said, "Maybe she needs a bodyguard. Somebody with a gun."

"You want the job?"

"It's either that or go home. The Spivaks are in a bunker."

"Come on down and let's talk," Lucas said. "I need some theoretical bullshit."

"I'm on my way."

Lucas tried to go back to sleep, failed, eventually got up, cleaned up, looked at the clock, and realized that Andreno could be there at any minute. He called and Andreno said, "I'm just coming into town. If I don't get lost, I'll be there in ten minutes."

Lucas called Nadya's room. She was up, dressed, and sounded like she had a cold.

"Breakfast," he said. "Ya gotta eat."

"I need advice," she said. "And I need coffee."

"I'll see you upstairs in two minutes," Lucas said.

Lucas took the elevator. It stopped two floors up-she'd changed rooms-and Nadya got on, eyes and nose puffy, and said, "Oh, God."

"Yeah." Lucas was tempted to give her a hug, but he wasn't a hugger, and she slumped in the corner, staring at the control buttons. At the top, they went into the restaurant, got a booth. The restaurant was already rotating, and they were overlooking the city but turning toward the harbor. They could see two long, low freighters standing offshore, heading into port, and another one, on the horizon, a dwindling lump.

The waitress came and they ordered coffee and Lucas asked for a waffle and bacon. The waitress left and Nadya said, "Do you think the… news… of our relationship will be successfully suppressed?"

Lucas shrugged. "I don't know. It doesn't help anybody if it gets out, but police departments are the biggest rumor mills in the world. Everybody in the department knows by now. The police reporter here, the guy we met down at that shack… he's no dummy. He'll probably hear about it."

"But will he print it?"

"If he does, it could hurt him with his sources in the department-everybody would be pissed off at him. I don't think anyone would confirm it, officially, so he'd have to worry about printing rumors…"

Nadya took a napkin out of a napkin holder and folded it, precisely square, then folded it again. "I have to decide whether to tell my superiors what happened. If I do, it would not be good for me. If I don't, and they find out, it would be worse. But if I don't, and they don't find out, and if we get the killer…"

As she was talking, Lucas noticed another woman approaching their table-not a waitress, but a woman in jeans and a nylon windbreaker. She was dark haired and stocky, and she was moving quickly, beelined toward them, and Lucas said, "Uh…" but the woman ignored him and said to Nadya, "Are you Nadezhda Kalin?" She pronounced the name with authority and a light went on in Lucas's brain and he started to get out of the booth just as the waitress appeared with two cups of hot coffee and blocked him, and Nadya looked at the woman and said, "Yes?"

"I am Jerry Reasons's wife," the woman said, and she launched herself into the booth on top of Nadya, her fingernails flashing, and Lucas said, "Oh, shit," and the waitress with the coffee went down ass-over-coffee-cup and Nadya screamed and slashed back.

Lucas was out of the booth and grabbed Reasons around the waist and tried to pull her off Nadya, but she was strong, angry, out of control, and when Lucas got her back a foot she turned in his arms and slashed at his face with inch-long, highly polished fingernails, cut him across the nose and he grunted and lost her, and she went back after Nadya.

Nadya had gotten her feet up into the booth in front of her and kicked Reasons in the chest, and they were both screaming and waiters were running toward them, and Lucas got Reasons around the waist again and tried to pull back while avoiding the fingernails. Both women now had blood on their faces and Lucas, trying not to hurt Reasons, but at the same time hold on to her, lost her again, and she went back into the booth and Nadya picked up the silver-metal napkin holder and smashed Reasons in the forehead.

Reasons stopped, hung over Nadya for a second, and Lucas wrapped himself around her and pinned her arms, and then Nadya, now screamingly angry herself, smashed her a second time in the forehead, and Reasons went limp.

Lucas was shouting "Whoa, whoa, whoa" at Nadya, who came out of the booth with the napkin holder, looking for a third shot, and Lucas let go of Reasons with one arm, put his hand in Nadya's face, and catapulted her back into the booth.

"Whoa!" he shouted, and the combination of the shout and the impact she took at the back of the booth stopped her. Lucas pivoted away, with Reasons still wrapped up. She was conscious, but loopy, like a fighter who's been tagged hard, but not quite dropped.

The restaurant manager was running toward them and Lucas said, "I'm a state cop. Call the police, tell them to get a car up here."

Without a word, the woman turned and ran the other way. The waitress was back on her feet, holding her coffee-stained shirt away from herself, saying, "I'm really fucked up. I'm really fucked up."

"Are you burned?" Lucas asked.

"Look at my blouse. This is like three days old," she said, and Lucas decided that if she was burned, she wasn't burned badly. Lucas looked back at Nadya, said, "Stay in the booth," and pushed Reasons further away, put her in another booth, and blocked it with his body.

"Jesus…"

Both women were bleeding, and Reasons was still dazed, but neither was badly hurt. One of them started crying, and then the other. A waitress said to Lucas, "You're bleeding like crazy," and pressed a napkin to his forehead. "She must have got you with her fingernails."

A busboy was gawking at Lucas and said, "Boy, I wish I could have seen this," which made Lucas laugh despite himself.

Then the cops arrived, a sergeant and a patrolman, and trailing them, Andreno, with a look of wonderment. Lucas explained what happened to the cops, and the sergeant said, "Ah, shit," and then, "What do you want to do?"

"Could you take Mrs. Reasons home? Talk to her?"

"Well, uh, are we gonna have charges here?"

"Just a goddamn bar fight, kind of, except in a restaurant," Lucas said.

"And except that it's in a big restaurant in the middle of the morning and nobody's drunk and everybody's bleeding," the patrolman said.

"Won't do anybody any good if it gets out," Lucas said. "Why don't we just do something?"

"Disappear it?" the sergeant suggested.

"That would be good."

"We oughta call in and see what they want to do," the patrolman said cautiously. A new guy, Lucas thought.

"Why don't you call the chief directly," Lucas said to the sergeant. "Go off the record-there's been a lot of shit since last night, and we're trying to handle it. Nobody wants charges. What's the good of an assault charge against a woman whose husband just got murdered?"

The cop nodded, looked at Nadya and then at Reasons, and then at his partner. "I'll make the call right here. Nothing happened."

"Atta boy," Andreno said.

"Who the fuck are you?" the partner asked.

"BCA undercover," Lucas said. "Pretend you never saw him."

"What about my shirt?" the waitress asked. "It's new, it's probably ruined."

Lucas asked, "What's the biggest tip you ever got for coffee and waffles?"

"Maybe five dollars."

"Brace yourself; your ship just came in."

She nodded, looked down at her blouse, and up at Lucas: "All right. Hope it's like one of them supertankers."

The Duluth cops took Reasons out, and Andreno said, "You got a cut on your nose. You need another napkin."

"That woman was like a hurricane of fingernails," Lucas said. He touched his nose, and it stung. "I hope she didn't give me something."

"You mean, like the clap?" Andreno said. He was having a pretty good time, now.

"What is this clap?" Nadya asked. She had tears running down through her makeup, and Lucas shook his head at Andreno, said, "Let's get her to her room."

Andreno proved to be expert at gently cleaning and bandaging wounds, and he did both Nadya and Lucas, using Band-Aids from Lucas's Dopp kit. "Leave them on until the blood dries-tomorrow would be good-and then wash them off. You'll still have grooves, both of you."

"I'm not leaving it on my fuckin' nose," Lucas said. "I'd rather bleed."

"What is this groove?" Nadya asked. She'd become quiet, somber after the fight.

"Fingernail cuts," Andreno said. "Nasty. I always hated to break up fights between women. When women fight, civilization goes right out the window. They don't know how to play-fight, like guys. They go right for the eyes."

"I hit her hard, with those napkins," Nadya said, with just a sliver of satisfaction.

"Yes, you did," Lucas said. "She wasn't exactly a lightweight, either. I think I fucked up my back, getting her off you."

"Two Aleves," Andreno said. "Get a couple for Nadya."

Nadya was reluctant, but they went back to the restaurant when Andreno complained that he hadn't had breakfast. The manager looked at them with trepidation, but the waitress was right there: Lucas had given her a hundred-dollar bill. After they ordered, Andreno said, "Tell me everything. I don't know shit."

Lucas told him. Andreno was bright, and a longtime street cop. When he finished, Andreno said, "What you need is to finish those genealogies. If there are four families, somebody in the families is gonna know who the killer is."

"Spivak might know," Lucas said. "That's not doing us any good."

"I know, but the more you nail down the families, the more you bring up the possibility that they're all going to jail on spy charges. Somebody, somewhere along the line, is gonna crack."

"We haven't even talked with the Svobodas yet," Lucas said. "Put some bullshit on a woman in their shop…"

"The thing I keep thinking about is those birth certificates from the ancestors. The fake ones. Maybe there's some way to go through the vital records and pull everybody who makes that claim."

"I don't think they'd be computerized that far back," Lucas said. "Maybe they would. I can check."

They thought about that for a minute, then Nadya said, "Remember when we talk to this horse-woman, the one who is a barmaid at Spivak's?"

"Yeah?"

"If I remember, she said that one of the men at the table was very old. We do not have any very old people in our families. Is there a way you can look at driver's papers?"

Lucas snapped his fingers: "Good. Good thought. That's all been on the computer for a long time. Say we go back ten years, so he's likely to have a driver's license. Everything we've seen has been on the Range, so we look only at the Range cities-Virginia, Eveleth, Hibbing, Chisholm, whatever, there can't be too many people. We pull those names, and then we start pulling birth certificates."

"Another possibility," Andreno said. "How about some kind of analysis of the telephone records of the two families you already have? Who'd they call? If they're spies, and they're all hooked together, I bet there's been a long history of calling each other."

"Mmm. I don't know how far that stuff goes back," Lucas said. "The FBI could figure it out."

"How do we get all this stuff going?"

"Make some phone calls," Lucas said. He added, "Micky, I think you should hang around with Nadya, at least when I'm not. Maybe, when we're driving around, you oughta follow, about six cars back. See if you can spot somebody looking at us."

"How did they find us here?" Nadya asked.

"When the woman called from St. Paul, the woman from the shack, she said she figured this is the hotel we'd stay at. Maybe everybody figures that. They just call up and asked for you. If the front desk put the call through, they'd just hang up. Then they'd know where you were… Not that many big hotels in Duluth."

"Maybe we should move," Andreno said.

"I think so," Lucas said. "You guys, anyway. Get adjoining rooms somewhere, go in under a different name. Ask the desk to notify you if anybody asks under your real name."

"We can do that," Andreno said, looking at Nadya. "What do you think, honey?"

"What is this 'honey'?" Nadya asked.

Before Andreno and Nadya left to find a new place, Lucas took Nadya aside and said, "Before the fight, you were wondering about telling your bosses about this… liaison."

"Yes."

He shook his head: "I wouldn't. If you tell them, you're in trouble. If you don't tell them, you're in a little more trouble, but what are they gonna do, shoot you? So the spread in penalty isn't that much if they find out one way or the other. But if we crack the case, and they never find out-you're gold."

She looked at him for a long time, and then asked, "Have you been in trouble much, with your agency?"

"Not with this one. I once got fired from another one, but they hired me back."

"Why did they fire you?"

"I beat up a guy. A pimp. Maybe I was too enthusiastic."

"Why'd they hire you back?"

"Couldn't live without me," Lucas said.

She looked at him for another long moment, then smiled just a little, and said, "I think maybe you were… this is a phrase Jerry used for some people… a big pain in the ass."

Lucas hadn't known Reasons very well-they had spent a few hours together over a couple of days, enough that Lucas knew that they would never have been good friends. But the murder hung over his head; he didn't have any trouble functioning, didn't feel any great sorrow or terrible regret for things left undone or unsaid… but the death hung there. For one thing, he thought he should feel worse than he did. When his friend Del had been shot in the leg the previous winter, Lucas had spent a couple of hours a day at the hospital, then more time at Del's home, had worked out with him in rehab. With Reasons, he could hardly remember what his voice sounded like. And when he stopped to think about it, that made him feel bad. Reasons was a mote in the eye…

After Nadya and Andreno left, Lucas spent the rest of the morning and afternoon harassing people in St. Paul, trying to pull people into work on a Saturday. He called up Neil Mitford, the governor's top aide, and had him wade in, asked Rose Marie Roux to call downtown and kick butt. Generating the list of licenses was not a problem, but pulling the vital records essentially had to be done by hand. He tried to get twenty people working at it.

He'd worked this out: there were more or less forty thousand people in the Range cities. According to an almanac he carried in his laptop, only about 1 percent of the American population was male and eighty years old or older. The Range might have an older population than the country as a whole, because young people had been fleeing the area for decades-still, even if there were twice as many eighty-plus males, that'd only be eight hundred. With twenty people working on it, they would have to check only forty records each.

At four in the afternoon, a young man named Joshua called and said he'd found the name of a ninety-one-year-old man named Lou Witold who showed a baptismal certificate in Mahnomen County, and a notation that his original birth certificate, issued by the Catholic hospital, had been destroyed.

"That's the guy," Lucas said.

"He's dead," Joshua said. "He died six years ago."

"That's not the guy," Lucas said. "Got anything else on him?"

"He was married to an Anne Witold, whose records were destroyed in the same fire. She's also dead."

"Okay. You said it's, uh, Joshua? Listen, Joshua, start tracking Witolds. Pull all the Witold driver's licenses from St. Louis County, and see if you can build a genealogy, okay?"

"Okay. Do you want it today?"

"Yes. Tell your supervisor that all the overtime was authorized by the governor."

"Really?"

"Really," Lucas said. "You don't want to piss off the governor, not with these reductions in force going on."

"I need the overtime," Joshua said earnestly. "I'll work as long as the computers are turned on."

"Atta boy," Lucas said; he sounded like Andreno.

The early news had Reasons all over the place. First cop killed in years-died trying to save a Russian. Every news channel that Lucas looked at had bought the bodyguard line.

At five twenty, a woman named Romany called: "I've got another one of these Mahnomen-fire birth certificates, issued to a Burt and Melodie Walther. Both still alive-Burt still has a driver's license. He's ninety-two. You want me to do the genealogy thing, like Josh?"

"Yeah. This could be the guy we want… How's Joshua doing?"

"Let me check," she said.

Joshua came back. "Lou and Anne Witold had two children, both boys, Leon and Duane. Duane married somebody named Karen Hafner, and we have driver's licenses for them up to nineteen seventy-eight, and then no more. It's like they moved. The other kid, Leon, married a Wanda Lindsey, and they're still in Hibbing. And they've got a couple of kids, named John and Sarah, and Sarah I can't find, but John is living in Rochester-he's twenty-eight, and I don't know if he's married or not, or if he has any kids. I'm still looking."

"Keep going," Lucas said. He hung up, took his notes on Witold over to the Oleshev genealogy, and slipped it into one of the two remaining charts, three generations.

"Goddamnit," he said, looking at it. Too good to be true? They'd get a test with Bert and Melodie Walther.

He called Nadya, who'd moved to the Harbor Lodge: "What'd you tell the bosses?"

"I told them that Jerry was shot while guarding me."

"Atta girl," he said.

"That's what Micky says. Atta girl.'"

"We've got some new people for our genealogy," he said.

He filled her in, and she said, "We need a picture of this man," she said. "This Walther. We can show it to the woman in the aluminum house with the horses, who saw the old man at Spivak's…"

"Maisy Reynolds," Lucas said. "We can do that. I'll talk to the chief up there about getting a picture. What are you doing?"

"Watching a movie. Legally Blonde. This is a very peculiar movie."

"Actually, it's based on a true story," Lucas said. "It's kind of a documentary."

"Really?"

"True. This can be a very unusual country, sometimes."

Lucas was smiling when he hung up. Weather had made him watch Legally Blonde, and he'd loathed it. Then she made him watch Legally Blonde II, and he'd wanted to pluck out his eyeballs. The idea of Legally Blonde going back to the KGB, or whatever the fuck it was, as a documentary…

That made him laugh, and then he thought of the mote in the eye, Jerry Reasons, and he stopped laughing.

Maybe laugh tomorrow, he thought.