Hidden Prey

Chapter 21

Andreno and Nadya arrived at nine o'clock the next morning, Nadya still red and puffy around the eyes. She'd been having crying jags, Andreno told him, but not as often anymore. Andreno was solemn and attentive when he was beside her, but he winked at Lucas when her back was turned. Andreno was wearing a green-and-white baseball jacket with a hammerless. 38 hanging in a holster under his arm. "What's happening?"

"The Hibbing cops got a picture of the old man this morning," Lucas said. "They phoned it in to St. Paul, and St. Paul e-mailed it to me. I've got it in my laptop."

"Christ, you're a computer weenie," Andreno said. "But I knew that."

"Look, here's where we're at," Lucas said. "We know that who-ever's doing the shooting isn't ninety years old and is probably hooked into these families-unless the shooter is from completely outside." He looked at Nadya. "Like a shooter out of the embassy."

She shook her head: "Absolutely no."

"I buy that," Lucas said to Andreno. "The only reason to go after the Russian Mafia guy, the Russian embassy guy, and Nadya is that these people are trying to protect themselves from everybody. So we're looking for somebody tied into these families, but young and healthy enough to run away from me. Spivak's kids would be candidates, except that we know where they were when the killings took place."

"Maybe not the daughter…"

"That wasn't the daughter running from me the other night," Lucas said. "That was a guy. Anyway: it's gotta be somebody young enough to run, which means not more than my age. I'm in good shape, for my age, and I wasn't gaining on him."

"So if we look at everybody related, everybody young enough to run away from you…"

"Unless the families have brought somebody in," Nadya said. "They were spies. They have resources. They would have some hidden money-gold, even. They would have some criminal contacts to perform their duties."

"Yeah…" They all thought about it for a few seconds. "If they were moving people out of the country through Canada… I mean, Canada is notorious for the criminal gangs along the border, preying on Americans," Lucas said. "They work over here, go back there, and take advantage of the lack of coordination by the cops. If it's a Canadian killer, we're probably not going to find him."

"But we keep looking," Andreno said, "Because it probably isn't."

Nadya shifted the subject: "Should I find Jerry's wife and try to talk with her?"

Lucas shook his head: "No. Nothing to be said."

"Always something to be said," Nadya argued.

"Nothing that would do any good," Lucas said. "Best to finish this case, and go back home."

She nodded, but with an air of doubt, and Andreno said, "If you gotta talk to her, I'll go along. Don't go sneaking over there. Cops got guns."

Nadya nodded again and changed the subject again: "What now? With this picture in your laptop?"

"We go back up to Virginia," Lucas said. "We'll talk to Maisy Reynolds-I called and told her we're coming-and show her the old man's picture. The guy I've got in the computer looks like her description, but we need her to say yes."

"What about the genealogy?" Nadya asked.

"It fits," Lucas said. "The Walther family slips right in. One difference: the oldest ones, Burt and Melodie, the ones with the weird birth certificates, are still alive. But their kids-they had a son named Thomas, who was married to a woman named Catherine-are dead. They were killed in a car accident back in the seventies. There was still a third generation, though. Thomas and Catherine had a son named Roger who married a woman named Janet. They're still around, in Hibbing."

"You still want me to trail you?" Andreno asked.

"Yeah. If Reynolds identifies the old guy as the one who was in Spivak's bar, we're gonna go jack him up. Maybe even if she can't identify him. I'd like you to get to his place before we do, find a spot on the street, and then just watch. See if anything happens after we leave."

"What about the youngest one?" Nadya asked. "The old man's… what? Grandson?"

"Grandson, yes. Roger," Lucas said. "After we're done with the old man, we'll look him up. Him and his wife. He's our best candidate right now."

"Are we breaking the case now?" Nadya asked.

Lucas looked at Andreno, who did something Italian with his face and shoulders, meaning, "Could be." He said, "Could be."

And on the way down in the elevator, Nadya said, "Micky says this woman in Legally Blonde will be appointed to the federal appeals court by the president."

Lucas looked at Andreno, and said, "You pushed it too far." Andreno shrugged.

"You're joking me again," she said. "Why do American men joke so much? Do you ever discuss?"

On the drive up to Virginia, Nadya again asked about going to see Raisa Reasons. "I believe there are some useful things that I could tell her."

"Listen… you're not really a cop, are you?" Lucas asked. "You're some kind of intelligence agent. You can tell me, because I know you're not a cop."

"Why is this?"

"Because you know some stuff that cops know, but you don't know other stuff. Daily things. What we see every day. You don't know why you shouldn't go see Reasons's wife."

"Well, why shouldn't I?"

"Are you a cop? I won't tell anybody what you say."

She thought about it for a minute, then said, "No. I'm a major with the SVR. I'm in the Counterintelligence Division."

"Now we're getting somewhere," Lucas said. "Reasons and I figured out that you weren't a cop the first time we went to the morgue, to look at Oleshev's body."

"Yes?" She may have been discomfited, but didn't reflect it. Instead, she seemed amused and interested.

"Yes. You flinched when you looked at the body. Cops your age don't flinch. They've seen two hundred bodies and are interested in what they're going to find out, they don't really feel much about looking at another dead guy."

"Why would that tell me about talking to Raisa Reasons?"

" 'Cause you'd know it wouldn't do any good. When you've been a cop for a while, you figure out that the best thing in domestic disputes is distance," Lucas said. "Just simple distance. You get a husband and wife breaking up, and one of them goes after the other, the one thing that'll end the violence, end the anger, is distance. If you can't find the other person, don't know where she is, pretty soon the violent feelings dissipate and everybody goes back to living their lives."

"But I could tell her-"

"What's to explain? She knows what happened. What're you going to tell her, that it didn't feel good?"

"No, I-"

"That it did feel good?"

Small smile. "No, but-"

Lucas kept interrupting: "That he really loved her, but their marriage was troubled and he was lonely? That makes his death her fault. That he really wasn't serious? That devalues her marriage, that he could sleep with somebody so casually."

"Maybe tell her that I'm sorry."

"If you're sorry for her, that's patronizing, and it'll really piss her off. If you're sorry about the situation, that's obvious, and she won't care how sorry you are. None of it does any good," Lucas said. "The best thing to do is go home, get some distance. You know the saying 'Let sleeping dogs lie'?"

"I know it, but this dog is not sleeping," Nadya said.

"She'll be okay, when the shock wears off. The Duluth guys will manage her, they'll take care of her, and after a while, you won't be so important. She'll have other things to do and other things to think about. What to do with herself."

"Without Jerry," Nadya added, the gloom settling back.

"Without Jerry, but with some money," Lucas said. "Jerry had a lot of insurance coverage. She'll be okay."

Nadya sighed and stretched and yawned and finally said, "Maybe you're right."

"Of course I am," Lucas said. "I've seen it a lot. Best thing to do: get away from it if you can."

Maisy Reynolds was two minutes out of the shower, looking good in a cowboy shirt with pearl buttons and tight riding jeans; she smelled like Irish Spring soap. "I'm getting ready to go to work. If you guys keep coming around, I'll probably get fired. They're really mad about what you're doing. About Anton."

"How long have you worked for him?" Lucas asked, as he and Nadya followed her into her trailer. The place smelled like celery and carrots and beer. She pointed them at a tiny dinette, and Nadya and Lucas settled into chairs. Lucas took his laptop out of his briefcase and set it on the tippy Formica-topped table.

"Six years. He's not a bad guy. He's paternal, I guess you'd say. A little bit cheap, but you can talk to him. He doesn't mess with your tips."

"How about his kids?"

"The son is just like his dad. The daughter's an asshole."

"But this job, it must be good enough, if you can keep horses and a nice house," Nadya ventured.

"Thank you, honey, for the 'nice house,' " Reynolds said, looking around the kitchen. "Sometimes in the winter, when we get an ice storm, I feel like I'm living in a beer can… You guys want some carrot juice? I got some fresh."

"No, thanks," Lucas said, grinning at her. "It's made out of vegetables."

"I would like," Nadya said. "The vegetables in your restaurants are not so good."

"Better in Russia?" Reynolds asked, interested.

"I should say so," Nadya said. "Also better in France, in Germany, in Scandinavia, in Italy, in Israel."

"I can believe that. Most of our vegetables are designed so they're cheap to ship," Reynolds said, as she took a blender pitcher from the refrigerator. "But these are fresh and old-fashioned, right out of the garden, fertilized with genuine horse shit."

Lucas brought up the photograph of Burt Walther. Walther was outside his house in Hibbing, looking toward the camera, but not at it. He seemed to be looking at a van driver, while the photo was taken from the back of the van. Lucas turned the computer toward Reynolds, who was pouring the juice. She handed a glass to Nadya, and they both looked at the photo over their glasses. Reynolds sipped and said, "Jeez, it kinda looks like him…"

Lucas had the picture up in Photoshop Elements, and he put the zoom tool on the old man's face and clicked a couple of times, enlarging it. Reynolds half crouched, looking straight at the screen, and finally said, "That's the guy. That's definitely him. Who is he?"

"Rather not say right at the moment," Lucas said. He turned the computer around and shut it down.

"Okay. Spy stuff," Reynolds said. "Is this the thing that's gonna get me fired?"

"We won't tell if you don't," Lucas said.

"This juice, it is excellent," Nadya said. "From horse shit? I should try this when I get home. We have much horse shit in Moscow."

The Walthers lived in a small house in a working-class neighborhood of Hibbing. Most of the neighbors had gone to vinyl siding, but the Walthers had stuck with the original gray-shingle siding, with white trim gone gray and flaky with age. The small lawn was neatly kept; a sparse foot-wide flower bed, with burgundy petunias, lay along the front wall under the picture window. A detached garage leaned disconsolately away from the wind; an old bulk-oil tank stuck to the back of the house like a metal leech.

Lucas had called Andreno as they rolled into town, and was told that he'd been down the street for twenty minutes. "The old man's there-he went out to his mailbox."

When Lucas turned the corner, following the MDX's navigation system through town, he saw the blue-painted mailbox and pulled to the curb beside it. He saw Andreno's van parked up the street, where Andreno could see both Walther's house and the garage behind it.

"When I knock, stay behind me," Lucas said.

"Yes?" She said it with a question mark.

"In case he's a nutso Russian spy and comes up shooting. Knocking on doors is the most dangerous thing we do."

She stopped smiling when Lucas took his. 45 out of its holster, racked a shell into the chamber, and, leaving it cocked, clicked on the safety before slipping it back in its holster.

"Let's go," he said.

Burt Walther was standing in the picture window. Lucas saw him as they started up the walk and said out of the side of his mouth, "There he is."

Walther was wearing a generic gray sweatshirt and pleated khaki pants. He had his hands in his pockets as he watched them come up the walk, and as they approached the front door, he moved toward it, opening it as they came up to the stoop. Lucas had his ID in his left hand as the door opened. Walther stuck his head out, looked at them with blue-eyed uncertainty, and said with a question mark, as Nadya had, "Yes?"

"Mr. Walther. My name is Lucas Davenport, and I'm an investigator with the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. We're investigating the death of a Russian seaman in Duluth, and we need to talk to you about it."

"Duluth?" The old man-and Lucas could see he was very old-was uncertain, unfocused; his sweatshirt was worn and pilled around the neck, and his khakis were wrinkled and worn.

"The killing of Rodion Oleshev, although he may have told you his name was Moshalov."

"His name?" The old man grappled with the concept.

Lucas thought, Ah, shit, and glanced at Nadya.

Then the old man rallied and said, "Come in, I suppose. I don't have any food. My wife makes cookies sometimes but we don't have any now…"

They followed as he tottered back inside. An aging color television was stuck in the corner of a room and an old lady was sitting in a wheelchair, staring at it. She didn't look at them.

"Mrs. Walther?" Lucas asked.

No reply. Walther said, "She's not so well, today. You want me to go to Duluth? I can't go, there's nobody to stay with Melodie…"

"No, no, we don't want you to go anywhere…"

The ensuing interview was jagged, uninformative. Walther claimed that he hadn't been to Virginia for two years. Then he agreed that he might have been, but couldn't remember exactly when, how he got there, or what he did. He didn't remember Oleshev, the Svobodas, or the Witolds. He remembered Anton Spivak, though, and Spivak's Tap, and began a wandering reminiscence of the last time he'd been to Spivak's.

He'd gone with a man named Frank, he said, after a Hibbing-Virginia football game in which Walther's son had played right guard. Lucas realized a few seconds into the account that the game had taken place in the fifties or sixties, and that he was talking about the son who'd died in the car accident. He tried to interrupt, but Walther took such great pleasure in the story-his son had picked up a fumble out of the air and had run it back for a touchdown, and it turned out that the fumbler was a Spivak, which they didn't learn until they were laughing about it in the bar-that Nadya shushed Lucas and made him listen.

When the story was finished, they tried to press on, asking about the hospital where he'd been born.

"My parents came here with a boat, the whole boat all to the same place. From New York to Minnesota on the train. They were called the Vilnius Boat, because they gathered at Vilnius for their tickets. Vilnius is in…" His mind wandered away. Then, "They all came over on the same boat, and then the farms failed because of the winter, and everything died. People starved and the mines were opening and the boat came to Hibbing. The whole boat. They went to work in the mines, the men."

They asked about Roger: Roger made him happy-a good boy, worked hard, he'd be a success in this life. He was studying to be an accountant at the University of Minnesota-Duluth and had a scholarship to play hockey…

"I thought he was thirty or forty-something," Lucas said.

The old man looked puzzled, struggled with it for a moment, then sat up, his eyes suddenly sharp, sniffed, and with a new alertness, said, "I've got to change Melodie." And it became apparent from the odor that he did-if he didn't, he said, she'd get sores.

He refused help from Nadya, said he did this every day, and he competently rolled the old woman into the bathroom and closed the door.

"This is a waste of time," Lucas said, when the door had closed. "He thinks Roger's still in college. The guy's running on one headlight."

Five minutes later, Walther pushed his wife out of the bathroom, now smelling of the same Johnson's baby powder that Lucas used on Sam. He parked her in front of the television set and said, "I can't go to Duluth unless we can find somebody to take care of Grandma."

"You don't remember Spivak's Tap two weeks ago?" Lucas asked.

"I remember Spivak's. Did I tell you, I told somebody, my boy played football here for Hibbing, you know-"

Lucas jumped in. "We've got to go. Is there anything we can do for your wife? The county, there might be some kind of service…"

"But I called them already. Are you from the county? I called them, and they said, 'Okay they had the papers now.' I can't remember, yesterday?"

"Okay. We'll check. Mr. Walther, thanks for your help, okay?"

Nadya smiled and nodded and Lucas bobbed his head and fluttered his hands and a minute later they were walking back down the sidewalk. "That didn't work out," Lucas said. In the car, he picked up the phone and said, "I'll call off Andreno…"

Nadya held up a hand and said, "Leave Andreno for a while."

"Why? The guy…?"

"Because I am a spy, I notice that the old man now knows everything we know, and we know nothing that he does. He is probably senile. But for a man who is senile, he did an excellent debriefing."

Lucas looked at the house, where the old man had taken up his post in the picture window, staring out at the lawn. "No."

"I think no also. But…" She shrugged. "I see a chess magazine in his bookcase."

"A chess magazine."

"This is about the contest between the world champion of chess and the IBM computer. This contest was in the summer, so the magazine is new."

"Huh. You think he bitch-slapped me?"

"What?"

"Never mind. I'll leave Andreno," Lucas said. "Couple hours can't hurt."

"So now…"

"Back to the genealogies. We've got the rest of the afternoon. Pick out a new target…"

"One more thing-this boat that his parents came on. I have heard of such things," Nadya said. "Societies that gathered people together, and they rented a boat to come to a certain, em, colony in the United States that was purchased in advance. Many of these were swindles and the land would be poor or too cold and the boat would be destroyed and the people would go somewhere else."

Lucas nodded. "The point being that this might not be a cover story for illegal entry. It could be real."

"Doesn't feel real; it's too unlikely. But… there is a ten percent chance that this hospital problem is innocent."

"You believe in coincidence."

"As long as there are not too many."

"There are getting to be too many," Lucas said.

"I think so, but I am not certain," Nadya said. "Let's find a new target. What about this Roger person, the old man's grandson?"

"My exact thought."