Hidden Prey ld-15 Read online

  Lucas followed his gaze: Reasons was looking at a fortyish blonde, hair pulled back in a severe bun. Thin, intent, she was wearing a dress, with some makeup; most un-Minnesotan. And the dress, though stylish, had an undefinable foreign something to it-something that went back to the sixties and June Cleaver. She was carrying a nylon briefcase, holding the handle with both hands. She was nice-looking, Lucas thought, and had the same slanting eyes as his wife, who was a Finn. "You think?"

  "She's the only one looking around, like she's expecting to be met. She's checked us out pretty good. She looks kind of Russian."

  "You oughta know," Lucas said. With Reasons trailing behind, Lucas walked over and said, "Would you be Nadezhda Kalin?"

  The woman smiled briefly, automatically: "Yes. Officer Davenport?"

  "Lucas Davenport. We were told we were meeting a man."

  "Well. You're not." The smile again came and went. Her English was good, but accented. She had square shoulders and there was a gap between her two front teeth, a diastema; she reminded him a bit of Lauren Hutton. "You should call me Nadya."

  "I didn't get it right, did I? The Nadezhda?"

  "Well. I thought, em, that you had perhaps sneezed?" She was amused.

  "Sorry."

  "No, no." She smiled and patted him on the arm. "Anyway, I wait for my baggage."

  "We'll help you wait," Lucas said.

  "We'll even help you say a little prayer," Reasons added.

  "A prayer?" She looked from Reasons to Lucas.

  "This airline does not always deliver the baggage with the passenger," Lucas said.

  "Ah. It is the same everywhere." She laughed and patted Reasons on the chest, and Lucas could see that Reasons liked it.

  They waited for another minute, and nothing happened with the baggage, and Nadya said to Lucas, "We must talk about my, em, em, authority is not the right word, because I have no authority here." Her eyes were green with flecks of amber around the pupils. "About my…"

  She needed help. "Status," Lucas suggested.

  "Yes. Status."

  They talked about her status: "As far as the investigation goes, you can see everything we get, and can suggest anything you want, and I'll probably do it, as long as it's legal," Lucas said. "I mean, it's a free country, but we'd like to get this guy, the killer. He really made a mess on our dock…"

  She looked at him oddly-she didn't quite recoil, but a line appeared in her forehead-and she said, "Thank you very much. I'm sorry for this… mess."

  "No, no, not your fault. I assume you want him caught?"

  "Well, of course," she said. "What do you think?"

  Lucas shrugged. "There's politics going on. That's what the FBI says. We're not exactly sure what you guys want."

  The corners of her mouth dropped: "It's very simple. We would like justice."

  "Oh, Jesus," Reasons said. And he added, out of the side of his mouth, "Gavno."

  Her eyebrows went up: "You speak Russian?"

  "My wife is Russian," Reasons said. "I speak three words: gavno, Stolichnaya, and Solzhenitsyn."

  The smile came again, and the corners of her eyes crinkled: "With those, you would get along very well with our intellectuals."

  "Yeah, well…"

  "You don't think we'll get justice?"

  "We might get the killer," Reasons said. "Justice is out of the question."

  They waited some more, and then the luggage started coming. Lucas watched her from the corner of his eye. She was not somebody who hit you as pretty, he decided, but if she was around for a while… She was like Weather that way; Weather wasn't conventionally pretty, but she was intensely attractive.

  Her bag arrived, a black nylon duffel, and Reasons threw it over his shoulder. Lucas offered to carry her briefcase, but she declined, and Lucas led the way out to the city car. She climbed in the backseat, and Reasons took the wheel with Lucas in the front passenger seat.

  "What first?" Reasons asked over his shoulder.

  "I would like to see the body," she said. "If this is possible."

  "We can do that," Reasons said. "You want to freshen up first? Check into your hotel?"

  "No, I'm afraid it would be wasted, if then I went to see the body," she said.

  "No problem."

  The morgue was at the University of Minnesota-Duluth medical school. They talked about the weather on the way over; in Moscow,

  Nadya said, it was no different than here in Duluth. And they talked about the length of her trip: it was not so much the hours in the air, as the shift in time, she said. She would be disoriented for a while. "At home, we are nine hours ahead of your time. Right now, I am okay. At seven o'clock tonight, I will fall asleep. For sure."

  "What exactly is your job back home?" Lucas asked.

  "I am a police officer, a major in the Federal Security Service-like your FBI," she said. "If I help with this case, I will have some good hopes of becoming a colonel. If I don't help, I will have some good hopes of becoming a lieutenant." She smiled to show that she was joking.

  "So this is a big deal." Reasons looked at her in the rearview mirror.

  "Yes, big deal," she said. "What is a Dairy Queen?"

  They explained Dairy Queen, and then rode in silence for a bit until Lucas asked Reasons, "You gonna stay with us? Or are you gonna get pulled for this old lady?"

  "I don't know. I'd like to work with you guys, but there might not be much to do. And politics gets into it. Nobody cares much about the Russian, but folks are gonna be kinda pissed about Wheaton."

  "What is this?" Nadya asked, from the backseat.

  "Ah, we had another murder here…" Reasons went on to regale her with the facts of the murder. Lucas was watching her face, the play of emotions running across them as Reasons got into the details. When he finished, Nadya touched three fingers to her lips and asked, "Does this happen often?"

  "Nope. Hardly anybody ever gets killed up here. We got maybe two or three murders a year. Four in a good year."

  "Only Russians and old women alcoholics," she said.

  "The first Russian in memory," Reasons said. "As a matter of fact, that was the first Russian boat to come in for quite a while."

  "Really," Lucas said. "I didn't know that."

  "Lots of Russians back in the seventies; not many anymore," Reasons said. He looked over the seat at Nadya.

  She shrugged, and said, "As far as I know, that… would not be connected to this death. That the boat would come here."

  "So you think it was just a coincidence?" Lucas asked.

  "I believe in coincidences," she said, "As long as there are not too many of them."

  The morgue was in the medical school's loading dock; a convenience, Reasons said. "You just back the ambulance up to the dock, open up the garage door, wheel the deceased over to the cooler, and put him or her inside."

  They'd called ahead, and were met in the dock by the pathologist on duty, a Chinese-American man with a pleasant accent who introduced himself as Doctor Chu. He unlocked the door to the cooler, and rolled the dead man out. Oleshev was covered with a hospital sheet, and the pathologist pulled it back.

  Nadya turned away, just an inch or two, a flinch, Lucas thought, and then she turned back. Oleshev looked as though he'd been carved out of a piece of chipboard. Nadya gazed at him for a moment, then dipped into her bag and took out a brown envelope, slipped out three glossy photographs, looked at the photos and then at the face. After a moment, she showed them to Lucas and Reasons. The photos didn't look exactly like the dead man, but resembled him; resembled him the way flesh resembles wood.

  Lucas asked, "You know him?" Behind Nadya, Reasons's eyes cut to Lucas.

  "No." To Chu she said, "It looks like him. Rodion Oleshev."

  "That's not the name on his papers," Chu said.

  Nadya shrugged.

  "All the people from the ship agreed he was a guy named Oleg Moshalov," said Reasons, pressing just a little.

  Nadya said, "Well, he's not." To Ch
u: "If you could make some fingerprints for me, that I could witness…" She dipped into her bag again and took out a stack of thin plastic envelopes.

  "We've got prints…" Chu began.

  "She'd like to witness it," Lucas said. "With her own stuff."

  The pathologist nodded. "What do I do?"

  She opened one of the envelopes and slipped out a sheet of plastic half the size of a dollar bill. In the center of the plastic sheet was a red square covered with a strip of peel-off film.

  "You pull off the cover and roll one of the right-hand fingers in the red square," she said.

  "Red Square," Chu said. To Lucas: "Get it?"

  Lucas shook his head once and Nadya sighed and said, "Then you let the sheet dry for a few seconds, and we put it back in the envelope."

  The pathologist said, "Slick," and took the prints. He did it quickly, expertly, and as he finished each print, Nadya lifted it to the overhead light to look through the plastic. Satisfied, she fanned each print for a moment, drying it, then slipped each plastic sheet back in its individual envelope.

  "Where would you get a fingerprint kit like that?" Chu asked.

  "You would have to call the consulate," Nadya said. She handed him an unused envelope. "You can have this one, if you would like. The manufacturer is named on the back, but it is in Russian. There's a phone number in St. Petersburg."

  "Get my wife to translate it," Reasons said.

  Nadya nodded: "The chemical on the sheet is made to… mmm… I don't know the English word, but it is, er, compounded to reflect light from a scanner, so that any scanner can be used to digitize the fingerprints." She used her hands when she talked, like a French woman.

  "Slick," Chu said again. "Thanks."

  Outside, Nadya took a breath, looked up and down the street and said, "This could be a Russian town, except for the signs. I don't mean the words on the signs, I mean the signs are everywhere. Everything is signs."

  "So you want to look at the files, or what?" Reasons asked.

  "No. If we could go to the hotel, I could transmit the fingerprints back to Washington, and use the toilet and maybe get clean from the trip. Then the files?"

  Like Lucas, Nadya was staying at the Radisson, a cylindrical building that looked like a chubby, upright tower of Pisa; the hotel was conveniently across the street from the police station. They took her all the way to her room, where Lucas explained the TV remote and the movies channel, and they showed her how to hook the modem through the hotel's phone system. They dialed into the Russian embassy's server, got the connect tone, and left her.

  "We'll wait in the restaurant. Back in half an hour," Lucas said, as they went out the door.

  Going back down the hallway to the elevators, Reasons said, "She said she didn't know him."

  "I don't think she did," Lucas said. "She was too careful about the fingerprints."

  "You saw her jump, though."

  "Yeah," Lucas said. "She's no cop."

  "What do you think? She's a spy?"

  "I think she's probably with one of their intelligence services, and for some reason, they sent somebody who isn't used to dealing with bodies," Lucas said. They got to the elevators and Lucas pushed the up button; Reasons pushed it again just to make sure it was pushed. "She's not a clerk. She's an executive. She's been around."

  "More than me," Reasons said. "I'm not exactly a world traveler," Lucas said. "I went to Mexico a couple of years ago, on a job. I went to Europe when I was in college. That's about it."

  "Europe," Reasons said. "French pussy."

  "I was playing hockey," Lucas said. "All I saw was German hockey rinks and the insides of buses. I did get to see the Wall before they knocked it down."

  "More'n me," Reasons said.

  The elevator doors opened and they got on. Lucas pushed the button for the top floor, and Reasons pushed it again, just to make sure it was pushed. "Maybe I'll travel when I retire. The old lady would like to see Moscow."

  "That's where she's from?"

  "Naw. She's from some one-horse town on the Polish border. Moscow, to her… it'd be like seeing Manhattan the first time."

  As they walked into the restaurant, a man sitting in a lounge chair with a New York Times looked over the paper, stood up, and asked, "Lucas Davenport?"

  Lucas stopped: "Yeah?"

  The man was wearing twill pants and a neat tweed jacket with a burgundy tie. He was six feet tall, military erect, sandy haired, early thirties, and pleasant, like a hopeful Xerox salesman. "I'm Andy Harmon. Barney Howard probably told you I'd look you up. I saw you going through with the lady, but couldn't catch you. I thought you'd probably come up here… Could I get a word with you?"

  Lucas said to Reasons, "This guy's a fed. Get a booth, I'll be with you in a minute."

  Lucas and Harmon drifted toward the windows facing the lake, away from other patrons. Harmon looked too young for a serious federal job; if he was not exactly apple-cheeked, the apples had only recently departed. "She give you anything interesting?"

  "She said America has a lot more signs than Russia," Lucas said.

  Harmon pulled at his lower lip for a couple of seconds, and then said, "That's true."

  "Other than that…" Lucas shrugged. "We went over to the medical examiner's office and took prints off the dead guy, Oleshev. She had a fingerprint kit that makes it easy to digitize prints. She gave one of the pickup sheets to the ME and told him where he could order some more in St. Petersburg."

  "Mmm."

  "She's not a cop," Lucas said. "She's probably from one of the intelligence agencies that doesn't deal with bodies."

  Now he was mildly interested. "How do you know that?"

  Lucas explained and Harmon nodded. "We never really thought she was a cop," Harmon said. "Something happened here, and they don't know exactly what it was. She's supposed to figure it out before we do."

  "Think she will?"

  "She will be smart," Harmon said.

  "She might be smart, but if we see everything she does, how does she plan to stay ahead of us?" Lucas asked. "There's gotta be something else."

  "Mmm. She's probably got a shadow operator." He said it deferentially, as if talking to a moderately slow child.

  "What's that, in English?"

  "She's out here in the open, picking up everything you get. Then, even though they don't know exactly what's going on, they've probably got some ideas of their own-some conjectures, maybe some contacts who might know something. So she sends everything she gets from you back to the embassy, and her controller bounces it back to the shadow op. So he's got everything they know and everything we know… and maybe he stays a few steps ahead."

  "What does he do if he figures it out?"

  Harmon shrugged. "Takes care of it himself. Or maybe, if it doesn't jeopardize whatever they're doing here, Nadya feeds the information back to you and you make the bust."

  "Well, Jesus." Lucas had never encountered anything like it.

  "As for us… We'd like to know if they've got an organization here and what it's been doing. It could be completely commercial-tracking grain prices, that sort of thing. Then… maybe not."

  "And I just ride along," Lucas said.

  "Don't worry about it," Harmon said. "This dead guy, nobody will miss him much, except maybe his old man. He was an idiot. That's what people say…"

  Lucas interrupted. "What people?"

  Another shrug. "People. Anyway, I don't think it counts for much whether or not you get the killer. What really counts is that there might be an organization here that we should know about. The fact that she's from the SVR suggests that there is."

  "The SVR is…"

  "The Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki, their foreign intelligence service. The FSB, the Federal'naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, is the national police force. That's what she says she's from." He pronounced the Russian names with relish and a sputtering dampness. "She might be quite… immoral, I suppose you'd call it, in your terms. If she thinks you're getting somew
here, and you're not keeping her up with it, she might try to initiate a sexual relationship with you. They're very, very well trained." Harmon's thin tongue, looking a little like a Ritz cracker, flicked over his lower lip.

  Lucas nearly laughed, but suppressed the impulse and said, solemnly, "I'll take care."

  "So she had nothing else? Nothing relevant, other than the signs?"

  "No, we were mostly setting up a schedule. We'll show her the files when she's finished transmitting prints, and gets cleaned up. She's said she's jet-lagged and she's gonna crash pretty early."

  "All right." Harmon eased away. "We'll be in touch."

  "I just can't figure out…"

  "What?"

  "I can't figure out why you guys don't seem to care. I mean… people are getting killed."

  "Honestly? Catching spies for the former Soviet Union is not exactly a good career move anymore. Costs a lot of money, disturbs the relationship, and nobody cares. So, catch a spy, you get an atta-boy and transferred to Boise, where you'll be less expensive."

  "That's really… fuckin' great," Lucas said.

  "Call me if you need anything," Harmon said. He turned away. "Anything that we got, that doesn't cost too much."

  "Hey," Lucas called after him. "How was the 'signs' thing relevant?"

  "Might mean she's never been here," Harmon called back. And "Good report, Davenport."

  Lucas slid into the booth across from Reasons. Since the hotel was a cylinder, the restaurant, naturally, revolved. When Lucas and Harmon started talking, they were looking at the lake; when they finished, they were looking south, at right angles to the lake. When Lucas joined Reasons, they were looking down at the Civic Center complex, which included the federal building, the county courthouse, and the city hall; the port and the lake were coming up. Lucas settled into the booth and ordered a Diet Coke. "Another spy?" Reasons asked.

  "Yeah, one of ours."

  "Is ours better than theirs?"

  Lucas waited as the barman put a glass of Coke in front of him, and then said, "I don't think so. The guy says, 'She might be immoral, in your terms. She might try to initiate a sexual relationship with you.' "

  "Really?" Reasons was impressed. "If she does, will you tell me about it? I mean, the details?"