Lucas Davenport Collection: Books 11-15

by John Sandford

  “The guy who ran away . . . you didn’t see him shoot the dead man, you didn’t see a gun?”

  “No. And the thing is, I never even heard the shots, even though we were on deck not more than a couple of hundred feet away. There was some noise, you know, but it’s not loud, the hold filling up. The cops, the police, said there were a bunch of shots, but I didn’t hear a thing. Neither did the crew.”

  “So then what?”

  “So then nothin’. The cops came and looked all over the place, and picked up the dead guy, and took a statement from me. Looked around in the weeds.”

  “You didn’t see anybody in the weeds.”

  “No, I never did. The thing is, I had a couple of cigarettes—I had one about fifteen minutes before, and I went up to the bow and there was nobody in sight. The whole thing happened in that fifteen minutes. Then . . .” He glanced at Nadya and colored a bit.

  “What?” Lucas asked.

  “The Russian guys . . . this was years ago, mostly, we don’t see many Russians anymore. The thing is, it used to be that every time a Russian boat came in, you’d see carloads of girls coming out here. They’d go on the boat and you know, take care of the guys. Sometimes, when we were loading, and there was a lot of dust and guys banging around, they’d get a blanket and go out in the weeds. I don’t think there were any women aboard, but . . . there might have been some guys down in the weeds earlier in the night.”

  “Did you see any women at all?”

  “No, I didn’t. I just thought, with the weeds all crushed down . . . sometimes you’d see that. But that was years ago.”

  “Okay,” Lucas said.

  “How many of the crew did you see? Up on the deck?” Nadya asked.

  “Just the captain and the loader, the guy who was helping with the loading. The rest of them were all asleep.”

  “So you don’t think somebody from the crew might have met Oleshev on the dock . . .”

  Kellogg was shaking his head: “No. The guy I saw ran away, and there was no way to get back past me on the boat. As soon as the cops got here, they sealed off the boat so nobody could come or go. I was here all that time, and pretty soon, all of the crew was up, when they heard the commotion, the sirens and all. The captain did a head count, and they were all accounted for. Nobody came or went. Besides, the guy I saw didn’t look like a Russian.”

  “ ‘Didn’t look like a Russian,’ ” Nadya repeated.

  Kellogg shook his head. “The crew are blue-collar guys. Beefy, strong guys. Gorillas. The guy I saw was small. I think he was small. He looked . . . you know, thin. He had on that long coat and the Russian guys, you never saw them in long coats. They wore jackets. Leather jackets, or just regular cloth jackets, or rain suits, but I never saw one in a long coat. This looked . . . old-fashioned.”

  THEY TALKED a few minutes more, but Kellogg had nothing else that was relevant. They said good-bye and walked down to the end of the slip where Lucas had parked the Acura.

  “Where was this weeds place, where Jerry thought there was a chase?” Nadya asked.

  “Over here . . .” Lucas took her out into the weeds. “Right around here. From the lake, back this far. He said you could see what looked like pathways crushed into the weeds . . . You can see where we walked this morning. Same thing.”

  “Mmm.” She looked around. “This does not look like so good a place for sex.”

  “Depends on how bad you want the sex,” Lucas said. “I suppose.”

  THE GROUND UNDERFOOT was rough, as though it had been dug over a few times, rutted by heavy equipment and trucks. Here and there were piles of broken concrete. Nadya tramped through the weeds for a few more minutes, and then said, “If there was a chase over here, who got chased? Why was Oleshev in the middle of this big concrete? He couldn’t run after he was shot, that’s for sure. He was shot in the heart and the head . . . Does it make any sense?”

  Lucas was looking at the remnants of a broken wine bottle. He picked it up and read the label: Holiday Arbor, and below that, a price tag: $2.99. He rubbed his face and Nadya said again, “Does it make any sense?”

  Lucas thought about the pictures of the old woman in the police file, and the shot of her on the street that he’d seen in the newspaper. In the police pictures, she’d been lying on her back, her arms flung out to the side, a long coat beneath her, like a black puddle in the camera’s strobe light. In the newspaper pictures, she looked small, round-shouldered.

  “What?” Nadya asked, her hands on her hips.

  Lucas looked at the bottle. Two ninety-nine. Mary Wheaton had been a street person. Street people wore long coats on warm nights in the summer, and they drank cheap. She’d been killed in a way he’d never seen on the street, but he had seen. He’d been wrong when he told the Duluth cops that he’d never seen it before. He’d seen it in the movies, when the Navy SEAL sneaks up on a lazy sentry and zut—the neck is cut. Was it a spy thing, a military technique? He’d assumed it was simply dramatic bullshit . . .

  He looked back at the fragment of wine bottle. Holiday Arbor, $2.99. The paper label on the bottle looked new, as though it hadn’t been long in the weeds.

  “Come on,” he said to Nadya. He started walking fast toward the elevator.

  “To where?” She jogged along behind him.

  “Back to the morgue. The medical examiner’s.”

  “You have an idea?” She was looking at the chunk of glass in his hand. He carried it by the sharp edges.

  “Maybe,” Lucas said. “We need one.”

  DR. CHU HAD gone home, but the night man in pathology called the campus cops, who came with the keys, and when Lucas explained what he wanted, the night man called Dr. Chu, who gave the go-ahead.

  “Everything’s here,” the night man said. He put a box of clothing on the counter. Much of it was soaked in now-black and dried blood. “I’ll get it out for you, if you want.”

  “That’d be good . . .”

  The night man slipped on plastic gloves and took Mary Wheaton’s clothing out of the box piece by piece. At the bottom was an olive-green military-style coat with a red-white-and-blue patch on the shoulder. The night man held it up and said, “That what you want to see?”

  “Long green coat,” Nadya said. “With a Czechoslovakian flag on the shoulder.”

  “Is that what that is?” Lucas looked at the coat for another minute, and then said, “I think we better call Reasons.”

  REASONS CAME DOWN, looked at the coat. “Could be,” he said. He didn’t sound skeptical; he sounded neutral. “What do you want to do?”

  “See if we can get some prints off the piece of bottle I found, see if the prints match the old lady’s. See if we can find more bottle. Try to figure out what she might have been doing over there.”

  “I might be able to tell you what she was doing,” Reasons said. “There’s a Goodwill store maybe two blocks from there. It’s just about the only thing around, I mean, that’s not a warehouse. This coat, this looks like something from Goodwill.”

  “But it wouldn’t have been open in the middle of the night,” Lucas said.

  “No . . .”

  “Is the place still open? Now?”

  Reasons looked at his watch: “I think so. Let me make a call.”

  TWENTY MINUTES LATER, Maxine Just, the manager at the Goodwill, led them back through the store to a clothing rack, where three Czech Army coats hung from wire hangers. “We had about five of them. A surplus place up in town, caters to college kids, got a bunch of them a couple of years ago. They couldn’t sell them all, and finally gave them to us. Tax write-off. We put them up for eight dollars each.”

  “So you sold two.”

  “Two or three, yeah. We got five or six.”

  “Do you know who you sold them to?”

  Just shrugged. “People who wanted long wool coats. The wool’s pretty good. Some people buy them to make rugs—they dye the wool, do these folky kind of rugs for people’s cabins. College students used to buy the
m, when grunge was big, but they went out of style . . . I suppose they mostly went to people who couldn’t afford better. Most of our clientele.”

  “But you wouldn’t know specifically.”

  “No. I could ask some of our cashiers, maybe somebody would remember.”

  Reasons asked her to contact the cashiers, and they agreed that he would stop by in the morning to talk with them. They talked for a couple of more minutes, then said thanks to Just, and wandered back outside. The Goodwill store was a long walk from the city center, Lucas thought—he pointed it out to Reasons and asked, “How would she get down here?”

  “Bus, probably. Cheap ride, by bus. I’ll have the guys check with the drivers.”

  They were drifting back toward the cars when a dark-complected young man with a Latino accent stepped outside and called, “Excuse.”

  Reasons called back, “Yeah?” The young man walked across the parking lot. He was wearing worn jeans, an Iowa Wrestling sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off at the biceps, and pointed-toe black dress shoes caked with mud. He had a sterling-silver earring in his left earlobe and a small black mustache.

  “Mrs. Just said you were looking for the lady with the coat?”

  “Yeah.”

  He pointed across the street. “I see her every day, catch the bus there.”

  They all looked at the bus stop.

  “Every morning, she get on, every night, she get off. I think she lived around there somewhere. I see her in the Dumpster in the back. When she see me, she run across the street into the bushes.” He said booshes.

  “Where would she live?” Lucas asked. But they were all looking at a small cube-shape shed across the street. “You think in the shed?”

  The man shrugged. “I don’t know. But every morning, every night, I see her. All summer.”

  “Wearing the coat.”

  “Two or three days only, in the coat,” he said. “We only get the coats one month ago mostly.”

  “Could I get your name?” Reasons said. “Where do you live?”

  AS REASONS TALKED to the man, Lucas and Nadya walked across the street and through a ring of knee-high weeds to the shed. The place was a plywood cube, with boarded-over windows on two sides, a windowless, padlocked door at the front. An abandoned storage shed, Lucas thought, probably for the railroad.

  “How do we look in?” Nadya asked.

  “Have to talk to Reasons,” Lucas said. Reasons and the Latino man were walking toward them, and when Lucas asked about breaking in the shed, Reasons said, “Let me make a call.”

  He stepped away again. The Latino man said, “She goes around back. I never see her open this door.”

  Lucas and Nadya walked around to the back of the shed and found a blank wall—but the weeds next to one part of the cinder-block foundation were worn and scuffed, almost like an animal trail that went nowhere, ending at the foundation. Lucas stooped, pushed on a block, and it moved. A few seconds later, he’d pulled out four blocks, and kneeling, and cranking his head around, he could see a man-sized hole in the floor.

  “Somebody’s been going in and out,” he said.

  “You want me to go in?” asked the Latino.

  “No, no—let’s do it right.” He pushed the block back into place.

  REASONS CAME BACK with his cell phone and said, “The city engineer says it’s been condemned as an eyesore. The railroad’s agreed to tear it down, but just hasn’t gotten around to it yet. Bacon—the city engineer—he’s calling the railroad guy who knows about it, to get the okay to go inside. There’s something around back?”

  “Yeah, somebody’s been going in and out,” Lucas said. He explained about the foundation.

  Reasons went around to look and then went back to his phone. When he got off, they stood around looking at the shed, and at the port, and Lucas started talking to the Latino man about Mexico, and Reasons started bullshitting Nadya about dating in Russia, and then Reasons’s phone rang. He listened, nodded, and said, “Thanks.”

  “We can go in. If we can get in.” A patrol car was rolling down the street toward them. “I called for a hammer,” he said.

  The patrol car pulled to the curb. A uniformed cop got out of the car, lifted a hand to Reasons, went around to the trunk, popped it, and lifted out a sledge. “What do you need broke?” he asked.

  THE COP TOOK three swings to break the padlocked latch off the door; even then, the door was jammed shut. The cop went back to his car, dug around in the trunk, and returned with an eighteen-inch-long screwdriver. “When I started on the force, they called all that shit ‘burglar’s tools,’ ” Reasons said.

  “Yeah, but that was a hundred years ago,” the cop said.

  He worked the blade of the screwdriver around the edge of the door, grunted, “Warped,” and Reasons said, “Well, Jesus, don’t baby it—they’re gonna tear the fucking thing down.”

  Then the door popped, and they all clustered together and peered inside. They could see what looked like the remains of a camp: and a briefcase with paper scattered around.

  “Think we can go in?” Reasons asked.

  “I’m going,” Lucas said. “Fuck a bunch of crime-scene weenies.”

  The interior had an animal smell about it: the place had been inhabited, and recently, by somebody not fastidious. A flat pad made of bubble wrap was pushed against one wall, with an army blanket on top of it. A bed, Lucas thought.

  Peeking from under the briefcase, he could see one half of what looked like a wallet. He stooped, took a pencil out of his pocket, and used the pencil to drag the wallet into the open.

  “What do you see?” Nadya called.

  Lucas got down on his knees and pushed his face close to the wallet. “A wallet. A bunch of cards in Russian and an ID card in English that says, ‘Oleg Moshalov.’ ”

  “Sonofabitch,” Reasons said.

  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.