“Great knees,” Lucas said.
No-name was not in a mood for repartee. “Fuck you. Let me look.”
He stood in the door of the shack and shined the flashlight across the floor. “Somebody was living here, all right. You sure it was Wheaton?”
“I don’t know. Sounds like her. We got a guy saw her every day. He’s over there . . .” Reasons pointed across the street, where the Latino man was sitting on the hood of an eighties Plymouth. “And for Christ’s sake, don’t ask for a green card until we’ve deposed him.”
The no-name detective glanced at the Latino, then continued playing his flashlight across the interior of the shed, methodically sweeping the dirty floor and walls. Now he said, “Look at this,” and he stepped inside.
Lucas looked. Eight inches to the side of the door, at head height, a nail stuck out of the wood. In the light from the flash, Lucas could see a tiny swatch of fiber hanging from the head of the nail, like hair, or short, bristly spiderwebs.
“Green. Green wool, I think,” no-name said. “That fuckin’ army coat. That’s weird.”
“What’s weird?” Lucas asked.
“We know where she lived. We already turned the place over. What the hell was she doing down here?”
FIVE MINUTES BEFORE the crime-scene guys arrived, two TV trucks pulled up. Reasons went across the street and pushed them back fifty yards; and then, with a show of reluctance, made an on-air statement. “See? He gets on TV,” Lucas told Nadya.
Then the crime-scene crew showed, two guys in golf shirts and jeans. Reasons walked over and asked, “Where in the hell have you been? Playing golf?”
“Got here fast as we could,” one of the guys said. He counterattacked. “None of you went inside, did you?”
“Of course not,” Reasons said.
Lucas and no-name shook their heads. “We were waiting for you.”
WHEN THE PHOTOGRAPHY was done, the crime-scene people began picking up the litter—with Lucas’s urging, they started with the small paper, picking up each piece with forceps, bagging it, and passing it out the door. Most of it was cards, most of it in Russian.
There were several items of interest: an American Express platinum card under the name Zbigniew Riscin, a New York driver’s license under the same name, and a receipt from the National car-rental agency at the Duluth airport for a car rented to Zbigniew Riscin. The car had been driven a hundred and seventy-five miles and returned the same day it was rented—the day that Oleshev had been murdered.
They also found a receipt, paid with the platinum card, for $145 from Spivak’s Tap, in Virginia, Minnesota.
“It’s about an hour up to Virginia,” Reasons said. “If he went up and back, did a little driving around, it’d be about right.”
“I wonder what is the Spivak’s Tap?” asked Nadya.
“A tap’s a bar,” Reasons said. “I’ll check.” He got his phone out.
Next out was a Targus retractable reel with six feet of telephone cable on it; it was used to connect laptops to motel telephones, and Lucas had one just like it. There were also three different white plastic-bodied electric wall-plug adapters for U.S. and European outlets. Nadya looked at them and said, “He had a laptop.”
“No laptop in here,” said a crime-scene guy.
“I’d like to find a laptop,” Lucas said to Nadya.
Nadya said, “Greatly,” and then, “I will check with the Potemkin, to see if he left one in his cabin.”
ALL THE MATERIAL from the hut was bagged. One of the crime-scene guys stepped to the door and said, “Look at this.” He had, in his forceps, a money band, printed “$100.”
“Took some money off him,” Lucas said. “How many bills in this?”
The crime-scene guy said, “Five thousand, I think.”
“So she got five grand, at least. Where is it?” no-name asked. “Nothing at her place. Didn’t look like she was eating any better.”
“Got a Kotex here,” one of the crime-scene guys said from the interior. “Unused.”
Lucas said, “How old was Wheaton?”
“Fifty-eight,” said no-name.
“We got a problem,” Lucas said. He looked across the street at the Latino perched on the car. “I think we better haul Raul up to the medical examiner’s.”
THEY DID THAT.
On the way, Nadya said, “So I am thinking, this woman did not kill Oleshev, but she was first to find his body. She robbed him and when the man on the boat saw her, she ran away. So we have nobody who saw the killer.”
“I am thinking that, too,” Lucas said, falling into her syntax. “If it was Wheaton. But they sold more coats out of that store. It might have been another woman . . .”
At the medical examiner’s, they rolled Wheaton out and peeled back the body bag. Unlike Nadya, Raul didn’t flinch when the body was exposed. He looked at Wheaton’s face, at her open eyes, and shook his head. “Not her. This one I saw was a younger chick, man. This one I saw was maybe . . . I don’t know. Wash her up, maybe forty.”
“Goddamnit,” said Reasons. He looked at Raul: “Can I see your green card?”
“HOW’D YOU FIGURE this out, man?” no-name asked Lucas.
Lucas explained, the whole line of indications starting from the chase through the weeds, which didn’t make any sense in terms of the dead man; the small figure in a long coat, seen running away from the body; the photographs of the small street woman in the long coat, murdered the night before; the cheap wine bottle in the area of the chase through the weeds. And luck: Reasons’s idea about the Goodwill store, and Raul.
“You know, it’s like detective work or something,” no-name marveled.
“IT’S TIME,” Lucas said. “To have a beer and think it over.”
“Are we breaking the investigation?” Nadya asked.
Lucas had to think for a minute: “I have to talk to you about your slang. But no, not exactly.”
“More like the investigation is breaking us,” Reasons said.
“If you want to have a beer and think it over, I can tell you where to have the beer,” no-name said. He took out a fat cell phone, which was also a PDA, looked up a name, and pressed the button. “Barbara, babe: we need to talk. Where are you?” He listened for a few seconds, then said, “How about we meet at Duke’s? Okay.”
THEY SENT RAUL back to the Goodwill store, where he’d left his car, with a campus cop, and fifteen minutes later filed into Duke’s Lounge, a lump of brown brick in a wilderness of on-ramps, at the south end of the city.
The place was full of neon beer signs and dark wood, with a coin-op shuffleboard game in the back. Four guys in backwards ball caps sat talking at the bar; the bartender himself sat on a stool and leaned back toward an aged Schlitz sign with a hole in it, so he could read a book in the light coming through the hole.
When they all walked in, the guys at the bar stopped talking and looked at no-name’s shorts, and the bartender said, “Barb’s in the back booth.” At the same time, a woman in a black leather jacket stood up and said, “Here,” and the guys at the bar started talking again.
Lucas, Nadya, Reasons, and no-name, who’d finally introduced himself as Larry Kelly, trooped to the back, clunking along the wooden floor. Lucas stopped to look at an old Budweiser-made print of Custer being wiped out by the Sioux at Little Bighorn.
Nadya stopped at his elbow, took in the print, and said, “Why do Americans celebrate defeats?”
Lucas shrugged. “Like what?”
“Bunker Hill, the Alamo, Custer, Pearl Harbor, the Chosin Reservoir, September eleventh—I have even seen this movie Blackhawk Down. It seems strange.”
“You know a lot about our history,” Lucas said.
“I studied it, of course. But this is not so much history as psychology.”
Lucas looked at the picture for a few more seconds; in the lower right corner, an Indian was peeling the scalp off a dead cavalryman. “I don’t know why we do it,” he said. “But we do, don’t we?”
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THEY WENT ON to the back, where Kelly introduced Barbara Langersham, a woman in her early forties, dark haired, dark eyed, broken nosed. A white scar, a match for the one on Lucas’s forehead, disappeared up into her hairline.
“Barbara knows all the street people,” he said. “She works for Catholic Charities.”
“Doesn’t have a hell of a lot of Catholic charity, though,” Reasons grumbled.
“It all depends on what you want, doesn’t it Jerry?” Langersham said, and Lucas thought, Oops.
ONLY FOUR OF them could fit in the booth, so Reasons and Lucas pulled up chairs and they all ordered beer, and Kelly said, “Barbara: Mary Wheaton, you’ve read about it.”
“Yes.” She poured her beer expertly into a pilsner glass, so the head came just over the top, not too thick. “I heard her head was almost cut off.”
“Yeah. Now—we think there’s a possibility that whoever killed her was the same guy who killed the Russian last week. But they got the wrong woman. Was there another woman street person around here, who walked around in a long green army coat?”
“Ah . . . shoot.” She thought for a moment. “I don’t remember one. But I think Mary only had that coat for a day or two. I only saw her with it once. Like she just got it. I remember thinking it was too hot.”
“We’re looking for a woman who might have lived across the street from the Goodwill store,” Lucas said. “Might have been a redhead, or sort of reddish hair, maybe forty.”
“Somebody saw her?”
“Yeah, but not somebody who could give us any information,” Reasons said. “He just saw her.”
Langersham licked a bit of foam off her upper lip, then said, to Reasons, “You know I don’t like to talk to cops.”
“But you do, when you need something,” Reasons said. “The fact is, this other woman is in trouble. If the killer knows he got the wrong woman . . .”
They didn’t have to draw a picture. Langersham said, “There was another woman. I think her name was Trey, but I don’t know her last name. She wasn’t forty—she was more like early thirties. I suppose, when she had a little dirt on her, she could go for forty. I saw her, I don’t know, a couple of weeks ago, panhandling up at Miller Hill Mall. I haven’t seen her since. I did see her, earlier this summer, a couple of times, maybe three times, on the Garfield Avenue bus. This was at night, I saw the bus going by, so she might have been going out Garfield. Toward the Goodwill.”
“Tray, like ashtray,” Kelly said.
“I think it was Trey, like a three-card,” Langersham said. “I don’t think she interacted too much with the cops, or anybody, for that matter. She pretty much stayed to herself.”
“Anything else?” Lucas asked. “You know if she was ever arrested . . . ?”
Langersham shook her head. “I just don’t know. She was well-spoken, like she’d had some schooling. I mean, she wasn’t a dropout, or anything. I think she probably took a lot of dope sometime or other; she knew all the words, and she had that doper sense of humor. She was very good at picking out guys who’d cough up a buck.”
“We can look through arrest reports; try to look her up in the nickname file,” Reasons said.
They sat and talked and ate potato chips for a half hour, much of the conversation between Nadya and Langersham as the men sat back and listened. Nadya was fascinated by the underage-hooker world that Langersham worked: “We have the same problems in Moscow, but we don’t even know how to start with it,” she said.
“Look to your religious people,” Langersham said. “Cops won’t work, because they’re in the crime life. The only thing that attracts these kids is the belief that somebody actually cares about them.”
“But not police,” Nadya said.
“Not police. You can’t pretend to care about them. You’ve actually got to care. About them, personally, one-on-one. So—recruit the religious. It’ll give them something worthwhile to do, instead of shaking their beads at some bishop. You got bishops in Russia?”
“Everywhere,” Nadya said. “More than anyone could need.”
Langersham nodded: “That’s a problem. You’ve got to get your religious people away from the bishops. Get them out in the streets. If everybody saved just one person . . . we’d all be saved. And it’d do wonders for both sides.”
They sat in silence for a minute, and then Reasons said, “Right on. Pass the joint.”
“Fuck you, Jerry,” Langersham said; but she was smiling when she said it. “Your turn to buy a round.”
7
TREY SAT IN a Country Kitchen in Hudson, Wisconsin, eating French toast with link sausage, reading a copy of the St. Paul Pioneer Press, a story out of Duluth:
Mary Wheaton lies in the county morgue, a few doors down from Rodion Oleshev, a Russian sailor—or perhaps a spy—who was executed at the TDX grain terminal two weeks ago.
Nobody has been arrested in the murders—but now a top state investigator and a Russian policewoman, teamed with Duluth police, may have forged a link between the two brutal killings.
“We believe that somebody killed Mary Wheaton to silence her,” said Duluth Police Sgt. Jerry Reasons. “We believe that she may have witnessed the murder of Mr. Oleshev.”
Reasons said that police have developed specific information to link the two killings, but would not elaborate. Sources at the police department, however, said that fibers found in a hut where Wheaton was believed to have lived were matched with the military coat that Wheaton was wearing when she was killed—and the hut contained papers that appeared to have been taken from the body of Rodion Oleshev.
Reasons said that he and Lucas Davenport, an agent for the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, and Nadya Kalin, an officer of the Russian . . .
THE STORY WENT on, but Trey’s eyes had gone watery: she wasn’t seeing it. The killer had come back for her, and he must have found Mary, thinking she was Trey.
For just an instant, the wary, feral, traveling Trey felt a pulse of victory: if the police knew there was a witness to the murder—and they must have known that because somebody at the grain terminal had seen her, had shouted at her—and if they thought that person was dead . . . she was safe.
Then the Annabelle Ramford lawyer brain clicked over: it wouldn’t happen. Too many people knew her, and too many knew Mary. If they checked with Tony on the bus route, he would tell them that Mary hadn’t lived in the hut, and that another woman had worn the coat.
The cashier at the Goodwill store who’d sold her the coat—she’d remember, too. She’d tried to wipe out the prints in the shack, but there must have been hair left behind—and if they compared the hair from the hut with Mary’s hair, they’d know that there was another woman.
A live witness. They’d come looking.
TREY HAD ALWAYS viewed her life as a strange trip: strange from the time she’d been old enough to understand the concept. The last years of high school, all of college, the crack years, the traveling time, all strange. She seemed at times to be standing outside of her body, watching herself doing something crazy. A rational, coldly realistic Annabelle standing to one side, watching a mindless, pleasure-hungry Trey fire up a crack pipe. An intelligent, skeptical, upper-middle-class lawyer watching an out-of-control freak eating discarded pizza from a garbage can on the Santa Monica Mall.
Life had always been strange, but nothing, she thought, had ever matched the strangeness of the past few days.
SQUATTING THERE in the shack, stuffing money into her backpack, scrubbing all the wooden surfaces with a rag—get rid of the fingerprints, her only thought—she’d been aware that the world had shifted. There’d been an earthquake. She was no longer a bum; she was back in the middle class, a woman of substance. A woman with liquidity.
When the cops came, their sirens seemed aimed at her hideout—but then they turned away, bumping across the rough road down to the TDX terminal. When God gave her the few minutes she needed to finish cleaning the shack, she slid beneath the floorboards, pull
ing her pack behind her. The pack was stuffed with money and her clothes.
The shack was on Garfield Avenue, one of the gritty working streets found on the outskirts of all industrial towns: heavy-equipment repair shops, lumberyards, warehouses, like that, all dressed in gray and grime and broken glass. Dirt roads and railroad tracks crisscrossed the area, with weeds and brush growing up between them.
Trey stayed in the weeds, like a wild animal, stuck to the shadows, heading toward town by a long, looping route. To the north, near the terminal, a dozen cop cars were scattered around the concrete ramp, roof racks flashing, and she could see men with flashlights, and she could hear people calling to one another.
When she’d gone far enough that she felt she could risk it, she crossed Garfield to the south, toward the highway overpasses coming in from Wisconsin, a wilderness of train tracks, mud, weeds. In the green army coat, with the dark blue backpack, she was invisible.
An hour after she set out, she’d crossed an I-35 overpass into Duluth proper and started up the hill above the lake. At two o’clock in the morning, she arrived at the garage where she’d once spent a few nights. The place was full of junk piled around a wrecked car, and the floor was oily, and there were rats . . . but it was out of sight and dry.
She tried to sleep: got three hours, at best, interspersed with long fantasies of having the bag taken from her. She’d never been afraid of bogeymen in the dark, not after living with the candy man. Now she had something to lose, and the fear crept around her.
At sunrise, she started out again, now with a plan. She crawled up to the top of the city, to an all-night laundromat, sat inside and washed the best clothes she had—jeans, a black Rolling Stones T-shirt, underpants, and bra. She threw in her towel and washcloth. Her shoes were okay, a pair of cheap boating sneaks she could wear without socks.
Lucas Davenport Collection: Books 11-15 Page 144
