Lucas Davenport Collection: Books 11-15

by John Sandford

  Nadya started with Piotr again, then went silent, and Lucas, grumpy, was blessing the silence when she said, “So, you know that I am sleeping with Jerry. This offends you?”

  “You’re sleeping with Reasons?” He feigned astonishment.

  “Please.” She said it exactly like a New Yorker.

  “None of my business,” Lucas said. “You’re adults.”

  “That’s exactly what I thought,” she said. More silence, but Lucas knew she wasn’t going to leave it alone. Two minutes went by with sipping of coffee, views out the passenger window—trees, then more trees—and then she said, “Do you want to know why?”

  “It’s none of my business,” Lucas repeated, but he did want to know, so he tried to keep any harshness out of his voice.

  “It’s because, as Jerry would say, I am horny.”

  “Okay,” Lucas said. “Okay.”

  “I am separated six years now, and here I am—I am out of town where my colleagues can’t see me, I am in a nice hotel with a good bed, Jerry is somewhat attractive and certainly safe, and very enthusiastic.”

  “That’s uh . . . Jesus, it’s gotta be Piotr, don’t you think?”

  She looked at him sideways and said, “I am sorry if this affair offends you. But I have not had so much sex in my life, and I took the opportunity.”

  “No. No. Like I said . . . Poor old Piotr . . .”

  Two-thirds of the way to Hibbing, Lucas said, “We should call Andy Harmon.” But they didn’t.

  CHIEF ROY HOPPER was standing on the edge of the road, bullshitting with a couple of guys in tan Carhartt jackets, all three of them with their hands in the jacket pockets. Lucas pulled into the weeds off the tarmac and climbed out.

  “There you are,” Hopper called cheerfully. He turned to the other two and he said, “Top guy from the BCA, and this is his Russian friend. Nadya? Got that right?”

  “Is it Piotr?” Nadya asked.

  “We don’t know,” he said. “You got a picture?”

  “Yes, I do, on my laptop, I have my laptop . . .”

  “Haven’t got him up yet, he’s over the edge . . .”

  Lucas looked around. They were in a road cut, with trees and brush all around. “Down in what?”

  “Down in the pit,” the chief said. When Lucas didn’t react, he said, “The Rust-Hull mine pit. Biggest pit in the country.”

  “Grand Canyon of the north, is what they call it around here,” one of the Carhartts said.

  “Where is it?” Lucas asked, looking around again.

  “About thirty yards that way,” the other Carhartt said, tipping his head toward the north side of the road.

  “Whoever it is got throwed over the side, but he hung up on a ledge maybe a hundred feet down,” Hopper said. “Come on, I’ll show you.”

  “How’d you find him?” Nadya asked as they scrambled up the road cut. She’d gotten her boots properly tied, and Lucas thought they looked cute: retro-styled brown combat boots with giant cleated soles, but only about ten inches long.

  Hopper didn’t answer until they got over the top, then said, “Well, I knew you were going to ask . . . I told everybody to keep a lookout, and this morning, there were these crows flying around . . .”

  “Crows.”

  “Sort of the all-purpose cleanup crew around here,” Hopper said. “They’ll eat anything.”

  Nadya stopped, blood draining from her face and she said, “Oh my shit.”

  “That’s exactly right,” Hopper said.

  They pushed another twenty yards through light brush, and then suddenly the mine pit opened out in front of them. It wasn’t the Grand Canyon, but it was big. The lowest part of it was filled with water, a good-sized lake. A pickup truck on the dry pit floor beneath them looked like a Tonka toy. “Jesus,” Lucas said.

  “Never seen it before?” Hopper asked.

  “Never.” The dirt and rock were a deep purple, or maybe magenta—he got those confused. The colored stuff must be the iron ore, Lucas supposed. They slid carefully down a slope to a rock ledge perhaps ten yards wide, where two men in firemen’s uniforms were working with a winch. Lucas and Nadya stepped carefully to the edge and looked over the side.

  The pit was deep enough that Lucas had no idea of exactly how deep. Hundreds of feet, anyway, and it appeared to be miles long, maybe a couple of miles across. As Hopper had said, the body was a hundred or so feet below them, arms thrown to the side, legs spread, wrapped in a black coat, faceup. Two more firemen were maneuvering a lift basket.

  “You know how to rappel?” Hopper asked Lucas.

  “Fuck no,” Lucas asked.

  “A man after my own heart,” Hopper said.

  LUCAS HAD BEEN on recoveries before, and they always seemed to take two hours longer than they should; but they’d arrived more than an hour into this one, so they only had to wait a half hour before the basket was winched over the lip of the cut and pulled onto the ledge.

  Nadya had gone back to the truck for her laptop, and as the body came up, she opened the laptop and brought up a picture of Nikitin. The body was wrapped in a blanket.

  “Want to look?” Hopper asked Nadya. “I can look for you.”

  “I must look,” Nadya said.

  Hopper nodded, and carefully unwrapped the blanket that covered the face. When he pulled back the last flap, Nadya said, “Ohhhh . . .” and turned away, put the laptop down, walked back to the fat part of the hill and tried to vomit. The crows had gotten the eyes and the other soft parts—the lips and the nose—before they’d been chased away.

  Hopper said quietly, “Put some eyes on him . . .”

  “It’s him,” Lucas said. “Could you get your guys to print him? We can send the prints back to the Russian embassy, just to make sure.”

  “You’ll have them in a half hour.”

  “Thanks, Chief.” Lucas went back and took Nadya by the arm. “Let’s go.”

  “I had nothing in my stomach except some coffee,” she said, dabbing at her mouth with the back of her hand. “Now my mouth tastes like acid. It’s . . . Piotr, correct?”

  “Yup. They’re gonna print him for you. Let’s get out of here.”

  THEY SPENT SOME time driving around; Lucas got her a bottle of Scope at a convenience store, and wound up on the main drag. Lucas asked a passerby about Svoboda’s Bakery, got pointed, and they walked down together.

  “Is this smart?” Nadya asked.

  “We’re pushing,” Lucas said.

  Lucas had been in dozens of bakeries like Svoboda’s all over Minnesota and Wisconsin, small-town affairs with all the baking done on the premises, the varieties of cakes a fading tale of ethnic preferences from the early-nineteenth-century settlements. Lucas wandered down between the display cases, Nadya trailing behind. He chose two poppy-seed kolaches, and Nadya got a glazed doughnut, with two cups of coffee, and they carried them to one of two round metal tables at the front of the store and looked out at the street as they ate.

  The woman behind the case busied herself with another customer, and then asked cheerfully, “You folks tourists?”

  “Cops,” Lucas said. He sipped his coffee, and said, “They had a Russian fellow killed up here a couple days ago. Found his body down in the Rust-Hull mine this morning. Crows got to him.”

  “Oh my . . . God,” the woman behind the case said. Her hand went to her throat.

  Lucas slipped into semi-hayseed mode. “Yup. Gonna be a big deal, all right. FBI flying around like a bunch of bats. They’re talking spy rings, they’re talking multiple murder. Haven’t seen so much screaming and yelling since I went to a goat-fuck out in South Dakota.” He sipped at his coffee and squinted NYPD-like at the street.

  “Well . . . did they catch anybody?” the woman asked.

  “Not yet. But they will,” Lucas said. He dragged his index finger across his neck. “Murder one. Federal rap.”

  Nadya jumped in, her accent suddenly thicker. “They will be lucky peoples if they get to court. If my peopl
e catch them . . .” She smiled at the woman behind the counter. “ . . . I am Russian—then they wish for your murder one.”

  “She’s a spy,” Lucas said to the woman, tipping a thumb toward Nadya. “But she’s on our side for this one.” He looked at his watch. “Oops. We better get going. Don’t want to keep Chief Hopper waiting. Hey: great kolaches, huh?”

  WHEN THEY WERE back on the street, Lucas looked down at Nadya and grinned. “I hope to hell that was one of the Svobodas. I don’t want to have wasted that act.”

  “You have some abilities,” Nadya conceded. Then, sadly, “Now we get these fingerprints, eh? I did not know this man, but I feel sorry for his child. Not natural to lose both your parents this way. This should not happen to anybody.”

  Nikitin’s body had been taken to the medical examiner’s office. Nadya had given Hopper some of her fingerprint forms, and the prints were ready when they got there. They spent ten minutes going through his personal effects—comb, two expensive pens, a wallet, a couple of credit cards, two photos, one of a small girl and one of a Harley-Davidson motorcycle.

  “Not much,” Lucas said.

  “He was very professional,” said Nadya. “There shouldn’t be much.”

  “Which doesn’t help.”

  “Now what?” she asked.

  “Nothing to do but push. Push Spivak, push the Svobodas, once we decide to talk to them . . . and I guess I better call Harmon now.”

  Nadya picked up the picture of the girl: “And I should call the embassy, send the fingerprints. Then they will have to talk to the child.”

  “Find out where he was staying,” Lucas suggested. “Maybe he left something in his room.”

  She nodded: “I will do that also.”

  17

  GRANDPA WAS BURNING with anxiety when Carl arrived after school, said, “Where have you been?”

  “School . . . we had choir practice,” Carl said. Grandpa’s house smelled of years of spaghetti and red spaghetti sauce and mushrooms; and old cigarette smoke, cooked into the walls for decades, ending, Carl was told, just after he was born. “I heard they found the body.”

  Grandma, slumped in her wheelchair, mumbled something about a good day—did you have a good day?—and Carl patted her on the shoulder.

  Grandpa said, “Yes, but we knew they would—this is just sooner than we hoped. But we’ve got more trouble.” He took a quick turn around the living room, stopped and stooped and looked out over the couch, between the yellowed cotton curtains, to the street. “Karen Svoboda got out and made a call. The cops who were in the Duluth paper, this Davenport and the Russian Kalin, came into the bakery today and got some pastry, and then they sat in front and told Karen about finding the body, and about spy rings and murder charges, and the FBI coming in. This was no accident, that they came to the bakery.”

  Carl was freaked: “Man. I hope they weren’t watching Karen when she called.”

  “She was smart,” Grandpa said. “She went down to Webster’s Beauty; she’s got a friend who works there. She talked to the friend and then borrowed her cell phone to make the call. I don’t see how they could trace that. They couldn’t see her friend, couldn’t see the phone, couldn’t see her calling . . .”

  “But they went another step,” Carl said. “Is Spivak talking? Maybe this house is bugged . . .” Carl looked up at the light fixture as if a bug might be dangling there.

  “I don’t think it’s Anton. We would have had a warning. But Marsha Spivak’s a Svoboda, so maybe it was just more pressure. They can’t talk to Anton because of the lawyers, but they talk to the Svobodas, figuring it will get back to the Spivaks . . .”

  “We hope,” Carl said. “So what do we do? Hide out?”

  “No, no. We confuse, delay, run around.” He took another quick lap of the living room, twisting his gnarled fists together. Not frightened, Carl thought: excited. “I’m thinking that we should send you out again.”

  Carl glanced at Grandma, but she seemed to be asleep. “Who?”

  “Kalin. The Russian,” Grandpa said. “If we get her, there’ll be a question: Where does this come from? Is this more retribution for Oleshev? Make it seem even more as though there are two Russian groups fighting it out.”

  Carl said, “I can’t do it tomorrow night. We’re singing.”

  “The woman is at the Radisson Hotel in Duluth. What room, I don’t know. If you were there at eleven o’clock tonight, when she would be there, and if you could figure out which room she’s in . . .”

  “I could buy a pizza at Domino’s and get my old pizza hat and deliver a pizza to her.”

  Grandpa shook a finger at him. “That is excellent, if we can find out her room number.”

  “How do we do that?”

  “We think. We think. We will find a way . . . but.” Grandpa paused, then said, “I want you to tell me what you think about the whole idea. Of taking out Kalin. Can you do it? Does it make sense?”

  Carl had no other ideas, and nodded. “Makes sense to me. Especially if we could be sure that they are confused. Like, we call them, you could speak Russian, maybe call the embassy, tell them to stay out. If the Russians are working with the FBI . . .”

  “Another phone call,” Grandpa said. “That could work . . . We need confusion, we need . . . something to make them go away. To look somewhere else. Something. Something.”

  GRANDPA GAVE GRANDMA two sleeping pills, and she was gone. “She’ll wake up at two o’clock in the morning and she’ll be up all night, crying half the time,” Grandpa said. “I think she just hurts sometimes.”

  “Maybe the pills screw her up,” Carl said. He looked at her face; if anything, it looked more tense asleep than it did when she was awake.

  “So many pills; I’m sure you’re right, but who knows which ones to stop, eh? Anyway, let’s work this out . . .”

  They’d had their idea; Grandpa’s eyes twinkled when he outlined it to Carl, and though Carl was doubtful, Grandpa thought it might work. “Russia is forever from these people in Duluth. What do they know about Russia? It’s a million miles away, that’s what.”

  They made the call from a shopping center telephone. They wanted a busy place, inside, but not one with loud announcements. Carl had brought an old battery-powered radio, tuned to a nonstation, so they got a noisy dead-air hiss. Grandpa dialed the number with a prepaid card, nodded when he got an answer, and Carl held the radio close to the mouthpiece. Grandpa said, with a growly, put-on Russian accent, “Hello? Hello? One moment. Radisson.”

  Carl took the phone. “Yes, this is Foreign Ministry calling from Moscow for a Nadya Kalin. Could you forward us to her room?”

  A woman at the other end said, “Yes. Just a minute.”

  “Wait, wait. This is five o’clock your time, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Middle of the night here,” Carl said. “Is she still in five sixty-two?”

  “No, no, she’s on the seventh floor, but, uh, we can’t give out the room number on the telephone.”

  “What? I’m in Moscow, what . . .”

  “I’m sorry, but you can get that number from Ms. Kalin. I’ll put you through . . .”

  The operator disappeared from the line, and a moment later, the phone started ringing and Carl hung up. “Shit.”

  “What?” Grandpa asked.

  “Got the floor, but she wouldn’t give out the room number. She’s on the seventh floor.”

  Grandpa thought for a moment, then said, “We’ve got to go to Duluth.”

  “You’re coming? What about Grandma?”

  “She’s asleep. We’ll be back before she wakes.”

  THE DRIVE TO Duluth took forever. Grandpa had another plan for finding the room, but it would only work if Kalin were out. “We should try to get there when she would be eating,” Grandpa said. But when Carl drove over the speed limit, Grandpa would say, “Slow, slow, we can’t afford a ticket. Look at the clock, remember the miles—we will be all right with steady progress. Calculat
e. Always calculate.”

  They finally came over the top of the hill, headed into downtown, saw the Radisson ahead, pulled into the hotel parking lot.

  “We could find a public phone, so we wouldn’t have to use your cell phone,” Carl said.

  “I think one call with a cell phone, into the switchboard . . .”

  “But it’s the small things that kill us,” Carl said. “Let me go inside and look around.”

  “Quickly,” Grandpa said, with a small smile. Carl was thinking.

  CARL WENT INSIDE, had a piece of luck: the check-in desk was just inside the door, and he walked on past, as though he had a room, and found the elevators. The elevators were in the central tower, so most of the area around the elevators and stairs was not visible from the desk. And there was only one person at the desk, and apparently another person in a side room . . .

  And he found a pay phone, off the lobby, out of sight from the desk. He turned and went back out. “C’mon,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I got a phone.”

  He took Grandpa through, the old man putting on a hobble as they walked into the lobby. They ignored the girl behind the desk, who ignored them back, and he left Grandpa with the phone. “One minute exactly,” Carl said. “You’ve got change?”

  Grandpa fumbled in his pocket, took out some quarters and dimes. “Go,” he said.

  Carl took the elevator to the seventh floor. Another piece of luck: not as many rooms as he’d feared. The floor was circular, curving away from him, nobody in sight. He waited, looking at his watch. One minute. The phone should be ringing. . . .

  Then he heard it. He followed the sound, four rooms down. Room 745. He paused outside the room, making sure. When he was sure, he walked the rest of the way around the tower, and found nothing but silence. He came back around to 745, and the phone was still ringing. Good.