Hidden Prey ld-15

by John Sandford

  "Twenty minutes," Reasons said.

  Lucas cleaned up, put on a fresh shirt and sport coat, got a bottle of Diet Coke from the machine down the hall, and found Nadya and Reasons standing opposite the elevator doors in the lobby.

  "Breakfast?" Reasons asked, looking at the Coke.

  "Of champions," Lucas said. Then he had to explain to Nadya. "See, there was this cereal, there still is this cereal…"

  When he was finished explaining, she didn't see why it was funny.

  "Well, it wasn't, very."

  "Give it up," Reasons said.

  Lucas asked Nadya, "Did you hear anything about the computer?"

  "No. The question is traveling through the bureaucracy."

  The Range is the remnant of both an ancient sea and an ancient mountain range, more or less an hour northwest of Duluth; it's the largest iron-ore lode in the U.S. The Range runs from northeast to southwest, and sitting atop it is a string of small iron-mining cities-Virginia, Chisholm, Eveleth, Biwabik, Hibbing. The cities are cold, hardworking, blue-collar, economically depressed, and addicted to hockey.

  The town of Virginia was straight up Highway 53 from Duluth, across gently rolling countryside covered with birch and aspen-some of the aspen just beginning to turn yellow-interspersed with blue-and-green-colored fir, spruce, tamarack, and occasional rigidly ordered stands of plantation pine. Lucas drove and Reasons played with the navigation system for a while, and finally said, "So what?"

  "It works when you're trying to find an address," Lucas said. "Out on the open highway, it doesn't do much. Tells you what direction you're traveling."

  "Does this cost extra?" Nadya asked.

  "A little bit," Lucas said.

  "A lot," Reasons said.

  "If it doesn't help, why do you have it?"

  "It looks neat," Reasons said.

  Nadya yawned, and went back to the New York Times, while working methodically through three bottles of spring water. She'd gotten a teensy bit in the bag the night before, drinking two vodka martinis without any rest after the trip. "Help me sleep," she'd muttered as Reasons and Lucas steered her out of the elevator down to her door.

  She'd complained of dehydration as they were leaving Duluth, so they stopped for the water and the newspapers, and both Reasons, with the Star Tribune, and Nadya, with the Times, took turns reading bits and pieces to Lucas. When they were finished with the paper, Reasons and Nadya began a kind of teasing chatter.

  Lucas, looking between them, thought, Hmmm.

  Virginia's downtown section was made up of five long blocks of 1900-era red-and-yellow-brick two- and three-story buildings. Inside the five blocks, as Lucas remembered them, you could find anything you needed and most of what you wanted: you could eat American or Mexican, get drunk, acquire a tattoo, wreck your car, get busted, hire a lawyer, and get your car fixed without going off the street. You could get saved by Jesus on a Wednesday evening and then walk a hundred feet across the way and get a dirty magazine; you could buy a Jenn-Air range or a Sub-Zero refrigerator or a used paperback, a homemade quilt or a doughnut, a chain saw or an ice-cream cone or a pack of Gitanes or Players. There was an ample supply of bars, ranging from places where you'd take your aged Aunt Sally to outright dives.

  Lucas had always thought it might be the best main drag in Minnesota, and maybe the whole Midwest. He'd visited the place a dozen times between eighth grade and his senior year in high school, as a hockey player, and remembered with some fondness the brutally cold nights after the games when he and a half dozen friends went out looking for underage beer and hot women. They'd never gone home dry, and, as far as Lucas knew, nobody had ever gotten laid, despite expansive and ingenious lies about close calls, about barmaids and Virginia cheerleaders.

  They arrived a little before ten o'clock in the morning. He was happy to see the street was still intact.

  Spivak's Tap was halfway down the ranks from cocktail lounge to dive. They parked in front, and got out, the sun hot on their backs despite the cool air, and Nadya said, "More signs."

  "What's this thing you've got for signs?" Reasons asked.

  "I have nothing for signs, but there are so many," she said. "Most people here, most men, have signs on their shirts. Why do you need so many signs?"

  Reasons said, "Beats the hell out of me."

  Lucas looked up at the front of the bar. "This guy-his name is Spivak?"

  Reasons had called the owner the night before, and told him that they were coming, but not the purpose of the visit. He said, "Right. Anthony Spivak."

  Nadya asked, "He will have a toilet here, yes?" and Lucas said, "Yes," and they followed Reasons inside.

  Spivak's was an unembarrassed beer joint, with clunky plank floors, a long mahogany bar, jars of pickled eggs and pigs' feet, two dozen booths with high backs upholstered in red leatherette, an area near a jukebox where you could dance, if you were so inclined, a couple of stuffed muskies, and an old, six-foot-long painting of a plump pink nude woman behind the bar, holding a strategically placed white ostrich feather. Lucas remembered both the painting and the feather.

  Spivak was sitting at the end of the bar with a spiral notebook, a calculator, and a beer. He was a broad, short man, with a square pink face, square yellow teeth, and white hair growing out of his head, ears, and nose. He had a fat nose that looked as though it had been broken a couple of times. A blond woman with tired eyes stood behind the bar, taking glasses out of a stainless-steel sink, wiping them dry with a bar towel. Two guys in ball caps and plaid shirts sat in one of the booths, talking over their beers.

  When they walked in, Spivak looked up, closed the spiral notebook, and asked, "Are you the folks from Duluth?"

  "Yeah." Reasons nodded. He introduced Lucas and Nadya. Lucas raised a hand and Nadya nodded.

  "Come on in the back," Spivak said. They followed him past the rest rooms, which had signs that said setters and pointers, and which had to be explained to Nadya, who then disappeared into Setters; and then into the back, where four long tables were scattered among sixteen chairs in a party room. They took a table and Spivak cleared some chairs and said, "Could I get you something-on the house?"

  "Ah, no, thanks," Reasons said. "We needed to talk to you about something that happened up here last week, but we've got to wait until Nadya gets back."

  "She's got an accent," Spivak said, as they settled in at the table. "Where she from?"

  "Russia."

  "Russia." The corners of his mouth turned down as his eyebrows went up. "Huh. She's not a cop?"

  "Yeah, she is," said Lucas. "She's part of this whole… We'll tell you about it in a minute." He looked around: "I used to come here as a kid-it hasn't changed much. Did the can always say Setters and Pointers?"

  Spivak said, "A long time ago, it used to say Bucks and Does, but then in the seventies, some Indian guys said 'Bucks' was racist, so my dad changed it."

  "But bucks means… deer bucks, right?"

  "Well, yeah, but, you know, it was the seventies, Jane Fonda, all that," Spivak said. "And we used to get quite a few guys from Nett Lake in here drinking, they worked in the mines…"

  "Nett Lake is an Indian reservation," Reasons told Lucas, who said, "I know."

  Spivak asked Lucas, "You used to come in here?"

  "Yeah, playing hockey. We were always going around looking for beer afterwards."

  "You probably got a few here," Spivak said. "Dad always thought that if you were old enough to skate, a little beer wouldn't hurt you. When was this?"

  "Late seventies."

  Spivak nodded. "I would've missed you-I was the sixties. Things were different back then… So are the Wild gonna do anything this year?"

  They talked hockey for a couple of minutes, until Nadya came back, and when she was seated, Reasons said to Spivak, using his formal cop explanatory voice, "About fifteen days ago, a Russian guy came in here and apparently got together with some people at a meeting here in your bar. We'd like to know what you remember abo
ut that."

  Spivak frowned. "A Russian? I don't remember a Russian specifically."

  "He was a tough-looking guy in a leather jacket, heavy five-o'clock shadow, big square head like a milk carton," Lucas said. "Looked like a mean sonofabitch."

  "You were sure he was here?" Spivak asked uncertainly.

  "We got an American Express card receipt from here," Reasons said. "For a hundred and forty-five dollars."

  "Ohhh…" Spivak's eyebrows went up again, but his eyes slid away. "Yeah. Okay. In fact, they were sitting right here. There must have been five or six guys. I didn't know the guy was Russian, though."

  "What'd they do?"

  Spivak shrugged: "Drank. Talked. In English, not Russian. What I remember was, when they were finished, they all tossed some money in a pot and the one guy, he must've been your Russian, collected the money, and then paid with his Amex. I mean, I was thinking it was sort of a scam, somebody would get stuck with an expense account when all the guys paid for themselves."

  "We need specifics," Lucas said. "Did you know any of them?"

  "No. Didn't know a single one." He frowned. "That's a little unusual. This is mostly a town joint. But it happens. We get tourists, whatever. Fishermen on their way north to Canada, sometimes they meet up here."

  "They were Americans," Nadya said.

  "Yeah, I guess. They spoke English. They looked like they were from around here."

  "Were they talking about their families, or their business, or what?" Lucas asked.

  "I don't know, I didn't pay any attention. Let me think." He leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes, and tipped his head back. After a moment, he opened his eyes and said, slowly, "Okay. When I was in here, most of the time it was the Russian guy and another guy who were doing the talking. The guy in the leather jacket. The other guy was like a big lumberjack-looking guy, plaid shirt, big shoulders, red hair. The other guys, I don't know-they looked like guys. One of them had a Green Bay hat."

  "What is this?" Nadya asked Lucas.

  "Sports team hat," Lucas said, watching Spivak, his eyes, listening to his voice. Spivak was lying to them for some reason.

  They pressed him, but the barkeep gave them nothing more. The people at the meeting were, he said, "just a bunch of guys. Didn't disturb anybody, didn't get drunk, came, drank, paid, and left. I wish I had more of them like that."

  Lucas asked, "Who all was working that night. Could we get a list?"

  "Well, I guess. I'd have to go back and look," he said reluctantly. "We don't use everybody every night…"

  He checked his time cards and put together a list of phone numbers and addresses, and as he did, said, "You guys scared the shit out of me. I thought you were up here, I mean, I thought somebody had done something in the bar, that I didn't know about. You know, raped somebody out back in the parking lot, or felt somebody up in the rest room. I thought I was gonna get sued."

  They left him standing at the end of the bar next to his calculator and spiral notebook, and headed out.

  "Well, that was weird," Lucas said, as they stood blinking in the sunshine.

  "I think we are not through with Mr. Spivak," Nadya said, looking up at him.

  "You guys, uh…" Reasons smiled, turned his hands palms up. "I missed something, right?"

  "Unless he asked you while I was in the Setters," Nadya said. To Lucas: "Did he ask you what the Russian had done?"

  Lucas shook his head. "No. He never did."

  "Maybe he was, em, reticent," Nadya said. "But I think not."

  "I think not also," Lucas said.

  "Well, if you both think not, then I think not," Reasons said. He looked back at the bar door. "Want to go ask him why he didn't ask?"

  "Leave it for a while," Lucas said. "Let's go talk to the rest of the employees. Maybe there'll be something else."

  Spivak had given them a list of four employees who'd worked that night. They spent two hours tracking them down, and eventually found all four-three of them working at their day jobs, a fourth at home. The first three didn't work the back room, didn't specifically remember the group. The fourth one remembered.

  Maisy Reynolds lived in a single-wide trailer on a country lot, what Lucas thought was probably forty acres, ten miles outside of Virginia. The lot had been cut over perhaps ten years earlier, and now showed a few fir trees spotted through new-growth aspen on the rim of the lot. The trailer sat on a concrete foundation a hundred feet back from the road; behind it was a twenty- or thirty-acre pasture with a marshy creek running along the back edge. A metal stable stood behind the trailer; a white plastic fence, made to look like a white board fence, surrounded the stable and part of the pasture. Three horses were grazing the pasture. "Horses don't like me," Reasons said.

  "Do you think that could be a question of character?" Nadya asked. She was teasing him again, Lucas thought.

  The stoop outside the trailer door was simply four concrete blocks set in the ground. Lucas stepped up on them, knocked, and then stepped back when he heard somebody inside coming toward the door. Reynolds, a fortyish, weathered blonde in a plaid shirt, jeans, and green gum boots, opened the inside door and looked out at them.

  "You don't look like Witnesses," she said. She was chewing on a carrot and her house smelled, pleasantly enough, of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom Soup, horse shit, and straw.

  Lucas showed her his ID, told her what they wanted, and she said, "I remember the people in the back, but I don't know what they were talking about. I don't remember a Russian. What'd they do?"

  "The Russian was killed down in Duluth," Lucas said. "We're trying to figure out what he did earlier in the day that might have caused… something to happen."

  She was wide-eyed, and poked the carrot at Lucas: "I remember that from the paper. That was the guy? The paper said he was executed."

  "That's the guy," Reasons said.

  "My lord," she said. "I didn't see anything that would have led to that. You want a carrot? No? There weren't any arguments or anything, just a bunch of guys talking…"

  "The people in the group," Nadya said. "Anything…?"

  Reynolds stepped outside, onto the stoop, thinking about it, crunching the carrot. "I remember one guy was really old. I mean, really old. Ninety. Jeez-maybe a hundred. He got around okay… I don't remember the Russian. I wasn't waiting on them, Anton was."

  "Mr. Spivak?" Reasons asked. "Anthony?"

  "Anton. Not Anthony. Yeah, he took care of them. Must've been special, he doesn't wait on people. Have you talked to him?"

  "Did he know them?"

  She paused, then said, "Listen, I don't want to get in trouble with Anton, I sorta need the job."

  "All this is confidential," Lucas said.

  Out in the field, a horse whinnied, and took off in a little romp, followed by a second one. Reynolds smiled, nodding at them, then turned back to Lucas, still a bit wary. "I only saw them together for a couple of minutes, but he was talking with them. I don't know if he knew them, but they were talking along. What'd he tell you?"

  "He said they were just some people passing through, they came, they drank, they paid, and they left. He said he had no idea who they were."

  "Hmmm," she said. Her eyes clicked to the left and she tilted her head, as if listening to music. Then, "Maybe I got the wrong impression."

  "But you don't think so."

  "Listen…"

  "The guy was executed," Lucas said. He looked up at her, on the stoop.

  She pursed her lips, tilted her head, and then said, "I got the impression that Anton knew them better than that."

  "A lot better?"

  "Better," she said. "Yeah. Better."

  They talked for a few more minutes, but Reynolds had nothing specific about the group. In the car again, Reasons said, "So we go and talk to Spivak again."

  From the backseat, Nadya said, "Perhaps we should wait one day. If I can get to my room, I can do some research, to see if we know him. You could do some research also."

&
nbsp; Reasons exhaled thoughtfully, then said to Lucas, "Between you, me, and the FBI guys, we oughta be able to put a book together. If the guy was in the army, if he was ever in trouble anywhere…"

  Lucas was waiting for a car to pass, and then pulled out onto the road; in his rearview mirror he saw Reynolds go back inside her trailer, and hoped she wouldn't call Spivak. Before they left, she'd said she wouldn't.

  "I'm a little worried about the Wheaton thing," he said. "It's not a sure thing that they're connected, but it feels like a sure thing."

  "They are connected," Nadya said. "This killing of the old woman, this wire, this is a military technique. Very well known in the Spetsnaz, in the U.S. Special Forces, in the Special Air Service, et cetera. It does not seem to me something you would find with ordinary criminals."

  "I wondered about that," Lucas said. "I saw it in the movies…" He turned, his arm on the back of the seat. "You think a Russian did it?"

  She looked out the window, then back and said, "No. I am almost certain."

  "Why?"

  "Because the only reason to kill the old woman would be to silence her as a witness. The only reason to silence her would be to prevent her identification of the killer. The only way she could identify the killer is if he's still here. If a Russian had done the killing, already he would be exfiltrated and this identification would not be a problem."

  A tidy line of logic. "I knew that," Reasons said.

  "So we do research," Lucas said.

  They did research.

  Nadya worked from her room, Lucas and Reasons from the detective bureau.

  Spivak had been arrested twice for drunken driving, once in 1960 and once in 1961. He had been in two automobile accidents, fifteen years apart, and hadn't been charged in either. He'd been sued twice in accidents involving people who had been drinking at his bar, lost one and had the suit paid by his insurance company. He'd been sued twice more for nonpayment of suppliers' bills, although a law clerk who pulled the records at the St. Louis County Courthouse said that both times, Spivak had had a countercomplaint against the supplier, and both suits had eventually been settled.