Hidden Prey ld-15

by John Sandford

  Now they believed him a little more; didn't uncuff him, but he said, "Look, let's go over to the hotel. Reasons looked pretty bad. And be careful of the. 45. The safety's on, but it's still cocked and there's a round in the chamber."

  He let them put him in the backseat of the squad car, and then said, "Put out a call and tell them to nail any speeders they see. I don't know what kind of car, but we're looking for a thin blond guy in a black jacket or a white shirt. He was wearing a white shirt when I saw him, but he pulled a black jacket over it."

  The driver put out the call immediately; then the other guy said, "What about Reasons?"

  Lucas thought about Reasons shaking and trembling on the floor of Nadya's room. Brain death. He'd seen it before, when a guy's brain was starving of oxygen. "I think Jerry… Jerry was hit pretty hard," Lucas said. "I called nine one one before I ran after the guy, but he was hit hard."

  "You think…"

  "Yeah, I think."

  "Jesus Christ," the cop said, his eyes big. "Jesus Christ. I was just talking to him this afternoon."

  The uniform cops brought Lucas through the police lines around the hotel, everybody looking at him hard-they thought he might be a suspect-and they went up in the elevator and Nadya, in the hallway, her blouse soaked with black blood, saw them coming and said, "Lucas, why are you…" and then Larry Kelly, the cop who'd been leading the Wheaton murder, and who had been talking to her, turned, saw his arms pinned behind him and asked, "What's going on with you?" looking querulously behind him at the uniform cops.

  "How about Jerry?" Lucas asked.

  Kelly shook his head. "Didn't even bother to transport him. He's still here."

  Lucas stepped forward and looked in the room: Reasons was as Lucas had left him, sprawled faceup on the carpet.

  "So what about you?" Kelly said, pressing.

  "Found him in the street waving a gun, so we picked him up," one of the cops said, and then, to Lucas, "Sorry," and he stepped behind Lucas and popped off the cuffs.

  "Did you see the man?" Nadya asked.

  "I chased him about a fuckin' mile," Lucas said, rubbing his wrists. "Then we sort of got tangled up…"

  "What?" Kelly demanded of the uniforms, incredulity riding his voice. "You had two guys running and you busted this one?"

  "Ah, there was no way for them to know," Lucas said. "They couldn't see the other guy and there I was running around in the dark, no ID. Nothing but a gun. They did okay."

  "Maybe not," one of the uniformed said. He handed Lucas his. 45. "I sorta let off a couple of rounds."

  "Yeah." Lucas remembered. He looked down at his left shirtsleeve, put his little finger through the nine-millimeter hole.

  "Ah, fuck me," the cop said, turning away.

  "We can talk about it," Lucas said. "Just everybody keep their mouths shut for a while, and… we can talk about it."

  "Go," Kelly said to the uniforms. "But don't go too far."

  "What about Jerry?" one of them asked.

  "Jerry's dead," Kelly said.

  "Jesus, I just talked to him this afternoon."

  "Most of us did," Kelly said. "Go."

  "Are you all right?" Lucas asked Nadya.

  "Yes, I am all right. If Jerry hadn't been here, I would have been…" She tipped her head toward the doorway. And she didn't look all right; she looked scared to death; as they talked, she started to shake, and Kelly put his arm around her, squeezing her. "There is nothing between me and death, but luck and sex and coincidence."

  "You believe in coincidence."

  "Yes," she said, sadly.

  "So what happened?"

  "A man came to the door. He said he had a pizza, but I ordered no pizza. But Jerry was standing in the bedroom door and… he was leaving, we had been in bed already… and he went to the door and opened it and I came behind him to say I ordered no pizza, and the man there, bang. But not so loud a bang. I saw Jerry start to fall and I ran back to the bed and got his pistol and the man came to the door and I shoot at him three times, and he shoots at me two or three times and hits the lamp…"

  "You didn't hit him?"

  "No. I know the pistol well enough to fire it, but I am not intimate with it, and everything was so fast that he came to the door and I shoot, shoot, shoot, with no thinking. Then he ran, and I ran to the door, and then you came."

  "Ah, brother…"

  Kelly: "What the fuck is going on?"

  "We don't know," Lucas said. To Nadya. "How good a look did you get? Could you identify him?"

  She shook her head. "I see almost nothing. Nothing! I see the hat, I see the shoot, I run to get the gun and I shoot and shoot and then he was gone."

  "Goddamnit."

  "But," she said, holding up a finger. She turned and pointed at a blaze orange glove on the floor. "This is his glove. This belongs not to us, and I saw it when he was at the door… saw the orange. He must have lost it."

  "We're gonna bag it, check it for DNA," Kelly said, as Lucas stepped over to look at it. It was a cheap, fuzzy, synthetic-cloth glove like the ones deer hunters used.

  "You saw the guy," Kelly said to Lucas.

  The phone rang and Nadya said, "I will get that," and edged around Reasons's body.

  "Yes. White guy, white hat, one of those paper pizza hats, blond, I think, wearing a white shirt when I saw him first," Lucas said. "The girls down in the lobby said he was pulling on a black jacket when he went by them… He was carrying a pizza box. The whole fuckin' time, he was carrying a pizza box."

  "All right. We'll check the pizza places, see if somebody picked up a pizza."

  "Probably a dummy to cover the gun."

  "Yeah, I think."

  Nadya started shouting into the phone, in Russian, then she turned toward Kelly and Lucas and pointed at the phone and Lucas said, "Shit, it's somebody. You got a cell phone?"

  Kelly handed him a cell phone and he called Harmon and when Harmon came up, as cool as ever, Lucas said, "We've got a phone call coming into room seven forty-five at the Radisson exactly now, and we need it traced… Shit."

  Nadya was shaking her head, and hung up.

  To Harmon, Lucas said, "You gotta trace that call. We got a big problem here…" He explained quickly and Harmon said, "This is a whole new thing. I'll check out guys, but I'm pretty sure that nobody that we're watching is in Duluth."

  "Hang on," Lucas said.

  To Nadya, "What was that all about?"

  "I must call the embassy," she said. "This was a Russian, a man. He said that I should leave, or I will be killed, like Nikitin. He said this action is none of the concern of, of, my people. He called us the siloviki. This, I do not think, was an American. This siloviki, used this way, meaning members of the KGB, this is a new usage."

  "So you're saying…"

  "Maybe this is not the local Americans. Maybe… I don't know. This siloviki, this is a word Oleshev would have used."

  "This is Harmon," he said, handing her the phone. "Tell him about it." She took the phone and stepped away.

  Lucas said to Kelly, "We're gonna need the feds in a major way. This thing is out of control."

  "You're saying Reasons was killed by a Russian. A Russian Russian. By mistake."

  Lucas said, "I don't know anymore. For a pro, like you know, an international spy hit man, the guy kinda fucked up."

  "I don't see that. There was no reason to think that Jerry would be here," Nadya said, the phone at her side. "Besides that, he was good enough."

  "Yeah…" The orange glove caught his eye. "But would an international assassin wear a goddamn used blaze orange hunter's glove? Where would he even get one at this time of year?"

  They thought about that for a minute, then Lucas: "Climbing down from the international intrigue for a minute… Has somebody gone to tell Mrs. Reasons?"

  Nadya, hand to mouth: "Oh, my God." Lucas could hear Harmon's voice: "Hello? Hello?"

  Chapter 19

  Trey put her new apartment together in two long days. The
apartment was off Cretin Avenue, in St. Paul, not far from St. Thomas University, in a well-kept gray-stucco building; two bedrooms, one of which she could use for an office. The rent was twelve hundred dollars a month, which was a lot, but the place felt right.

  She bought used furniture for it-good used furniture, most of it from low-end antique shops-and a new bed from Sears. She squandered another two thousand dollars at four different Target stores, buying bathroom and kitchen equipment and a small but nice-looking stereo and twenty CDs, and a television. She went to a used-book store and picked up thirty paperbacks, the best books she remembered from high school and college; To Kill a Mockingbird, like that.

  When she was done, the place looked almost like a home. All it needed was some living-in, some accumulation of detritus. Where do you buy a clamshell full of pennies and nickels? She would get it, she thought.

  The day after that, at six in the evening, when she'd gotten her guts up, she drove down Summit Avenue to the brown-brick four-square house where she'd spent her teen years. There were lights on, and she drove on past, then two more times around the block. This was necessary, she thought. But what if they kicked her out without giving her a chance?

  She'd dressed up a little bit; a nice skirt and blouse, a navy blue jacket. Her face still looked a little wild-the kind of weathering she'd had, you didn't get rid of in two weeks. Still: she was about a million percent different from the Trey of two weeks past.

  She finally parked, walked through a pattern of falling leaves up the sidewalk to the screened porch, through the outer door, crossed the porch-there was an oaken porch swing, but it looked as though it hadn't been used in years. She swallowed, and rang the doorbell; rang it quickly, so she wouldn't have a chance to run.

  When she heard the footsteps, she knew her father was coming. That was better: her mother was more skeptical, less given to romantic hope. She had her back to the door as he came up, and she turned just as he opened it.

  "Hi, Dad," she said. "I need to talk with you."

  "Annabelle…" He was a tall man, much balder than she remembered, older, and a little heavier. He seemed shocked.

  "I don't need any money," she said. "I'm looking more for… information, I guess."

  "Annabelle," he said again. He turned, still holding on to the doorknob. "Lucy-Annabelle is here."

  After a moment, she heard her mother coming, and her father looked her over again and said, "Well, you better come in."

  Her mother came out of the dining room and into the parlor. Her mother had always colored her hair, and still did-expensive coloring, the kind where they give you the touch of gray that looks almost natural. Her hair looked great, but her face no longer did: she had gotten much older, quickly. She said, "Annabelle. I… you look a lot better than last time."

  "I've given up all that other stuff," she said. "I finally burned out. I've been working-and as I told Dad, I don't need money. I just need a little information. A little push in the right direction."

  "Well, come in," her father said. "What exactly are we talking about?"

  They moved into the parlor, and Annabelle perched on an easy chair while her parents faced her from a couch. "I need… a place to start. You know I got in trouble with the county attorneys office, but I was never brought up on any charges, I was never arrested for anything. Never had any sanctions from the bar. I've been working around, saving my money… I've got an apartment here and I'd like to find a job. Clerking, doing pro bono. Anything like that. I don't need much money."

  Her father said, "You're really off the dope."

  She nodded: "I'm absolutely clean. No dope, no alcohol. All I want is a little quiet. I want to work."

  They both stared at her for a long time, and then her mother said, "It's very hard to trust you, after what you've put us through."

  "I know that," Annabelle said. "I'm not asking you for money, and I'm not asking you to trust me. I'm asking you to tell me where I can go and get an office and start working. I'll go there, rent the office, or apply for the job, but I want to shortcut it. I don't want to be running around for six weeks. I want to get going."

  They looked at her again, long, measuring stares, then her father said to her mother, "We need to talk somewhere." To Annabelle: "You wait here, we're going in the kitchen."

  They were gone for ten minutes, and might have been arguing, Annabelle thought. She sat perched on the chair, looked at all the stuff-the detritus-that the Ramfords had accumulated in forty years of mar-riage. Knickknacks, paintings, pottery, photographs. Seashells full of nickels and pennies, and the odd pair of fingernail clippers.

  Ten minutes, and they came back out of the kitchen. Her father sat down, her mother moved behind the couch.

  "You know our suite in the Foster Building," her father said. He cleared his throat. "At the end of the fourth floor annex, that's one up from where I am, there's an empty office. One big room. We could put a desk in there, some office equipment, and a couple of chairs. You'd have access to our library and Lexis. You would not be an employee of the firm, but… we'd give you all our pro bono. Nobody wants to do it, and it's all over the place, and I'll pay you out of my pocket. But: you screw up just once, and I'll lock the office and I'll tell the security people to keep you out of the building."

  She thought about it: not exactly what she wanted. Better in some ways, but the idea of her father looking over her shoulder every minute…

  But then, she could handle her father, now, she thought. Because way deep down in her heart, she no longer really gave a shit what he thought. She needed the break, and as soon as she'd worked it, as soon as she was on her feet, she could move out.

  "I'll take it," she said. "You won't be sorry. All I want to do is work."

  Not everything was sweetness and light. They were still wary of her, still waiting for the monster to jump out of her eyes. When she left, her father said, "I'll see you tomorrow?" and it really was a question.

  "I'll be waiting for you," she said.

  She stopped at a supermarket on Grand, got enough food for a week, including some easy microwave one-dish stuff. As she was lying on her used couch, eating chicken-and-rice, it occurred to her that she was about six blocks from the first place she'd ever sampled crack.

  Watching herself, she was amazed to find not even the slightest whisper of desire. Two weeks ago, a bottle of cheap wine was home. Now, she thought, she might be a teetotaler. Maybe. Maybe the stress of trying to get a job going would bring back all the bad stuff.

  She doubted it: it seemed now, at this time and place, that all that had been scorched right out of her.

  Later that evening, before she went to bed, she again felt the barrenness of the apartment. Not an emotional thing, but a simple, physical emptiness. She needed pottery, bird feathers, milkweed hulls, pinecones, a cup full of dried-up ballpoint pens and eraserless pencils, a file cabinet full of paper about one thing or another. She needed insurance, she needed a retirement program, she needed to open an account at Fidelity. She needed quarterly reports.

  Standing in her new Target nightgown, she dumped her new pack on the floor, and looked at the few pieces that fell out. All that was left of her old life. She picked up her knife. Ought to throw it, she thought. This was not a good vibe…

  But still, a girl should have a knife.

  She opened the blade and noticed the brown crusty stuff… "What?"

  Blood? She held it next to a new Target lamp. Dried blood. She cut the guy up there in Duluth, the killer guy.

  And she thought: DMA. Serious evidence against somebody, right there in her hand.

  What to do? She was afraid of that cop, Davenport. He'd sounded so damn mean…

  She closed the blade on the knife.

  Tomorrow, an office.

  The knife, she'd think about.

  Chapter 20

  The hours after a cop is killed are always a nightmare: telling the family, figuring out what went wrong, deciding if some living person is to blam
e-and Nadya was taking a hit on the last item.

  She insisted that Reasons had initiated the relationship, telling her that his marriage was essentially over. Her argument was good enough, and detailed enough, that it made the Duluth cops angrier than ever. To have one of their own killed, and thus automatically qualified for sainthood-nobody liked to see a dead cop, but on the other hand, it never hurt the budgetary process if you lost the occasional flatfoot-and to have all of that tarnished by a Russian and maybe even a Commie…

  Lucas took some of the heat off in a quick, illegal, and private meeting with the police chief, where everybody agreed that Lucas hadn't actually been stopped, shot at, or really handcuffed while he was pursuing the killer… that wouldn't have been good for the budget.

  There was also a general agreement that it wouldn't be necessary to mention the sexual liaison to the press. Reasons had actually been guarding Nadya when he was murdered-he had given his life to save hers.

  Lucas got back to Weather, late, waking her, telling her what had happened. Nadya had moved to a new room, and Weather said she would call her.

  "I can tell you she ain't asleep," Lucas said.

  While all that was going on, so was the chase: Duluth cops went to every pizza place in town, trying to see who might have bought the pizza. They knew it was a fresh one-Nadya said she could smell it, even after the shooting.

  "Must have been a hungry sonofabitch, hanging on to the pizza when you're chasing him all over the fuckin' hill," Kelly said.

  "Weird shit happens," Lucas said.

  Several pizza places had customers who might have fit the vague description they had of the killer: thin, blond, blackjacket or white shirt. None of those had any more details.

  The women at the hotel's front desk had seen nothing but the back of the pizza-man's head.

  In any case, nobody found anything: the killer was gone.

  In the morning, Andreno, calling upstate from Virginia, asked, "What the fuck happened down there?"

  Lucas told him, and Andreno said, "Maybe she needs a bodyguard. Somebody with a gun."

  "You want the job?"