Hidden Prey ld-15

by John Sandford

  "And you don't have so many signs," Lucas said.

  She laughed, the first time Lucas had heard her laugh since Reasons was killed. "You are ridiculous here. When we stopped to buy gasoline, on one pump, there were twenty-two signs. On one pump!"

  "I saw you counting," Lucas said.

  "Stickers," Andreno said. "They're called stickers."

  "But they were signs. Only, small ones."

  The rain had stopped, but everything was still damp and dripping when they arrived at Kelly Harbinson's place outside Virginia.

  "What a dump," Andreno said from the backseat. He'd taken his revolver out of its holster, and he put it in his jacket pocket. "Looks like something from a cotton plantation."

  "Yeah, well… his ex-wife said he was like one step off the street," Lucas said.

  "Wish we had vests," Andreno said.

  They got out, and like Andreno, Lucas put his. 45 in his jacket pocket, held it in his hand. They told Nadya to wait back off the porch, and then Lucas and Andreno trooped across the wooden stoop and knocked on the screen door. The knock, Lucas thought, might have been inaudible inside: the wood was so wet and old that the knock was more of a soggy pup-pup-pup. There was no sound or movement from inside, and Lucas pulled the screen door open and knocked on the inside door, a little harder.

  No sound, no movement. A car went by on the road, and they looked after it, but the driver was a woman and she never looked back at them.

  Lucas knocked again. Nothing. "Damnit," he said.

  "Let me walk around back," Andreno said.

  Lucas nodded, sure that there was nobody inside. The door was solid, without an inset window, so as Andreno squished on the wet shaggy lawn around to the back, Lucas stepped over to the front window and tried to peer in. The window was dirty enough that there was a lot of reflection, and he couldn't see much-what he could see looked like a messy house, which, given the outside appearance, wasn't surprising.

  Andreno came back around. "I looked in the back door, couldn't see shit."

  Lucas stepped back out to the car, took his phone out, and called John Terry. "We're out at Kelly Harbinson's place. There's nobody here. You know where she works?"

  "No, but I might be able to find out. Let me get back to you. Give me fifteen minutes."

  They spent the fifteen minutes filling Nadya in on American search rules. "We could go in and if it became necessary, lie about it," Nadya said.

  Lucas said, "That has been done, but… usually, when only the one investigator is around."

  Andreno agreed: "As long as you got defense attorneys, better to play by the law. When you don't see an upside."

  "What is this upside?"

  They explained the upside to her, and she said, "Capitalism."

  John Terry called back and said, "I had my girl call around to Harbinsons, and she found her parents. She works at Reeves' Wine and Spirits. About ten to one, that's where she met Walther."

  "Okay. You got a number?"

  Lucas called the liquor store, identified himself to the owner, Jack Reeves, and asked for Harbinson.

  "I don't know where she is," Reeves said. "We're a little worried. She was supposed to be here at eight. She drinks a little, but she's pretty reliable."

  "This hasn't happened before?"

  "No, not really. She's been here four years… I mean, she's been late, but you know, it snowed and she was late six minutes. If she didn't come in soon, I was going to drive out to her place and knock on the door."

  "Nobody here… we're out there now," Lucas said.

  Off the phone, Lucas looked at the house and said, "Let's check all the windows. See what we can see."

  "Maybe they took off," Andreno said.

  "That's what I'm afraid of."

  They walked around the left side of the house; most of the windows had Venetian blinds, and they could see through the string holes in the sides, and the corners where the blinds weren't quite straight. They saw nothing useful until they'd circled the house. From there, a blind looked into the bedroom, and they could see a pile of clothes on the floor by what must have been a closet, and more strewn in the hallway beyond.

  "Goddamnit," Lucas said.

  Andreno tried the front door. "It's unlocked," he said.

  "Let me do this," Lucas said. He pushed the door open and called, "Hello? Anybody home?"

  No answer. He pushed the door open another foot. The place was messy inside, and smelled like tomato soup and nicotine, but there was no law against any of that.

  There wasn't room on the porch for Nadya, but Andreno had moved up behind Lucas and he said, "There's a butcher knife on the floor."

  "Where?"

  "Right there in front of the TV" There was nothing in front of the TV except an oval braided rug.

  "I better check the place," Lucas said. He stepped inside, again called, "Hello?" Nothing. He went through the living room, looked into the kitchen, checked a bedroom, which was empty, the bath, empty but in disarray, then the second bedroom, where the pile of clothes sat in front of the closet.

  He almost didn't see her-nothing was visible but her head. The rest of her body was buried under a pile of clothes that had been thrown across the bed. Lucas took another step: her forehead had a hole in it.

  Lucas retreated, went into the kitchen, took a tissue from a box on the counter, picked up a butcher knife, dropped it on the floor in front of the television, and went back to the porch.

  Andreno looked at his face and said, "What?"

  "She's in there," Lucas said.

  "She's dead," Nadya said.

  "Yes. Shot in the forehead."

  "This is nuts," Andreno said.

  Lucas called Terry back: "We got a problem out here, Chief. Who covers this area?"

  "St. Louis County sheriff. What do you got?"

  Lucas told him, and Terry said, "Jesus Christ, Davenport, you're some kind of death angel."

  "Yeah, yeah…"

  "I'll get the sheriff started, and we'll get a couple cars out there-we got a mutual aid pact. Ten minutes."

  Lucas hung up and Andreno said, "Roger Walther."

  "Didn't take her with him," Lucas said. "I hope somebody has a picture."

  "His wife…"

  Lucas said to Nadya: "Okay. We've got a lot of stuff to do now. We've got to put out a bulletin on this guy, and since he might have been working with somebody from Russia, we'll have to make it international. Can you call your embassy…"

  They were making up a list of must-do tasks when they heard the first siren coming in: Lucas turned toward the siren, then back to the other two.

  "We'll hit Janet Walther first, ask if she's seen him. Then hit the old man again-Nadya thinks he might have been fucking with us with the Alzheimer's act. Start the cops looking either for his car, or Harbinson's. Check the state registrations for both of them, get the tag numbers out to the highway patrol and everybody else. Get the name to the security people at the airports…"

  "If these cells were set up to move people, then he could be hard to locate," Nadya said. "They would have protected routes out."

  "I don't know-all I know is what we can do," Lucas said. He turned and looked toward the incoming cop car, and then back to Nadya. "There's something not quite right with this whole thing. You say the group wasn't active as far as you know… if they were active, would somebody have told you? Warned you off?"

  "Yes. And nobody did. There would be some indication that while they wanted enthusiasm, they did not want success. I never got that. It was the other way around-that I should learn what is happening, and we should not spare ourselves. That is why Piotr is dead."

  Lucas said, "I'm just not sure how far I can trust you."

  "That's for you to decide," she said. "But-we are breaking this case. We will join you in the hunt for Roger Walther, and if he is running to us, we will tell you."

  "You will give him back?"

  She shrugged. "That's not for me to decide. He did murder a popu
lar diplomat."

  He looked at her for a long moment, and then as the cop car turned into the yard, and he saw John Terry's face in the window, he nodded and said, "Okay. For now, anyway."

  Chapter 26

  Lucas pushed relentlessly through their list. They were on the scene of the killing for two hours, handed it over first to the Virginia cops, then to a sheriff's deputy named Max Anderson. They were there long enough for an assistant medical examiner to guess that Harbinson had been dead for twelve hours, or less.

  "That's just a guess based on body temp," he said. He was a young man, thin with blond shaggy hair; prematurely shabby and quite earnest. "The temperature in here is actually fairly low, and she hadn't gotten down to room temp. So… last night."

  A sheriff's technician said, "I saw that shell from the shooting down in Hibbing. The one at the Greyhound Museum. The shells we picked up back there…" He nodded toward the bedroom.

  "They look the same to me. That's just eyeballing it, but the firing-pin depth looks about the same, and it's round, and it's off center on the primer, just a hair, like the one from the museum."

  "When will we know for sure?"

  "I've got digital microphotographs on my computer back at the office. If I could get these back there, I could tell you ninety-nine percent in an hour, but I'm working on the scene here…"

  "Screw the scene. Let me get you a car," Lucas said.

  Terry, the Virginia chief, came out of the bedroom and noticed Lucas looking into a front-room closet, and asked, "Everything under control?"

  "No." And Lucas asked, "Did it rain all night?"

  "Pretty much. Why?"

  "Walther didn't take his raincoat," Lucas said, pulling a trench-coat sleeve out of the closet. "Not a bad coat, either."

  "Maybe he had a rain suit."

  When Lucas pulled the coat sleeve out of the closet, Nadya looked that way from across the room. She frowned, walked to the closet, squatted, and pushed the trench coat to one side.

  "What?" Lucas asked.

  "Look." She pointed, and Lucas squatted beside her. A single blaze orange hunter's glove was lying in the back of the closet.

  "Sonofabitch."

  Lucas called Andy Harmon. "We've broken it down. The killer was a guy named Roger Walther. That's the Walther family on the chart I gave you. We'll send you the details on him, and we've got all the local cops looking for him, but it's time you guys got in on the act. He's running, and he's got twelve hours on us, and he's probably headed for Russia down the old spy route. Could be in Canada, so somebody's got to talk to the Mounties."

  "Got a picture?" the FBI man asked.

  "I'll get one, and we'll scan it and send it to you. We've got a driver's-license photo that's three years old, not too good, but I'm gonna hit his wife in a few minutes, assuming she's still there and still alive, and I'll get whatever I can and send it along."

  "Excellent. Excellent job, Davenport. I'll put it in my report."

  Lucas hung up. "Fuckhead," he said.

  "Let's go," Lucas told Nadya. "Let's go talk to Janet Walther." Andreno went to get his jacket, and as he did, another car pulled off the road outside. A middle-aged woman got out with a plastic sack in her hand, and walked down toward the house and talked to a deputy parked on the road at the end of the walk.

  The deputy came to the house and said to Lucas, "It's Harbinson's stepsister. Corine Maples. She's got a picture of Harbinson with Roger Walther."

  "Bring her in."

  The woman, dry-eyed but nervous, asked Lucas, "Is she still here?"

  "Yes. I'm afraid we can't let you in."

  "No, no, I don't want to see her… But I have a funeral home, the name of the funeral home."

  "See the guy over there?" Lucas asked, pointing to a deputy. "That's Max Anderson; he's the deputy in charge of the scene. Give it to him. She'll be taken to the medical school first, for an autopsy, and then… Well, talk to Max."

  "Okay," she said. "I knew Roger was bad news, the first time I met him."

  "You have a photograph?"

  She fumbled in her plastic bag and pulled out a photograph taken in a backyard with a wooden fence, a summer scene with a flower bed and, partly visible to one side, a plaster Virgin Mary with her hands spread over a pond the size of a garbage-can lid. Two people stood in the foreground, squinting into the sun and the camera.

  "We had a barbecue and they came," Maples said.

  "Does he still look like this?"

  "Oh, yes. I saw them on the street two weeks ago. That picture is only two months old."

  "He looks older than I expected. I thought he was right around forty."

  She bobbed her head. "He is, but, he's had a pretty hard life. He smokes and he drinks and he stays out all hours. You can't drink two or three six-packs a day and not have it get to you."

  "Doesn't look fat."

  "No, no, he's never been fat. But he's not healthy. We tried to tell him…"

  "We need to send this picture to the FBI," Lucas said. "If you don't mind…"

  "He'll know it came from me," Maples said nervously. "He's still loose, with a gun."

  "We'll just use the head portion," Lucas said. "And we think he's running. It's pretty unlikely that he's still around here."

  "Okay…" But nervous.

  "Do you know Janet Walther? Roger's ex-wife?"

  "No. Roger wasn't from here, he was from Hibbing. I never met the family."

  "Okay. Let me introduce you to Max. He'll fill you in…"

  Out in the car, Lucas drove silently while Nadya and Andreno chatted. Andreno noticed after a while, and said, "What?"

  "That fuckin' glove," Lucas said.

  "What?"

  "The fuckin' glove puts it on Walther. The shells in the bedroom could have been left behind by anyone, but that fuckin' glove…"

  "That's bad?"

  Lucas said, "I run three miles most days. I try to keep it at twenty-one minutes. Some days, I run five or six."

  "You're my hero," Andreno said.

  "You see that picture of Walther? The guy looked like a walking heart attack. And he outran me up and down the hills of Duluth, carrying a pizza box?"

  Then they all rode for a while, and finally Andreno said, "You know the old line: too many facts can fuck up a perfectly good case."

  "Yeah, yeah."

  "What is this?" Nadya asked.

  They went to Janet Walther's house, which was on the way into downtown Hibbing, found it-nobody home-and continued to the frame shop. An older woman in a cloth coat was talking to Walther about a frame for a photograph of her grandchildren, something under twenty-five dollars, and Walther, almost flinching away from Lucas, Andreno, and Nadya, took her to a ready-made stand and helped her choose one. The woman said twice, "You can help these other people," and she smiled and nodded at Lucas, but Walther said, "No, no, let's get this right."

  When the woman was finally gone, she moved behind her counter and said, "What do you want?"

  "Your ex-husband was living with a woman named Kelly Harbinson, up near Virginia," Lucas began.

  "So what? I don't know what he does, and I don't care."

  "We found her shot to death in her bed this morning. Roger Walther is missing. We're looking for him."

  Her mouth opened and closed, and opened and closed again, as though she were having trouble breathing, and then she said, "Oh, my God."

  "Have you seen him?"

  "Not for weeks. He came here and asked for a loan and I told him I didn't have any extra."

  "You don't know where he might be running to? Or how he might be getting there?"

  She shook her head: "I have no idea. This whole spy thing is crazy, though. He's probably in a tavern in Duluth. Or here." She looked out the front window, as though she expected him to show up. Then, "Are you sure he's the one who… did it?"

  "He was living with her, he's missing, apparently some clothing and his shaving equipment are gone…"

  "I don't know. I
just don't know."

  He tried a threat: "You know that if you're hiding him, or helping him, you're an accomplice."

  Now she raised her voice: "I'm not doing that! I don't like the man anymore! He's not the man I married anymore! I don't have anything to do with him!"

  Lucas swerved to a new topic: "How… senile… is Burt Walther? Is he qualified to take care of his wife?"

  "Burt? Burt's not senile. Burt's sharp as a tack." Her voice was sharp, at first, as though she was afraid of a trick. Then her voice softened: "Melodie has gone away, though. She was a nice woman, and she's gone now. If Grandpa couldn't take care of her, I don't know what would happen. They'd lose the house if they had to put her in a nursing home."

  "Burt's not senile."

  "No, he's not senile. Have you talked to him?"

  Out the door, pissed.

  Lucas said to Nadya, "You were right. The guy bullshitted me. That doesn't happen too often."

  "It's because you're afraid to look at old people who are, mmm, mentally dying? I don't know your word, but you know what I mean," Nadya said. "This happened to my grandfather, when he lived with us, and I saw it all. Old friends would not look at him or talk to him. It is very unpleasant. Burt did not seem that way to me."

  There was no one at Burt Walther's house. Lucas banged on the door, and looked in the windows, and finally a neighbor came out and said, "They're not home. Can I help you with something?"

  "We're police officers and we need to talk with Burt Walther," Lucas said. "Have you seen him?"

  "This is their day at the doctor," the man said. "You missed them by ten minutes. They're usually gone for two hours."

  "Do you know which doctor?"

  "Not exactly which, but I know the clinic…"

  At the clinic, Andreno spotted Walther's Taurus. "They're here. Want to go in after them?"