Lucas Davenport Collection: Books 11-15

by John Sandford

  “Don’t know it was an old gun,” Reasons said.

  “Who’d put fifty-year-old ammo in a new gun?” Lucas asked. “You pay four or five hundred dollars for a gun, and you’re not gonna pay ten bucks for a box of nines?”

  Reasons nodded: “Won’t argue with that.”

  THE NORTHWEST FLIGHT was only ten minutes late. When they’d confirmed the arrival time, they wandered off, both bought copies of the Duluth News Tribune. Lucas turned to the sports to see what, if anything, had happened with the Twins. They’d lost to Baltimore, 6–1; the story didn’t try to make the game sound exciting.

  The front page was dominated by a hard-news story and a sidebar, a weeper, about the murdered street person:

  Mary Wheaton was a thin, round-shouldered woman who pushed a shopping cart full of treasures she collected daily from the gutters and alleys of Duluth, a familiar figure to downtown store owners. They were shocked when they heard of her murder.

  “She wasn’t quite right, but there was nothing bad about her,” said Bob Anderson, of Five Corners Hardware. “She’d come in most days and get a dollar from somebody. The folks at the Burger King’d always give her a burger and fries. That’s about all she needed to keep herself together. I hope to God they get the animal who did this . . .”

  The rest of the story was in the same vein. A file photo showed Wheaton pushing a shopping cart along a downtown street, peering nearsightedly, and maybe unhappily, at the photographer.

  “You read about the murder?” Reasons asked.

  “Yeah. Just sounds like . . . what it is,” Lucas said.

  “Like a dime-a-dozen down in the Cities.”

  “Well—anywhere that there are a lot of street people. The reporter was getting a lot of mileage out of it.”

  They strolled back toward the baggage claim, Reasons still looking at the article, then at the photo again, and he said, “You wanna hear a joke about an old lady beggar and a photographer?”

  “If I’ve got to.”

  “Wait a minute. I don’t tell jokes good, so I got to think it out,” Reasons said. He thought for a moment, then said, “There was this old lady bum, she used to push a shopping cart full of shit around this rich neighborhood. This newspaper photographer was out one day, looking for a good feature shot, and he sees her and asks if he can get a picture of her. She says, yes, and he takes a couple, and they get to talking.

  “She tells him that she used to be rich, that she grew up right in that very neighborhood. She used to go to balls and big parties and she went to a fancy school, and then she inherited about a million bucks. But over the years she had a couple of bad marriages and her husbands took it all, and she didn’t know how to work, and over the years, she kept going down, down, down.

  “And now, here she was, in her old age, pushing a cart around the neighborhood where she used to be rich, asking people for money so she could eat. So the photographer goes back to the newspaper, and tells the story to his editor, this really sad story, and the editor says, ‘Wow, that is really sad. What’d you give her?’ ”

  “And the photographer says, ‘Oh, about f-4.5 at 125.’ ”

  LUCAS SMILED and said, “You told that all right.”

  “Ahh, there are guys in the office who really know how . . .” He looked up at a monitor. “They’re in.”

  They folded their newspapers and stuffed them into a trash can. A couple of minutes later, fifteen or twenty passengers wandered in. Half of them were too young, and most of the other half too Minnesotan, too certain of what they were doing, and too worried about their luggage, to be the Russian.

  Lucas was looking at a stout man in a gray suit when Reasons leaned over and asked, “You think it could be the chick?”

  Lucas followed his gaze: Reasons was looking at a fortyish blonde, hair pulled back in a severe bun. Thin, intent, she was wearing a dress, with some makeup; most un-Minnesotan. And the dress, though stylish, had an undefinable foreign something to it—something that went back to the sixties and June Cleaver. She was carrying a nylon briefcase, holding the handle with both hands. She was nice-looking, Lucas thought, and had the same slanting eyes as his wife, who was a Finn. “You think?”

  “She’s the only one looking around, like she’s expecting to be met. She’s checked us out pretty good. She looks kind of Russian.”

  “You oughta know,” Lucas said. With Reasons trailing behind, Lucas walked over and said, “Would you be Nadezhda Kalin?”

  The woman smiled briefly, automatically: “Yes. Officer Davenport?”

  “Lucas Davenport. We were told we were meeting a man.”

  “Well. You’re not.” The smile again came and went. Her English was good, but accented. She had square shoulders and there was a gap between her two front teeth, a diastema; she reminded him a bit of Lauren Hutton. “You should call me Nadya.”

  “I didn’t get it right, did I? The Nadezhda?”

  “Well. I thought, em, that you had perhaps sneezed?” She was amused.

  “Sorry.”

  “No, no.” She smiled and patted him on the arm. “Anyway, I wait for my baggage.”

  “We’ll help you wait,” Lucas said.

  “We’ll even help you say a little prayer,” Reasons added.

  “A prayer?” She looked from Reasons to Lucas.

  “This airline does not always deliver the baggage with the passenger,” Lucas said.

  “Ah. It is the same everywhere.” She laughed and patted Reasons on the chest, and Lucas could see that Reasons liked it.

  THEY WAITED FOR another minute, and nothing happened with the baggage, and Nadya said to Lucas, “We must talk about my, em, em, authority is not the right word, because I have no authority here.” Her eyes were green with flecks of amber around the pupils. “About my . . .”

  She needed help. “Status,” Lucas suggested.

  “Yes. Status.”

  They talked about her status: “As far as the investigation goes, you can see everything we get, and can suggest anything you want, and I’ll probably do it, as long as it’s legal,” Lucas said. “I mean, it’s a free country, but we’d like to get this guy, the killer. He really made a mess on our dock . . .”

  She looked at him oddly—she didn’t quite recoil, but a line appeared in her forehead—and she said, “Thank you very much. I’m sorry for this . . . mess.”

  “No, no, not your fault. I assume you want him caught?”

  “Well, of course,” she said. “What do you think?”

  Lucas shrugged. “There’s politics going on. That’s what the FBI says. We’re not exactly sure what you guys want.”

  The corners of her mouth dropped: “It’s very simple. We would like justice.”

  “Oh, Jesus,” Reasons said. And he added, out of the side of his mouth, “Gavno.”

  Her eyebrows went up: “You speak Russian?”

  “My wife is Russian,” Reasons said. “I speak three words: gavno, Stolichnaya, and Solzhenitsyn.”

  The smile came again, and the corners of her eyes crinkled: “With those, you would get along very well with our intellectuals.”

  “Yeah, well . . .”

  “You don’t think we’ll get justice?”

  “We might get the killer,” Reasons said. “Justice is out of the question.”

  THEY WAITED SOME more, and then the luggage started coming. Lucas watched her from the corner of his eye. She was not somebody who hit you as pretty, he decided, but if she was around for a while . . . She was like Weather that way; Weather wasn’t conventionally pretty, but she was intensely attractive.

  Her bag arrived, a black nylon duffel, and Reasons threw it over his shoulder. Lucas offered to carry her briefcase, but she declined, and Lucas led the way out to the city car. She climbed in the backseat, and Reasons took the wheel with Lucas in the front passenger seat.

  “What first?” Reasons asked over his shoulder.

  “I would like to see the body,” she said. “If this is possible.”r />
  “We can do that,” Reasons said. “You want to freshen up first? Check into your hotel?”

  “No, I’m afraid it would be wasted, if then I went to see the body,” she said.

  “No problem.”

  THE MORGUE WAS at the University of Minnesota–Duluth medical school. They talked about the weather on the way over; in Moscow, Nadya said, it was no different than here in Duluth. And they talked about the length of her trip: it was not so much the hours in the air, as the shift in time, she said. She would be disoriented for a while. “At home, we are nine hours ahead of your time. Right now, I am okay. At seven o’clock tonight, I will fall asleep. For sure.”

  “What exactly is your job back home?” Lucas asked.

  “I am a police officer, a major in the Federal Security Service—like your FBI,” she said. “If I help with this case, I will have some good hopes of becoming a colonel. If I don’t help, I will have some good hopes of becoming a lieutenant.” She smiled to show that she was joking.

  “So this is a big deal.” Reasons looked at her in the rearview mirror.

  “Yes, big deal,” she said. “What is a Dairy Queen?”

  THEY EXPLAINED Dairy Queen, and then rode in silence for a bit until Lucas asked Reasons, “You gonna stay with us? Or are you gonna get pulled for this old lady?”

  “I don’t know. I’d like to work with you guys, but there might not be much to do. And politics gets into it. Nobody cares much about the Russian, but folks are gonna be kinda pissed about Wheaton.”

  “What is this?” Nadya asked, from the backseat.

  “Ah, we had another murder here . . .” Reasons went on to regale her with the facts of the murder. Lucas was watching her face, the play of emotions running across them as Reasons got into the details. When he finished, Nadya touched three fingers to her lips and asked, “Does this happen often?”

  “Nope. Hardly anybody ever gets killed up here. We got maybe two or three murders a year. Four in a good year.”

  “Only Russians and old women alcoholics,” she said.

  “The first Russian in memory,” Reasons said. “As a matter of fact, that was the first Russian boat to come in for quite a while.”

  “Really,” Lucas said. “I didn’t know that.”

  “Lots of Russians back in the seventies; not many anymore,” Reasons said. He looked over the seat at Nadya.

  She shrugged, and said, “As far as I know, that . . . would not be connected to this death. That the boat would come here.”

  “So you think it was just a coincidence?” Lucas asked.

  “I believe in coincidences,” she said, “As long as there are not too many of them.”

  THE MORGUE WAS in the medical school’s loading dock; a convenience, Reasons said. “You just back the ambulance up to the dock, open up the garage door, wheel the deceased over to the cooler, and put him or her inside.”

  They’d called ahead, and were met in the dock by the pathologist on duty, a Chinese-American man with a pleasant accent who introduced himself as Doctor Chu. He unlocked the door to the cooler, and rolled the dead man out. Oleshev was covered with a hospital sheet, and the pathologist pulled it back.

  Nadya turned away, just an inch or two, a flinch, Lucas thought, and then she turned back. Oleshev looked as though he’d been carved out of a piece of chipboard. Nadya gazed at him for a moment, then dipped into her bag and took out a brown envelope, slipped out three glossy photographs, looked at the photos and then at the face. After a moment, she showed them to Lucas and Reasons. The photos didn’t look exactly like the dead man, but resembled him; resembled him the way flesh resembles wood.

  Lucas asked, “You know him?” Behind Nadya, Reasons’s eyes cut to Lucas.

  “No.” To Chu she said, “It looks like him. Rodion Oleshev.”

  “That’s not the name on his papers,” Chu said.

  Nadya shrugged.

  “All the people from the ship agreed he was a guy named Oleg Moshalov,” said Reasons, pressing just a little.

  Nadya said, “Well, he’s not.” To Chu: “If you could make some fingerprints for me, that I could witness . . .” She dipped into her bag again and took out a stack of thin plastic envelopes.

  “We’ve got prints . . .” Chu began.

  “She’d like to witness it,” Lucas said. “With her own stuff.”

  The pathologist nodded. “What do I do?”

  She opened one of the envelopes and slipped out a sheet of plastic half the size of a dollar bill. In the center of the plastic sheet was a red square covered with a strip of peel-off film.

  “You pull off the cover and roll one of the right-hand fingers in the red square,” she said.

  “Red Square,” Chu said. To Lucas: “Get it?”

  Lucas shook his head once and Nadya sighed and said, “Then you let the sheet dry for a few seconds, and we put it back in the envelope.”

  The pathologist said, “Slick,” and took the prints. He did it quickly, expertly, and as he finished each print, Nadya lifted it to the overhead light to look through the plastic. Satisfied, she fanned each print for a moment, drying it, then slipped each plastic sheet back in its individual envelope.

  “Where would you get a fingerprint kit like that?” Chu asked.

  “You would have to call the consulate,” Nadya said. She handed him an unused envelope. “You can have this one, if you would like. The manufacturer is named on the back, but it is in Russian. There’s a phone number in St. Petersburg.”

  “Get my wife to translate it,” Reasons said.

  Nadya nodded: “The chemical on the sheet is made to . . . mmm . . . I don’t know the English word, but it is, er, compounded to reflect light from a scanner, so that any scanner can be used to digitize the fingerprints.” She used her hands when she talked, like a French woman.

  “Slick,” Chu said again. “Thanks.”

  Outside, Nadya took a breath, looked up and down the street and said, “This could be a Russian town, except for the signs. I don’t mean the words on the signs, I mean the signs are everywhere. Everything is signs.”

  “So you want to look at the files, or what?” Reasons asked.

  “No. If we could go to the hotel, I could transmit the fingerprints back to Washington, and use the toilet and maybe get clean from the trip. Then the files?”

  LIKE LUCAS, Nadya was staying at the Radisson, a cylindrical building that looked like a chubby, upright tower of Pisa; the hotel was conveniently across the street from the police station. They took her all the way to her room, where Lucas explained the TV remote and the movies channel, and they showed her how to hook the modem through the hotel’s phone system. They dialed into the Russian embassy’s server, got the connect tone, and left her.

  “We’ll wait in the restaurant. Back in half an hour,” Lucas said, as they went out the door.

  Going back down the hallway to the elevators, Reasons said, “She said she didn’t know him.”

  “I don’t think she did,” Lucas said. “She was too careful about the fingerprints.”

  “You saw her jump, though.”

  “Yeah,” Lucas said. “She’s no cop.”

  “What do you think? She’s a spy?”

  “I think she’s probably with one of their intelligence services, and for some reason, they sent somebody who isn’t used to dealing with bodies,” Lucas said. They got to the elevators and Lucas pushed the up button; Reasons pushed it again just to make sure it was pushed. “She’s not a clerk. She’s an executive. She’s been around.”

  “More than me,” Reasons said.

  “I’m not exactly a world traveler,” Lucas said. “I went to Mexico a couple of years ago, on a job. I went to Europe when I was in college. That’s about it.”

  “Europe,” Reasons said. “French pussy.”

  “I was playing hockey,” Lucas said. “All I saw was German hockey rinks and the insides of buses. I did get to see the Wall before they knocked it down.”

  �
�More’n me,” Reasons said.

  The elevator doors opened and they got on. Lucas pushed the button for the top floor, and Reasons pushed it again, just to make sure it was pushed. “Maybe I’ll travel when I retire. The old lady would like to see Moscow.”

  “That’s where she’s from?”

  “Naw. She’s from some one-horse town on the Polish border. Moscow, to her . . . it’d be like seeing Manhattan the first time.”

  AS THEY WALKED into the restaurant, a man sitting in a lounge chair with a New York Times looked over the paper, stood up, and asked, “Lucas Davenport?”

  Lucas stopped: “Yeah?”

  The man was wearing twill pants and a neat tweed jacket with a burgundy tie. He was six feet tall, military erect, sandy haired, early thirties, and pleasant, like a hopeful Xerox salesman. “I’m Andy Harmon. Barney Howard probably told you I’d look you up. I saw you going through with the lady, but couldn’t catch you. I thought you’d probably come up here . . . Could I get a word with you?”

  Lucas said to Reasons, “This guy’s a fed. Get a booth, I’ll be with you in a minute.”

  LUCAS AND HARMON drifted toward the windows facing the lake, away from other patrons. Harmon looked too young for a serious federal job; if he was not exactly apple-cheeked, the apples had only recently departed. “She give you anything interesting?”

  “She said America has a lot more signs than Russia,” Lucas said.

  Harmon pulled at his lower lip for a couple of seconds, and then said, “That’s true.”

  “Other than that . . .” Lucas shrugged. “We went over to the medical examiner’s office and took prints off the dead guy, Oleshev. She had a fingerprint kit that makes it easy to digitize prints. She gave one of the pickup sheets to the ME and told him where he could order some more in St. Petersburg.”

  “Mmm.”

  “She’s not a cop,” Lucas said. “She’s probably from one of the intelligence agencies that doesn’t deal with bodies.”