Lucas Davenport Collection: Books 11-15

by John Sandford

  Now he was mildly interested. “How do you know that?”

  Lucas explained and Harmon nodded. “We never really thought she was a cop,” Harmon said. “Something happened here, and they don’t know exactly what it was. She’s supposed to figure it out before we do.”

  “Think she will?”

  “She will be smart,” Harmon said.

  “She might be smart, but if we see everything she does, how does she plan to stay ahead of us?” Lucas asked. “There’s gotta be something else.”

  “Mmm. She’s probably got a shadow operator.” He said it deferentially, as if talking to a moderately slow child.

  “What’s that, in English?”

  “She’s out here in the open, picking up everything you get. Then, even though they don’t know exactly what’s going on, they’ve probably got some ideas of their own—some conjectures, maybe some contacts who might know something. So she sends everything she gets from you back to the embassy, and her controller bounces it back to the shadow op. So he’s got everything they know and everything we know . . . and maybe he stays a few steps ahead.”

  “What does he do if he figures it out?”

  Harmon shrugged. “Takes care of it himself. Or maybe, if it doesn’t jeopardize whatever they’re doing here, Nadya feeds the information back to you and you make the bust.”

  “Well, Jesus.” Lucas had never encountered anything like it.

  “As for us . . . We’d like to know if they’ve got an organization here and what it’s been doing. It could be completely commercial—tracking grain prices, that sort of thing. Then . . . maybe not.”

  “And I just ride along,” Lucas said.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Harmon said. “This dead guy, nobody will miss him much, except maybe his old man. He was an idiot. That’s what people say . . .”

  Lucas interrupted. “What people?”

  Another shrug. “People. Anyway, I don’t think it counts for much whether or not you get the killer. What really counts is that there might be an organization here that we should know about. The fact that she’s from the SVR suggests that there is.”

  “The SVR is . . .”

  “The Sluzhba Vneshney Razvedki, their foreign intelligence service. The FSB, the Federal’naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, is the national police force. That’s what she says she’s from.” He pronounced the Russian names with relish and a sputtering dampness. “She might be quite . . . immoral, I suppose you’d call it, in your terms. If she thinks you’re getting somewhere, and you’re not keeping her up with it, she might try to initiate a sexual relationship with you. They’re very, very well trained.” Harmon’s thin tongue, looking a little like a Ritz cracker, flicked over his lower lip.

  Lucas nearly laughed, but suppressed the impulse and said, solemnly, “I’ll take care.”

  “So she had nothing else? Nothing relevant, other than the signs?”

  “No, we were mostly setting up a schedule. We’ll show her the files when she’s finished transmitting prints, and gets cleaned up. She’s said she’s jet-lagged and she’s gonna crash pretty early.”

  “All right.” Harmon eased away. “We’ll be in touch.”

  “I just can’t figure out . . .”

  “What?”

  “I can’t figure out why you guys don’t seem to care. I mean . . . people are getting killed.”

  “Honestly? Catching spies for the former Soviet Union is not exactly a good career move anymore. Costs a lot of money, disturbs the relationship, and nobody cares. So, catch a spy, you get an atta-boy and transferred to Boise, where you’ll be less expensive.”

  “That’s really . . . fuckin’ great,” Lucas said.

  “Call me if you need anything,” Harmon said. He turned away. “Anything that we got, that doesn’t cost too much.”

  “Hey,” Lucas called after him. “How was the ‘signs’ thing relevant?”

  “Might mean she’s never been here,” Harmon called back. And “Good report, Davenport.”

  LUCAS SLID INTO the booth across from Reasons. Since the hotel was a cylinder, the restaurant, naturally, revolved. When Lucas and Harmon started talking, they were looking at the lake; when they finished, they were looking south, at right angles to the lake. When Lucas joined Reasons, they were looking down at the Civic Center complex, which included the federal building, the county courthouse, and the city hall; the port and the lake were coming up. Lucas settled into the booth and ordered a Diet Coke. “Another spy?” Reasons asked.

  “Yeah, one of ours.”

  “Is ours better than theirs?”

  Lucas waited as the barman put a glass of Coke in front of him, and then said, “I don’t think so. The guy says, ‘She might be immoral, in your terms. She might try to initiate a sexual relationship with you.’ ”

  “Really?” Reasons was impressed. “If she does, will you tell me about it? I mean, the details?”

  “I’m more married than you are,” Lucas said. Imitating Harmon’s voice, Lucas said, “They’re very, very well trained.”

  Reasons laughed merrily. “You’re shitting me.”

  “That’s what the man said.” Lucas shook his head. “He also said, ‘Good report, Davenport.’ ”

  “That rhymes.”

  “Brilliant observation.”

  Reasons said, “If she can’t get to you, maybe she’ll try to fuck me. I’m a good American. If my country calls, I’d have to answer the call.”

  “Just don’t tell her any military secrets,” Lucas said. “Andy Harmon will be all over your ass.”

  “Maybe I couldn’t help myself,” Reasons said, “If she’s that well trained.”

  AS THEY LEFT the restaurant, on the way back to Nadya’s room, Lucas excused himself, took his calendar and his cell phone out of his pocket, and looked up a St. Louis phone number. He needed help.

  A man answered on the third ring.

  “How many Italians does it take to screw in a lightbulb?” Lucas asked.

  After a moment, the man said, “You sound like a fuckin’ Canadian. Is that you, Davenport?”

  They talked for five minutes. When Lucas hung up, he felt a little like a spy himself.

  5

  NADYA WAS LOOKING GOOD.

  She’d changed into a dark blue suit that went well with her blond hair and showed off her figure; she’d added a touch of lipstick and small diamond-chip earrings. Her hair, worn short, and still damp from the shower, looked artlessly windblown. As they got in the elevator to go back down, Reasons muttered to Lucas, “Christ, she wouldn’t even need any training.”

  “What?” She’d heard part of it.

  “How’d the prints go? When will you find out?” Lucas asked.

  She said, “He’s Oleshev,” she said. “The fingerprints, they’ve already checked, there is no doubt. There wasn’t much before.”

  “What does his father do?” Reasons asked. Distracting her from the training comment. “We’ve heard he’s a big shot.”

  She was nodding. “His father is important in oil. Very important. Not so much oil itself, as, em, support machinery.”

  “Pumps?” Reasons suggested.

  “Maybe pumps,” she said. “But bigger than that. Pipelines, refineries. Systems. There is so much oil in some places in Russia, you can get it out of the ground with a stick. Getting it from the stick to Europe . . . that is the problem.”

  “Okay.”

  But she expanded: “So you see, Maksim Oleshev not only controls money, he controls workers—jobs in factories, jobs in pipeline construction. These are votes. Some people think his power could be destabilizing.”

  “So what’s his son doing in Duluth?” Lucas asked.

  “The son went his own way,” she said. “He was a government official before his father came to power in oil.”

  “He was in the KGB,” Lucas said.

  She nodded. “Yes. Of course. Then in the merchant marine.”

  “That seems like an unlikely job change
, from spy to sailor,” Lucas said dryly.

  She looked up at him and said, “First, he was not a spy. He was an analyst and an, mmm, I don’t know the English. An arranger. Second, you were not in Russia in the nineties. People had no jobs. The government collapsed. The intelligence services collapsed. High, important men were selling shoes in the markets. If somebody said, ‘Here is a job,’ you took it. Oleshev, we think, had contacts in the merchant marine through his covert service, from being an arranger. Perhaps he . . . knew something about some of them. Anyway, he got a job. He was good at it, the crew says. He started as a third officer, which is nothing, and would have had his own ship soon.”

  “Really,” Lucas said.

  “Really. It’s true.” Her eyes were opaque, giving away nothing, but she smiled sweetly. “In fact . . . I will tell you some things, but if they appear on paper and I am asked, I will deny them.”

  “Between us, then,” Lucas said.

  “Yes. One line of speculation in Moscow is that Oleshev was a courier for his father, perhaps working toward some unknown agreement with American oil service companies. The Moscow government would oppose this, if they knew about it. You see, the best oil service companies are American, but the Moscow government wishes, understandably, that Russian companies begin to develop the capacity to provide these services. But how can this be done if all the contracts go to America?”

  Lucas said, “But then . . . the obvious agency to kill Oleshev would be your Moscow government. The American companies wouldn’t do it—they’d want Oleshev to succeed. His father wouldn’t do it. And our government would probably like to see American companies get the business. So it’d be you guys. What do they call it? The SVR?”

  She shook her head. The mention of the SVR didn’t faze her: “Ah. But I can tell you, from the highest sources, that the SVR knows nothing. They would like to know something, because there are many people shouting at them, but they do not. And Maksim Oleshev claims that there was nothing to know; that he had no business dealings with his son. Therefore, the problem must be here.”

  “You believe that? He had no dealings with his son?”

  She cocked her head to the side, pushed out a lip. Then, “I don’t know. In Russia, the family is important. If your father has a billion dollars, why cover yourself with dirt in some old ship? But that is what Maksim says.”

  “So what’s the Moscow speculation on the kind of problem it might be?” Lucas asked.

  She ticked them off on her fingers: “One: An American thug sees a man in the dark and kills him in course of a robbery. Two: Rodion Oleshev is dealing with the Russian criminal underground, perhaps as a courier of drugs or financial instruments. There is a falling-out, and they kill him, or a rival gang kills him. Maybe Russian, maybe American. That’s my favorite. Three: Maksim Oleshev is lying, and his son was working for him. Four: Something else. What, we don’t know.”

  Reasons said, “You can probably scratch the American thug. That’s a terrible place for a strong-arm robbery, down by the docks. You can’t see a thing in the dark, there’s no way to get out of there in a hurry, nobody has much money, and a lot of the people you might try to rob are meaner’n shit themselves.”

  “And he was probably shot with a silenced pistol,” Lucas said. “In my whole career, I’ve seen about three silencers that would actually work. They’re rare, here. This wasn’t a street robbery.”

  “I agree,” Nadya said. “I think, one way or another, that he was a courier, a contact person, and criminality was involved.”

  “The crew didn’t have much to say about him,” Reasons said.

  Nadya frowned. “The Potemkin has stopped in Quebec, so that our investigators can speak to the crew members. I’ll get summaries of the interrogations and give them to you.”

  Reasons nodded: “Okay.”

  Nadya said, “I would like to speak to the man who saw the killer, the American.”

  “So would I,” said Lucas. “But he’s fishing. He has a shift this afternoon. He’s due in at three o’clock. He knows we’ll be coming.”

  DULUTH POLICE HEADQUARTERS were in City Hall, a stone building that looked like a 1930s WPA post office. Along with the federal building and the St. Louis County Courthouse, it made up the civic center a block from the Radisson. They walked over, a nice afternoon, sunshine slanting down over the hill, a maple tree down the street showing a flame of autumn orange.

  The detective bureau was like fifty others that Lucas had been in over his career, an undistinguished beige-painted room with a counter near the entrance, a bulletin board full of FBI “Wanted” posters, a couple of short rows of desks separated by low partitions, a twenty-four-hour wall clock, a few computers, a lot of paper. A single detective sat hunched over a newspaper, eating a sandwich from a brown paper sack. He looked up when they came in, and went back to his sandwich as Reasons led them into a side room.

  “The lieutenant’s gone, he’s down in St. Paul at murder school. We can use his office,” Reasons said. He pointed them at chairs around a conference table, and added, “I’ll be right back.”

  He was back in a minute with a file folder, which he gave to Nadya. “Anything you want, we’ll Xerox. Can I get you some coffee?”

  “A cup would be good,” she said. She looked at the file: “Thin.”

  “Not much to work with,” Reasons agreed. “You’ve probably already seen most of it.”

  “Well.” She flipped through the file. “Maybe I’ll get some sleep tonight.”

  LUCAS SETTLED INTO an unused desk, paging through a copy of Trailer Boat magazine that had been sitting under a telephone. Reasons took a cup of coffee into Nadya, and he could hear them talking, and Reasons laughed once. Reasons came out, put his hands on the edge of a desk, backed his feet away, and did fifty quick push-ups. The sandwich-eating detective said, “If your feet ever slip out when you’re doing that, you’re gonna break your teeth on the edge of the desk.”

  “I’m quicker’n that,” Reasons said.

  “Okay. Your problem, as long as it’s not my desk,” said the other man. “I don’t want any tooth marks on it.”

  Ten minutes after Nadya started reading, another detective wandered in, carrying a briefcase. He stopped when he saw Lucas.

  Reasons said, “Davenport. BCA.”

  Lucas said, “Your desk? Sorry, we’re just waiting.”

  He stood up and moved to the guest chair next to Reasons, and the second detective ambled over to his desk, said, “Take the magazine if you want, I’m all done with it.” Then he sat down, sighed and said, “What a day.”

  “Talk to a bum?” asked Reasons.

  “Talked to fifteen of them,” the detective said. “Nobody knows what happened. They kept asking me if somebody was killing bums.”

  “We gonna lose it?”

  “I don’t know. Probably.”

  “Better you than me,” Reasons said.

  The detective nodded toward the lieutenant’s office. “Is that the . . .”

  “Russian. Yeah.”

  The detective whistled and said, “I thought they all wore them things like my ma. You know, the babushkas.”

  “She’s probably got one hidden somewhere,” Reasons said.

  “What’s happening with the old lady?” Lucas asked. “I saw the story in the paper.”

  “If you read the paper, you probably know more than I do, ’cause I haven’t read it yet,” the detective said. “But . . .”

  He dipped into his briefcase and took out a manila file and passed it to Lucas. Inside was a sheaf of photos of the crime scene and the dead woman. The detective turned back to Reasons. “By the way, Chick Daniels is looking for you. He knows all about the Russian and the BCA guy . . . Davenport?”

  “Davenport,” Lucas said. “Who is Chick Daniels?”

  “Reporter for the News Tribune.”

  “Mmm.” Lucas looked at one of the photos and then held it up to the detective. “Is this the way she looked? Is that nec
k right?”

  “That’s the way she looked. Almost cut her head off.”

  “I’ve never seen that before,” Lucas said. “The cut goes all the way around.”

  “Sliced right through the whole front half of her neck, arteries, veins, and all.”

  “Maybe you got a nut,” Lucas said.

  The two detectives regarded Lucas for a moment, then the no-name detective said, “That’s what I’m afraid of. We got a nut and he’s gonna do it again.” Pause. “Fuck.”

  NADYA WOUND UP Xeroxing a half dozen sheets from the Oleshev murder file, then she and Lucas headed for the port. Reasons opted to go home: “I already talked to the guy three times. If you get anything new, call me up.”

  Nadya settled into the Acura, lifted an eyebrow at the video screen on the dashboard, but left it without comment; Lucas followed the on-screen map through the maze of streets around I-35, and made it down to Garfield Avenue. At the TDX terminal, they found the entrance, a tiny white door in the otherwise faceless tower. Inside, they found a small two-man office, everything with a patina of dust. A man sat with his back to them, typing on a manual typewriter that sat on a government-style gray metal desk with a broken leg set on a two-by-four block. Lucas hadn’t seen a typewriter like it in twenty years. The man didn’t turn when they came in. He said, “Chris called, he wants you to call back.”

  “Wrong guys,” Lucas said.

  Then man turned from the typewriter: “Ah . . . you must be the state police guy.”

  Lucas nodded, introduced himself and Nadya. “Are you Harry Kellogg?”

  “No, no, Harry doesn’t work here, he works for the port. He’s supposed to be here to meet you . . .” They heard a truck outside and the guy said, “That’s probably him.”

  They went back outside, and found a portly, red-faced man in a yellow hard hat, just climbed out of his red-and-black GMC pickup. He shook hands with Lucas, and nodded at Nadya.

  “I didn’t see much. I just finished filling the number-two hold and I walked out to the bow to have a cigarette—can’t have one right by the hold because there’s dust in the air, and you could have an explosion,” Kellogg said. “So I light up and I look over the bow. I wasn’t sure what I was seeing, because . . . I don’t know, I haven’t seen that many dead people, and I didn’t expect to see one there. I mean, it took a few seconds. Then I saw this other guy, not exactly running, but he was in a hurry, moving off into the dark. Into the weeds way back there . . . and I realized the guy on the ground was probably dead, or maybe unconscious. I yelled and the one guy started running away, and that’s the last I saw of him. The dead guy was just layin’ there. I ran down to the gangway and down to my truck and got my baseball bat and ran down to the dead guy. I used my cell phone and I called the ambulance . . .”