Lucas Davenport Collection: Books 11-15

by John Sandford

  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.”

  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.

  He’d been born in St. Louis County, in 1944; his wife was also from St. Louis County, born in 1945. Spivak’s fath
er had owned the bar before him. His father and mother had both been born in Mahnomen County, his father in 1912 and his mother in 1914; Mahnomen didn’t have a regular vital-records registration at the time, and the birth certificates came from a Catholic hospital, which had since burned down.

  Spivak had served with the Eighth U.S. Army in peacetime Korea, from 1962 to 1964. He had been honorably discharged, though he’d received two article fifteens—administrative punishment—for drunkenness. He’d had money withheld from his paycheck in both cases, as fines.

  “Ain’t shit,” Reasons said, when they were done. “Nothing with NCIC, nothing with the sheriff. He did a little tearing around when he was a kid, went in the army, got out, got married and had kids, and runs a bar.”

  “Maybe Nadya got something . . .”

  She hadn’t: “We can’t even find his phone number,” she said. She was sitting in a high-backed chair looking at her laptop. Out the window, they could see a sailboat heading north into the lake. “He is delisted.”

  “Unlisted,” said Reasons.

  “We need phone books in Russia,” she said. “Your phone books are outstanding in the whole world. Your Yellow Pages. I would cry to have Yellow Pages like this in Russia.”

  Was she doing a tap dance, Lucas wondered, watching her eyes, or was this all there was? “So tomorrow, we go push on Spivak.”

  THEY’D BEEN TOGETHER all day, and nobody mentioned dinner. After they agreed to meet in the morning, Lucas took the elevator down to his room, said good-bye to Reasons, and called home and talked to Weather and Sam.

  Weather said that the new garage door matched the other two perfectly, and that if he looked on page two of the Pioneer Press, he would see that the governor’s daughter’s boyfriend had been arrested for possession of a controlled substance after a party the two of them attended together, and there was a rumor around the university that the kid was taking the fall for the girl.

  “Probably wind up as the highway commissioner,” Lucas said.

  “I just don’t want you to get involved. I don’t want you to have anything to do with it,” Weather said. “I don’t want you fixing anything.”

  He promised he wouldn’t.

  AFTER HE GOT off the phone, he went down to the lobby, bought both the St. Paul and Minneapolis newspapers, rode back up, and read them as he watched the evening news. Then, restless, he called Nadya’s room to see if she wanted to get a bite. No answer.

  He cleaned up a bit, went back down, drove out to the mall, and spent an hour browsing through a bookstore, and then, with a half dozen magazines under his arm, did a walk around to see what was in the place, crossed the highway to an outdoor-sports shop, where he looked at guns and fishing equipment, and finally headed back to the hotel.

  He was suffering from the nothing-to-do, out-of-town blues. If there was nothing from Spivak the next day, he thought, and nothing obvious to do in the afternoon, he might zip back home for dinner. He could be back in two hours . . .

  HE WAS WATCHING a Seinfeld rerun and reading a Gray’s Sporting Journal when his cell phone buzzed at him:

  “Lucas?” A male voice, hushed but intense.

  “Yeah?”

  “Listen, man, there’s something weird going on here, and I don’t know what the fuck to do,” the words tumbling over each other. “I’m watching the guy’s car, waiting for the bar to close, and it closes but he doesn’t come out. All the lights go out except one in the back, and nothing’s moving. So I get a plastic garbage can and I carry it over to the window and I stand on it and peek in, and the guy is standing on a six-pack of beer, bottles, with a rope around his neck and there’s somebody in there with him. The guy’s legs are shaking like crazy but the place has got a big fucking metal door on the back and there’s no way I can kick it and if I go in through the front it’ll be too late and I don’t have a gun, it’s back in my car . . .”

  “You mean right now?” Lucas asked.

  “I mean right fuckin’ now. I’m still standing on this fuckin’ trash can and I can see the guy standing there.”

  “Don’t move,” Lucas said. “Just hang on, I’m going on the other phone.”

  He had no phone numbers. He dialed 911 and when the operator came up, said, trying to remain calm and authoritative, “I’m Lucas Davenport. I’m an agent with the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. I’ve got an emergency up in Virginia, and I need the telephone number of the Virginia cops right now . . .”

  The operator said, “Please slow down, sir. You need the emergency number for Virginia? Can you describe the nature . . . ?”

  “Give me the fuckin’ number,” Lucas shouted. “The emergency number for Virginia . . .”

  The woman tried to calm him again and he shouted her down and she transferred him to a supervisor, while, in his other ear, the male voice was saying, “What’s going on, man? You got something coming?” and then the supervisor came up and said, “Can I help you?”

  In the end, he thought, it took him only a minute to get through to the Virginia cops: “I am an agent with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, my name is Lucas Davenport. Anthony Spivak at Spivak’s Bar is being hanged in the back room of the bar and you have to get a couple of cars there RIGHT NOW.”

  “Sir, tell me again who you are . . .”

  The cops got something going, and ten seconds later, in the cell phone, the male voice said, “He’s out, there’s a guy out the back and let me see, ah holy, I’m running . . .” Then the voice went away, but Lucas could hear a clunking, wrestling sound, and the male voice shouting something, then the cell phone apparently hit the floor, and Lucas got back on the other phone and shouted, “I’ve got a man in the bar, I’ve got a man in the bar, be careful with him, he’s not armed, he’s my man.”

  The cell phone went out. Lucas dialed it, but got no answer. On the hotel phone, he shouted at the Virginia cop, “What’s going on? I’ve lost my guy.”

  “We’re on the scene now, sir. Can you tell me your location? You said your name is Louis?”

  “Lucas Davenport. I’m in Duluth.” He was trying to shout calmly. “I will be there in one hour. Call Rose Marie Roux, the commissioner of Public Safety. I will give you her home phone number and she will fill you in. I will be on my cell phone on the way up—here’s the number . . .”

  WHEN HE WAS off the phone, he tried his man’s cell phone again, got nothing. He thought about calling Nadya, decided against it, didn’t have time to pick up Reasons. He’d call him from the road. He clipped on his .45, picked up a jacket, and was at the door when the phone rang. “Shit.” He went back, picked it up.

  A woman’s high-pitched voice asked, “Is this Lucas Davenport?”

  “Yes. What is it?” He assumed it was the front desk, and he had no time for it.

  “Mary Wheaton, the lady who was murdered . . . she told me about it. She told me she saw the other man murder the Russian man, the story that was in the newspaper.”

  The words confused him for a moment: Who the hell was this, and why was she bothering him? “What?”

  “She saw the murder of the Russian man. She told me about it, and I thought I should call.”

  “Who is this?” A crank, he thought—but then, maybe not. There had been a second woman.

  “I’m not going to tell you. For one thing, you sound mean.”

  “I’m in a hurry,” Lucas said. “Just tell me what she told you.”

  “You really sound mean . . .”

  The woman was frightened and, Lucas thought, he did sound mean. He took a breath, and said, “I’m sorry. You caught me at a really bad moment. What did Mrs. Wheaton tell you?”

  “She said she was down by the grain elevators, in some weeds, right by the lake. Watching the lake. She was drinking, she had a bottle, and she heard a man walking toward her so she stayed hidden. The men down there can be really tough. So she was hiding down there in the weeds, and she heard some shots. She thought they were shots, but they were quiet . . .” />
  “She was probably right, the gun may have had a sound suppressor on it,” Lucas said, as softly as he could, trying to be agreeable. He was still burning off the adrenaline from the cell-phone call. “What did she see?”

  “She said one man shot the other man, and she made a noise. When she made the noise, the man with the gun saw her, and she ran away, and he chased her. She thinks he shot his gun at her and missed, and then she fell down and he caught her, and he pointed his gun and tried to shoot her, but the gun didn’t work. She had a knife and she slashed at him because she was afraid that he might try to strangle her or something. He ran away and got in his car and drove off.”

  “Where was his car?”

  There was a second of calculation, Lucas thought, and then: “She said it was over by the street, over by the Goodwill store.”

  “Do you know what she was drinking? What kind of bottle it was?”

  More calculation: “No, she didn’t say, but I imagine it was an inexpensive wine. She didn’t drink so much hard liquor.”

  “I didn’t even know she drank,” Lucas said. “I thought she was more of a schizophrenic. I didn’t think she had an alcohol problem.”

  “Oh, she drank,” the woman said. “Wine, mostly. Sometimes, when she was on her meds, it made her crazy. Crazier.”

  “Did she tell you what the man looked like? The man with the gun?”

  “He looked like a college boy, but he might have been older than that. It was dark, and she couldn’t see him that well. He was blond and not really tall, but a little tall. Six feet. Strong-looking. She thought he was an American because before she cut him, he said, ‘Shit,’ in English, just like an American would.”

  “She cut him,” Lucas said. “Was she sure?”

  “Pretty sure. Not positive.”

  “Blond, strong, American. You didn’t see the car, see what make it was?”

  “No, uh, she didn’t say anything about that.”

  “Anything that you can think of that she said, that might be of more use? Anything about the guy? It’s really important, because he’s still out there and we think he’s nuts.”