Hidden Prey ld-15

by John Sandford

  He looked back at the fragment of wine bottle. Holiday Arbor, $2.99. The paper label on the bottle looked new, as though it hadn't been long in the weeds.

  "Come on," he said to Nadya. He started walking fast toward the elevator.

  "To where?" She jogged along behind him.

  "Back to the morgue. The medical examiner's."

  "You have an idea?" She was looking at the chunk of glass in his hand. He carried it by the sharp edges.

  "Maybe," Lucas said. "We need one."

  Dr. Chu had gone home, but the night man in pathology called the campus cops, who came with the keys, and when Lucas explained what he wanted, the night man called Dr. Chu, who gave the go-ahead.

  "Everything's here," the night man said. He put a box of clothing on the counter. Much of it was soaked in now-black and dried blood. "I'll get it out for you, if you want."

  "That'd be good…"

  The night man slipped on plastic gloves and took Mary Wheaton's clothing out of the box piece by piece. At the bottom was an olive-green military-style coat with a red-white-and-blue patch on the shoulder. The night man held it up and said, "That what you want to see?"

  "Long green coat," Nadya said. "With a Czechoslovakian flag on the shoulder."

  "Is that what that is?" Lucas looked at the coat for another minute, and then said, "I think we better call Reasons."

  Reasons came down, looked at the coat. "Could be," he said. He didn't sound skeptical; he sounded neutral. "What do you want to do?"

  "See if we can get some prints off the piece of bottle I found, see if the prints match the old lady's. See if we can find more bottle. Try to figure out what she might have been doing over there."

  "I might be able to tell you what she was doing," Reasons said. "There's a Goodwill store maybe two blocks from there. It's just about the only thing around, I mean, that's not a warehouse. This coat, this looks like something from Goodwill."

  "But it wouldn't have been open in the middle of the night," Lucas said.

  "No…"

  "Is the place still open? Now?"

  Reasons looked at his watch: "I think so. Let me make a call."

  Twenty minutes later, Maxine Just, the manager at the Goodwill, led them back through the store to a clothing rack, where three Czech Army coats hung from wire hangers. "We had about five of them. A surplus place up in town, caters to college kids, got a bunch of them a couple of years ago. They couldn't sell them all, and finally gave them to us. Tax write-off. We put them up for eight dollars each."

  "So you sold two."

  "Two or three, yeah. We got five or six."

  "Do you know who you sold them to?"

  Just shrugged. "People who wanted long wool coats. The wool's pretty good. Some people buy them to make rugs-they dye the wool, do these folky kind of rugs for people's cabins. College students used to buy them, when grunge was big, but they went out of style… I suppose they mostly went to people who couldn't afford better. Most of our clientele."

  "But you wouldn't know specifically."

  "No. I could ask some of our cashiers, maybe somebody would remember."

  Reasons asked her to contact the cashiers, and they agreed that he would stop by in the morning to talk with them. They talked for a couple of more minutes, then said thanks to Just, and wandered back outside. The Goodwill store was a long walk from the city center, Lucas thought-he pointed it out to Reasons and asked, "How would she get down here?"

  "Bus, probably. Cheap ride, by bus. I'll have the guys check with the drivers."

  They were drifting back toward the cars when a dark-complected young man with a Latino accent stepped outside and called, "Excuse."

  Reasons called back, "Yeah?" The young man walked across the parking lot. He was wearing worn jeans, an Iowa Wrestling sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off at the biceps, and pointed-toe black dress shoes caked with mud. He had a sterling-silver earring in his left earlobe and a small black mustache.

  "Mrs. Just said you were looking for the lady with the coat?"

  "Yeah."

  He pointed across the street. "I see her every day, catch the bus there."

  They all looked at the bus stop.

  "Every morning, she get on, every night, she get off. I think she lived around there somewhere. I see her in the Dumpster in the back. When she see me, she run across the street into the bushes." He said booshes.

  "Where would she live?" Lucas asked. But they were all looking at a small cube-shape shed across the street. "You think in the shed?"

  The man shrugged. "I don't know. But every morning, every night, I see her. All summer."

  "Wearing the coat."

  "Two or three days only, in the coat," he said. "We only get the coats one month ago mostly."

  "Could I get your name?" Reasons said. "Where do you live?"

  As Reasons talked to the man, Lucas and Nadya walked across the street and through a ring of knee-high weeds to the shed. The place was a plywood cube, with boarded-over windows on two sides, a windowless, padlocked door at the front. An abandoned storage shed, Lucas thought, probably for the railroad.

  "How do we look in?" Nadya asked.

  "Have to talk to Reasons," Lucas said. Reasons and the Latino man were walking toward them, and when Lucas asked about breaking in the shed, Reasons said, "Let me make a call."

  He stepped away again. The Latino man said, "She goes around back. I never see her open this door."

  Lucas and Nadya walked around to the back of the shed and found a blank wall-but the weeds next to one part of the cinder-block foundation were worn and scuffed, almost like an animal trail that went nowhere, ending at the foundation. Lucas stooped, pushed on a block, and it moved. A few seconds later, he'd pulled out four blocks, and kneeling, and cranking his head around, he could see a man-sized hole in the floor.

  "Somebody's been going in and out," he said.

  "You want me to go in?" asked the Latino.

  "No, no-let's do it right." He pushed the block back into place.

  Reasons came back with his cell phone and said, "The city engineer says it's been condemned as an eyesore. The railroad's agreed to tear it down, but just hasn't gotten around to it yet. Bacon-the city engineer-he's calling the railroad guy who knows about it, to get the okay to go inside. There's something around back?"

  "Yeah, somebody's been going in and out," Lucas said. He explained about the foundation.

  Reasons went around to look and then went back to his phone. When he got off, they stood around looking at the shed, and at the port, and Lucas started talking to the Latino man about Mexico, and Reasons started bullshitting Nadya about dating in Russia, and then Reasons's phone rang. He listened, nodded, and said, "Thanks."

  "We can go in. If we can get in." A patrol car was rolling down the street toward them. "I called for a hammer," he said.

  The patrol car pulled to the curb. A uniformed cop got out of the car, lifted a hand to Reasons, went around to the trunk, popped it, and lifted out a sledge. "What do you need broke?" he asked.

  The cop took three swings to break the padlocked latch off the door; even then, the door was jammed shut. The cop went back to his car, dug around in the trunk, and returned with an eighteen-inch-long screwdriver. "When I started on the force, they called all that shit 'burglar's tools,' " Reasons said.

  "Yeah, but that was a hundred years ago," the cop said.

  He worked the blade of the screwdriver around the edge of the door, grunted, "Warped," and Reasons said, "Well, Jesus, don't baby it-they're gonna tear the fucking thing down."

  Then the door popped, and they all clustered together and peered inside. They could see what looked like the remains of a camp: and a briefcase with paper scattered around.

  "Think we can go in?" Reasons asked.

  "I'm going," Lucas said. "Fuck a bunch of crime-scene weenies."

  The interior had an animal smell about it: the place had been inhabited, and recently, by somebody not fastidious. A flat pad
made of bubble wrap was pushed against one wall, with an army blanket on top of it. A bed, Lucas thought.

  Peeking from under the briefcase, he could see one half of what looked like a wallet. He stooped, took a pencil out of his pocket, and used the pencil to drag the wallet into the open.

  "What do you see?" Nadya called.

  Lucas got down on his knees and pushed his face close to the wallet. "A wallet. A bunch of cards in Russian and an ID card in English that says, 'Oleg Moshalov.' "

  "Sonofabitch," Reasons said.

  Chapter 6

  When Reasons said, "Sonofabitch," Lucas stood up and backed out of the shed, slapped his hands together to get rid of the dust, and said, "Better call your crime-scene guys."

  Crime-scene investigation had somehow become the flavor-of-the-month on TV shows, but Lucas could not remember the last time that crime-scene guys had actually broken a case. They gathered evidence-blood, semen, hair, fingerprints, firearms and shells, tool marks, clothing fibers-that could be used to pin a suspect after the cops found him, but the cops had to find him first.

  In the one major case in which the crime-scene people were dominant, and in which Lucas had participated, if only from the sidelines, a hot assistant county attorney and her crime-scene buddies had proven beyond doubt, from crime-scene evidence alone, that a dope dealer named Rashid al-Balah had killed a gambler named Trick Bentoin. The evidence showed that Bentoin's body had been dumped in a peat bog in the Carlos Avery state wildlife-management area north of Minneapolis.

  They'd had witnesses who recounted tension between Bentoin and al-Balah over a gambling debt, and threats made by al-Balah. They had blood from the trunk of al-Balah's car, they had seeds and soil from plants that grew nowhere else but Carlos Avery, and when it was all done, they put their man away.

  Then, a year or so later, the dead man showed up. He'd been in Panama, playing high-stakes gin rummy. As the Russians would say, gavno; and as Lucas's pal Del had wondered, "Who did Rashid kill and throw in a peat bog? Had to be somebody."

  The crime-scene crew arrived half an hour after Reasons called in.

  Fifteen minutes before they got there, Chick Daniels from the News-Tribune hopped out of his car in the parking lot of the Goodwill store and Reasons said, "Here comes the press," and walked toward him. They met in the middle of the street, talked for a few minutes, then Reasons walked him across to the shed and said, "We're gonna let him have a look inside, but deny we did it."

  Lucas nodded, and the reporter, a twenties-something guy with long brown hair and Labrador retriever eyes, stuck his head in the door of the shed, looked at the litter inside for a minute, then backed away and said, "Can I look at this foundation thing?" Reasons walked him around back; they looked at the foundation. Lucas heard his name mentioned and then Nadya's, mentioned and spelled.

  Nadya said, "You always talk to the news before you know anything?"

  Lucas nodded. "Always. Especially before we know anything."

  "That seems operationally unsound." She was very serious.

  "It might be," Lucas said cheerfully. "But see this way, we get our pictures on television."

  "This is good?"

  "Sure. It proves we exist."

  She still looked solemn, and a bit uncertain, so Lucas said, "I'm pulling your leg. With this kind of thing, we've found that talking to the news media, especially the newspapers, doesn't hurt much. Especially if the reporter's decent. The news is gonna get out anyway, and it's better to have it accurate, than a bunch of rumors."

  "What is this leg-pulling?" she asked.

  After the walk around, the reporter went back to the other side of the street and got on his cell phone. "I told him he's gotta stay over there," Reasons said. "He's a pretty good guy. TV'll be here in a couple of minutes."

  Ten minutes before the crime-scene crew arrived, as Lucas was looking at the sole of his shoe, wondering about the brown stuff stuck on it, the no-name detective arrived, wearing knee shorts and a golf shirt. He was carrying a black milled-aluminum flashlight.

  "Great knees," Lucas said.

  No-name was not in a mood for repartee. "Fuck you. Let me look."

  He stood in the door of the shack and shined the flashlight across the floor. "Somebody was living here, all right. You sure it was Wheaton?"

  "I don't know. Sounds like her. We got a guy saw her every day. He's over there…" Reasons pointed across the street, where the Latino man was sitting on the hood of an eighties Plymouth. "And for Christ's sake, don't ask for a green card until we've deposed him."

  The no-name detective glanced at the Latino, then continued playing his flashlight across the interior of the shed, methodically sweeping the dirty floor and walls. Now he said, "Look at this," and he stepped inside.

  Lucas looked. Eight inches to the side of the door, at head height, a nail stuck out of the wood. In the light from the flash, Lucas could see a tiny swatch of fiber hanging from the head of the nail, like hair, or short, bristly spiderwebs.

  "Green. Green wool, I think," no-name said. "That fuckin' army coat. That's weird."

  "What's weird?" Lucas asked.

  "We know where she lived. We already turned the place over. What the hell was she doing down here?"

  Five minutes before the crime-scene guys arrived, two TV trucks pulled up. Reasons went across the street and pushed them back fifty yards; and then, with a show of reluctance, made an on-air statement. "See? He gets on TV," Lucas told Nadya.

  Then the crime-scene crew showed, two guys in golf shirts and jeans. Reasons walked over and asked, "Where in the hell have you been? Playing golf?"

  "Got here fast as we could," one of the guys said. He counterattacked. "None of you went inside, did you?"

  "Of course not," Reasons said.

  Lucas and no-name shook their heads. "We were waiting for you."

  When the photography was done, the crime-scene people began picking up the litter-with Lucas's urging, they started with the small paper, picking up each piece with forceps, bagging it, and passing it out the door. Most of it was cards, most of it in Russian.

  There were several items of interest: an American Express platinum card under the name Zbigniew Riscin, a New York driver's license under the same name, and a receipt from the National car-rental agency at the Duluth airport for a car rented to Zbigniew Riscin. The car had been driven a hundred and seventy-five miles and returned the same day it was rented-the day that Oleshev had been murdered.

  They also found a receipt, paid with the platinum card, for $145 from Spivak's Tap, in Virginia, Minnesota.

  "It's about an hour up to Virginia," Reasons said. "If he went up and back, did a little driving around, it'd be about right."

  "I wonder what is the Spivak's Tap?" asked Nadya.

  "A tap's a bar," Reasons said. "I'll check." He got his phone out.

  Next out was a Targus retractable reel with six feet of telephone cable on it; it was used to connect laptops to motel telephones, and Lucas had one just like it. There were also three different white plastic-bodied electric wall-plug adapters for U.S. and European outlets. Nadya looked at them and said, "He had a laptop."

  "No laptop in here," said a crime-scene guy.

  "I'd like to find a laptop," Lucas said to Nadya.

  Nadya said, "Greatly," and then, "I will check with the Potemkin, to see if he left one in his cabin."

  All the material from the hut was bagged. One of the crime-scene guys stepped to the door and said, "Look at this." He had, in his forceps, a money band, printed "$100."

  "Took some money off him," Lucas said. "How many bills in this?"

  The crime-scene guy said, "Five thousand, I think."

  "So she got five grand, at least. Where is it?" no-name asked. "Nothing at her place. Didn't look like she was eating any better."

  "Got a Kotex here," one of the crime-scene guys said from the interior. "Unused."

  Lucas said, "How old was Wheaton?"

  "Fifty-eight," said
no-name.

  "We got a problem," Lucas said. He looked across the street at the Latino perched on the car. "I think we better haul Raul up to the medical examiner's."

  They did that.

  On the way, Nadya said, "So I am thinking, this woman did not kill Oleshev, but she was first to find his body. She robbed him and when the man on the boat saw her, she ran away. So we have nobody who saw the killer."

  "I am thinking that, too," Lucas said, falling into her syntax. "If it was Wheat on. But they sold more coats out of that store. It might have been another woman…"

  At the medical examiner's, they rolled Wheaton out and peeled back the body bag. Unlike Nadya, Raul didn't flinch when the body was exposed. He looked at Wheaton's face, at her open eyes, and shook his head. "Not her. This one I saw was a younger chick, man. This one I saw was maybe… I don't know. Wash her up, maybe forty."

  "Goddamnit," said Reasons. He looked at Raul: "Can I see your green card?"

  "How'd you figure this out, man?" no-name asked Lucas.

  Lucas explained, the whole line of indications starting from the chase through the weeds, which didn't make any sense in terms of the dead man; the small figure in a long coat, seen running away from the body; the photographs of the small street woman in the long coat, murdered the night before; the cheap wine bottle in the area of the chase through the weeds. And luck: Reasons's idea about the Goodwill store, and Raul.

  "You know, it's like detective work or something," no-name marveled.

  "It's time," Lucas said. "To have a beer and think it over."

  "Are we breaking the investigation?" Nadya asked.

  Lucas had to think for a minute: "I have to talk to you about your slang. But no, not exactly."

  "More like the investigation is breaking us," Reasons said.

  "If you want to have a beer and think it over, I can tell you where to have the beer," no-name said. He took out a fat cell phone, which was also a PDA, looked up a name, and pressed the button. "Barbara, babe: we need to talk. Where are you?" He listened for a few seconds, then said, "How about we meet at Duke's? Okay."

  They sent Raul back to the Goodwill store, where he'd left his car, with a campus cop, and fifteen minutes later filed into Duke's Lounge, a lump of brown brick in a wilderness of on-ramps, at the south end of the city.