Hidden Prey ld-15

by John Sandford

  The place was full of neon beer signs and dark wood, with a coin-op shuffleboard game in the back. Four guys in backwards ball caps sat talking at the bar; the bartender himself sat on a stool and leaned back toward an aged Schlitz sign with a hole in it, so he could read a book in the light coming through the hole.

  When they all walked in, the guys at the bar stopped talking and looked at no-name's shorts, and the bartender said, "Barb's in the back booth." At the same time, a woman in a black leather jacket stood up and said, "Here," and the guys at the bar started talking again.

  Lucas, Nadya, Reasons, and no-name, who'd finally introduced himself as Larry Kelly, trooped to the back, clunking along the wooden floor. Lucas stopped to look at an old Budweiser-made print of Custer being wiped out by the Sioux at Little Bighorn.

  Nadya stopped at his elbow, took in the print, and said, "Why do Americans celebrate defeats?"

  Lucas shrugged. "Like what?"

  "Bunker Hill, the Alamo, Custer, Pearl Harbor, the Chosin Reservoir, September eleventh-I have even seen this movie Blackhawk Down. It seems strange."

  "You know a lot about our history," Lucas said.

  "I studied it, of course. But this is not so much history as psychology."

  Lucas looked at the picture for a few more seconds; in the lower right corner, an Indian was peeling the scalp off a dead cavalryman. "I don't know why we do it," he said. "But we do, don't we?"

  They went on to the back, where Kelly introduced Barbara Langersham, a woman in her early forties, dark haired, dark eyed, broken nosed. A white scar, a match for the one on Lucas's forehead, disappeared up into her hairline.

  "Barbara knows all the street people," he said. "She works for Catholic Charities."

  "Doesn't have a hell of a lot of Catholic charity, though," Reasons grumbled.

  "It all depends on what you want, doesn't it Jerry?" Langersham said, and Lucas thought, Oops.

  Only four of them could fit in the booth, so Reasons and Lucas pulled up chairs and they all ordered beer, and Kelly said, "Barbara: Mary Wheaton, you've read about it."

  "Yes." She poured her beer expertly into a pilsner glass, so the head came just over the top, not too thick. "I heard her head was almost cut off."

  "Yeah. Now-we think there's a possibility that whoever killed her was the same guy who killed the Russian last week. But they got the wrong woman. Was there another woman street person around here, who walked around in a long green army coat?"

  "Ah… shoot." She thought for a moment. "I don't remember one. But I think Mary only had that coat for a day or two. I only saw her with it once. Like she just got it. I remember thinking it was too hot."

  "We're looking for a woman who might have lived across the street from the Goodwill store," Lucas said. "Might have been a redhead, or sort of reddish hair, maybe forty."

  "Somebody saw her?"

  "Yeah, but not somebody who could give us any information," Reasons said. "He just saw her."

  Langersham licked a bit of foam off her upper lip, then said, to Reasons, "You know I don't like to talk to cops."

  "But you do, when you need something," Reasons said. "The fact is, this other woman is in trouble. If the killer knows he got the wrong woman…"

  They didn't have to draw a picture. Langersham said, "There was another woman. I think her name was Trey, but I don't know her last name. She wasn't forty-she was more like early thirties. I suppose, when she had a little dirt on her, she could go for forty. I saw her, I don't know, a couple of weeks ago, panhandling up at Miller Hill Mall. I haven't seen her since. I did see her, earlier this summer, a couple of times, maybe three times, on the Garfield Avenue bus. This was at night, I saw the bus going by, so she might have been going out Garfield. Toward the Goodwill."

  "Tray, like ashtray," Kelly said.

  "I think it was Trey, like a three-card," Langersham said. "I don't think she interacted too much with the cops, or anybody, for that matter. She pretty much stayed to herself."

  "Anything else?" Lucas asked. "You know if she was ever arrested… ?"

  Langersham shook her head. "I just don't know. She was well-spoken, like she'd had some schooling. I mean, she wasn't a dropout, or anything. I think she probably took a lot of dope sometime or other; she knew all the words, and she had that doper sense of humor. She was very good at picking out guys who'd cough up a buck."

  "We can look through arrest reports; try to look her up in the nickname file," Reasons said.

  They sat and talked and ate potato chips for a half hour, much of the conversation between Nadya and Langersham as the men sat back and listened. Nadya was fascinated by the underage-hooker world that Langersham worked: "We have the same problems in Moscow, but we don't even know how to start with it," she said.

  "Look to your religious people," Langersham said. "Cops won't work, because they're in the crime life. The only thing that attracts these kids is the belief that somebody actually cares about them."

  "But not police," Nadya said.

  "Not police. You can't pretend to care about them. You've actually got to care. About them, personally, one-on-one. So-recruit the religious. It'll give them something worthwhile to do, instead of shaking their beads at some bishop. You got bishops in Russia?"

  "Everywhere," Nadya said. "More than anyone could need."

  Langersham nodded: "That's a problem. You've got to get your religious people away from the bishops. Get them out in the streets. If everybody saved just one person… we'd all be saved. And it'd do wonders for both sides."

  They sat in silence for a minute, and then Reasons said, "Right on. Pass the joint."

  "Fuck you, Jerry," Langersham said; but she was smiling when she said it. "Your turn to buy a round."

  Chapter 7

  Trey sat in a Country Kitchen in Hudson, Wisconsin, eating French toast with link sausage, reading a copy of the St. Paul Pioneer Press, a story out of Duluth:

  Mary Wheaton lies in the county morgue, a few doors down from Rodion Oleshev, a Russian sailor-or perhaps a spy-who was executed at the TDX grain terminal two weeks ago.

  Nobody has been arrested in the murders-but now a top state investigator and a Russian policewoman, teamed with Duluth police, may have forged a link between the two brutal killings.

  "We believe that somebody killed Mary Wheaton to silence her," said Duluth Police Sgt. Jerry Reasons. "We believe that she may have witnessed the murder of Mr. Oleshev."

  Reasons said that police have developed specific information to link the two killings, but would not elaborate. Sources at the police department, however, said that fibers found in a hut where Wheaton was believed to have lived were matched with the military coat that Wheaton was wearing when she was killed-and the hut contained papers that appeared to have been taken from the body of Rodion Oleshev.

  Reasons said that he and Lucas Davenport, an agent for the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, and Nadya Kalin, an officer of the Russian…

  The story went on, but Trey's eyes had gone watery: she wasn't seeing it. The killer had come back for her, and he must have found Mary, thinking she was Trey.

  For just an instant, the wary, feral, traveling Trey felt a pulse of victory: if the police knew there was a witness to the murder-and they must have known that because somebody at the grain terminal had seen her, had shouted at her-and if they thought that person was dead… she was safe.

  Then the Annabelle Ramford lawyer brain clicked over: it wouldn't happen. Too many people knew her, and too many knew Mary. If they checked with Tony on the bus route, he would tell them that Mary hadn't lived in the hut, and that another woman had worn the coat.

  The cashier at the Goodwill store who'd sold her the coat-she'd remember, too. She'd tried to wipe out the prints in the shack, but there must have been hair left behind-and if they compared the hair from the hut with Mary's hair, they'd know that there was another woman.

  A live witness. They'd come looking.

  Trey had always viewed
her life as a strange trip: strange from the time she'd been old enough to understand the concept. The last years of high school, all of college, the crack years, the traveling time, all strange. She seemed at times to be standing outside of her body, watching herself doing something crazy. A rational, coldly realistic Annabelle standing to one side, watching a mindless, pleasure-hungry Trey fire up a crack pipe. An intelligent, skeptical, upper-middle-class lawyer watching an out-of-control freak eating discarded pizza from a garbage can on the Santa Monica Mall.

  Life had always been strange, but nothing, she thought, had ever matched the strangeness of the past few days.

  Squatting there in the shack, stuffing money into her backpack, scrubbing all the wooden surfaces with a rag-get rid of the fingerprints, her only thought-she'd been aware that the world had shifted. There'd been an earthquake. She was no longer a bum; she was back in the middle class, a woman of substance. A woman with liquidity.

  When the cops came, their sirens seemed aimed at her hideout-but then they turned away, bumping across the rough road down to the TDX terminal. When God gave her the few minutes she needed to finish cleaning the shack, she slid beneath the floorboards, pulling her pack behind her. The pack was stuffed with money and her clothes.

  The shack was on Garfield Avenue, one of the gritty working streets found on the outskirts of all industrial towns: heavy-equipment repair shops, lumberyards, warehouses, like that, all dressed in gray and grime and broken glass. Dirt roads and railroad tracks crisscrossed the area, with weeds and brush growing up between them.

  Trey stayed in the weeds, like a wild animal, stuck to the shadows, heading toward town by a long, looping route. To the north, near the terminal, a dozen cop cars were scattered around the concrete ramp, roof racks flashing, and she could see men with flashlights, and she could hear people calling to one another.

  When she'd gone far enough that she felt she could risk it, she crossed Garfield to the south, toward the highway overpasses coming in from Wisconsin, a wilderness of train tracks, mud, weeds. In the green army coat, with the dark blue backpack, she was invisible.

  An hour after she set out, she'd crossed an I-35 overpass into Duluth proper and started up the hill above the lake. At two o'clock in the morning, she arrived at the garage where she'd once spent a few nights. The place was full of junk piled around a wrecked car, and the floor was oily, and there were rats… but it was out of sight and dry.

  She tried to sleep: got three hours, at best, interspersed with long fantasies of having the bag taken from her. She'd never been afraid of bogeymen in the dark, not after living with the candy man. Now she had something to lose, and the fear crept around her.

  At sunrise, she started out again, now with a plan. She crawled up to the top of the city, to an all-night laundromat, sat inside and washed the best clothes she had-jeans, a black Rolling Stones T-shirt, underpants, and bra. She threw in her towel and washcloth. Her shoes were okay, a pair of cheap boating sneaks she could wear without socks.

  When it was all washed and dried, she repacked and started out again, downtown this time, to the ladies' room in the skyway. It was still early, and she had the place to herself. She washed in patches, at the sink, then got impatient, soaked the whole towel, retreated to one of the bathroom stalls, stripped, washed herself clean, and put on the clean clothes. The old clothes, the dirty clothes, she stuffed in the pack on top of the money. Everything went in the bag except the army coat, which was too big.

  Still nobody in the rest room.

  Taking a chance-if the cops caught you, they'd toss you back out on the street-she washed her hair in the rest-room sink, using hand soap from the dispenser. She patted her hair dry with paper towels and looked at herself in the mirror. She was presentable, but just barely. She looked, she thought, like a woman just back from three weeks in the wilderness. Or maybe six weeks. Or ten. But when she left the skyway restroom, she was mostly clean, and barely resembled the woman who'd gone in.

  On the way down the street, she took the dirty clothes out of her pack and dropped them in a trash basket. She carried the army coat, still unwilling to give it up.

  Her first stop was at a drugstore. Under the careful eye of a sales clerk, she bought deodorant, razor blades and a razor, fingernail clippers, tweezers, a hairbrush and comb, a bottle of soap, and two tubes of lipstick. She was about to check out when she caught sight of herself in a mirror on a Camel's display; she went back into the store and bought a bottle of moisturizing lotion.

  The next stop was the Westerway Motel, where she'd stayed three or four times when she had the money, before she hit bottom. The place was dank, the beds were crappy, but the price was right and the showers were just as good as the showers at the Radisson. Most important, they'd let her in.

  At the Westerway, she stood in the shower for fifteen minutes. She would have taken a bath, but the tub was so grimy that it frightened her. Besides, somebody had stolen the drain plug. Who in the fuck, she wondered, jabbing at the furry hole with her big toe, would steal a drain plug? Never mind. When she was thoroughly clean, she began grooming herself. Nothing she could do about her hair, she thought: she looked like a witch.

  Clean, dry, nails clipped, deodorized, and moisturized, she headed downtown. Stopped at a bank, where she changed three hundreds into twenties. Passed a test, too: a woman rubbed one of the hundreds with a test pen, and they were fine. If they'd been fake, Trey thought, she'd have had a heart attack.

  She would catch a cab, she thought, and head up to a sporting-goods store across the highway from the Miller Hill Mall, and buy a real pack, the kind young women sometimes traveled with. An expensive one.

  On the way down the street, she passed Hair Today, and saw the sign in the window that said, "We Take Walk-Ins," and she walked in.

  By noon, she had a cut and a 'do that would take her anyplace in Minnesota; she still had that burned-out, feral face, but you couldn't see that from behind.

  And by two o'clock, she had a new backpack full of new clothes from the Miller Hill Mall, two delicate pearl earrings, and a selection of expensive facial creams and moisturizers.

  Back at the Westerway, she gathered up the few remaining pieces of her old identity, her old pack and the coat, and carried them out to a trash can. As she was about to dump them in, she saw Mary Wheaton rattling down the street with her cart.

  The coat, she thought, was perfectly good…

  "Mary…"

  The older woman turned and looked and kept going. Trey caught up with her: "Mary. You want my coat?"

  Wheaton looked at her nearsightedly, then looked at the coat. "Who're you?"

  "I'm… just a person. You want the coat?"

  Wheaton took the coat, shook it, looked at it, and said, "You don't want it?"

  "No more."

  Wheaton nodded, put the coat in the cart, and rattled away without a backward glance. She and Trey had talked a dozen times, and Wheaton knew her. This time she showed no sign of recognition.

  Back at the Westerway, she looked in the mirror: she was changing, she thought. She tried to spot one thing that made the difference, but finally decided it wasn't one thing-it was a haircut that looked paid for, rather than done with manicure scissors or a knife; it was a face that looked cared for, instead of desert dry and flaking; it was an uprightness.

  The next morning she left the Westerway, walked downtown, and caught a cab to the airport. She didn't have a reservation, so she had to sit in the terminal for six hours, until she got a seat on a Northwest flight to Minneapolis.

  She took a cab from the airport to the University of Minnesota, where she bought a used Corolla for cash from a Lebanese graduate student who seemed nothing less than grateful for the money. Not a great car, with 85,000 miles, but it would do. As soon as she got the paper on it, she'd trade up: changing $50,000 into usable money wasn't all that easy, but she knew a few tricks from her doper days.

  From Minneapolis, she moved on to Hudson, Wisconsin, on the Mi
nnesota border twelve miles from St. Paul, where she knew a motel that would take cash, and wouldn't ask to see a credit card. Again, not a great place, but she was developing a base.

  The next move: an apartment in the city, a bank account, and credit card applications. She saw the applications everywhere, and took them.

  She was still in Hudson, waiting to be approved for an apartment in suburban St. Paul, when she sat down to eat French toast and link sausages in the Hudson Country Kitchen, and opened the paper to the story from Duluth.

  Mary Wheaton was dead…

  She sat and leaked tears for a while, read the rest of the story, looked at photographs of the cops standing outside her old hut in Duluth, then firmed up and finished her breakfast.

  She'd go see about the apartment, and then she'd think.

  Something had to be done.

  Chapter 8

  Lucas woke with a start.

  There was a noise somewhere, in the room. The room was dimly lit, the light coming from cracks at the sides of the blackout curtain, so it must be after dawn. He glanced at the illuminated face of the bedside clock: eight in the morning. The sound wasn't threatening, there was no intruder in the room, but what…?

  He groped until he found the bedside light, turned it on. The sound was coming from the telephone: not a ring, but a low, strangled jingle, as if somebody had punched the phone in the solar plexus and it hadn't gotten its voice back.

  He picked it up. "Yeah?" His voice sounded like a rusty coffin hinge in a horror movie.

  "You told me to call," Reasons said. "I'm just leaving my house."

  He stifled the impulse to moan. "Is there any air outside?"

  "What?"

  "Never mind. I'll be down in the lobby in twenty minutes. Did you call Nadya?"

  "Yup. She sounds like she's been up for a while."

  "I have been too, I've been up for hours," Lucas said. He yawned. He'd never been an early riser. "I was doing my push-ups."