Hidden Prey

put it off.”
    “Keep putting it off. We got no money for nothin’.”
    “Absolutely speaking, or relatively speaking?”
    “Relatively. I’m not nearly stupid enough to be absolutely broke.” More twiddling, and a couple of more drumbeats, then, “So I could get you free for a week or two—you personally?”
    “For the spy?”
    “We’ve got a Russian coming in,” she began. “The State Department called the governor . . .”
     
    T HE DEAD R USSIAN , she said, had been named Oleg Moshalov, according to his seaman’s papers, but FBI counterintelligence had identified him as a Rodion Oleshev, once an agent for the Russian KGB. They’d spotted and printed him when he’d been stationed in Washington as a junior attaché in the late 1980s.
    “The feds don’t know what he was doing in Duluth, or why he was doing it. The Russians say he was fired during the big government layoffs in the nineties and he joined the merchant marine. He was supposedly the first officer on this ship,” Rose Marie said. She snubbed out her cigarette, went to the window, opened it, fanned some smoke toward the opening. “The feds say that’s bullshit. They say he was on an intelligence mission and somebody murdered him. They interviewed the ship’s captain and crew, and they all said he really was the first officer . . . Well. Read the report.” She stepped back to her desk and touched a file folder, and nudged it an inch closer to Lucas.
    He didn’t move. “Okay. What then?”
    “Nothing much, for a while,” she sat down again, heavily. “The Russians denied everything, and the case was being handled by some Joe Blow at their consulate as a routine misadventure. The investigationwas a dead end. Then, out of the blue, two days ago, the Russians call up the FBI and start screaming for action. Turns out that the dead guy’s father is a big shot in the oil ministry—it took them that long to figure out who Oleshev really was. The father talked to Putin and now their embassy is jumping up and down and the State Department’s got the vapors. The Russians are sending an observer to see what the FBI and the Duluth cops have been doing. He’s scheduled into Duluth on Monday afternoon.”
    “What’s everybody been doing?”
    “The usual workup, but the case isn’t going anywhere,” Rose Marie said. “It looks like a planned ambush. The feds, the local guys in Duluth, think it’s Russian on Russian. And they don’t care about the State Department. Not much, anyway.”
    “A cluster fuck.”
    “Exactly. Nobody knows who’s doing what to whom. Mitford and I thought you could go up there. When this Russian arrives, take him on a tour of the crime scene and fill him in on what everybody’s done.”
    “Mitford wants it fixed.” Mitford was the governor’s top aide, what the newspaper called his go-to guy.
    “He wants everything made nice,” Rose Marie said. “He wants people to cooperate with each other, and to shake hands and agree that this was a tragedy, and that what could be done, was done.”
    Rose Marie stopped talking, and for a moment, they examined each other across her desk: the years really were piling up, Lucas thought. Rose Marie had crossed the physical border that comes in the late fifties or early sixties, when people begin to look old. Not that she’d particularly worry about it. Like Lucas and Weather, she worked all the time.
    “So you want me to do PR,” Lucas said into the silence.
    “Do me a favor,” Rose Marie said. She nudged the file another inch closer to Lucas. “Go up and look around. See if you can figure something out. If you can, that’s fine. If not, fuck it—just make us look good.Right now, we look bad and everybody’s annoyed. And we’ve got this budget thing on our back. The goddamned legislature . . .”
     
    T HERE WAS NO big hurry to the job. Lucas called Duluth from Rose Marie’s outer office, talked to the cop who was covering the homicide, and made arrangements to meet him on Monday morning. Then he called the Minneapolis office of the FBI, left a message for the special agent in charge, who was, he was told, “in Kenora, discussing border problems with his opposite number in the RCMP.”
    “In an office or out in a boat?” Lucas asked. The SAC had been in the newspaper for taking a fly-fishing record for northern pike on one-pound tippet.
    “I have no information about boats, nor would I rule boats out,” said the fed who’d answered the