Hidden Prey

luck—they wouldn’t have to find a second pistol.
    At loose ends, he went back to the living room, looked at Grandma—she was asleep, he thought, her breathing imperceptible, but he touched her neck anyway, to find the artery, now so close to the skin . . . found it, and the thready beat, and felt the usual trickle of relief. Still alive.
    He could work a chess problem, but the thought bored him. Big events were under way. Lives were coming to a close. He checked Grandma again and then back to the bedroom, lay on the bed and closed his eyes.
    The cop, the state cop, had seemed bright and tough, and the Russian woman just as bright. He knew their types from the early days. He’d learned, though, that the young feared dementia—Alzheimer’s they all called it—and he knew how to play that card. He was old enough that not only did they believe the act, they expected it. He smiled and drifted . . .
    The feel and smell of the gun took him back, all the way back. He’d been a young boy in Moscow when the revolution swept through. He could remember the crowds in the streets, the excited arguments between the adults, people rushing into the house with newspapers. His father was a Bolshevik from the start; when his father died, too young, in the winter of 1921, Sergey Vasilevich Botenkov had been taken in by his old comrades, shown how to use a rifle, and had gone off to fight the Whites.
    He’d been little more than a boy, but he’d done well. He was trusted. And when he was grown, when he was eighteen, he’d been sent to the Ukraine to help with the elimination of the kulak class.
    He remembered one place, one city, where they’d brought the kulaks in trucks, unloaded them in the city park, hands tied behind themby the soldiers. He and the other executioners shot each one in the back of the head and let them topple into the grave; nine shots and reload, nine shots and reload. A cigarette, a bottle of tea, another truck full of the enemies of the state.
    Sergey Vasilevich Botenkov lay on his bed and remembered.
    And smiled.

     23 
    T HEY FOUND J AN W ALTHER in the back of Mesaba Frame and Artist’s Supply, doing inventory on her acrylic paints; the place smelled of paint and freshly cut wood and coffee. They’d been to her house, had been told by a neighbor that she and Roger Walther had divorced years before, and that while Roger was still around, the neighbor didn’t know where.
    “Good riddance, if you ask me,” the neighbor said. She had the eyes of a chicken, small and suspicious. “He used to beat her, and the boy, too. More’n one time she’d be hiding a black eye. He drinks, is what does it.”
    If they wanted him, the neighbor said, Jan would probably know where he was: “He must be paying child support; I don’t think she makes enough to support both her and the boy.” She directed them to the frame store, just off Hibbing’s main drag.
     
    W ALTHER WAS A BUSY , pretty woman, with the beginnings of worry lines on her forehead and at the corners of her eyes and mouth. She was wearing a pink blouse with a round-tipped collar, inexpensive beige slacks, and a matching vest, with an arty silver dangle on a chain. With a round face and ten extra pounds, she was precisely a Minnesota Scandinavian; and when they came in, a bell jingling overhead, she was happy to see them.
    That didn’t last.
    Lucas identified himself, told her that they were investigating the murders of two Russians and a cop, and she put both hands at her throat and said, “What do you want from me?”
    “We’d like to talk to your husband,” Lucas said. “We really don’t know who is doing what, but there seems to be a group of associated families up here, and he belongs to one of them. We think they may have been spies for the Soviet Union.”
    “The Walthers? That’s ridiculous. They’ve been here forever. They’re from German stock, not Russian . . .” But her interlaced fingers were white as chalk.
    “You wouldn’t know about these people, whoever they are?” Nadya asked.
    “Well, sure, I know Grandpa Walther,” she said. “I never knew Roger’s parents. They were killed in a car accident. This spy thing . . . you’re not joking? This is absolutely ridiculous. If this rumor gets out, you’ll ruin my business . . .” Now she had tears in her eyes.
    Nadya was not sympathetic. “Did Roger tell you that he was a spy?”
    “No. No. Roger’s not a spy. If you knew Roger . . .