Hidden Prey

television, and went back to the porch.
    Andreno looked at his face and said, “What?”
    “She’s in there,” Lucas said.
    “She’s dead,” Nadya said.
    “Yes. Shot in the forehead.”
    “This is nuts,” Andreno said.
     
    L UCAS CALLED T ERRY BACK : “We got a problem out here, Chief. Who covers this area?”
    “St. Louis County sheriff. What do you got?”
    Lucas told him, and Terry said, “Jesus Christ, Davenport, you’re some kind of death angel.”
    “Yeah, yeah . . .”
    “I’ll get the sheriff started, and we’ll get a couple cars out there—we got a mutual aid pact. Ten minutes.”
     
    L UCAS HUNG UP and Andreno said, “Roger Walther.”
    “Didn’t take her with him,” Lucas said. “I hope somebody has a picture.”
    “His wife . . .”
    Lucas said to Nadya: “Okay. We’ve got a lot of stuff to do now. We’ve got to put out a bulletin on this guy, and since he might have been working with somebody from Russia, we’ll have to make it international. Can you call your embassy . . .”
    They were making up a list of must-do tasks when they heard the first siren coming in: Lucas turned toward the siren, then back to the other two.
    “We’ll hit Janet Walther first, ask if she’s seen him. Then hit the oldman again—Nadya thinks he might have been fucking with us with the Alzheimer’s act. Start the cops looking either for his car, or Harbinson’s. Check the state registrations for both of them, get the tag numbers out to the highway patrol and everybody else. Get the name to the security people at the airports . . .”
    “If these cells were set up to move people, then he could be hard to locate,” Nadya said. “They would have protected routes out.”
    “I don’t know—all I know is what we can do,” Lucas said. He turned and looked toward the incoming cop car, and then back to Nadya. “There’s something not quite right with this whole thing. You say the group wasn’t active as far as you know . . . if they were active, would somebody have told you? Warned you off?”
    “Yes. And nobody did. There would be some indication that while they wanted enthusiasm, they did not want success. I never got that. It was the other way around—that I should learn what is happening, and we should not spare ourselves. That is why Piotr is dead.”
    Lucas said, “I’m just not sure how far I can trust you.”
    “That’s for you to decide,” she said. “But—we are breaking this case. We will join you in the hunt for Roger Walther, and if he is running to us, we will tell you.”
    “You will give him back?”
    She shrugged. “That’s not for me to decide. He did murder a popular diplomat.”
    He looked at her for a long moment, and then as the cop car turned into the yard, and he saw John Terry’s face in the window, he nodded and said, “Okay. For now, anyway.”

     26 
    L UCAS PUSHED RELENTLESSLY through their list. They were on the scene of the killing for two hours, handed it over first to the Virginia cops, then to a sheriff’s deputy named Max Anderson. They were there long enough for an assistant medical examiner to guess that Harbinson had been dead for twelve hours, or less.
    “That’s just a guess based on body temp,” he said. He was a young man, thin with blond shaggy hair; prematurely shabby and quite earnest. “The temperature in here is actually fairly low, and she hadn’t gotten down to room temp. So . . . last night.”
     
    A SHERIFF ’ S TECHNICIAN SAID , “I saw that shell from the shooting down in Hibbing. The one at the Greyhound Museum. The shells we picked up back there . . .” He nodded toward the bedroom.“They look the same to me. That’s just eyeballing it, but the firing-pin depth looks about the same, and it’s round, and it’s off center on the primer, just a hair, like the one from the museum.”
    “When will we know for sure?”
    “I’ve got digital microphotographs on my computer back at the office. If I could get these back there, I could tell you ninety-nine percent in an hour, but I’m working on the scene here . . .”
    “Screw the scene. Let me get you a car,” Lucas said.
     
    T ERRY , THE V IRGINIA CHIEF , came out of the bedroom and noticed Lucas looking into a front-room closet, and asked, “Everything under control?”
    “No.” And Lucas asked, “Did it rain all night?”
    “Pretty much. Why?”
    “Walther didn’t take his raincoat,” Lucas said, pulling a trench-coat