Hidden Prey

phone. “I am simply designated to answer phone calls on a weekend when the temperature is eighty-four degrees, the skies are partly cloudy, and there is little or no wind to influence the flight of a golf ball. He’ll be in the office Monday.”
     
    L UCAS AND W EATHER spent a quiet Saturday at home. The missing garage door was a constant irritant. The house looked as though somebody had punched out one of its teeth.
    “Big New House looks hurt,” Weather said, as they went out for croissants in the morning, leaving Sam with the housekeeper. Later, they spent an hour at a pottery show given by one of Lucas’s old flames—Weather only cared what he was doing now , she claimed. So they looked at pots and had a nice chat with Jael, the flame, who was looking very good, and who made goo-goo noises at Sam. Sometime during the tour, it occurred to Lucas that maybe he was being shown off with a baby on his back . . . then he thought, nah, Weather wouldn’t do that.
    That afternoon, Lucas took Sam for a stroll. Actually, he took him for a five-mile run on the bike path that ran along the top of the river valley. Sam was tucked in a high-tech, big-wheeled, three-hundred-dollar tricycle stroller, designed, Weather said, expressly for yuppies. A few minutes after he got back, Letty called from canoe camp. Her school had an introductory week, involving four days of consciousness-raising in canoes, which is what you get from Episcopalian private schools, and said that her group was headed into the Boundary Waters the next morning, right after church.
     
    L ATE IN THE afternoon, Lucas read the file that Rose Marie had given him. The file had been compiled by the FBI, and included findings both by local FBI agents and the Duluth police. There was a narrative on the discovery of the body, and the search of the area around the dock, as well as interviews with the elevator worker who’d discovered the body and with members of the ship’s crew. There were photos of the victim both at the scene and at the medical examiner’s office.
    The dead man had been shot three times and fragments of two hollow-point slugs had been recovered from the body, enough to establish the killer’s weapon as a nine millimeter. The fragments were too badly damaged to match to a particular gun. One interesting note was that three shells had been found, and the shells were old—1950s vintage. They’d been polished: there were no prints.
    A man was spotted running from the dock area just as the body was discovered by a worker at the grain terminal. The man was reported as wearing a long coat. A scrawled note by the Duluth investigator, on the edge of the typed report, said, “Kid? What was coat? Check temp.”
    The report noted that the dead man’s body apparently had been searched. The Russian’s wallet and papers were missing, and maybe a money belt from around his waist—the man’s pants had been loosened, and the medical examiner found elastic-band marks in the skin aroundhis waist that were not consistent with his underpants, and which might have been consistent with a money belt.
    There were details: the Duluth cops had found a fresh trail through the weeds along the lakeshore, which showed signs of a number of falls, which they thought might represent a chase, which seemed odd, in what otherwise looked like an execution. There was no question that the dead man had been killed where he was found: there were bullet impressions on the concrete under his head.
     
    L UCAS MULLED IT all over: there was information to work with, which wasn’t always the case. He began to put together a list of questions.
     
    S ATURDAY EVENING , they barbecued: Sloan and his wife came over, and Del and his wife—Del worked in Lucas’s office and was investigating the McDonald’s thefts. Sister Mary Joseph, wearing street clothes, showed up with a post-doc student in psychology, who’d wanted to meet Weather and talk about cranial-facial surgery.
    Earlier in the summer, Lucas had met a white-haired Georgia man on a flight between Chicago and Atlanta. The man was wearing a burgundy-colored baseball cap that said Big Pig Jig on the front, and it turned out that he was a barbecue judge.
    In the ensuing conversation, James Lever of Tifton, Georgia, recommended that Lucas try his special competition Pig Jig spareribs. Getting the ingredients together had been a pain in the ass, cutting the membrane off the bone with a dull knife had been a pain in the