Hidden Prey

York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Star Tribune —went back to the clinic parking lot, rolled down the windows, and read newspapers for half an hour. Then Andreno said, “Here they come.”
    A nurse was pushing Melodie Walther in a wheelchair, and helped her into the car. She and Burt Walther talked for a moment, then Burt got in the car and drove away. Lucas fell in behind and closed up. When he was close enough, he could see Burt’s eyes in the rearview mirror. He hung at that distance, and Burt took them home.
    At the house, Lucas pulled to the side of the alley, next to the garage. Burt came out to meet him. “Get your wife inside, then we’ll talk.”
    “I don’t . . .” His eyes unfocused.
    “Can the senile shit,” Lucas said. “We talked to Janet Walther. She said you’re sharp as a tack.”
    Walther’s head bobbed up and down a couple of times, and he shuffled back to the car and helped his wife out, and into a wheelchair that he’d left in the garage. He pushed her up the back walk, helped her inside, with Lucas a step behind, Andreno and Nadya trailing.
    “Where’s your grandson?” Lucas asked, as Walther moved inside the house.
    “Are you going to arrest me?” Walther asked, through the open door.
    “Maybe.”
    “I want a lawyer. Right now,” Walther said. “Before I answer a single question.”
    “Your grandson may have killed the woman he lived with.”
    “Am I under arrest?”
    “Not yet.”
    “Then get out of my yard,” Walther said. He closed the door in Lucas’s face.
     
    “T HAT WAS PRETTY rude of him,” Andreno said, looking at the door.
    Lucas was smiling now: “He knows where Roger is, I think. I think we’re getting to them.”
    Lucas led the way back to the car, called Roy Hopper, the Hibbing chief, and said, “I need a favor.”
    “What?”
    “I need you to park a car outside Burt Walther’s place. The guy doesn’t need to do anything—just park it there, and watch the house.”
    “Ah, jeez, I don’t have all that many guys . . .”
    “Just . . . please.”
     
    T HE SHERIFF ’ S DEPUTIES were still at the murder scene outside Virginia. On the way back to check on progress, Lucas told Nadya, “When somebody does the lawyer thing—he wants a lawyer and he tells you that—you have to break off any questioning. That’s the way it works here. You can sometimes bullshit your way around them, but if they insist, that’s it. But the thing is, most of the time, it amounts to a kind of confession. You know you’ve got the right guy.”
    “That’s a big deal,” Andreno said. “Once you know you’ve got the right guy, you can come at him from all kinds of directions. Talk to his friends, relatives, everybody he knows. You can build a picture.”
    Nadya nodded. “I know this from my own work. Identification is perhaps more important there than here. Identification is everything.”
    “Ah, there’s still a lot of work.”
    “Oh, not really,” she said. “I tell you, you take the man down in the basement, where you have an old coal furnace, and you take off his shoes. Then you have one of these, mmm, metal cooking tools, they turn pancakes . . .”
    “Spatula,” Andreno said, and he glanced at Lucas.
    “Spatula,” she agreed. “You put this in the coals, and when it gets so hot that it is white, you start with the toes . . .”
    “Jesus Christ,” Andreno blurted out.
    Nadya had turned away, but Lucas caught the corner of a smile.
    “I think the Russian is joking us,” he said to Andreno.
     
    A T H ARBINSON ’ S HOUSE , the lead deputy said that the body had been moved, but the crime-scene crew was still picking up bits and pieces of DNA, as well as going through all the paper in the place. “We checked with the phone company, and there were no calls out of here last night. None. We’re thinking that if he’s running, and he’s got something sophisticated going, he should have called somebody .”
    “Did you check to see if he has a cell phone?”
    “We checked, but couldn’t find one. There are only three companies up here.”
    “How about bills, personal stuff?”
    “That’s what we’re looking at now. In the kitchen. We’d be happy to have your help.”
    “We can look for a while,” Lucas said. “Nothing in Russian?”
    “No.”
     
    T HEY WERE STILL THERE , an hour later, when the deputy took a call, looked at Lucas, said, “Yeah, he’s still here.” He handed the phone to Lucas, said,