Hidden Prey

Lucas: “What you’re saying is, you wouldn’t trust her any further than you could spit a rat.”
    “Did I say that?”
     
    A T EIGHT O ’ CLOCK , they were on their way back to Duluth when Lucas’s cell phone rang. Weather, he thought.
    He picked it up, said hello, and found a switchboard operator from the BCA headquarters in St. Paul. “A woman called for you. She says it’s urgent, life-and-death. She said she’s tried your hotel room in Duluth three times, but you’re never there. She’s calling from public phones . . . she says she’s the laptop lady.”
    “Ah, Jesus, is she gonna call back?”
    “I told her we could probably get in touch with you, and she said she’d call back in half an hour.”
    “Give her this number, but tell her I’ll just be getting back to Duluth and there are some cell-phone dead spots. Tell her I’ll be in my hotel by nine o’clock at the latest, or she can call me here on this phone any time after about eight forty-five.”
    “Okay.”
    “Trace the call, just in case.”
    Lucas hung up and Andreno said from the backseat, “What?”
    “The laptop lady,” Lucas said. “Life-and-death.”
    “Jesus. Maybe she knows where Roger went.”
    “How?”
    “Then what the fuck is life-and-death?”

     29 
    T HE DISAPPEARANCE OF Roger Walther, and the murder-suicide of Burt and Melodie Walther, fell on Jan Walther’s household like a thunderclap. She heard about it from a customer, rather than the police, closed the store, and drove to Burt and Melodie’s house, where she was turned back by the police.
    She saw the state cop, Davenport, and tried to flag him down. She was sure that he’d seen and heard her, but he ignored her. As the police did their work, the crowd outside the house continued to grow, now fed by rumors coming out of the police department—that the Walthers were Russian spies, and that there were other spies in the community.
    When she heard that, and with no luck talking to police at the scene, she went back home and found a message from Kurt Maisler, Burt Walther’s attorney. She called him back, and he told her of Burt’s phone call.
    “What do I do?”
    “Just sit tight. I understand the FBI is taking over. They’ll want to talk with you, and you might want to ask for representation.”
    “A lawyer? I haven’t done anything. I can’t afford one.”
    “If you can’t afford one, they have to appoint one for you. But I’d have a lawyer if any of this, uh, is true, these rumors about Burt.”
    Maisler said that the exposure of a spy ring would draw the media like flies, and after a long series of public screw-ups, the FBI was frightened to death of more bad publicity. On the rare occasion when they actually found a bad guy, they tended to tear him to bits, Maisler said. “You’ve got to be prepared.”
    She hired him. She took a check for fifty dollars to his office, promised to call him if the FBI approached her. She went back to Burt and Melodie’s house, not knowing what else she could do, and found Carl waiting for her.
     
    C ARL HAD HEARD about the murder-suicide at a service station, while he was buying gas for his old Chevy. He’d hurried downtown, found the store closed, went home, found the house empty, and continued on to Grandpa’s house. The cops wouldn’t let him within a block, so he ditched the car and walked in through alleys and backyards, joining a group of sixty or seventy people across the street. A few of them patted him on the back, a few edged away, and a couple pointed him out for the three TV cameras on the scene.
    A moment later, his mother arrived and she ran over to him and gave him a hug, and he said, “They said Grandpa and Grandma . . .”
    “It’s true,” she said. She held on to him but looked toward the house: “They won’t let us in. I’ll call Roy Hopper direct, to see what’s going on, but I think we should go back home.”
    “They’re taking pictures of us,” he said. He nodded, and she turned toward the TV cameras.
    “I think we should go back . . .”
     
    T HE PHONE WAS ringing when they got back home. TV, she thought—but it was a friend named Lucy Parks, who worked at a rug-and-tile store down the street, and who had been one grade ahead of Janet in school. “I heard what happened. Is there anything I can do?”
    “No, I don’t know what to do myself—this is crazy.”
    “Everybody’s talking about the spy business. Do you think Burt was really a spy?