Hidden Prey

well . . . against the odds, it became something.”
    “About the kid . . .”
    “If it’s the kid, we could probably crack him. Our interrogators could. That’s if he knows something. He’s the age where they’re easy to manipulate,” Harmon said.
    “But you don’t want in on the criminal investigation? I mean like, today?”
    “You’re going so well . . . keep going. I’ll tell the local guys you’re coming back.”
    Del called from the lab:
    “Yellow-handled switchblade in a plastic bag. The package was addressed with a computer-printed address label. She made the label with a piece of typing paper Scotch taped to the package, and the evidence guy here says we’re not going to get anything on her off the package, and he’s willing to bet we’re not going to get anything on her off the knife, either. She was pretty careful.”
    “How about the blood?”
    “It’s blood, all right. All gummy down in the grooves. We’ll have it typed before you get up there, and we’ll see if the kid has a blood type on record. You going right now?”
    “Yup.”
    “Call you on the way.”
    “Hey, Del?”
    “Yeah?”
    “I’m really fascinated by that McDonald’s stuff.”
    “Fuck you, pal.”
     
    M ORE CALLS . He arranged for a search warrant and called Dannie Carson, a BCA investigator who had been working in Brainerd on an old case involving the killing of a hooker, and asked her to meet himin Hibbing. “We’re gonna get some DNA evidence and look at a kid for murder,” he said.
    He called the Hibbing police chief, explained about the phone call from the laptop woman, the knife, the search warrant, and the need for somebody to take a DNA sample.
    “You sure it’s Carl? He always seemed like a pretty good kid to me,” Hopper said in a worried tone.
    “He was over there, giving her a hug. He looked like her. If it’s not her kid, it’s somebody she knows pretty well.”
    “Of course, it could all be bullshit, this call from the woman.”
    “Yeah, it could be. But I don’t think so. The knife will tell us, the DNA. If you got a DNA guy handy . . .”
    “We use the pathologist over at the hospital. Be on your ticket, though. He isn’t cheap.”
    “Tell him today at two o’clock. And we’d like you to send a car along with us.”
    And Lucas called Nadya: “Be ready to go.”
     
    N OW THINGS WERE running: Lucas was out of the building, heading north again. Listening to Tom Petty and Mary Jane’s Last Dance, Lynyrd Skynyrd, That Smell. Cop songs. Closing-in music. Fast up I-35, fast through a hundred and fifty miles of aspen and birch and cattails and pine trees and small lakes with boats . . . cutting into Duluth, the big lake opening out below him, snatching Nadya off the blacktop at her hotel, heading north up into the Range . . .
    “I think this is amazing,” Nadya said, when he picked her up.
    “I think so, too,” Lucas said. “But it feels right.”
     
    D ANNIE C ARSON WAS a large woman, not fat, but big as a door: wide shouldered, wide hipped, like a female tackle. She was alsointensely personable, and one of the best interrogators Lucas had ever met. Sympathy gushed out of her, and not many suspects could resist it.
    She met him at the Hibbing police station: “What’re we doing?”
    “Pick up the kid, bring him here, get him a lawyer. Look at his arm. If he shows any kind of scar, we arrest him on suspicion of murder and do the DNA test. Short and sweet.”
    Hopper, the chief, said, “Is this the end of it?”
    “Can’t tell. Still don’t know what happened to Roger.”
    “Well, things are really pretty screwed up around here—Janet Walther’s pretty popular, and this guy up in Virginia . . .”
    “Spivak.”
    “Yeah, the TV is saying the case against him is really thin and that he was even assaulted by the Russians, much less helping them.”
    “I’m gonna let the FBI worry about all of that,” Lucas said. “I’m just gonna worry about the kid.”
    “The kid’s in school,” Hopper said. “I checked. I didn’t let on why, and told the principal to keep my call under her hat.”
    “What is this hat?” Nadya asked.
     
    A T TWO O ’ CLOCK , they headed for Janet Walther’s frame shop in a three-car parade—the chief, followed by Lucas, Nadya, and Dannie Carson in Lucas’s Acura, and a squad car with two cops. Walther was alone in her shop, and angry when she saw Lucas; Hopper took off his hat when they walked inside, and Nadya