Hidden Prey

did. FBI agents worked in offices and did intricate investigations; they weren’t on the street. But as cops began to develop FBI-like attitudes, and to build FBI-like fortresses, as they sealed themselves away in patrol cars, as they fended off contact with the public, they began to resemble a paramilitary force, rather than peace officers.
    When Lucas was a kid, cops were part of his neighborhood, with jobs just like the mailman and the teacher. By the time Lucas had joined the Minneapolis cops, that old workaday attitude was disappearing—cops were creating their own bars, holding their own cop parties, picking up privileges that weren’t available to outsiders.
    That all began, Lucas thought, with the spreading influence of the feds, and he didn’t like it. It was bad for the country and bad for cops, he thought. And he thought it again as he checked through the airlock and was buzzed into the FBI offices in Minneapolis.
     
    C HARLES P EYTON WAS a small man, thin, blue eyed, windburned with chapped lips. He wore jeans and a long-sleeved outdoorsy blue shirt, with the sleeves rolled up over the elbows, the rolls held in place by a little buttoned tab on each sleeve; nobody ever called him Charley.
    His feet, in expensive-looking leather ankle boots, were up on one corner of his desk. He stood up when Lucas was ushered into the office, said, “Lucas, how’re you doing?” and reached across his desk to shake hands. Another man, heavier, lazy eyed, red faced, and blond, sat off to the right on a leather chair, and said, “Barney Howard,” and lifted a hand.
    Peyton pointed at a visitor’s chair and asked, “Can I get you a coffee or a Coke?”
    Lucas settled down in the chair and said, “No, thanks . . . What’s going on?”
    “Have you read the file? We sent a Xerox over to Rose Marie.”
    “Yeah,” Lucas said. “Mostly forensics.”
    “We did what we could, on the technical end, but there wasn’t much,” Peyton said. “Nothing moving.”
    “How many investigators are working it?”
    Peyton leaned back, as if chewing over what he was going to say, then leaned forward again. “Look, you’re a smart guy. That’s not moonshine, that’s the fact of the matter, and you’ve worked with some of our big guys . . .”
    “Louis Mallard,” Howard chipped in. “He says you’re a friend.”
    Lucas tipped his head: Maybe. Then again, maybe not.
    “We’ve got some people up there. Some counterintelligence people,” Peyton said. “They’re working the case, but not as criminal investigators. They’re not homicide cops.”
    “They work with you?” Lucas asked Howard.
    “Yeah.” Howard nodded, smiled, and showed large square teeth. “They’re doing a lot of analysis, looking at people coming and going through the port, that sort of thing. Computer stuff. Looking at people we know who are close to the Russians. We’ve been keeping up with the Duluth police through the office here, in Minneapolis—but when we heard that you were going up there, we thought we’d talk to you directly.”
    “About?”
    “About what you find, if anything. What you think. What you suppose. We’re interested in speculation,” he said. “We won’t interfere with your investigation and if you catch the killer, that’s fine. But if you find anything else that might suggest a Russian intelligence operation—if you find anything at all—we’d like to hear about it before the newspapers. For your protection and the protection of our people up there.”
    “Have your guys picked up anything on the murder?”
    “We poke around and hear all this stuff,” Peyton said. “We hear that the dead guy was an intelligence agent. We hear that he really was a sailor. We hear that he may have had a connection with the Russian Mafia, or that he was operating for his old man in the oil business. We hear all this stuff, and I’d give you even money that he picked up the wrong woman in some beer joint and got himself shot. But we just don’t know. ”
    “The shells that Duluth picked up were older than I am,” Lucas said. “That does sound like a beer-joint job.”
    “But it was one in the heart and two in the head, dead-on, and that sounds like a pro,” Howard replied. “There was no heat-of-passion. He was ambushed. He was hit. ”
    “But if it was an assassination, why’d they roll him?” Peyton asked Howard. “Computer disks? What?”
    “I don’t know,” Howard said. “Could be anything. But if