Hidden Prey

shard of glass, which he removed with a pair of tweezers.
    When he’d finished, Nadya asked Lucas to take a picture of her with the blood on her face: “This I can use,” she said. She posed next to the ambulance, with Carl’s feet visible on a gurney, her face smeared with blood.
     
    T WO DAYS LATER , she was gone. Lucas dropped her at Minneapolis–St. Paul International, and said, “Well: it’s been real.”
    “What is this ‘real’?”
    “I mean, it’s been interesting.”
    “I think I have been a pain in your ass,” she said, smiling at him.
    “Ah, well . . .”
    “I’m so sorry about Jerry . . .” Her smile disappeared. “This will not go away.”
    “Nothing you could do. You did nothing wrong—except run into a crazy kid.”
    “Who thought he was working for Mother Russia.” They were coming up to the security screening, and she sighed, stood on her tiptoes, kissed him on the cheek. “If you ever come to Russia . . .”
    “Right.”
    She smiled again. “I know—you won’t. But if you do . . .” She patted him on the chest. “Say good-bye to Weather for me. I like her very much. And I think she has a very good husband.”
     
    T HE DAY AFTER THAT , he’d gotten comfortable with his couch again.
    He was lying on it, reading GQ, an article about a specially spun wool used by an Italian tailor, for suits that cost six thousand dollars. He would not pay six thousand dollars for a suit under any conditions, he decided. Well. It’d have to be a really good suit.
    He was reading about bespoke shoes when heard a car enter the driveway, and then a quick beep on a horn. He’d been waiting for it. He dropped the magazine, rolled off the couch, and headed out the front door. Weather was there, standing back, looking at her new red BMW 330 sedan. “It’s not as good-looking as the Prelude,” she fretted.
    “It’s better -looking than the Prelude,” Lucas said, walking around the car. “It’s just different.”
    “More practical,” she said. “All-wheel drive and you can carry more stuff.”
    “I got your practical right here,” Lucas said. “You don’t buy a forty-thousand-dollar car to haul celery.” He patted the car on the ass. “You buy it because it’s an artwork. Just don’t drive it through the fuckin’ garage door.”
    She looked at the new garage door, then said, “What about Carl?”
    When they’d gotten Carl to the hospital, an examination showed that a piece of the bullet jacket had fragmented off and had ripped into his sphincter muscle. That could have been serious, but a delicate operation had removed the remains of the bullet and had repaired the damage to the muscle.
    “I talked to the doc about an hour ago—everything went fine. He won’t be running for a while.”
    “Thirty years, if you have anything to say about it.”
    “The little asshole killed Jerry Reasons,” Lucas said. “And the Russian. I have a hard time feeling any sympathy for him.”
    “Good-looking guy, though,” Weather said. She turned back to her car. “Would blue have been better?”
     
    A FEW MORE days went by. Weather began driving the new BMW into the driveway at fifty miles an hour, and Del got surveillance on the McDonald’s truck deliveries.
    The St. Louis County attorney announced that the grand jury had indicted Carl Walther on charges of first-degree murder in the killings of both Rodion Oleshev and Jerry Reasons. The feds indicted Anthony Spivak on espionage charges, and the county attorney dropped charges of accessory to murder, saying that they were redundant in light of the federal charges. In fact, he seemed pleased to get out from under the Spivak case.
    Lucas heard from Harmon, unofficially, that Janet Walther was willing to talk about the espionage ring if she could make a deal for Carl.
    The deal would be a tough one, though: the Duluth cops were convinced that Carl had killed Jerry Reasons, and they wanted him put away. The only problem was that they had little evidence, other than Lucas’s story of chasing a man up and down the hills, and some general descriptions from the women behind the hotel desk.
    On the other hand, the blood from the switchblade definitely was Carl Walther’s, and Carl had definitely gone to the emergency room the night Oleshev was murdered, within a couple of hours of the murder taking place.
    Carl claimed that the cut on his arm had come from a broken window in Grandpa’s basement. The feds, as it happened, had