Hidden Prey

pointing down into Minnesota; the lake itself is sunken into the landscape, with steep hills and bluffs along the shore. On the east side of the tip of the knife point is Superior, Wisconsin; Duluth, Minnesota, is on the west side, built on the flats along the lake, up a long lakeside hill, and then onto the plateau west of the crest.
    The main airport is on the west side, a twenty-minute drive from the lake. They took Garfield Avenue out of the terminal area, crossed the interstate, climbed the hill, and dodged traffic on the main east-west drag. Lucas knew a little about the town, but Reasons kept up a running commentary on the local attractions as he drove, and got Lucas oriented on the main business and governmental areas.
    “Be a nice place if it wasn’t so fuckin’ cold,” Lucas said.
    “Ah, it ain’t bad. When it gets really bad in January, we can always run down to the Cities and get a little sun.”
    “Very little sun,” Lucas said. “The whole fuckin’ state’s a freezer.”
    “I kind of like it,” Reasons said.
    “Yeah, so do I.”
     
    T HE AIRPORT TERMINAL building was a concrete-and-red-brick wedge. They parked in an open lot and went inside, showed their ID to security so nobody would get excited about their guns, and figured out where the baggage would be coming in.
    “I can’t remember a case like this Russian,” Reasons said, as they walked to the baggage claim. “Sixty percent of the time, you know whodid it two minutes after you arrive. Twenty-five percent of the time, you figure it out in the next day or two. The rest of the time, you look at it and you say, shit—we ain’t gonna solve this one. And you don’t, except by accident.” He turned and stared out one of the windows, brooding a bit: “This one’s like a hybrid—a lot of dumb-fuck stuff, and the rest of it is ‘Uh-oh, we ain’t gonna solve it.’ ”
    “Planned, cold, probably for business or political or money reasons—maybe even espionage reasons—but with an old gun and crappy ammo and he almost breaks a leg running off into the weeds,” Lucas said.
    “Don’t know it was an old gun,” Reasons said.
    “Who’d put fifty-year-old ammo in a new gun?” Lucas asked. “You pay four or five hundred dollars for a gun, and you’re not gonna pay ten bucks for a box of nines?”
    Reasons nodded: “Won’t argue with that.”
     
    T HE N ORTHWEST FLIGHT was only ten minutes late. When they’d confirmed the arrival time, they wandered off, both bought copies of the Duluth News Tribune. Lucas turned to the sports to see what, if anything, had happened with the Twins. They’d lost to Baltimore, 6–1; the story didn’t try to make the game sound exciting.
    The front page was dominated by a hard-news story and a sidebar, a weeper, about the murdered street person:
    Mary Wheaton was a thin, round-shouldered woman who pushed a shopping cart full of treasures she collected daily from the gutters and alleys of Duluth, a familiar figure to downtown store owners. They were shocked when they heard of her murder.
    “She wasn’t quite right, but there was nothing bad about her,” said Bob Anderson, of Five Corners Hardware. “She’d come in most days and get a dollar from somebody. The folks at the Burger King’d always give her a burger and fries.That’s about all she needed to keep herself together. I hope to God they get the animal who did this . . .”
    The rest of the story was in the same vein. A file photo showed Wheaton pushing a shopping cart along a downtown street, peering nearsightedly, and maybe unhappily, at the photographer.
    “You read about the murder?” Reasons asked.
    “Yeah. Just sounds like . . . what it is,” Lucas said.
    “Like a dime-a-dozen down in the Cities.”
    “Well—anywhere that there are a lot of street people. The reporter was getting a lot of mileage out of it.”
    They strolled back toward the baggage claim, Reasons still looking at the article, then at the photo again, and he said, “You wanna hear a joke about an old lady beggar and a photographer?”
    “If I’ve got to.”
    “Wait a minute. I don’t tell jokes good, so I got to think it out,” Reasons said. He thought for a moment, then said, “There was this old lady bum, she used to push a shopping cart full of shit around this rich neighborhood. This newspaper photographer was out one day, looking for a good feature shot, and he sees her and asks if he can get a picture of her. She says, yes, and he