Hidden Prey

Russian?”
    “My wife is Russian,” Reasons said. “I speak three words: gavno, Stolichnaya, and Solzhenitsyn. ”
    The smile came again, and the corners of her eyes crinkled: “With those, you would get along very well with our intellectuals.”
    “Yeah, well . . .”
    “You don’t think we’ll get justice?”
    “We might get the killer,” Reasons said. “Justice is out of the question.”
     
    T HEY WAITED SOME more, and then the luggage started coming. Lucas watched her from the corner of his eye. She was not somebody who hit you as pretty, he decided, but if she was around for a while . . . She was like Weather that way; Weather wasn’t conventionally pretty, but she was intensely attractive.
    Her bag arrived, a black nylon duffel, and Reasons threw it over his shoulder. Lucas offered to carry her briefcase, but she declined, and Lucas led the way out to the city car. She climbed in the backseat, and Reasons took the wheel with Lucas in the front passenger seat.
    “What first?” Reasons asked over his shoulder.
    “I would like to see the body,” she said. “If this is possible.”
    “We can do that,” Reasons said. “You want to freshen up first? Check into your hotel?”
    “No, I’m afraid it would be wasted, if then I went to see the body,” she said.
    “No problem.”
     
    T HE MORGUE WAS at the University of Minnesota–Duluth medical school. They talked about the weather on the way over; in Moscow,Nadya said, it was no different than here in Duluth. And they talked about the length of her trip: it was not so much the hours in the air, as the shift in time, she said. She would be disoriented for a while. “At home, we are nine hours ahead of your time. Right now, I am okay. At seven o’clock tonight, I will fall asleep. For sure.”
    “What exactly is your job back home?” Lucas asked.
    “I am a police officer, a major in the Federal Security Service—like your FBI,” she said. “If I help with this case, I will have some good hopes of becoming a colonel. If I don’t help, I will have some good hopes of becoming a lieutenant.” She smiled to show that she was joking.
    “So this is a big deal.” Reasons looked at her in the rearview mirror.
    “Yes, big deal,” she said. “What is a Dairy Queen?”
     
    T HEY EXPLAINED Dairy Queen, and then rode in silence for a bit until Lucas asked Reasons, “You gonna stay with us? Or are you gonna get pulled for this old lady?”
    “I don’t know. I’d like to work with you guys, but there might not be much to do. And politics gets into it. Nobody cares much about the Russian, but folks are gonna be kinda pissed about Wheaton.”
    “What is this?” Nadya asked, from the backseat.
    “Ah, we had another murder here . . .” Reasons went on to regale her with the facts of the murder. Lucas was watching her face, the play of emotions running across them as Reasons got into the details. When he finished, Nadya touched three fingers to her lips and asked, “Does this happen often?”
    “Nope. Hardly anybody ever gets killed up here. We got maybe two or three murders a year. Four in a good year.”
    “Only Russians and old women alcoholics,” she said.
    “The first Russian in memory,” Reasons said. “As a matter of fact, that was the first Russian boat to come in for quite a while.”
    “Really,” Lucas said. “I didn’t know that.”
    “Lots of Russians back in the seventies; not many anymore,” Reasons said. He looked over the seat at Nadya.
    She shrugged, and said, “As far as I know, that . . . would not be connected to this death. That the boat would come here.”
    “So you think it was just a coincidence?” Lucas asked.
    “I believe in coincidences,” she said, “As long as there are not too many of them.”
     
    T HE MORGUE WAS in the medical school’s loading dock; a convenience, Reasons said. “You just back the ambulance up to the dock, open up the garage door, wheel the deceased over to the cooler, and put him or her inside.”
    They’d called ahead, and were met in the dock by the pathologist on duty, a Chinese-American man with a pleasant accent who introduced himself as Doctor Chu. He unlocked the door to the cooler, and rolled the dead man out. Oleshev was covered with a hospital sheet, and the pathologist pulled it back.
    Nadya turned away, just an inch or two, a flinch, Lucas thought, and then she turned back. Oleshev looked as though he’d been carved out of a piece of chipboard.