Hidden Prey

whole career, I’ve seen about three silencers that would actually work. They’re rare, here. This wasn’t a street robbery.”
    “I agree,” Nadya said. “I think, one way or another, that he was a courier, a contact person, and criminality was involved.”
    “The crew didn’t have much to say about him,” Reasons said.
    Nadya frowned. “The Potemkin has stopped in Quebec, so that our investigators can speak to the crew members. I’ll get summaries of the interrogations and give them to you.”
    Reasons nodded: “Okay.”
    Nadya said, “I would like to speak to the man who saw the killer, the American.”
    “So would I,” said Lucas. “But he’s fishing. He has a shift this afternoon. He’s due in at three o’clock. He knows we’ll be coming.”
     
    D ULUTH POLICE HEADQUARTERS were in City Hall, a stone building that looked like a 1930s WPA post office. Along with the federal building and the St. Louis County Courthouse, it made up the civic center a block from the Radisson. They walked over, a nice afternoon, sunshine slanting down over the hill, a maple tree down the street showing a flame of autumn orange.
    The detective bureau was like fifty others that Lucas had been in over his career, an undistinguished beige-painted room with a counternear the entrance, a bulletin board full of FBI “Wanted” posters, a couple of short rows of desks separated by low partitions, a twenty-four-hour wall clock, a few computers, a lot of paper. A single detective sat hunched over a newspaper, eating a sandwich from a brown paper sack. He looked up when they came in, and went back to his sandwich as Reasons led them into a side room.
    “The lieutenant’s gone, he’s down in St. Paul at murder school. We can use his office,” Reasons said. He pointed them at chairs around a conference table, and added, “I’ll be right back.”
    He was back in a minute with a file folder, which he gave to Nadya. “Anything you want, we’ll Xerox. Can I get you some coffee?”
    “A cup would be good,” she said. She looked at the file: “Thin.”
    “Not much to work with,” Reasons agreed. “You’ve probably already seen most of it.”
    “Well.” She flipped through the file. “Maybe I’ll get some sleep tonight.”
     
    L UCAS SETTLED INTO an unused desk, paging through a copy of Trailer Boat magazine that had been sitting under a telephone. Reasons took a cup of coffee into Nadya, and he could hear them talking, and Reasons laughed once. Reasons came out, put his hands on the edge of a desk, backed his feet away, and did fifty quick push-ups. The sandwich-eating detective said, “If your feet ever slip out when you’re doing that, you’re gonna break your teeth on the edge of the desk.”
    “I’m quicker’n that,” Reasons said.
    “Okay. Your problem, as long as it’s not my desk,” said the other man. “I don’t want any tooth marks on it.”
    Ten minutes after Nadya started reading, another detective wandered in, carrying a briefcase. He stopped when he saw Lucas.
    Reasons said, “Davenport. BCA.”
    Lucas said, “Your desk? Sorry, we’re just waiting.”
    He stood up and moved to the guest chair next to Reasons, and the second detective ambled over to his desk, said, “Take the magazine if you want, I’m all done with it.” Then he sat down, sighed and said, “What a day.”
    “Talk to a bum?” asked Reasons.
    “Talked to fifteen of them,” the detective said. “Nobody knows what happened. They kept asking me if somebody was killing bums.”
    “We gonna lose it?”
    “I don’t know. Probably.”
    “Better you than me,” Reasons said.
    The detective nodded toward the lieutenant’s office. “Is that the . . .”
    “Russian. Yeah.”
    The detective whistled and said, “I thought they all wore them things like my ma. You know, the babushkas.”
    “She’s probably got one hidden somewhere,” Reasons said.
    “What’s happening with the old lady?” Lucas asked. “I saw the story in the paper.”
    “If you read the paper, you probably know more than I do, ’cause I haven’t read it yet,” the detective said. “But . . .”
    He dipped into his briefcase and took out a manila file and passed it to Lucas. Inside was a sheaf of photos of the crime scene and the dead woman. The detective turned back to Reasons. “By the way, Chick Daniels is looking for you. He knows all about the Russian and the BCA guy . . . Davenport?”
    “Davenport,” Lucas said. “Who