Hidden Prey

but . . . there might have been some guys down in the weeds earlier in the night.”
    “Did you see any women at all?”
    “No, I didn’t. I just thought, with the weeds all crushed down . . . sometimes you’d see that. But that was years ago.”
    “Okay,” Lucas said.
    “How many of the crew did you see? Up on the deck?” Nadya asked.
    “Just the captain and the loader, the guy who was helping with the loading. The rest of them were all asleep.”
    “So you don’t think somebody from the crew might have met Oleshev on the dock . . .”
    Kellogg was shaking his head: “No. The guy I saw ran away, and there was no way to get back past me on the boat. As soon as the cops got here, they sealed off the boat so nobody could come or go. I was here all that time, and pretty soon, all of the crew was up, when they heard the commotion, the sirens and all. The captain did a head count, and they were all accounted for. Nobody came or went. Besides, the guy I saw didn’t look like a Russian.”
    “ ‘Didn’t look like a Russian,’ ” Nadya repeated.
    Kellogg shook his head. “The crew are blue-collar guys. Beefy, strong guys. Gorillas. The guy I saw was small. I think he was small. He looked . . . you know, thin. He had on that long coat and the Russian guys, you never saw them in long coats. They wore jackets. Leather jackets, or just regular cloth jackets, or rain suits, but I never saw one in a long coat. This looked . . . old-fashioned.”
     
    T HEY TALKED a few minutes more, but Kellogg had nothing else that was relevant. They said good-bye and walked down to the end of the slip where Lucas had parked the Acura.
    “Where was this weeds place, where Jerry thought there was a chase?” Nadya asked.
    “Over here . . .” Lucas took her out into the weeds. “Right around here. From the lake, back this far. He said you could see what looked like pathways crushed into the weeds . . . You can see where we walked this morning. Same thing.”
    “Mmm.” She looked around. “This does not look like so good a place for sex.”
    “Depends on how bad you want the sex,” Lucas said. “I suppose.”
     
    T HE GROUND UNDERFOOT was rough, as though it had been dug over a few times, rutted by heavy equipment and trucks. Here and there were piles of broken concrete. Nadya tramped through the weeds for a few more minutes, and then said, “If there was a chase over here, who got chased? Why was Oleshev in the middle of this big concrete? He couldn’t run after he was shot, that’s for sure. He was shot in the heart and the head . . . Does it make any sense?”
    Lucas was looking at the remnants of a broken wine bottle. He picked it up and read the label: Holiday Arbor, and below that, a price tag: $2.99. He rubbed his face and Nadya said again, “Does it make any sense?”
    Lucas thought about the pictures of the old woman in the police file, and the shot of her on the street that he’d seen in the newspaper. In the police pictures, she’d been lying on her back, her arms flung out to the side, a long coat beneath her, like a black puddle in the camera’s strobe light. In the newspaper pictures, she looked small, round-shouldered.
    “What?” Nadya asked, her hands on her hips.
    Lucas looked at the bottle. Two ninety-nine. Mary Wheaton had been a street person. Street people wore long coats on warm nights in the summer, and they drank cheap. She’d been killed in a way he’d never seen on the street, but he had seen. He’d been wrong when he told the Duluth cops that he’d never seen it before. He’d seen it in the movies, when the Navy SEAL sneaks up on a lazy sentry and zut —the neck is cut. Was it a spy thing, a military technique? He’d assumed it was simply dramatic bullshit . . .
    He looked back at the fragment of wine bottle. Holiday Arbor, $2.99. The paper label on the bottle looked new, as though it hadn’t been long in the weeds.
    “Come on,” he said to Nadya. He started walking fast toward the elevator.
    “To where?” She jogged along behind him.
    “Back to the morgue. The medical examiner’s.”
    “You have an idea?” She was looking at the chunk of glass in his hand. He carried it by the sharp edges.
    “Maybe,” Lucas said. “We need one.”
     
    D R . C HU HAD gone home, but the night man in pathology called the campus cops, who came with the keys, and when Lucas explained what he wanted, the night man called Dr. Chu, who gave the