Hidden Prey

go-ahead.
    “Everything’s here,” the night man said. He put a box of clothing on the counter. Much of it was soaked in now-black and dried blood. “I’ll get it out for you, if you want.”
    “That’d be good . . .”
    The night man slipped on plastic gloves and took Mary Wheaton’s clothing out of the box piece by piece. At the bottom was an olive-green military-style coat with a red-white-and-blue patch on the shoulder. The night man held it up and said, “That what you want to see?”
    “Long green coat,” Nadya said. “With a Czechoslovakian flag on the shoulder.”
    “Is that what that is?” Lucas looked at the coat for another minute, and then said, “I think we better call Reasons.”
     
    R EASONS CAME DOWN , looked at the coat. “Could be,” he said. He didn’t sound skeptical; he sounded neutral. “What do you want to do?”
    “See if we can get some prints off the piece of bottle I found, see if the prints match the old lady’s. See if we can find more bottle. Try to figure out what she might have been doing over there.”
    “I might be able to tell you what she was doing,” Reasons said. “There’s a Goodwill store maybe two blocks from there. It’s just about the only thing around, I mean, that’s not a warehouse. This coat, this looks like something from Goodwill.”
    “But it wouldn’t have been open in the middle of the night,” Lucas said.
    “No . . .”
    “Is the place still open? Now?”
    Reasons looked at his watch: “I think so. Let me make a call.”
     
    T WENTY MINUTES LATER , Maxine Just, the manager at the Goodwill, led them back through the store to a clothing rack, where three Czech Army coats hung from wire hangers. “We had about five of them. A surplus place up in town, caters to college kids, got a bunch of them a couple of years ago. They couldn’t sell them all, and finally gave them to us. Tax write-off. We put them up for eight dollars each.”
    “So you sold two.”
    “Two or three, yeah. We got five or six.”
    “Do you know who you sold them to?”
    Just shrugged. “People who wanted long wool coats. The wool’spretty good. Some people buy them to make rugs—they dye the wool, do these folky kind of rugs for people’s cabins. College students used to buy them, when grunge was big, but they went out of style . . . I suppose they mostly went to people who couldn’t afford better. Most of our clientele.”
    “But you wouldn’t know specifically.”
    “No. I could ask some of our cashiers, maybe somebody would remember.”
    Reasons asked her to contact the cashiers, and they agreed that he would stop by in the morning to talk with them. They talked for a couple of more minutes, then said thanks to Just, and wandered back outside. The Goodwill store was a long walk from the city center, Lucas thought—he pointed it out to Reasons and asked, “How would she get down here?”
    “Bus, probably. Cheap ride, by bus. I’ll have the guys check with the drivers.”
    They were drifting back toward the cars when a dark-complected young man with a Latino accent stepped outside and called, “Excuse.”
    Reasons called back, “Yeah?” The young man walked across the parking lot. He was wearing worn jeans, an Iowa Wrestling sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off at the biceps, and pointed-toe black dress shoes caked with mud. He had a sterling-silver earring in his left earlobe and a small black mustache.
    “Mrs. Just said you were looking for the lady with the coat?”
    “Yeah.”
    He pointed across the street. “I see her every day, catch the bus there.”
    They all looked at the bus stop.
    “Every morning, she get on, every night, she get off. I think she lived around there somewhere. I see her in the Dumpster in the back. When she see me, she run across the street into the bushes.” He said booshes.
    “Where would she live?” Lucas asked. But they were all looking at a small cube-shape shed across the street. “You think in the shed?”
    The man shrugged. “I don’t know. But every morning, every night, I see her. All summer.”
    “Wearing the coat.”
    “Two or three days only, in the coat,” he said. “We only get the coats one month ago mostly.”
    “Could I get your name?” Reasons said. “Where do you live?”
     
    A S R EASONS TALKED to the man, Lucas and Nadya walked across the street and through a ring of knee-high weeds to the shed. The place was a plywood cube, with boarded-over windows on two sides, a