Hidden Prey

Reasons walked over and asked, “Where in the hell have you been? Playing golf?”
    “Got here fast as we could,” one of the guys said. He counterattacked. “None of you went inside, did you?”
    “Of course not,” Reasons said.
    Lucas and no-name shook their heads. “We were waiting for you.”
     
    W HEN THE PHOTOGRAPHY was done, the crime-scene people began picking up the litter—with Lucas’s urging, they started with the small paper, picking up each piece with forceps, bagging it, and passing it out the door. Most of it was cards, most of it in Russian.
    There were several items of interest: an American Express platinum card under the name Zbigniew Riscin, a New York driver’s license under the same name, and a receipt from the National car-rentalagency at the Duluth airport for a car rented to Zbigniew Riscin. The car had been driven a hundred and seventy-five miles and returned the same day it was rented—the day that Oleshev had been murdered.
    They also found a receipt, paid with the platinum card, for $145 from Spivak’s Tap, in Virginia, Minnesota.
    “It’s about an hour up to Virginia,” Reasons said. “If he went up and back, did a little driving around, it’d be about right.”
    “I wonder what is the Spivak’s Tap?” asked Nadya.
    “A tap’s a bar,” Reasons said. “I’ll check.” He got his phone out.
    Next out was a Targus retractable reel with six feet of telephone cable on it; it was used to connect laptops to motel telephones, and Lucas had one just like it. There were also three different white plastic-bodied electric wall-plug adapters for U.S. and European outlets. Nadya looked at them and said, “He had a laptop.”
    “No laptop in here,” said a crime-scene guy.
    “I’d like to find a laptop,” Lucas said to Nadya.
    Nadya said, “Greatly,” and then, “I will check with the Potemkin, to see if he left one in his cabin.”
     
    A LL THE MATERIAL from the hut was bagged. One of the crime-scene guys stepped to the door and said, “Look at this.” He had, in his forceps, a money band, printed “$100.”
    “Took some money off him,” Lucas said. “How many bills in this?”
    The crime-scene guy said, “Five thousand, I think.”
    “So she got five grand, at least. Where is it?” no-name asked. “Nothing at her place. Didn’t look like she was eating any better.”
    “Got a Kotex here,” one of the crime-scene guys said from the interior. “Unused.”
    Lucas said, “How old was Wheaton?”
    “Fifty-eight,” said no-name.
    “We got a problem,” Lucas said. He looked across the street at the Latino perched on the car. “I think we better haul Raul up to the medical examiner’s.”
     
    T HEY DID THAT .
    On the way, Nadya said, “So I am thinking, this woman did not kill Oleshev, but she was first to find his body. She robbed him and when the man on the boat saw her, she ran away. So we have nobody who saw the killer.”
    “I am thinking that, too,” Lucas said, falling into her syntax. “If it was Wheaton. But they sold more coats out of that store. It might have been another woman . . .”
    At the medical examiner’s, they rolled Wheaton out and peeled back the body bag. Unlike Nadya, Raul didn’t flinch when the body was exposed. He looked at Wheaton’s face, at her open eyes, and shook his head. “Not her. This one I saw was a younger chick, man. This one I saw was maybe . . . I don’t know. Wash her up, maybe forty.”
    “Goddamnit,” said Reasons. He looked at Raul: “Can I see your green card?”
     
    “H OW ’ D YOU FIGURE this out, man?” no-name asked Lucas.
    Lucas explained, the whole line of indications starting from the chase through the weeds, which didn’t make any sense in terms of the dead man; the small figure in a long coat, seen running away from the body; the photographs of the small street woman in the long coat, murdered the night before; the cheap wine bottle in the area of the chase through the weeds. And luck: Reasons’s idea about the Goodwill store, and Raul.
    “You know, it’s like detective work or something,” no-name marveled.
     
    “I T ’ S TIME ,” Lucas said. “To have a beer and think it over.”
    “Are we breaking the investigation?” Nadya asked.
    Lucas had to think for a minute: “I have to talk to you about your slang. But no, not exactly.”
    “More like the investigation is breaking us,” Reasons said.
    “If you want to have a beer and think it over, I can tell you