Hidden Prey

where to have the beer,” no-name said. He took out a fat cell phone, which was also a PDA, looked up a name, and pressed the button. “Barbara, babe: we need to talk. Where are you?” He listened for a few seconds, then said, “How about we meet at Duke’s? Okay.”
     
    T HEY SENT R AUL back to the Goodwill store, where he’d left his car, with a campus cop, and fifteen minutes later filed into Duke’s Lounge, a lump of brown brick in a wilderness of on-ramps, at the south end of the city.
    The place was full of neon beer signs and dark wood, with a coin-op shuffleboard game in the back. Four guys in backwards ball caps sat talking at the bar; the bartender himself sat on a stool and leaned back toward an aged Schlitz sign with a hole in it, so he could read a book in the light coming through the hole.
    When they all walked in, the guys at the bar stopped talking and looked at no-name’s shorts, and the bartender said, “Barb’s in the back booth.” At the same time, a woman in a black leather jacket stood up and said, “Here,” and the guys at the bar started talking again.
    Lucas, Nadya, Reasons, and no-name, who’d finally introduced himself as Larry Kelly, trooped to the back, clunking along the wooden floor. Lucas stopped to look at an old Budweiser-made print of Custer being wiped out by the Sioux at Little Bighorn.
    Nadya stopped at his elbow, took in the print, and said, “Why do Americans celebrate defeats?”
    Lucas shrugged. “Like what?”
    “Bunker Hill, the Alamo, Custer, Pearl Harbor, the Chosin Reservoir, September eleventh—I have even seen this movie Blackhawk Down. It seems strange.”
    “You know a lot about our history,” Lucas said.
    “I studied it, of course. But this is not so much history as psychology.”
    Lucas looked at the picture for a few more seconds; in the lower right corner, an Indian was peeling the scalp off a dead cavalryman. “I don’t know why we do it,” he said. “But we do, don’t we?”
     
    T HEY WENT ON to the back, where Kelly introduced Barbara Langersham, a woman in her early forties, dark haired, dark eyed, broken nosed. A white scar, a match for the one on Lucas’s forehead, disappeared up into her hairline.
    “Barbara knows all the street people,” he said. “She works for Catholic Charities.”
    “Doesn’t have a hell of a lot of Catholic charity, though,” Reasons grumbled.
    “It all depends on what you want, doesn’t it Jerry?” Langersham said, and Lucas thought, Oops.
     
    O NLY FOUR OF them could fit in the booth, so Reasons and Lucas pulled up chairs and they all ordered beer, and Kelly said, “Barbara: Mary Wheaton, you’ve read about it.”
    “Yes.” She poured her beer expertly into a pilsner glass, so the head came just over the top, not too thick. “I heard her head was almost cut off.”
    “Yeah. Now—we think there’s a possibility that whoever killed herwas the same guy who killed the Russian last week. But they got the wrong woman. Was there another woman street person around here, who walked around in a long green army coat?”
    “Ah . . . shoot.” She thought for a moment. “I don’t remember one. But I think Mary only had that coat for a day or two. I only saw her with it once. Like she just got it. I remember thinking it was too hot.”
    “We’re looking for a woman who might have lived across the street from the Goodwill store,” Lucas said. “Might have been a redhead, or sort of reddish hair, maybe forty.”
    “Somebody saw her?”
    “Yeah, but not somebody who could give us any information,” Reasons said. “He just saw her.”
    Langersham licked a bit of foam off her upper lip, then said, to Reasons, “You know I don’t like to talk to cops.”
    “But you do, when you need something,” Reasons said. “The fact is, this other woman is in trouble. If the killer knows he got the wrong woman . . .”
    They didn’t have to draw a picture. Langersham said, “There was another woman. I think her name was Trey, but I don’t know her last name. She wasn’t forty—she was more like early thirties. I suppose, when she had a little dirt on her, she could go for forty. I saw her, I don’t know, a couple of weeks ago, panhandling up at Miller Hill Mall. I haven’t seen her since. I did see her, earlier this summer, a couple of times, maybe three times, on the Garfield Avenue bus. This was at night, I saw the bus going by, so she might have been going out Garfield. Toward the