Hidden Prey

Goodwill.”
    “Tray, like ashtray,” Kelly said.
    “I think it was Trey, like a three-card,” Langersham said. “I don’t think she interacted too much with the cops, or anybody, for that matter. She pretty much stayed to herself.”
    “Anything else?” Lucas asked. “You know if she was ever arrested . . . ?”
    Langersham shook her head. “I just don’t know. She was well-spoken, like she’d had some schooling. I mean, she wasn’t a dropout, or anything. I think she probably took a lot of dope sometime or other; she knew all the words, and she had that doper sense of humor. She was very good at picking out guys who’d cough up a buck.”
    “We can look through arrest reports; try to look her up in the nickname file,” Reasons said.
    They sat and talked and ate potato chips for a half hour, much of the conversation between Nadya and Langersham as the men sat back and listened. Nadya was fascinated by the underage-hooker world that Langersham worked: “We have the same problems in Moscow, but we don’t even know how to start with it,” she said.
    “Look to your religious people,” Langersham said. “Cops won’t work, because they’re in the crime life. The only thing that attracts these kids is the belief that somebody actually cares about them.”
    “But not police,” Nadya said.
    “Not police. You can’t pretend to care about them. You’ve actually got to care. About them, personally, one-on-one. So—recruit the religious. It’ll give them something worthwhile to do, instead of shaking their beads at some bishop. You got bishops in Russia?”
    “Everywhere,” Nadya said. “More than anyone could need.”
    Langersham nodded: “That’s a problem. You’ve got to get your religious people away from the bishops. Get them out in the streets. If everybody saved just one person . . . we’d all be saved. And it’d do wonders for both sides.”
    They sat in silence for a minute, and then Reasons said, “Right on. Pass the joint.”
    “Fuck you, Jerry,” Langersham said; but she was smiling when she said it. “Your turn to buy a round.”

     7 
    T REY SAT IN a Country Kitchen in Hudson, Wisconsin, eating French toast with link sausage, reading a copy of the St. Paul Pioneer Press, a story out of Duluth:
    Mary Wheaton lies in the county morgue, a few doors down from Rodion Oleshev, a Russian sailor—or perhaps a spy—who was executed at the TDX grain terminal two weeks ago.
    Nobody has been arrested in the murders—but now a top state investigator and a Russian policewoman, teamed with Duluth police, may have forged a link between the two brutal killings.
    “We believe that somebody killed Mary Wheaton to silence her,” said Duluth Police Sgt. Jerry Reasons. “We believe that she may have witnessed the murder of Mr. Oleshev.”
    Reasons said that police have developed specific information to link the two killings, but would not elaborate. Sources at the police department, however, said that fibers found in a hut where Wheaton was believed to have lived werematched with the military coat that Wheaton was wearing when she was killed—and the hut contained papers that appeared to have been taken from the body of Rodion Oleshev.
    Reasons said that he and Lucas Davenport, an agent for the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, and Nadya Kalin, an officer of the Russian . . .
     
    T HE STORY WENT on, but Trey’s eyes had gone watery: she wasn’t seeing it. The killer had come back for her, and he must have found Mary, thinking she was Trey.
    For just an instant, the wary, feral, traveling Trey felt a pulse of victory: if the police knew there was a witness to the murder—and they must have known that because somebody at the grain terminal had seen her, had shouted at her—and if they thought that person was dead . . . she was safe.
    Then the Annabelle Ramford lawyer brain clicked over: it wouldn’t happen. Too many people knew her, and too many knew Mary. If they checked with Tony on the bus route, he would tell them that Mary hadn’t lived in the hut, and that another woman had worn the coat.
    The cashier at the Goodwill store who’d sold her the coat—she’d remember, too. She’d tried to wipe out the prints in the shack, but there must have been hair left behind—and if they compared the hair from the hut with Mary’s hair, they’d know that there was another woman.
    A live witness. They’d come looking.
     
    T REY HAD ALWAYS viewed her life as