Hidden Prey

Kitchen, and opened the paper to the story from Duluth.
    Mary Wheaton was dead . . .
    She sat and leaked tears for a while, read the rest of the story, looked at photographs of the cops standing outside her old hut in Duluth, then firmed up and finished her breakfast.
    She’d go see about the apartment, and then she’d think.
    Something had to be done.

     8 
    L UCAS WOKE WITH A START .
    There was a noise somewhere, in the room. The room was dimly lit, the light coming from cracks at the sides of the blackout curtain, so it must be after dawn. He glanced at the illuminated face of the bedside clock: eight in the morning. The sound wasn’t threatening, there was no intruder in the room, but what . . . ?
    He groped until he found the bedside light, turned it on. The sound was coming from the telephone: not a ring, but a low, strangled jingle, as if somebody had punched the phone in the solar plexus and it hadn’t gotten its voice back.
    He picked it up. “Yeah?” His voice sounded like a rusty coffin hinge in a horror movie.
    “You told me to call,” Reasons said. “I’m just leaving my house.”
    He stifled the impulse to moan. “Is there any air outside?”
    “What?”
    “Never mind. I’ll be down in the lobby in twenty minutes. Did you call Nadya?”
    “Yup. She sounds like she’s been up for a while.”
    “I have been too, I’ve been up for hours,” Lucas said. He yawned. He’d never been an early riser. “I was doing my push-ups.”
    “Twenty minutes,” Reasons said.
     
    L UCAS CLEANED UP , put on a fresh shirt and sport coat, got a bottle of Diet Coke from the machine down the hall, and found Nadya and Reasons standing opposite the elevator doors in the lobby.
    “Breakfast?” Reasons asked, looking at the Coke.
    “Of champions,” Lucas said. Then he had to explain to Nadya. “See, there was this cereal, there still is this cereal . . .”
    When he was finished explaining, she didn’t see why it was funny.
    “Well, it wasn’t, very.”
    “Give it up,” Reasons said.
    Lucas asked Nadya, “Did you hear anything about the computer?”
    “No. The question is traveling through the bureaucracy.”
     
    T HE R ANGE IS the remnant of both an ancient sea and an ancient mountain range, more or less an hour northwest of Duluth; it’s the largest iron-ore lode in the U.S. The Range runs from northeast to southwest, and sitting atop it is a string of small iron-mining cities—Virginia, Chisholm, Eveleth, Biwabik, Hibbing. The cities are cold, hardworking, blue-collar, economically depressed, and addicted to hockey.
    The town of Virginia was straight up Highway 53 from Duluth, across gently rolling countryside covered with birch and aspen—some of the aspen just beginning to turn yellow—interspersed with blue-and-green-colored fir, spruce, tamarack, and occasional rigidly orderedstands of plantation pine. Lucas drove and Reasons played with the navigation system for a while, and finally said, “So what?”
    “It works when you’re trying to find an address,” Lucas said. “Out on the open highway, it doesn’t do much. Tells you what direction you’re traveling.”
    “Does this cost extra?” Nadya asked.
    “A little bit,” Lucas said.
    “A lot,” Reasons said.
    “If it doesn’t help, why do you have it?”
    “It looks neat,” Reasons said.
    Nadya yawned, and went back to the New York Times, while working methodically through three bottles of spring water. She’d gotten a teensy bit in the bag the night before, drinking two vodka martinis without any rest after the trip. “Help me sleep,” she’d muttered as Reasons and Lucas steered her out of the elevator down to her door.
    She’d complained of dehydration as they were leaving Duluth, so they stopped for the water and the newspapers, and both Reasons, with the Star Tribune, and Nadya, with the Times, took turns reading bits and pieces to Lucas. When they were finished with the paper, Reasons and Nadya began a kind of teasing chatter.
    Lucas, looking between them, thought, Hmmm.
     
    V IRGINIA ’ S DOWNTOWN SECTION was made up of five long blocks of 1900-era red-and-yellow-brick two- and three-story buildings. Inside the five blocks, as Lucas remembered them, you could find anything you needed and most of what you wanted: you could eat American or Mexican, get drunk, acquire a tattoo, wreck your car, get busted, hire a lawyer, and get your car fixed without going off the street. You could get saved