Hidden Prey

you what the Russian had done?”
    Lucas shook his head. “No. He never did.”
    “Maybe he was, em, reticent,” Nadya said. “But I think not.”
    “I think not also,” Lucas said.
    “Well, if you both think not, then I think not,” Reasons said. He looked back at the bar door. “Want to go ask him why he didn’t ask?”
    “Leave it for a while,” Lucas said. “Let’s go talk to the rest of the employees. Maybe there’ll be something else.”
     
    S PIVAK HAD GIVEN them a list of four employees who’d worked that night. They spent two hours tracking them down, and eventually found all four—three of them working at their day jobs, a fourth at home. The first three didn’t work the back room, didn’t specifically remember the group. The fourth one remembered.
    Maisy Reynolds lived in a single-wide trailer on a country lot, what Lucas thought was probably forty acres, ten miles outside of Virginia. The lot had been cut over perhaps ten years earlier, and now showed a few fir trees spotted through new-growth aspen on the rim of the lot. The trailer sat on a concrete foundation a hundred feet back from the road; behind it was a twenty- or thirty-acre pasture with a marshy creek running along the back edge. A metal stable stood behind the trailer; a white plastic fence, made to look like a white board fence, surrounded the stable and part of the pasture. Three horses were grazing the pasture. “Horses don’t like me,” Reasons said.
    “Do you think that could be a question of character?” Nadya asked. She was teasing him again, Lucas thought.
     
    T HE STOOP OUTSIDE the trailer door was simply four concrete blocks set in the ground. Lucas stepped up on them, knocked, and then stepped back when he heard somebody inside coming toward the door. Reynolds, a fortyish, weathered blonde in a plaid shirt, jeans, and green gum boots, opened the inside door and looked out at them.
    “You don’t look like Witnesses,” she said. She was chewing on a carrot and her house smelled, pleasantly enough, of Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup, horse shit, and straw.
    Lucas showed her his ID, told her what they wanted, and she said, “I remember the people in the back, but I don’t know what they were talking about. I don’t remember a Russian. What’d they do?”
    “The Russian was killed down in Duluth,” Lucas said. “We’re trying to figure out what he did earlier in the day that might have caused . . . something to happen.”
    She was wide-eyed, and poked the carrot at Lucas: “I remember that from the paper. That was the guy? The paper said he was executed.”
    “That’s the guy,” Reasons said.
    “My lord,” she said. “I didn’t see anything that would have led to that. You want a carrot? No? There weren’t any arguments or anything, just a bunch of guys talking . . .”
    “The people in the group,” Nadya said. “Anything . . . ?”
    Reynolds stepped outside, onto the stoop, thinking about it, crunching the carrot. “I remember one guy was really old. I mean, really old. Ninety. Jeez—maybe a hundred. He got around okay . . . I don’t remember the Russian. I wasn’t waiting on them, Anton was.”
    “Mr. Spivak?” Reasons asked. “Anthony?”
    “Anton. Not Anthony. Yeah, he took care of them. Must’ve been special, he doesn’t wait on people. Have you talked to him?”
    “Did he know them?”
    She paused, then said, “Listen, I don’t want to get in trouble with Anton, I sorta need the job.”
    “All this is confidential,” Lucas said.
    Out in the field, a horse whinnied, and took off in a little romp, followed by a second one. Reynolds smiled, nodding at them, then turned back to Lucas, still a bit wary. “I only saw them together for a couple of minutes, but he was talking with them. I don’t know if he knew them, but they were talking along. What’d he tell you?”
    “He said they were just some people passing through, they came, they drank, they paid, and they left. He said he had no idea who they were.”
    “Hmmm,” she said. Her eyes clicked to the left and she tilted her head, as if listening to music. Then, “Maybe I got the wrong impression.”
    “But you don’t think so.”
    “Listen . . .”
    “The guy was executed,” Lucas said. He looked up at her, on the stoop.
    She pursed her lips, tilted her head, and then said, “I got the impression that Anton knew them better than that.”
    “A lot better?”
    “Better,” she said.