Hidden Prey

“Yeah. Better.”
     
    T HEY TALKED FOR a few more minutes, but Reynolds had nothing specific about the group. In the car again, Reasons said, “So we go and talk to Spivak again.”
    From the backseat, Nadya said, “Perhaps we should wait one day. If I can get to my room, I can do some research, to see if we know him. You could do some research also.”
    Reasons exhaled thoughtfully, then said to Lucas, “Between you, me, and the FBI guys, we oughta be able to put a book together. If the guy was in the army, if he was ever in trouble anywhere . . .”
    Lucas was waiting for a car to pass, and then pulled out onto the road; in his rearview mirror he saw Reynolds go back inside her trailer, and hoped she wouldn’t call Spivak. Before they left, she’d said she wouldn’t.
    “I’m a little worried about the Wheaton thing,” he said. “It’s not a sure thing that they’re connected, but it feels like a sure thing.”
    “They are connected,” Nadya said. “This killing of the old woman, this wire, this is a military technique. Very well known in the Spetsnaz, in the U.S. Special Forces, in the Special Air Service, et cetera. It does not seem to me something you would find with ordinary criminals.”
    “I wondered about that,” Lucas said. “I saw it in the movies . . .” He turned, his arm on the back of the seat. “You think a Russian did it?”
    She looked out the window, then back and said, “No. I am almost certain.”
    “Why?”
    “Because the only reason to kill the old woman would be to silence her as a witness. The only reason to silence her would be to prevent her identification of the killer. The only way she could identify the killer is if he’s still here. If a Russian had done the killing, already he would be exfiltrated and this identification would not be a problem.”
    A tidy line of logic. “I knew that,” Reasons said.
    “So we do research,” Lucas said.
     
    T HEY DID RESEARCH .
    Nadya worked from her room, Lucas and Reasons from the detective bureau.
    Spivak had been arrested twice for drunken driving, once in 1960 and once in 1961. He had been in two automobile accidents, fifteen years apart, and hadn’t been charged in either. He’d been sued twice in accidents involving people who had been drinking at his bar, lost one and had the suit paid by his insurance company. He’d been sued twice more for nonpayment of suppliers’ bills, although a law clerk who pulled the records at the St. Louis County Courthouse said that both times, Spivak had had a countercomplaint against the supplier, and both suits had eventually been settled.
    He’d been born in St. Louis County, in 1944; his wife was also from St. Louis County, born in 1945. Spivak’s father had owned the bar before him. His father and mother had both been born in Mahnomen County, his father in 1912 and his mother in 1914; Mahnomen didn’t have a regular vital-records registration at the time, and thebirth certificates came from a Catholic hospital, which had since burned down.
    Spivak had served with the Eighth U.S. Army in peacetime Korea, from 1962 to 1964. He had been honorably discharged, though he’d received two article fifteens—administrative punishment—for drunkenness. He’d had money withheld from his paycheck in both cases, as fines.
    “Ain’t shit,” Reasons said, when they were done. “Nothing with NCIC, nothing with the sheriff. He did a little tearing around when he was a kid, went in the army, got out, got married and had kids, and runs a bar.”
    “Maybe Nadya got something . . .”
    She hadn’t: “We can’t even find his phone number,” she said. She was sitting in a high-backed chair looking at her laptop. Out the window, they could see a sailboat heading north into the lake. “He is delisted.”
    “Unlisted,” said Reasons.
    “We need phone books in Russia,” she said. “Your phone books are outstanding in the whole world. Your Yellow Pages. I would cry to have Yellow Pages like this in Russia.”
    Was she doing a tap dance, Lucas wondered, watching her eyes, or was this all there was? “So tomorrow, we go push on Spivak.”
     
    T HEY ’ D BEEN TOGETHER all day, and nobody mentioned dinner. After they agreed to meet in the morning, Lucas took the elevator down to his room, said good-bye to Reasons, and called home and talked to Weather and Sam.
    Weather said that the new garage door matched the other two perfectly, and that if he looked on page two of the