Hidden Prey

said your name is Louis?”
    “Lucas Davenport. I’m in Duluth.” He was trying to shout calmly. “I will be there in one hour. Call Rose Marie Roux, the commissioner of Public Safety. I will give you her home phone number and she will fill you in. I will be on my cell phone on the way up—here’s the number . . .”
     
    W HEN HE WAS off the phone, he tried his man’s cell phone again, got nothing. He thought about calling Nadya, decided against it, didn’t have time to pick up Reasons. He’d call him from the road. He clipped on his .45, picked up a jacket, and was at the door when the phone rang. “Shit.” He went back, picked it up.
    A woman’s high-pitched voice asked, “Is this Lucas Davenport?”
    “Yes. What is it?” He assumed it was the front desk, and he had no time for it.
    “Mary Wheaton, the lady who was murdered . . . she told me about it. She told me she saw the other man murder the Russian man, the story that was in the newspaper.”
    The words confused him for a moment: Who the hell was this, and why was she bothering him? “What?”
    “She saw the murder of the Russian man. She told me about it, and I thought I should call.”
    “Who is this?” A crank, he thought—but then, maybe not. There had been a second woman.
    “I’m not going to tell you. For one thing, you sound mean.”
    “I’m in a hurry,” Lucas said. “Just tell me what she told you.”
    “You really sound mean . . .”
    The woman was frightened and, Lucas thought, he did sound mean. He took a breath, and said, “I’m sorry. You caught me at a really bad moment. What did Mrs. Wheaton tell you?”
    “She said she was down by the grain elevators, in some weeds, right by the lake. Watching the lake. She was drinking, she had a bottle, and she heard a man walking toward her so she stayed hidden. The men down there can be really tough. So she was hiding down there in the weeds, and she heard some shots. She thought they were shots, but they were quiet . . .”
    “She was probably right, the gun may have had a sound suppressor on it,” Lucas said, as softly as he could, trying to be agreeable. He was still burning off the adrenaline from the cell-phone call. “What did she see?”
    “She said one man shot the other man, and she made a noise. When she made the noise, the man with the gun saw her, and she ran away, and he chased her. She thinks he shot his gun at her and missed, and then she fell down and he caught her, and he pointed his gun and tried to shoot her, but the gun didn’t work. She had a knife and she slashed at him because she was afraid that he might try to strangle her or something. He ran away and got in his car and drove off.”
    “Where was his car?”
    There was a second of calculation, Lucas thought, and then: “She said it was over by the street, over by the Goodwill store.”
    “Do you know what she was drinking? What kind of bottle it was?”
    More calculation: “No, she didn’t say, but I imagine it was an inexpensive wine. She didn’t drink so much hard liquor.”
    “I didn’t even know she drank,” Lucas said. “I thought she was more of a schizophrenic. I didn’t think she had an alcohol problem.”
    “Oh, she drank,” the woman said. “Wine, mostly. Sometimes, when she was on her meds, it made her crazy. Crazier.”
    “Did she tell you what the man looked like? The man with the gun?”
    “He looked like a college boy, but he might have been older than that. It was dark, and she couldn’t see him that well. He was blond and not really tall, but a little tall. Six feet. Strong-looking. She thought he was an American because before she cut him, he said, ‘Shit,’ in English, just like an American would.”
    “She cut him,” Lucas said. “Was she sure?”
    “Pretty sure. Not positive.”
    “Blond, strong, American. You didn’t see the car, see what make it was?”
    “No, uh, she didn’t say anything about that.”
    “Anything that you can think of that she said, that might be of more use? Anything about the guy? It’s really important, because he’s still out there and we think he’s nuts.”
    “She didn’t say too much . . . just that thing about how the shots weren’t too loud.”
    “Did she say what she took off the body?”
    “Nothing like that,” the woman said, and Lucas heard the lie in her voice.
    “How did you find me?”
    “I thought about where a state policeman would stay in Duluth, and called, and they switched me