Hidden Prey

and the view out toward the lake and about Nadya’s ass. Nadya came back and slipped into the booth next to Lucas. She wore a very light fragrance, like apple blossoms.
    She exhaled and said, “Well: they say to me that there is no shadow. But.”
    “But,” Lucas said.
    “Yes. But. But somebody else called to the embassy this morningand asked for the intelligence officer. When he got the duty officer, he asked for the shadow to be put in touch with him. This call came in twenty minutes ago.” She looked from Reasons to Lucas. “This was not you?”
    “Not us,” Lucas said.
    “What about your shadow? The FBI man you talk to—there must be one.”
    “I’ll ask,” Lucas said. He pulled his phone from his pocket. “What was his name again?”
    Nadya smiled and said, “I wouldn’t know that,” and waved at a waitress. “But say hello for me.”
     
    L UCAS CALLED Andy Harmon again and said, “This is Davenport. I’m sitting here eating a waffle and talking to Nadya. She says hello to my shadow. She says somebody just called the Russian embassy in Washington and asked to be put in touch with Nadya’s shadow. Nadya says she doesn’t have one, and she wants to know if it was you guys who called the embassy. ’Cause if it wasn’t, that would mean that the embassy is probably talking to the killer.”
    “Wasn’t us,” Harmon said. “It just flat wasn’t us. If the embassy will give us the time the call came in, we could try to trace it.”
    “Just a minute,” Lucas said. He turned to Nadya and said, “If the embassy can give us the time the call came in, we can trace it.”
    “Let me talk,” she said. Lucas passed her the phone and she and Harmon talked for a minute, and she gave Harmon the name of a man at the embassy he could check with.
    When she was done, Lucas took the phone back and asked, “What are the chances?”
    “I don’t know,” Harmon said. “But we’ll check it. By the way, she’s lying to you about the shadow. She’s got one. Be nice to find him, or identify him, anyway.”
    “Yeah, well . . .”
    “Get back to you,” Harmon said.
     
    F OR BREAKFAST , Nadya had a bowl of strawberries with a smidgen of cream, and two cups of coffee. She was a slow eater, and they went over the case again, piece by piece, as she worked her way through the strawberries. Finally, Reasons said, “I’m gonna go talk to the boss. What are you guys doing?”
    “Maybe I oughta go back to Virginia and jack up the Spivaks.”
    “Couldn’t hurt,” Reasons said.
    “Then that’s what I’ll do,” Lucas said.
     
    N ADYA WENT WITH HIM . Before they left, they both went to their rooms to check for messages, and Lucas used the break to call Andreno in Virginia. “Anything?”
    “No. I just got going a couple of hours ago. Spivak’s gonna be checked again this morning and then they’re gonna let him out. They’re gonna take him down to the police station and get a drawing of the guy who hanged him, for whatever that’s worth.”
    “Where’re you?”
    “In the van across from the hospital. His son went in fifteen minutes ago, and since Spivak doesn’t have a car here, I’d guess the son is picking him up.”
    “All right. Stay with him. I’m coming up that way with Nadya. I’m gonna jack the guy up a little. Maybe his kids, too.”
     
    L UCAS AND N ADYA drove north mostly in quiet, at the start, Pink Floyd’s A Collection of Great Dance Songs playing soft on the CD. Nadya, it turned out, was married, now separated, and had three children, twoboys and a girl, one at Moscow State University, the other two in secondary school. Both her husband and her father were professors at the university—her father had, in fact, introduced her to the man who’d become her husband. Her father was a chemist, her husband did computer software research.
    “I once owned a software company,” Lucas told her.
    Her eyebrows went up. “This is serious?”
    “Sure. Davenport Simulations. We made software programs that would simulate different kinds of emergencies on police computer systems to train people to respond. You know, you have a centralized communications center, and you get two car accidents with injuries and then a shooting, all coming in at the same time, and then one of the cars you expect to send is off the air, and another one breaks down on the way to a scene, what do you do, where do you put your people? We had dozens of different scenarios. I’m out of it now, but the