Hidden Prey

son was shaking his head: “We will be careful, and I think it’s all bullshit anyway. Dad doesn’t know anything. This asshole should have figured it out. If Dad knew anything, he would have told him, instead of letting himself get hanged, for Christ’s sakes.”
    “I hope so,” Lucas said. “But if I’m right, and you’re wrong . . .” He looked at Nadya. “There’re going to be some dead people in the Spivak family.”
    “Maybe all of them,” Nadya said. “This man . . . perhaps you should ask your police chief to see the pictures of old Mrs. Wheaton. He nearly cut her head off, with this wire. Maybe then you’ll believe.”
    “I don’t know anything,” Spivak repeated. He took a nervous hit on the beer. “Honest to God . . .”
    “It’s not us you’re gonna have to convince,” Lucas said. “You got guns? You better get some. Maybe the local cops will give you bodyguards.”
    Nadya shook her head, speaking to Lucas, as one sober police officer to another. “That wouldn’t work. This killer, as you say, is a professional.” She looked at the Spivaks, from father to son and back. “To you two, I say, and to your sister and wife, good-bye. I believe because you do not tell us what happens, some of you will be dead before I return.”
    They sat in silence for a moment, and then Lucas said, “Well, fuck ya. We told you.”
    “Good-bye,” Nadya said. “I am so sad . . .”
     
    O UTSIDE , in the street, Lucas said, “That was pretty good.”
    Nadya said, “Standard procedure. He will ripen in a day or two.”
    “If he’s not dead.”
    “That is my worry,” she said. “That I was not fooling about.”

     12 
    T HEY STOPPED IN Duluth to pick up clothes, and decided to keep their rooms; they’d be gone only overnight. As they headed south, they crossed the line of a weather front coming in from the west, a thin wedge of cloud that spit rain at them for a hundred miles, and then began to dissipate as they rolled through the northern suburbs of Minneapolis and St. Paul.
    On the way, Lucas called Weather and told her that they’d have an overnight guest.
    “The Russian guy?” she asked.
    “Not exactly.”
     
    M ARCY S HERRILL AND two of her intelligence cops were waiting in a no-parking zone by a McDonald’s in the Minneapolis student village called Dinkytown, just off the University of Minnesota campus.Lucas pulled in behind them, and Sherrill got out of the unmarked car and walked back, sipping a cup of McDonald’s coffee, a pretty, dark-haired woman who liked to fight.
    “Where’re we going?” Lucas asked, rolling his window down.
    “Jesus, not even a how-do-you-do,” Marcy said. She stooped to look past Lucas to Nadya and said, “You must be the Russian guy.”
    “Yes,” Nadya said. “You are the policeman?”
    “Listen,” Lucas said hastily, “Is this guy going to be a problem? Larry?”
    Marcy switched her eyes back to Lucas and shrugged. “I don’t know. I hope so. I haven’t kicked anybody’s ass in a long time.”
    “Yeah, yeah, very macho. Is he gonna be a problem?”
    “No reason to think so, but he could be a runner. I’ve got a couple of squads ready to roll; they’ll come in right behind us and cover the outside, back and front.”
    “What about a hammer?”
    “Got one in the car.”
    “So let’s go.”
    “What’s happening?” Nadya asked, as they pulled away from the curb. Her face was pink, her eyes bright.
    “Gonna sneak up on this guy’s apartment and knock the door down. Grab him before he can run,” Lucas said. And that, Lucas thought, should have been clear enough to any real cop.
     
    L IKE STUDENT VILLAGES everywhere, Dinkytown was a collection of old retail buildings that housed overpriced student supplies and clothing, and even older residences that had been converted to overpriced apartments that were given as little maintenance as was legally possible.
    Larry, the fence, lived in a crappy green shingle-sided two-story house with a sagging front porch and four rusting mailboxes nailed tothe outside wall next to the door. Marcy’s sources had said that there were four apartments inside, two up and two down, and that Larry rented both the upstairs apartments. There was a connecting door between the two of them with deadbolts on both sides, and the informants said Larry hoped to use one or the other as an escape route if the cops came.
    They parked down the block, sideways out of sight from the apartment.