Hidden Prey

seconds, he was over the edge. Carl listened for a thump, heard nothing, and scrambled back to the car.
    “Done?”
    “Done.” Carl put on the safety belt and started the car. “You cleaned up?”
    “Good as I can,” Grandpa said. He looked stressed now, and even older than he usually did. “I think I got some on my shirt . . . I didn’t even notice when it happened, the noise, the flash . . . it’s all over me.”
    “Back home in five minutes.”
    “All over me,” Grandpa said, scrubbing at his hands with the last of the Kleenex. “All over me . . .”
     
    C ARL DIDN ’ T GET home until after midnight. Jan Walther was ready for bed, and came out to see him. “It’s late,” she said. “Your homework?”
    “Done. Did it in study hall,” Carl said, hand on his bedroom doorknob.
    “Still have to get up early. What kept you?”
    “Ah, you know Grandpa. He doesn’t sleep so well anymore. He wanted to talk.”
    She smiled and said, “Okay, big guy. But get some sleep. You have to be in school in less than eight hours.”
    “No problem,” said the Imperfect Weapon.
    He never dreamed about the dead: he dreamed of girls in varying states of nakedness, of black cars street-racing in LA, of himself posed in a shadowed hallway somewhere with a pistol, muzzle upraised as he slid along the hall, back to the wall . . .
    Carl still dreamed a child’s dreams.

     14 
    A FTER HIS EXPERIENCE with the cops in Virginia, Lucas decided not to take a chance on the Hibbing police. Instead, he called the head of the BCA’s northern office in Bemidji, asked him to be the intermediary, waited ten minutes, then took the call from the Hibbing chief of police.
    “We’ve got a situation,” he told the chief. “The FBI’s involved, counterintelligence people, and the whole thing is way too complicated to talk about over the phone, but what it is, is, I need somebody to run out to the Greyhound Museum to look around. If you have a Greyhound museum.”
    “We’ve got one,” the chief said. He sounded sleepy, but cooperative. “I can get a car up there in five minutes. Are my boys going to run into anything?”
    “Tell them to take care,” Lucas said. “We’re talking about a killer.He’s done two people that we know of, that Russian over in Duluth and the old lady a few days later.”
    “Holy smokes, I been reading about it. All right, I’ll get somebody up there—hell, I’ll get my pants on and go up there with them. Can I call you back?”
    “I’ll be sitting here,” Lucas said. “Call no matter what.”
     
    W EATHER SAID , “I want to know how this comes out, but I’ve got to go to bed. I’m working early.”
    “Be up as soon as I can,” Lucas said. “Whatever happens, we won’t go back to Duluth tonight. It’s too late, and there’d be nothing to do.”
    “I am very worried,” Nadya said.
    Lucas raised his eyebrows and said, “Well . . . you guys didn’t have to have a shadow. We told you that.”
    “A shadow was convenient for everybody,” Nadya said. “If all this trouble was an artifact of the past, we could leave it. If not, we could settle it with your FBI, informally. The shadow could act in ways that you, perhaps, could not, with your TV and newspapers . . .”
    “I’ll leave you two to work it out,” Weather said. She yawned, kissed Lucas on the forehead, and disappeared back up the stairs.
     
    T HE H IBBING CHIEF , Roy Hopper, called back twenty minutes later. “We found a running back from the high-school football team in the backseat of his dad’s car with his girlfriend. The boy didn’t have his pants entirely on. Hope this doesn’t turn out to be a distraction.”
    “Distract from what?” Lucas asked.
    “He’s rushing for better than a hundred yards a game so far this season . . .”
    “Chief . . .”
    “ . . . and we found an empty car, doors unlocked, nothing inside buta cell phone on a charging cord. We ran the plates. It’s a rental from Avis at Duluth International. Checked out a week and a half ago to a Martin Johnson.”
    “Hang on,” Lucas said.
    He repeated the information to Nadya, who said, “That is surely the car, do you think? I don’t know the name. Is this policeman near the cell phone?”
    Lucas to Hopper: “Where’s the cell phone?”
    “Still here, in the car.”
    “Tell him, I will call,” Nadya said. She ran upstairs, got a calendar, ran back down, and punched a number into Lucas’s cell