Hidden Prey

phone. A minute later, the chief said, “It’s ringing.”
    “Oh my god,” Nadya said. “I must call in. I must call.”
    “Better treat that area as a crime scene, Chief,” Lucas said. “We’ll be back up there at the crack of dawn, or nine o’clock, whichever is later.”
    When Lucas got off the phone, he said to Nadya, “Call in, and then get a few hours of sleep. I’ve got an Ambien if you need one. I’ll get you up at five-thirty, we’ll get out of here at six.”
    Nadya nodded and started dialing. Lucas was at the bottom of the stairs, headed up, when she called after him, “I’m thinking I’m not liking this Minnesota too much.”
    “It ain’t Minnesota,” Lucas said. “Minnesota’s just fine.”
     
    L UCAS WAS UP at five forty-five, groggy until he got out of the shower, which he shared with Weather; she got his blood moving, anyway. Weather didn’t have to shave, so she was dressed and downstairs first, having stopped to knock on Nadya’s door.
    When Lucas got downstairs, Weather said, “Nadya’s up. She’s repacking. I’ll put some coffee in a thermos. You want some peanut-butter toast?”
    “That’d be great. I’m sorry about the quick turnaround. Gotta makea couple of calls.” He called Andreno, talked with him for a moment; then called Andy Harmon, who sounded as though he’d been up for hours, and filled him in on the shadow.
    “Interesting,” Harmon said. “We’ll get back to you.”
    Nadya came in, rubbing the back of her head. She had her carry-on bag, which she’d used as an overnighter, in her hand. “Are we ready?”
    “You want something to eat? Cereal, or peanut-butter toast?”
    She shook her head. “I just want to go.”
     
    A T SIX FIFTEEN , they were in the car. Nadya kept yawning, couldn’t stop. “I have no sleep at all,” she said as they backed out the driveway. She yawned and blinked. “I should have taken the pill.”
    Lucas braked, put the car in park, said, “Hang on,” and ran into the house. A minute later, he was back and handed Nadya a sleeping mask. “We’re three hours away. Crank the seat back, see if you can doze off. Any little bit will help.”
    She was gone before they got out of the Cities.
     
    T HE DAY WAS brilliant and warm, with a gusty wind from the south. Lucas didn’t want to disturb Nadya with the radio, so they rode in silence, running just over the speed limit in light traffic.
    Time to think: but not much to think about. The case was all in pieces. Andreno was keeping an eye on Spivak, though he couldn’t do a full surveillance. Nevertheless, when Lucas shook Andreno out of bed at six o’clock, he said he’d taken Spivak home at one o’clock in the morning, and had seen him, off and on, in the tavern during the day and all during the evening. The only place he’d gone all day was to a hardware store, this just before noon, where he’d bought two fluorescent lightbulbs, and to a Wal-Mart, at seven twenty.
    “He went inside, and I lost him for a minute or so and then I foundhim back in the DVDs. He got one, and then he trailed around the store some more and I got the impression he was looking for a tail, but he wasn’t very good at it. So I stayed back a little and let him run, and just before he walked out, he made a phone call from the public phones. He wasn’t on for more than a minute.”
    “That sounds like something. I’ll have the feds see if they can do anything with it.”
    “Okay. We might be getting a little tangled up here, though,” Andreno said. “The cops already got a call about my van. The chief short-stopped it, but somebody along the main drag here is getting suspicious.”
    “Get a different vehicle,” Lucas said. “Get Spivak in the bar during the day, and trade that one in for another one. I can make a call, get you the right one.”
    “Do that. But don’t call me back until about ten o’clock, which is when I’m going to get up.”
     
    W HOEVER HAD MET with the shadow, it wasn’t Spivak. What else? The laptop was a possibility. He should hear something from the FBI during the day. The street person, the woman who called him: Was there any way to hook into her? She almost certainly had a criminal record. If they could get a single print off anything in that shack, they should be able to get a name and a mug shot and maybe some idea of where she was. He made a mental note to call Reasons and push the Duluth crime-scene people to take the shack apart. There had to be