Hidden Prey

low concrete building painted red, white, and blue, with no style whatever, except perhaps existential garage.
    There were three cop cars in the parking lot, and beyond them, six men on their hands and knees, crawling up the parking lot; two more men stood chatting, watching the crawlers. Lucas rolled in next to the cars, and he and Nadya got out. One of the two standing men, a square-faced forty-year-old in a ball cap, walked over and said, “Are you Davenport?”
    “Yes, and Nadya Kalin, a police officer from Russia. She’s here as an observer.”
    “Pleased to meet you,” the chief said. “I’m Roy.” And then to Nadya: “You look just like Miz Wedig, a third-grade teacher here in town. You could be sisters.”
    “But I’m a spy,” Nadya said solemnly. “Mr. Davenport will tell you so.”
    “Well, I’m sure every big country needs spies,” Hopper said cheerfully. He turned to Lucas, his smile fading. “We may have some bad news. One of the boys was scuffing around and he found some blood over there on the other side of the car. We covered it, and the sheriff’s people came over and took some samples. I put my guys to crawling the lot, inch by inch. So far . . .” He dug in his pocket and pulled out a transparent plastic bag and handed it to Lucas. “ . . . this is what we found.”
    A nine-millimeter shell was inside the bag; it was shiny, new.
    “Nine millimeter,” Lucas said to Nadya.
    “But not from the same group of cartridges as the one that killed Oleshev,” she said. “The others were tarnished, and even had some, mmm, I don’t know the English, green coloring on the brass.”
    “That’d be your verdigris,” Hopper said.
    “We can tell by the firing-pin mark whether it was the same gun,” Lucas said. He handed the bag back to the sheriff: “If you could have that shipped right away down to the BCA crime lab, I’d appreciate it. They could get back to us overnight on the firing-pin mark.”
    “Good as done,” Hopper said. “You want to see where the blood was?”
    They walked over to look; there wasn’t much but a clean spot on the blacktop. “How much blood, you think?” Lucas asked. “Bad wound?”
    “I’d say pretty bad. I’d say the guy was down at least a quart.”
    “Shoot.” Lucas looked around. “I’ll tell you what. There’d be no reason to take the body except to delay the discovery. You might find it around pretty close. I imagine that they’d want to get rid of it.”
    “There are a few thousand square miles of woods and swamps around here, to say nothing of the pits,” Hopper said. “I wouldn’t hold your breath.”
    Nadya had been staring morosely at the clean spot on the blacktop; now she said, abruptly, “Is this all?”
    “That’s about all, ma’am,” Hopper said.
    “I will call,” she said, and she walked away from them.
    “She sure does look like Sally Wedig,” Hopper marveled, looking after her.
     
    N ADYA CAME BACK . “They are very upset in Washington.”
    “So am I,” Lucas said. “I don’t mean to . . . get on your case when one of your countrymen has been killed, but the whole bunch of you are playing games. It’s gotta stop. It’s getting people killed. You need totell me everything you know, everything they know in Moscow, and maybe I can stop it. And I don’t give a shit about this spy stuff . . .”
    “I don’t make that decision,” Nadya said. She stepped closer to him and looked up and said, “When Weather and I were shopping, she said you were a brilliant policeman because you made things happen. Make something happen.”
    “Like what?” Lucas asked; he was both irritated and flattered.
    “Something. I don’t know.”
     
    L UCAS CHECKED AGAIN with Andy Harmon. “I got the Duluth FBI guys going. They should be in Virginia by now. They’ll lean on Spivak,” Harmon said.
    “Okay. I’ve got some news about your friend Piotr Nikitin. He’s probably dead.”
    Silence, for five seconds. “You’re positive?”
    Lucas told him about the nine-millimeter shell, the blood, the car and the cell phone. “Probably too early to light a candle, but you might look around for a matchbook.”
    “Huh. I’ll pass the word on. Keep me informed.”
    Lucas decided: “Look. Have one of the FBI guys call me on this phone when they’re done with Spivak. I’m gonna give him an hour to think about it, assuming he doesn’t crack, and then I’m going to bust his ass.”
    “On what