Hidden Prey

said, “Anything else?”
     
    M ORE DRIFT TIME ; time not even spent thinking about the case. What could be done was being done. Reasons had walked out through the front door of the hotel when the meeting ended, never looking back; and Lucas wondered if he was wrong about Nadya and Reasons.
    He talked to Weather about it that night and she said, “Who cares? They’re adults.”

     16 
    L IKE ANY GOOD M INNESOTAN , Lucas rarely missed the TV weather before going to bed. But he missed it that night, caught up in watching The Hulk on a movie channel.
    The phone call came early the next day, and, as he was running out of the hotel at seven in the morning, still half asleep, the weather smacked him in the face. Fall had arrived overnight, and he could see his breath in the air as he headed for the car.
    Nadya called after him, “Wait, wait, wait.” Lucas had suggested that maybe she could get a ride with Reasons, but she didn’t want to ride with Reasons—the sarcasm was apparently lost on her—she wanted to go right now and with Lucas. She was wearing jeans and boots she’d bought when she was shopping with Weather, and the shoestrings were flapping and she couldn’t get her shirt tucked in, and she had her new Patagonia jacket pinned under her chin as she tried to dress on the run and she called, “Wait, please, wait, wait . . .”
    Lucas put the light on the roof and they were out of there, up the hill, over the top, running as hard as they could for Hibbing. “It’s Piotr,” she said.
    “I think so.”
    “I hope it’s not Piotr. It is Piotr, isn’t it? I think it must be . . .”
    Lucas was not good in the morning and had had neither a Coke nor a cup of coffee. On the outskirts of Duluth, he spotted a likely-looking gas station and roared into the lot, light still flashing, got two coffees to go, jumped the line at the cash register, ran back, hopped in the car, and took off again.
    Nadya started with Piotr again, then went silent, and Lucas, grumpy, was blessing the silence when she said, “So, you know that I am sleeping with Jerry. This offends you?”
    “You’re sleeping with Reasons?” He feigned astonishment.
    “Please.” She said it exactly like a New Yorker.
    “None of my business,” Lucas said. “You’re adults.”
    “That’s exactly what I thought,” she said. More silence, but Lucas knew she wasn’t going to leave it alone. Two minutes went by with sipping of coffee, views out the passenger window—trees, then more trees—and then she said, “Do you want to know why?”
    “It’s none of my business,” Lucas repeated, but he did want to know, so he tried to keep any harshness out of his voice.
    “It’s because, as Jerry would say, I am horny.”
    “Okay,” Lucas said. “Okay.”
    “I am separated six years now, and here I am—I am out of town where my colleagues can’t see me, I am in a nice hotel with a good bed, Jerry is somewhat attractive and certainly safe, and very enthusiastic.”
    “That’s uh . . . Jesus, it’s gotta be Piotr, don’t you think?”
    She looked at him sideways and said, “I am sorry if this affair offends you. But I have not had so much sex in my life, and I took the opportunity.”
    “No. No. Like I said . . . Poor old Piotr . . .”
    Two-thirds of the way to Hibbing, Lucas said, “We should call Andy Harmon.” But they didn’t.
     
    C HIEF R OY H OPPER was standing on the edge of the road, bullshitting with a couple of guys in tan Carhartt jackets, all three of them with their hands in the jacket pockets. Lucas pulled into the weeds off the tarmac and climbed out.
    “There you are,” Hopper called cheerfully. He turned to the other two and he said, “Top guy from the BCA, and this is his Russian friend. Nadya? Got that right?”
    “Is it Piotr?” Nadya asked.
    “We don’t know,” he said. “You got a picture?”
    “Yes, I do, on my laptop, I have my laptop . . .”
    “Haven’t got him up yet, he’s over the edge . . .”
    Lucas looked around. They were in a road cut, with trees and brush all around. “Down in what?”
    “Down in the pit,” the chief said. When Lucas didn’t react, he said, “The Rust-Hull mine pit. Biggest pit in the country.”
    “Grand Canyon of the north, is what they call it around here,” one of the Carhartts said.
    “Where is it?” Lucas asked, looking around again.
    “About thirty yards that way,” the other Carhartt said, tipping his head toward the