Hidden Prey

north side of the road.
    “Whoever it is got throwed over the side, but he hung up on a ledge maybe a hundred feet down,” Hopper said. “Come on, I’ll show you.”
    “How’d you find him?” Nadya asked as they scrambled up the road cut. She’d gotten her boots properly tied, and Lucas thought they looked cute: retro-styled brown combat boots with giant cleated soles, but only about ten inches long.
    Hopper didn’t answer until they got over the top, then said, “Well,I knew you were going to ask . . . I told everybody to keep a lookout, and this morning, there were these crows flying around . . .”
    “Crows.”
    “Sort of the all-purpose cleanup crew around here,” Hopper said. “They’ll eat anything.”
    Nadya stopped, blood draining from her face and she said, “Oh my shit.”
    “That’s exactly right,” Hopper said.
    They pushed another twenty yards through light brush, and then suddenly the mine pit opened out in front of them. It wasn’t the Grand Canyon, but it was big. The lowest part of it was filled with water, a good-sized lake. A pickup truck on the dry pit floor beneath them looked like a Tonka toy. “Jesus,” Lucas said.
    “Never seen it before?” Hopper asked.
    “Never.” The dirt and rock were a deep purple, or maybe magenta—he got those confused. The colored stuff must be the iron ore, Lucas supposed. They slid carefully down a slope to a rock ledge perhaps ten yards wide, where two men in firemen’s uniforms were working with a winch. Lucas and Nadya stepped carefully to the edge and looked over the side.
    The pit was deep enough that Lucas had no idea of exactly how deep. Hundreds of feet, anyway, and it appeared to be miles long, maybe a couple of miles across. As Hopper had said, the body was a hundred or so feet below them, arms thrown to the side, legs spread, wrapped in a black coat, faceup. Two more firemen were maneuvering a lift basket.
    “You know how to rappel?” Hopper asked Lucas.
    “Fuck no,” Lucas asked.
    “A man after my own heart,” Hopper said.
     
    L UCAS HAD BEEN on recoveries before, and they always seemed to take two hours longer than they should; but they’d arrived morethan an hour into this one, so they only had to wait a half hour before the basket was winched over the lip of the cut and pulled onto the ledge.
    Nadya had gone back to the truck for her laptop, and as the body came up, she opened the laptop and brought up a picture of Nikitin. The body was wrapped in a blanket.
    “Want to look?” Hopper asked Nadya. “I can look for you.”
    “I must look,” Nadya said.
    Hopper nodded, and carefully unwrapped the blanket that covered the face. When he pulled back the last flap, Nadya said, “Ohhhh . . .” and turned away, put the laptop down, walked back to the fat part of the hill and tried to vomit. The crows had gotten the eyes and the other soft parts—the lips and the nose—before they’d been chased away.
    Hopper said quietly, “Put some eyes on him . . .”
    “It’s him,” Lucas said. “Could you get your guys to print him? We can send the prints back to the Russian embassy, just to make sure.”
    “You’ll have them in a half hour.”
    “Thanks, Chief.” Lucas went back and took Nadya by the arm. “Let’s go.”
    “I had nothing in my stomach except some coffee,” she said, dabbing at her mouth with the back of her hand. “Now my mouth tastes like acid. It’s . . . Piotr, correct?”
    “Yup. They’re gonna print him for you. Let’s get out of here.”
     
    T HEY SPENT SOME time driving around; Lucas got her a bottle of Scope at a convenience store, and wound up on the main drag. Lucas asked a passerby about Svoboda’s Bakery, got pointed, and they walked down together.
    “Is this smart?” Nadya asked.
    “We’re pushing,” Lucas said.
    Lucas had been in dozens of bakeries like Svoboda’s all overMinnesota and Wisconsin, small-town affairs with all the baking done on the premises, the varieties of cakes a fading tale of ethnic preferences from the early-nineteenth-century settlements. Lucas wandered down between the display cases, Nadya trailing behind. He chose two poppy-seed kolaches, and Nadya got a glazed doughnut, with two cups of coffee, and they carried them to one of two round metal tables at the front of the store and looked out at the street as they ate.
    The woman behind the case busied herself with another customer, and then asked cheerfully, “You folks