Hidden Prey

tourists?”
    “Cops,” Lucas said. He sipped his coffee, and said, “They had a Russian fellow killed up here a couple days ago. Found his body down in the Rust-Hull mine this morning. Crows got to him.”
    “Oh my . . . God,” the woman behind the case said. Her hand went to her throat.
    Lucas slipped into semi-hayseed mode. “Yup. Gonna be a big deal, all right. FBI flying around like a bunch of bats. They’re talking spy rings, they’re talking multiple murder. Haven’t seen so much screaming and yelling since I went to a goat-fuck out in South Dakota.” He sipped at his coffee and squinted NYPD-like at the street.
    “Well . . . did they catch anybody?” the woman asked.
    “Not yet. But they will,” Lucas said. He dragged his index finger across his neck. “Murder one. Federal rap.”
    Nadya jumped in, her accent suddenly thicker. “They will be lucky peoples if they get to court. If my people catch them . . .” She smiled at the woman behind the counter. “ . . . I am Russian—then they wish for your murder one.”
    “She’s a spy,” Lucas said to the woman, tipping a thumb toward Nadya. “But she’s on our side for this one.” He looked at his watch. “Oops. We better get going. Don’t want to keep Chief Hopper waiting. Hey: great kolaches, huh?”
     
    W HEN THEY WERE back on the street, Lucas looked down at Nadya and grinned. “I hope to hell that was one of the Svobodas. I don’t want to have wasted that act.”
    “You have some abilities,” Nadya conceded. Then, sadly, “Now we get these fingerprints, eh? I did not know this man, but I feel sorry for his child. Not natural to lose both your parents this way. This should not happen to anybody.”
    Nikitin’s body had been taken to the medical examiner’s office. Nadya had given Hopper some of her fingerprint forms, and the prints were ready when they got there. They spent ten minutes going through his personal effects—comb, two expensive pens, a wallet, a couple of credit cards, two photos, one of a small girl and one of a Harley-Davidson motorcycle.
    “Not much,” Lucas said.
    “He was very professional,” said Nadya. “There shouldn’t be much.”
    “Which doesn’t help.”
    “Now what?” she asked.
    “Nothing to do but push. Push Spivak, push the Svobodas, once we decide to talk to them . . . and I guess I better call Harmon now.”
    Nadya picked up the picture of the girl: “And I should call the embassy, send the fingerprints. Then they will have to talk to the child.”
    “Find out where he was staying,” Lucas suggested. “Maybe he left something in his room.”
    She nodded: “I will do that also.”

     17 
    G RANDPA WAS BURNING with anxiety when Carl arrived after school, said, “Where have you been?”
    “School . . . we had choir practice,” Carl said. Grandpa’s house smelled of years of spaghetti and red spaghetti sauce and mushrooms; and old cigarette smoke, cooked into the walls for decades, ending, Carl was told, just after he was born. “I heard they found the body.”
    Grandma, slumped in her wheelchair, mumbled something about a good day— did you have a good day?—and Carl patted her on the shoulder.
    Grandpa said, “Yes, but we knew they would—this is just sooner than we hoped. But we’ve got more trouble.” He took a quick turn around the living room, stopped and stooped and looked out over the couch, between the yellowed cotton curtains, to the street. “Karen Svoboda got out and made a call. The cops who were in the Duluth paper, this Davenport and the Russian Kalin, came into the bakery today andgot some pastry, and then they sat in front and told Karen about finding the body, and about spy rings and murder charges, and the FBI coming in. This was no accident, that they came to the bakery.”
    Carl was freaked: “Man. I hope they weren’t watching Karen when she called.”
    “She was smart,” Grandpa said. “She went down to Webster’s Beauty; she’s got a friend who works there. She talked to the friend and then borrowed her cell phone to make the call. I don’t see how they could trace that. They couldn’t see her friend, couldn’t see the phone, couldn’t see her calling . . .”
    “But they went another step,” Carl said. “Is Spivak talking? Maybe this house is bugged . . .” Carl looked up at the light fixture as if a bug might be dangling there.
    “I don’t think it’s Anton. We would have had a warning. But