Hidden Prey

young people had been fleeing the area for decades—still, even if there were twice as many eighty-plus males, that’d only be eight hundred. With twenty people working on it, they would have to check only forty records each.
    At four in the afternoon, a young man named Joshua called and said he’d found the name of a ninety-one-year-old man named Lou Witold who showed a baptismal certificate in Mahnomen County, and a notation that his original birth certificate, issued by the Catholic hospital, had been destroyed.
    “That’s the guy,” Lucas said.
    “He’s dead,” Joshua said. “He died six years ago.”
    “That’s not the guy,” Lucas said. “Got anything else on him?”
    “He was married to an Anne Witold, whose records were destroyed in the same fire. She’s also dead.”
    “Okay. You said it’s, uh, Joshua? Listen, Joshua, start tracking Witolds. Pull all the Witold driver’s licenses from St. Louis County, and see if you can build a genealogy, okay?”
    “Okay. Do you want it today?”
    “Yes. Tell your supervisor that all the overtime was authorized by the governor.”
    “Really?”
    “Really,” Lucas said. “You don’t want to piss off the governor, not with these reductions in force going on.”
    “I need the overtime,” Joshua said earnestly. “I’ll work as long as the computers are turned on.”
    “Atta boy,” Lucas said; he sounded like Andreno.
     
    T HE EARLY NEWS had Reasons all over the place. First cop killed in years—died trying to save a Russian. Every news channel that Lucas looked at had bought the bodyguard line.
    At five twenty, a woman named Romany called: “I’ve got another one of these Mahnomen-fire birth certificates, issued to a Burt and Melodie Walther. Both still alive—Burt still has a driver’s license. He’s ninety-two. You want me to do the genealogy thing, like Josh?”
    “Yeah. This could be the guy we want . . . How’s Joshua doing?”
    “Let me check,” she said.
    Joshua came back. “Lou and Anne Witold had two children, both boys, Leon and Duane. Duane married somebody named Karen Hafner, and we have driver’s licenses for them up to nineteen seventy-eight, and then no more. It’s like they moved. The other kid, Leon, married a Wanda Lindsey, and they’re still in Hibbing. And they’ve got a couple of kids, named John and Sarah, and Sarah I can’t find, but John is living in Rochester—he’s twenty-eight, and I don’t know if he’s married or not, or if he has any kids. I’m still looking.”
    “Keep going,” Lucas said. He hung up, took his notes on Witold over to the Oleshev genealogy, and slipped it into one of the two remaining charts, three generations.
    “Goddamnit,” he said, looking at it. Too good to be true? They’d get a test with Bert and Melodie Walther.
    He called Nadya, who’d moved to the Harbor Lodge: “What’d you tell the bosses?”
    “I told them that Jerry was shot while guarding me.”
    “Atta girl,” he said.
    “That’s what Micky says. ‘Atta girl.’ ”
    “We’ve got some new people for our genealogy,” he said.
    He filled her in, and she said, “We need a picture of this man,” she said. “This Walther. We can show it to the woman in the aluminum house with the horses, who saw the old man at Spivak’s . . .”
    “Maisy Reynolds,” Lucas said. “We can do that. I’ll talk to the chief up there about getting a picture. What are you doing?”
    “Watching a movie. Legally Blonde. This is a very peculiar movie.”
    “Actually, it’s based on a true story,” Lucas said. “It’s kind of a documentary.”
    “Really?”
    “True. This can be a very unusual country, sometimes.”
     
    L UCAS WAS SMILING when he hung up. Weather had made him watch Legally Blonde, and he’d loathed it. Then she made him watch Legally Blonde II, and he’d wanted to pluck out his eyeballs. The idea of Legally Blonde going back to the KGB, or whatever the fuck it was, as a documentary . . .
    That made him laugh, and then he thought of the mote in the eye, Jerry Reasons, and he stopped laughing.
    Maybe laugh tomorrow, he thought.

     21 
    A NDRENO AND N ADYA arrived at nine o’clock the next morning, Nadya still red and puffy around the eyes. She’d been having crying jags, Andreno told him, but not as often anymore. Andreno was solemn and attentive when he was beside her, but he winked at Lucas when her back was turned. Andreno was wearing a green-and-white baseball jacket