John Sandford - Hidden Prey

The smile came again, and the corners of her eyes crinkled: "With those, you would get along very well with our intellectuals."

"Yeah, well…"

"You don't think we'll get justice?"

"We might get the killer," Reasons said. "Justice is out of the question."

They waited some more, and then the luggage started coming. Lucas watched her from the corner of his eye. She was not somebody who hit you as pretty, he decided, but if she was around for a while… She was like Weather that way; Weather wasn't conventionally pretty, but she was intensely attractive.

Her bag arrived, a black nylon duffel, and Reasons threw it over his shoulder. Lucas offered to carry her briefcase, but she declined, and Lucas led the way out to the city car. She climbed in the backseat, and Reasons took the wheel with Lucas in the front passenger seat.

"What first?" Reasons asked over his shoulder.

"I would like to see the body," she said. "If this is possible."

"We can do that," Reasons said. "You want to freshen up first? Check into your hotel?"

"No, I'm afraid it would be wasted, if then I went to see the body," she said.

"No problem."

The morgue was at the University of Minnesota-Duluth medical school. They talked about the weather on the way over; in Moscow,

Nadya said, it was no different than here in Duluth. And they talked about the length of her trip: it was not so much the hours in the air, as the shift in time, she said. She would be disoriented for a while. "At home, we are nine hours ahead of your time. Right now, I am okay. At seven o'clock tonight, I will fall asleep. For sure."

"What exactly is your job back home?" Lucas asked.

"I am a police officer, a major in the Federal Security Service-like your FBI," she said. "If I help with this case, I will have some good hopes of becoming a colonel. If I don't help, I will have some good hopes of becoming a lieutenant." She smiled to show that she was joking.

"So this is a big deal." Reasons looked at her in the rearview mirror.

"Yes, big deal," she said. "What is a Dairy Queen?"

They explained Dairy Queen, and then rode in silence for a bit until Lucas asked Reasons, "You gonna stay with us? Or are you gonna get pulled for this old lady?"

"I don't know. I'd like to work with you guys, but there might not be much to do. And politics gets into it. Nobody cares much about the Russian, but folks are gonna be kinda pissed about Wheaton."

"What is this?" Nadya asked, from the backseat.

"Ah, we had another murder here…" Reasons went on to regale her with the facts of the murder. Lucas was watching her face, the play of emotions running across them as Reasons got into the details. When he finished, Nadya touched three fingers to her lips and asked, "Does this happen often?"

"Nope. Hardly anybody ever gets killed up here. We got maybe two or three murders a year. Four in a good year."

"Only Russians and old women alcoholics," she said.

"The first Russian in memory," Reasons said. "As a matter of fact, that was the first Russian boat to come in for quite a while."

"Really," Lucas said. "I didn't know that."

"Lots of Russians back in the seventies; not many anymore," Reasons said. He looked over the seat at Nadya.

She shrugged, and said, "As far as I know, that… would not be connected to this death. That the boat would come here."

"So you think it was just a coincidence?" Lucas asked.

"I believe in coincidences," she said, "As long as there are not too many of them."

The morgue was in the medical school's loading dock; a convenience, Reasons said. "You just back the ambulance up to the dock, open up the garage door, wheel the deceased over to the cooler, and put him or her inside."

They'd called ahead, and were met in the dock by the pathologist on duty, a Chinese-American man with a pleasant accent who introduced himself as Doctor Chu. He unlocked the door to the cooler, and rolled the dead man out. Oleshev was covered with a hospital sheet, and the pathologist pulled it back.

Nadya turned away, just an inch or two, a flinch, Lucas thought, and then she turned back. Oleshev looked as though he'd been carved out of a piece of chipboard. Nadya gazed at him for a moment, then dipped into her bag and took out a brown envelope, slipped out three glossy photographs, looked at the photos and then at the face. After a moment, she showed them to Lucas and Reasons. The photos didn't look exactly like the dead man, but resembled him; resembled him the way flesh resembles wood.

Lucas asked, "You know him?" Behind Nadya, Reasons's eyes cut to Lucas.

"No." To Chu she said, "It looks like him. Rodion Oleshev."

"That's not the name on his papers," Chu said.

Nadya shrugged.

"All the people from the ship agreed he was a guy named Oleg Moshalov," said Reasons, pressing just a little.

Nadya said, "Well, he's not." To Chu: "If you could make some fingerprints for me, that I could witness…" She dipped into her bag again and took out a stack of thin plastic envelopes.

"We've got prints…" Chu began.

"She'd like to witness it," Lucas said. "With her own stuff."

The pathologist nodded. "What do I do?"

She opened one of the envelopes and slipped out a sheet of plastic half the size of a dollar bill. In the center of the plastic sheet was a red square covered with a strip of peel-off film.

"You pull off the cover and roll one of the right-hand fingers in the red square," she said.

"Red Square," Chu said. To Lucas: "Get it?"

Lucas shook his head once and Nadya sighed and said, "Then you let the sheet dry for a few seconds, and we put it back in the envelope."

The pathologist said, "Slick," and took the prints. He did it quickly, expertly, and as he finished each print, Nadya lifted it to the overhead light to look through the plastic. Satisfied, she fanned each print for a moment, drying it, then slipped each plastic sheet back in its individual envelope.

"Where would you get a fingerprint kit like that?" Chu asked.

"You would have to call the consulate," Nadya said. She handed him an unused envelope. "You can have this one, if you would like. The manufacturer is named on the back, but it is in Russian. There's a phone number in St. Petersburg."

"Get my wife to translate it," Reasons said.

Nadya nodded: "The chemical on the sheet is made to… mmm… I don't know the English word, but it is, er, compounded to reflect light from a scanner, so that any scanner can be used to digitize the fingerprints." She used her hands when she talked, like a French woman.

"Slick," Chu said again. "Thanks."

Outside, Nadya took a breath, looked up and down the street and said, "This could be a Russian town, except for the signs. I don't mean the words on the signs, I mean the signs are everywhere. Everything is signs."

"So you want to look at the files, or what?" Reasons asked.

"No. If we could go to the hotel, I could transmit the fingerprints back to Washington, and use the toilet and maybe get clean from the trip. Then the files?"

Like Lucas, Nadya was staying at the Radisson, a cylindrical building that looked like a chubby, upright tower of Pisa; the hotel was conveniently across the street from the police station. They took her all the way to her room, where Lucas explained the TV remote and the movies channel, and they showed her how to hook the modem through the hotel's phone system. They dialed into the Russian embassy's server, got the connect tone, and left her.

"We'll wait in the restaurant. Back in half an hour," Lucas said, as they went out the door.

Going back down the hallway to the elevators, Reasons said, "She said she didn't know him."

"I don't think she did," Lucas said. "She was too careful about the fingerprints."