John Sandford - Hidden Prey

"Me also," Nadya said. "This process feels like it is coming to an end."

Andreno nodded. "Roger'll give us something. Has to. Did you see the paper this morning?"

"The Star Tribune," Lucas said.

"The local paper has a story from Spivak's lawyer. You're gonna take some pressure at the preliminary hearing."

"We've got enough for the preliminary," Lucas said.

"Be a pretty fucked-up trial, though," Andreno said.

"Somebody'll crack before we get to trial. I hope."

With the focus on Roger Walther, they all rode to Virginia together. Lucas and Andreno chatted about another case they'd worked on, in St. Louis, and they compared promotion and salary practices with Nadya. Nadya's salary was small by American standards, but she paid almost nothing for housing, medical care, insurance, or any of the other dozens of possibilities that Americans dealt with. The one problem, she said, was food. "We don't eat so much in restaurants as you do; and the food in restaurants that I can afford is not so good anyway."

"And you don't have so many signs," Lucas said.

She laughed, the first time Lucas had heard her laugh since Reasons was killed. "You are ridiculous here. When we stopped to buy gasoline, on one pump, there were twenty-two signs. On one pump!"

"I saw you counting," Lucas said.

"Stickers," Andreno said. "They're called stickers."

"But they were signs. Only, small ones."

The rain had stopped, but everything was still damp and dripping when they arrived at Kelly Harbinson's place outside Virginia.

"What a dump," Andreno said from the backseat. He'd taken his revolver out of its holster, and he put it in his jacket pocket. "Looks like something from a cotton plantation."

"Yeah, well… his ex-wife said he was like one step off the street," Lucas said.

"Wish we had vests," Andreno said.

They got out, and like Andreno, Lucas put his. 45 in his jacket pocket, held it in his hand. They told Nadya to wait back off the porch, and then Lucas and Andreno trooped across the wooden stoop and knocked on the screen door. The knock, Lucas thought, might have been inaudible inside: the wood was so wet and old that the knock was more of a soggy pup-pup-pup. There was no sound or movement from inside, and Lucas pulled the screen door open and knocked on the inside door, a little harder.

No sound, no movement. A car went by on the road, and they looked after it, but the driver was a woman and she never looked back at them.

Lucas knocked again. Nothing. "Damnit," he said.

"Let me walk around back," Andreno said.

Lucas nodded, sure that there was nobody inside. The door was solid, without an inset window, so as Andreno squished on the wet shaggy lawn around to the back, Lucas stepped over to the front window and tried to peer in. The window was dirty enough that there was a lot of reflection, and he couldn't see much-what he could see looked like a messy house, which, given the outside appearance, wasn't surprising.

Andreno came back around. "I looked in the back door, couldn't see shit."

Lucas stepped back out to the car, took his phone out, and called John Terry. "We're out at Kelly Harbinson's place. There's nobody here. You know where she works?"

"No, but I might be able to find out. Let me get back to you. Give me fifteen minutes."

They spent the fifteen minutes filling Nadya in on American search rules. "We could go in and if it became necessary, lie about it," Nadya said.

Lucas said, "That has been done, but… usually, when only the one investigator is around."

Andreno agreed: "As long as you got defense attorneys, better to play by the law. When you don't see an upside."

"What is this upside?"

They explained the upside to her, and she said, "Capitalism."

John Terry called back and said, "I had my girl call around to Harbinsons, and she found her parents. She works at Reeves' Wine and Spirits. About ten to one, that's where she met Walther."

"Okay. You got a number?"

Lucas called the liquor store, identified himself to the owner, Jack Reeves, and asked for Harbinson.

"I don't know where she is," Reeves said. "We're a little worried. She was supposed to be here at eight. She drinks a little, but she's pretty reliable."

"This hasn't happened before?"

"No, not really. She's been here four years… I mean, she's been late, but you know, it snowed and she was late six minutes. If she didn't come in soon, I was going to drive out to her place and knock on the door."

"Nobody here… we're out there now," Lucas said.

Off the phone, Lucas looked at the house and said, "Let's check all the windows. See what we can see."

"Maybe they took off," Andreno said.

"That's what I'm afraid of."

They walked around the left side of the house; most of the windows had Venetian blinds, and they could see through the string holes in the sides, and the corners where the blinds weren't quite straight. They saw nothing useful until they'd circled the house. From there, a blind looked into the bedroom, and they could see a pile of clothes on the floor by what must have been a closet, and more strewn in the hallway beyond.

"Goddamnit," Lucas said.

Andreno tried the front door. "It's unlocked," he said.

"Let me do this," Lucas said. He pushed the door open and called, "Hello? Anybody home?"

No answer. He pushed the door open another foot. The place was messy inside, and smelled like tomato soup and nicotine, but there was no law against any of that.

There wasn't room on the porch for Nadya, but Andreno had moved up behind Lucas and he said, "There's a butcher knife on the floor."

"Where?"

"Right there in front of the TV" There was nothing in front of the TV except an oval braided rug.

"I better check the place," Lucas said. He stepped inside, again called, "Hello?" Nothing. He went through the living room, looked into the kitchen, checked a bedroom, which was empty, the bath, empty but in disarray, then the second bedroom, where the pile of clothes sat in front of the closet.

He almost didn't see her-nothing was visible but her head. The rest of her body was buried under a pile of clothes that had been thrown across the bed. Lucas took another step: her forehead had a hole in it.

Lucas retreated, went into the kitchen, took a tissue from a box on the counter, picked up a butcher knife, dropped it on the floor in front of the television, and went back to the porch.

Andreno looked at his face and said, "What?"

"She's in there," Lucas said.

"She's dead," Nadya said.

"Yes. Shot in the forehead."

"This is nuts," Andreno said.

Lucas called Terry back: "We got a problem out here, Chief. Who covers this area?"

"St. Louis County sheriff. What do you got?"

Lucas told him, and Terry said, "Jesus Christ, Davenport, you're some kind of death angel."

"Yeah, yeah…"

"I'll get the sheriff started, and we'll get a couple cars out there-we got a mutual aid pact. Ten minutes."

Lucas hung up and Andreno said, "Roger Walther."

"Didn't take her with him," Lucas said. "I hope somebody has a picture."

"His wife…"

Lucas said to Nadya: "Okay. We've got a lot of stuff to do now. We've got to put out a bulletin on this guy, and since he might have been working with somebody from Russia, we'll have to make it international. Can you call your embassy…"

They were making up a list of must-do tasks when they heard the first siren coming in: Lucas turned toward the siren, then back to the other two.

"We'll hit Janet Walther first, ask if she's seen him. Then hit the old man again-Nadya thinks he might have been fucking with us with the Alzheimer's act. Start the cops looking either for his car, or Harbinson's. Check the state registrations for both of them, get the tag numbers out to the highway patrol and everybody else. Get the name to the security people at the airports…"