John Sandford - Hidden Prey

"If these cells were set up to move people, then he could be hard to locate," Nadya said. "They would have protected routes out."

"I don't know-all I know is what we can do," Lucas said. He turned and looked toward the incoming cop car, and then back to Nadya. "There's something not quite right with this whole thing. You say the group wasn't active as far as you know… if they were active, would somebody have told you? Warned you off?"

"Yes. And nobody did. There would be some indication that while they wanted enthusiasm, they did not want success. I never got that. It was the other way around-that I should learn what is happening, and we should not spare ourselves. That is why Piotr is dead."

Lucas said, "I'm just not sure how far I can trust you."

"That's for you to decide," she said. "But-we are breaking this case. We will join you in the hunt for Roger Walther, and if he is running to us, we will tell you."

"You will give him back?"

She shrugged. "That's not for me to decide. He did murder a popular diplomat."

He looked at her for a long moment, and then as the cop car turned into the yard, and he saw John Terry's face in the window, he nodded and said, "Okay. For now, anyway."

Lucas pushed relentlessly through their list. They were on the scene of the killing for two hours, handed it over first to the Virginia cops, then to a sheriff's deputy named Max Anderson. They were there long enough for an assistant medical examiner to guess that Harbinson had been dead for twelve hours, or less.

"That's just a guess based on body temp," he said. He was a young man, thin with blond shaggy hair; prematurely shabby and quite earnest. "The temperature in here is actually fairly low, and she hadn't gotten down to room temp. So… last night."

A sheriff's technician said, "I saw that shell from the shooting down in Hibbing. The one at the Greyhound Museum. The shells we picked up back there…" He nodded toward the bedroom.

"They look the same to me. That's just eyeballing it, but the firing-pin depth looks about the same, and it's round, and it's off center on the primer, just a hair, like the one from the museum."

"When will we know for sure?"

"I've got digital microphotographs on my computer back at the office. If I could get these back there, I could tell you ninety-nine percent in an hour, but I'm working on the scene here…"

"Screw the scene. Let me get you a car," Lucas said.

Terry, the Virginia chief, came out of the bedroom and noticed Lucas looking into a front-room closet, and asked, "Everything under control?"

"No." And Lucas asked, "Did it rain all night?"

"Pretty much. Why?"

"Walther didn't take his raincoat," Lucas said, pulling a trench-coat sleeve out of the closet. "Not a bad coat, either."

"Maybe he had a rain suit."

When Lucas pulled the coat sleeve out of the closet, Nadya looked that way from across the room. She frowned, walked to the closet, squatted, and pushed the trench coat to one side.

"What?" Lucas asked.

"Look." She pointed, and Lucas squatted beside her. A single blaze orange hunter's glove was lying in the back of the closet.

"Sonofabitch."

Lucas called Andy Harmon. "We've broken it down. The killer was a guy named Roger Walther. That's the Walther family on the chart I gave you. We'll send you the details on him, and we've got all the local cops looking for him, but it's time you guys got in on the act. He's running, and he's got twelve hours on us, and he's probably headed for Russia down the old spy route. Could be in Canada, so somebody's got to talk to the Mounties."

"Got a picture?" the FBI man asked.

"I'll get one, and we'll scan it and send it to you. We've got a driver's-license photo that's three years old, not too good, but I'm gonna hit his wife in a few minutes, assuming she's still there and still alive, and I'll get whatever I can and send it along."

"Excellent. Excellent job, Davenport. I'll put it in my report."

Lucas hung up. "Fuckhead," he said.

"Let's go," Lucas told Nadya. "Let's go talk to Janet Walther." Andreno went to get his jacket, and as he did, another car pulled off the road outside. A middle-aged woman got out with a plastic sack in her hand, and walked down toward the house and talked to a deputy parked on the road at the end of the walk.

The deputy came to the house and said to Lucas, "It's Harbinson's stepsister. Corine Maples. She's got a picture of Harbinson with Roger Walther."

"Bring her in."

The woman, dry-eyed but nervous, asked Lucas, "Is she still here?"

"Yes. I'm afraid we can't let you in."

"No, no, I don't want to see her… But I have a funeral home, the name of the funeral home."

"See the guy over there?" Lucas asked, pointing to a deputy. "That's Max Anderson; he's the deputy in charge of the scene. Give it to him. She'll be taken to the medical school first, for an autopsy, and then… Well, talk to Max."

"Okay," she said. "I knew Roger was bad news, the first time I met him."

"You have a photograph?"

She fumbled in her plastic bag and pulled out a photograph taken in a backyard with a wooden fence, a summer scene with a flower bed and, partly visible to one side, a plaster Virgin Mary with her hands spread over a pond the size of a garbage-can lid. Two people stood in the foreground, squinting into the sun and the camera.

"We had a barbecue and they came," Maples said.

"Does he still look like this?"

"Oh, yes. I saw them on the street two weeks ago. That picture is only two months old."

"He looks older than I expected. I thought he was right around forty."

She bobbed her head. "He is, but, he's had a pretty hard life. He smokes and he drinks and he stays out all hours. You can't drink two or three six-packs a day and not have it get to you."

"Doesn't look fat."

"No, no, he's never been fat. But he's not healthy. We tried to tell him…"

"We need to send this picture to the FBI," Lucas said. "If you don't mind…"

"He'll know it came from me," Maples said nervously. "He's still loose, with a gun."

"We'll just use the head portion," Lucas said. "And we think he's running. It's pretty unlikely that he's still around here."

"Okay…" But nervous.

"Do you know Janet Walther? Roger's ex-wife?"

"No. Roger wasn't from here, he was from Hibbing. I never met the family."

"Okay. Let me introduce you to Max. He'll fill you in…"

Out in the car, Lucas drove silently while Nadya and Andreno chatted. Andreno noticed after a while, and said, "What?"

"That fuckin' glove," Lucas said.

"What?"

"The fuckin' glove puts it on Walther. The shells in the bedroom could have been left behind by anyone, but that fuckin' glove…"

"That's bad?"

Lucas said, "I run three miles most days. I try to keep it at twenty-one minutes. Some days, I run five or six."

"You're my hero," Andreno said.

"You see that picture of Walther? The guy looked like a walking heart attack. And he outran me up and down the hills of Duluth, carrying a pizza box?"

Then they all rode for a while, and finally Andreno said, "You know the old line: too many facts can fuck up a perfectly good case."

"Yeah, yeah."

"What is this?" Nadya asked.

They went to Janet Walther's house, which was on the way into downtown Hibbing, found it-nobody home-and continued to the frame shop. An older woman in a cloth coat was talking to Walther about a frame for a photograph of her grandchildren, something under twenty-five dollars, and Walther, almost flinching away from Lucas, Andreno, and Nadya, took her to a ready-made stand and helped her choose one. The woman said twice, "You can help these other people," and she smiled and nodded at Lucas, but Walther said, "No, no, let's get this right."