John Sandford - Hidden Prey

When the woman was finally gone, she moved behind her counter and said, "What do you want?"

"Your ex-husband was living with a woman named Kelly Harbinson, up near Virginia," Lucas began.

"So what? I don't know what he does, and I don't care."

"We found her shot to death in her bed this morning. Roger Walther is missing. We're looking for him."

Her mouth opened and closed, and opened and closed again, as though she were having trouble breathing, and then she said, "Oh, my God."

"Have you seen him?"

"Not for weeks. He came here and asked for a loan and I told him I didn't have any extra."

"You don't know where he might be running to? Or how he might be getting there?"

She shook her head: "I have no idea. This whole spy thing is crazy, though. He's probably in a tavern in Duluth. Or here." She looked out the front window, as though she expected him to show up. Then, "Are you sure he's the one who… did it?"

"He was living with her, he's missing, apparently some clothing and his shaving equipment are gone…"

"I don't know. I just don't know."

He tried a threat: "You know that if you're hiding him, or helping him, you're an accomplice."

Now she raised her voice: "I'm not doing that! I don't like the man anymore! He's not the man I married anymore! I don't have anything to do with him!"

Lucas swerved to a new topic: "How… senile… is Burt Walther? Is he qualified to take care of his wife?"

"Burt? Burt's not senile. Burt's sharp as a tack." Her voice was sharp, at first, as though she was afraid of a trick. Then her voice softened: "Melodie has gone away, though. She was a nice woman, and she's gone now. If Grandpa couldn't take care of her, I don't know what would happen. They'd lose the house if they had to put her in a nursing home."

"Burt's not senile."

"No, he's not senile. Have you talked to him?"

Out the door, pissed.

Lucas said to Nadya, "You were right. The guy bullshitted me. That doesn't happen too often."

"It's because you're afraid to look at old people who are, mmm, mentally dying? I don't know your word, but you know what I mean," Nadya said. "This happened to my grandfather, when he lived with us, and I saw it all. Old friends would not look at him or talk to him. It is very unpleasant. Burt did not seem that way to me."

There was no one at Burt Walther's house. Lucas banged on the door, and looked in the windows, and finally a neighbor came out and said, "They're not home. Can I help you with something?"

"We're police officers and we need to talk with Burt Walther," Lucas said. "Have you seen him?"

"This is their day at the doctor," the man said. "You missed them by ten minutes. They're usually gone for two hours."

"Do you know which doctor?"

"Not exactly which, but I know the clinic…"

At the clinic, Andreno spotted Walther's Taurus. "They're here. Want to go in after them?"

Lucas, still a little angry, thought about it, but finally shook his head.

"We can wait. Let's get lunch. No point in messing with them in public."

They took Nadya to a Subway; she liked the sandwiches and Lucas suggested that a franchise might work in Moscow. "Probably is one," she said. "We have one of everything now."

They swung past the clinic on the way back to the Walther house, and the Taurus was still there. Down on the main drag, they stocked up on newspapers-New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Star Tribune-went back to the clinic parking lot, rolled down the windows, and read newspapers for half an hour. Then Andreno said, "Here they come."

A nurse was pushing Melodie Walther in a wheelchair, and helped her into the car. She and Burt Walther talked for a moment, then Burt got in the car and drove away. Lucas fell in behind and closed up. When he was close enough, he could see Burt's eyes in the rearview mirror. He hung at that distance, and Burt took them home.

At the house, Lucas pulled to the side of the alley, next to the garage. Burt came out to meet him. "Get your wife inside, then we'll talk."

"I don't…" His eyes unfocused.

"Can the senile shit," Lucas said. "We talked to Janet Walther. She said you're sharp as a tack."

Walther's head bobbed up and down a couple of times, and he shuffled back to the car and helped his wife out, and into a wheelchair that he'd left in the garage. He pushed her up the back walk, helped her inside, with Lucas a step behind, Andreno and Nadya trailing.

"Where's your grandson?" Lucas asked, as Walther moved inside the house.

"Are you going to arrest me?" Walther asked, through the open door.

"Maybe."

"I want a lawyer. Right now," Walther said. "Before I answer a single question."

"Your grandson may have killed the woman he lived with."

"Am I under arrest?"

"Not yet."

"Then get out of my yard," Walther said. He closed the door in Lucas's face.

"That was pretty rude of him," Andreno said, looking at the door.

Lucas was smiling now: "He knows where Roger is, I think. I think we're getting to them."

Lucas led the way back to the car, called Roy Hopper, the Hibbing chief, and said, "I need a favor."

"What?"

"I need you to park a car outside Burt Walther's place. The guy doesn't need to do anything-just park it there, and watch the house."

"Ah, jeez, I don't have all that many guys…"

"Just… please."

The sheriff's deputies were still at the murder scene outside Virginia. On the way back to check on progress, Lucas told Nadya, "When somebody does the lawyer thing-he wants a lawyer and he tells you that-you have to break off any questioning. That's the way it works here. You can sometimes bullshit your way around them, but if they insist, that's it. But the thing is, most of the time, it amounts to a kind of confession. You know you've got the right guy."

"That's a big deal," Andreno said. "Once you know you've got the right guy, you can come at him from all kinds of directions. Talk to his friends, relatives, everybody he knows. You can build a picture."

Nadya nodded. "I know this from my own work. Identification is perhaps more important there than here. Identification is everything."

"Ah, there's still a lot of work."

"Oh, not really," she said. "I tell you, you take the man down in the basement, where you have an old coal furnace, and you take off his shoes. Then you have one of these, mmm, metal cooking tools, they turn pancakes…"

"Spatula," Andreno said, and he glanced at Lucas.

"Spatula," she agreed. "You put this in the coals, and when it gets so hot that it is white, you start with the toes…"

"Jesus Christ," Andreno blurted out.

Nadya had turned away, but Lucas caught the corner of a smile.

"I think the Russian is joking us," he said to Andreno.

At Harbinson's house, the lead deputy said that the body had been moved, but the crime-scene crew was still picking up bits and pieces of DNA, as well as going through all the paper in the place. "We checked with the phone company, and there were no calls out of here last night. None. We're thinking that if he's running, and he's got something sophisticated going, he should have called somebody."

"Did you check to see if he has a cell phone?"

"We checked, but couldn't find one. There are only three companies up here."

"How about bills, personal stuff?"

"That's what we're looking at now. In the kitchen. We'd be happy to have your help."

"We can look for a while," Lucas said. "Nothing in Russian?"

"No."

They were still there, an hour later, when the deputy took a call, looked at Lucas, said, "Yeah, he's still here." He handed the phone to Lucas, said, "Roy Hopper, down in Hibbing."

Lucas took the phone and said, "Hi."

Hopper was breathing hard, and Lucas could hear sirens: "Bill, uh, the guy we've got sitting outside of Walther's. He just heard two shots. He's going in."