John Sandford - Hidden Prey

"Mmm. Well, yes." A thin line appeared on her forehead. "Do you think he will take a picture with me? With my camera?"

"Sure. He loves that kind of thing."

They watched the tape again, and Lucas and Nadya made a statement for an assistant county attorney about their contacts with Burt Walther. At five o'clock, they caught the local evening news. The news was spectacular. Somebody had a good source with the Hibbing cops, and the on-the-scene reporter was standing outside of the yellow-taped Walther house. He ran down the whole story: the first killing at the harbor, the Russian agent at the bus depot, Reasons, Harbinson, and finally, the Walther murder-suicide.

An interview with Jan Walther: "I don't know what is happening. I don't know what is going on. My ex-husband is gone, and I hear these rumors… All of this is crazy, and the police don't tell me anything…"

There was more from the neighbors in the street. One guy, who didn't seem to know much about the Walthers, tried to float the line about the Walthers being loners who stayed to themselves. He was immediately and thoroughly contradicted by all the Walthers' neighbors and Burt Walthers' fellow union members, who testified that he and Melodie were good people and that Burt was a stand-up guy. "All of this, the final echoes of the fall of the Soviet Union, and a spy ring, in our midst here in Minnesota, for almost seventy years," the reporter finished portentously.

Nadya said, "This is, how do you say…"

"Bullshit," Lucas said.

"Mostly."

They had time to kill. When the news was over, they checked out with Hopper and drove to Virginia, which was only a few miles from the dance the governor was attending. They rode north in comfortable quiet, chatting about this or that aspect of the case. Nadya said that if Walther were spotted anywhere within the Soviet sphere, she would personally see that Lucas was notified.

"But I think he will not be. There is no sign that he speaks Russian, yes? I would think he would run to Canada. Maybe in the west, in the mountains, where there is not so much TV Perhaps Alaska. With a prepared identity, he would be hard to find."

"But what's he gonna do, be a drunk?" Lucas asked. "He's got no real skills that we know of. He was a car salesman for about six months…"

"There are no car stores in Alaska?" Nadya asked.

Andreno leaned in from the backseat. "Wal-Mart, man. Home Depot. There are all these places that hire and fire hundreds of people every day. They don't know who the fuck they are. Half of Mexico used to work for Wal-Mart."

"All right, he can get a job."

Nobody was hungry, but they stopped in Virginia for coffee, and helped Nadya buy two pounds of magazines for her flight to Washington. At seven o'clock, they drove to Eveleth, got lost, drove around aimlessly for a while, and eventually found the place by a process of elimination.

The dance was an AFL-CIO affair with a polka band and an acre of sheet cake and Jell-O molds, a cash bar, and balloons on the ceilings. The polka band was hot, and the governor not only liked to dance, he was good at it.

Elmer Henderson was a willowy man, narrow shouldered, with short blond hair going gray at the temples, a man who wore handmade suits and shoes and a different Hermes tie each day. His clan was one of Minnesota's richest, and Elmer was a typical product of money: conservative, mild, polite.

But he could dance a polka about as well as anybody Lucas had seen, and when he got going, the other dancers fell back into a circle and clapped with the band, and Lucas and Nadya laughed out loud.

He was dancing with a very fat lady-also a good dancer-when he spotted Lucas and waved. Lucas waved back and a man who'd come up behind him said, "Don't interrupt him. I've got six photographers shooting their ass off for the next campaign."

Lucas turned and found Neil Mitford, the governor's chief political operator. "Heck of a dancer," Lucas said.

"Hard to believe, huh? Look at the motherfucker go…"

A while later, the governor got loose and said, "Let's find a spot." They found a spot and Lucas introduced Nadya and Andreno, and the governor nodded and said, "Rose Marie briefed me, and I see it's leaked onto TV Is there anything in it? For us?"

Lucas shook his head. "You should stay clear on this one. If that tape gets out-and it may, there's a whole question of probate, because he made it his last will-you can't help feeling sorry for the old guy. I'd say, take the credit for doing the feds' job for them, but then say it's up to them to carry the ball the rest of the way."

"How about the Russians?" the governor asked Nadya. "You okay with this?"

"Yes. Thank you very much. I go back home tomorrow, I will ask them to send you an official thank-you for Minnesota's help."

"Excellent. Always happy to help."

Nadya held up her camera. "Is it permitted to get a picture of you? With me?"

"Absolutely."

Lucas took the picture, one of Henderson and Nadya shaking hands, and one of Henderson with his arm around her shoulder, giving her a little hug.

"Like old comrades," Lucas said.

Mitford said, nervously, "Not comrades, for Christ's sake."

"I've got to get back to the dance," Henderson said. He leaned into them, his head between Lucas and Nadya and said, "I really like to dance with the big fat ones. Even if I look like Jack Spratt. Not only that, Neil says you can tell that I like it, when you see it on TV Did you know that twenty-two point four percent of Minnesota women of voting age are officially obese?"

"Plus-sized," Mitford said.

"That's what I meant." Henderson beamed. "Plus-sized."

He left them, and Nadya looked at Lucas and said, "What is this Jack Spratt?"

"Just a guy," Lucas said.

"Who could eat no fat," said Mitford.

"And his wife could eat no lean," Lucas continued.

When they were done, she said, "You are joking me again."

When she'd gone to the ladies' room, Mitford looked after her and asked, "You getting any of that?"

"No, I am not. I am a happily married man," he said, thinking of Jerry Reasons. If he'd been an unhappily married man, like Reasons, he might be dead.

"Looks pretty good."

"She is pretty good. If you put her on your staff, she'd fit right in. She'd be one of your top guys in a week."

Mitford squinted at Lucas: "What you're saying is, you wouldn't trust her any further than you could spit a rat."

"Did I say that?"

At eight o'clock, they were on their way back to Duluth when Lucas's cell phone rang. Weather, he thought.

He picked it up, said hello, and found a switchboard operator from the BCA headquarters in St. Paul. "A woman called for you. She says it's urgent, life-and-death. She said she's tried your hotel room in Duluth three times, but you're never there. She's calling from public phones… she says she's the laptop lady."

"Ah, Jesus, is she gonna call back?"

"I told her we could probably get in touch with you, and she said she'd call back in half an hour."

"Give her this number, but tell her I'll just be getting back to Duluth and there are some cell-phone dead spots. Tell her I'll be in my hotel by nine o'clock at the latest, or she can call me here on this phone any time after about eight forty-five."

"Okay."

"Trace the call, just in case."

Lucas hung up and Andreno said from the backseat, "What?"

"The laptop lady," Lucas said. "Life-and-death."

"Jesus. Maybe she knows where Roger went."

"How?"

"Then what the fuck is life-and-death?"

The disappearance of Roger Walther, and the murder-suicide of Burt and Melodie Walther, fell on Jan Walther's household like a thunderclap. She heard about it from a customer, rather than the police, closed the store, and drove to Burt and Melodie's house, where she was turned back by the police.