'She wasn't quite right, but there was nothing bad about her,' said Bob Anderson, of Five Corners Hardware. 'She'd come in most days and get a dollar from somebody. The folks at the Burger King'd always give her a burger and fries. That's about all she needed to keep herself together. I hope to God they get the animal who did this…'
The rest of the story was in the same vein. A file photo showed Wheaton pushing a shopping cart along a downtown street, peering nearsightedly, and maybe unhappily, at the photographer.
'You read about the murder?' Reasons asked.
'Yeah. Just sounds like… what it is,' Lucas said.
'Like a dime-a-dozen down in the Cities.'
'Well-anywhere that there are a lot of street people. The reporter was getting a lot of mileage out of it.'
They strolled back toward the baggage claim, Reasons still looking at the article, then at the photo again, and he said, 'You wanna hear a joke about an old lady beggar and a photographer?'
'If I've got to.'
'Wait a minute. I don't tell jokes good, so I got to think it out,' Reasons said. He thought for a moment, then said, 'There was this old lady bum, she used to push a shopping cart full of shit around this rich neighborhood. This newspaper photographer was out one day, looking for a good feature shot, and he sees her and asks if he can get a picture of her. She says, yes, and he takes a couple, and they get to talking.
'She tells him that she used to be rich, that she grew up right in that very neighborhood. She used to go to balls and big parties and she went to a fancy school, and then she inherited about a million bucks. But over the years she had a couple of bad marriages and her husbands took it all, and she didn't know how to work, and over the years, she kept going down, down, down.
'And now, here she was, in her old age, pushing a cart around the neighborhood where she used to be rich, asking people for money so she could eat. So the photographer goes back to the newspaper, and tells the story to his editor, this really sad story, and the editor says, 'Wow, that is really sad. What'd you give her?''
'And the photographer says, 'Oh, about f-4.5 at 125.''
Lucas smiled and said, 'You told that all right.'
'Ahh, there are guys in the office who really know how…' He looked up at a monitor. 'They're in.'
They folded their newspapers and stuffed them into a trash can. A couple of minutes later, fifteen or twenty passengers wandered in. Half of them were too young, and most of the other half too Minnesotan, too certain of what they were doing, and too worried about their luggage, to be the Russian.
Lucas was looking at a stout man in a gray suit when Reasons leaned over and asked, 'You think it could be the chick?'
Lucas followed his gaze: Reasons was looking at a fortyish blonde, hair pulled back in a severe bun. Thin, intent, she was wearing a dress, with some makeup; most un-Minnesotan. And the dress, though stylish, had an undefinable foreign something to it-something that went back to the sixties and June Cleaver. She was carrying a nylon briefcase, holding the handle with both hands. She was nice-looking, Lucas thought, and had the same slanting eyes as his wife, who was a Finn. 'You think?'
'She's the only one looking around, like she's expecting to be met. She's checked us out pretty good. She looks kind of Russian.'
'You oughta know,' Lucas said. With Reasons trailing behind, Lucas walked over and said, 'Would you be Nadezhda Kalin?'
The woman smiled briefly, automatically: 'Yes. Officer Davenport?'
'Lucas Davenport. We were told we were meeting a man.'
'Well. You're not.' The smile again came and went. Her English was good, but accented. She had square shoulders and there was a gap between her two front teeth, a diastema; she reminded him a bit of Lauren Hutton. 'You should call me Nadya.'
'I didn't get it right, did I? The Nadezhda?'
'Well. I thought, em, that you had perhaps sneezed?' She was amused.
'Sorry.'
'No, no.' She smiled and patted him on the arm. 'Anyway, I wait for my baggage.'
'We'll help you wait,' Lucas said.
'We'll even help you say a little prayer,' Reasons added.
'A prayer?' She looked from Reasons to Lucas.
'This airline does not always deliver the baggage with the passenger,' Lucas said.
'Ah. It is the same everywhere.' She laughed and patted Reasons on the chest, and Lucas could see that Reasons liked it.
They waited for another minute, and nothing happened with the baggage, and Nadya said to Lucas, 'We must talk about my, em, em, authority is not the right word, because I have no authority here.' Her eyes were green with flecks of amber around the pupils. 'About my…'
She needed help. 'Status,' Lucas suggested.
'Yes. Status.'
They talked about her status: 'As far as the investigation goes, you can see everything we get, and can suggest anything you want, and I'll probably do it, as long as it's legal,' Lucas said. 'I mean, it's a free country, but we'd like to get this guy, the killer. He really made a mess on our dock…'
She looked at him oddly-she didn't quite recoil, but a line appeared in her forehead-and she said, 'Thank you very much. I'm sorry for this… mess.'
'No, no, not your fault. I assume you want him caught?'
'Well, of course,' she said. 'What do you think?'
Lucas shrugged. 'There's politics going on. That's what the FBI says. We're not exactly sure what you guys want.'
The corners of her mouth dropped: 'It's very simple. We would like justice.'
'Oh, Jesus,' Reasons said. And he added, out of the side of his mouth, 'Gavno.'
Her eyebrows went up: 'You speak Russian?'
'My wife is Russian,' Reasons said. 'I speak three words: gavno, Stolichnaya, and Solzhenitsyn.'
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.
