'So this is a big deal.' Reasons looked at her in the rearview mirror.
'Yes, big deal,' she said. 'What is a Dairy Queen?'
They explained Dairy Queen, and then rode in silence for a bit until Lucas asked Reasons, 'You gonna stay with us? Or are you gonna get pulled for this old lady?'
'I don't know. I'd like to work with you guys, but there might not be much to do. And politics gets into it. Nobody cares much about the Russian, but folks are gonna be kinda pissed about Wheaton.'
'What is this?' Nadya asked, from the backseat.
'Ah, we had another murder here…' Reasons went on to regale her with the facts of the murder. Lucas was watching her face, the play of emotions running across them as Reasons got into the details. When he finished, Nadya touched three fingers to her lips and asked, 'Does this happen often?'
'Nope. Hardly anybody ever gets killed up here. We got maybe two or three murders a year. Four in a good year.'
'Only Russians and old women alcoholics,' she said.
'The first Russian in memory,' Reasons said. 'As a matter of fact, that was the first Russian boat to come in for quite a while.'
'Really,' Lucas said. 'I didn't know that.'
'Lots of Russians back in the seventies; not many anymore,' Reasons said. He looked over the seat at Nadya.
She shrugged, and said, 'As far as I know, that… would not be connected to this death. That the boat would come here.'
'So you think it was just a coincidence?' Lucas asked.
'I believe in coincidences,' she said, 'As long as there are not too many of them.'
The morgue was in the medical school's loading dock; a convenience, Reasons said. 'You just back the ambulance up to the dock, open up the garage door, wheel the deceased over to the cooler, and put him or her inside.'
They'd called ahead, and were met in the dock by the pathologist on duty, a Chinese-American man with a pleasant accent who introduced himself as Doctor Chu. He unlocked the door to the cooler, and rolled the dead man out. Oleshev was covered with a hospital sheet, and the pathologist pulled it back.
Nadya turned away, just an inch or two, a flinch, Lucas thought, and then she turned back. Oleshev looked as though he'd been carved out of a piece of chipboard. Nadya gazed at him for a moment, then dipped into her bag and took out a brown envelope, slipped out three glossy photographs, looked at the photos and then at the face. After a moment, she showed them to Lucas and Reasons. The photos didn't look exactly like the dead man, but resembled him; resembled him the way flesh resembles wood.
Lucas asked, 'You know him?' Behind Nadya, Reasons's eyes cut to Lucas.
'No.' To Chu she said, 'It looks like him. Rodion Oleshev.'
'That's not the name on his papers,' Chu said.
Nadya shrugged.
'All the people from the ship agreed he was a guy named Oleg Moshalov,' said Reasons, pressing just a little.
Nadya said, 'Well, he's not.' To Chu: 'If you could make some fingerprints for me, that I could witness…' She dipped into her bag again and took out a stack of thin plastic envelopes.
'We've got prints…' Chu began.
'She'd like to witness it,' Lucas said. 'With her own stuff.'
The pathologist nodded. 'What do I do?'
She opened one of the envelopes and slipped out a sheet of plastic half the size of a dollar bill. In the center of the plastic sheet was a red square covered with a strip of peel-off film.
'You pull off the cover and roll one of the right-hand fingers in the red square,' she said.
'Red Square,' Chu said. To Lucas: 'Get it?'
Lucas shook his head once and Nadya sighed and said, 'Then you let the sheet dry for a few seconds, and we put it back in the envelope.'
The pathologist said, 'Slick,' and took the prints. He did it quickly, expertly, and as he finished each print, Nadya lifted it to the overhead light to look through the plastic. Satisfied, she fanned each print for a moment, drying it, then slipped each plastic sheet back in its individual envelope.
'Where would you get a fingerprint kit like that?' Chu asked.
'You would have to call the consulate,' Nadya said. She handed him an unused envelope. 'You can have this one, if you would like. The manufacturer is named on the back, but it is in Russian. There's a phone number in St. Petersburg.'
'Get my wife to translate it,' Reasons said.
Nadya nodded: 'The chemical on the sheet is made to… mmm… I don't know the English word, but it is, er, compounded to reflect light from a scanner, so that any scanner can be used to digitize the fingerprints.' She used her hands when she talked, like a French woman.
'Slick,' Chu said again. 'Thanks.'
Outside, Nadya took a breath, looked up and down the street and said, 'This could be a Russian town, except for the signs. I don't mean the words on the signs, I mean the signs are everywhere. Everything is signs.'
'So you want to look at the files, or what?' Reasons asked.
'No. If we could go to the hotel, I could transmit the fingerprints back to Washington, and use the toilet and maybe get clean from the trip. Then the files?'
Like Lucas, Nadya was staying at the Radisson, a cylindrical building that looked like a chubby, upright tower of Pisa; the hotel was conveniently across the street from the police station. They took her all the way to her room, where Lucas explained the TV remote and the movies channel, and they showed her how to hook the modem through the hotel's phone system. They dialed into the Russian embassy's server, got the connect tone, and left her.
'We'll wait in the restaurant. Back in half an hour,' Lucas said, as they went out the door.
Going back down the hallway to the elevators, Reasons said, 'She said she didn't know him.'
'I don't think she did,' Lucas said. 'She was too careful about the fingerprints.'
'You saw her jump, though.'
'Yeah,' Lucas said. 'She's no cop.'
'What do you think? She's a spy?'
'I think she's probably with one of their intelligence services, and for some reason, they sent somebody who isn't used to dealing with bodies,' Lucas said. They got to the elevators and Lucas pushed the up button; Reasons pushed it again just to make sure it was pushed. 'She's not a clerk. She's an executive. She's been around.'
'More than me,' Reasons said. 'I'm not exactly a world traveler,' Lucas said. 'I went to Mexico a couple of years ago, on a job. I went to Europe when I was in college. That's about it.'
'Europe,' Reasons said. 'French pussy.'
'I was playing hockey,' Lucas said. 'All I saw was German hockey rinks and the insides of buses. I did get to see the Wall before they knocked it down.'
'More'n me,' Reasons said.
The elevator doors opened and they got on. Lucas pushed the button for the top floor, and Reasons pushed it again, just to make sure it was pushed. 'Maybe I'll travel when I retire. The old lady would like to see Moscow.'
'That's where she's from?'
'Naw. She's from some one-horse town on the Polish border. Moscow, to her… it'd be like seeing Manhattan the first time.'
As they walked into the restaurant, a man sitting in a lounge chair with a New York Times looked over the paper, stood up, and asked, 'Lucas Davenport?'
Lucas stopped: 'Yeah?'
The man was wearing twill pants and a neat tweed jacket with a burgundy tie. He was six feet tall, military erect, sandy haired, early thirties, and pleasant, like a hopeful Xerox salesman. 'I'm Andy Harmon. Barney Howard probably told you I'd look you up. I saw you going through with the lady, but couldn't catch you. I thought you'd
