He stood up and moved to the guest chair next to Reasons, and the second detective ambled over to his desk, said, 'Take the magazine if you want, I'm all done with it.' Then he sat down, sighed and said, 'What a day.'
'Talk to a bum?' asked Reasons.
'Talked to fifteen of them,' the detective said. 'Nobody knows what happened. They kept asking me if somebody was killing bums.'
'We gonna lose it?'
'I don't know. Probably.'
'Better you than me,' Reasons said.
The detective nodded toward the lieutenant's office. 'Is that the…'
'Russian. Yeah.'
The detective whistled and said, 'I thought they all wore them things like my ma. You know, the babushkas.'
'She's probably got one hidden somewhere,' Reasons said.
'What's happening with the old lady?' Lucas asked. 'I saw the story in the paper.'
'If you read the paper, you probably know more than I do, 'cause I haven't read it yet,' the detective said. 'But…'
He dipped into his briefcase and took out a manila file and passed it to Lucas. Inside was a sheaf of photos of the crime scene and the dead woman. The detective turned back to Reasons. 'By the way, Chick Daniels is looking for you. He knows all about the Russian and the BCA guy… Davenport?'
'Davenport,' Lucas said. 'Who is Chick Daniels?'
'Reporter for the News Tribune.'
'Mmm.' Lucas looked at one of the photos and then held it up to the detective. 'Is this the way she looked? Is that neck right?'
'That's the way she looked. Almost cut her head off.'
'I've never seen that before,' Lucas said. 'The cut goes all the way around.'
'Sliced right through the whole front half of her neck, arteries, veins, and all.'
'Maybe you got a nut,' Lucas said.
The two detectives regarded Lucas for a moment, then the no-name detective said, 'That's what I'm afraid of. We got a nut and he's gonna do it again.' Pause. 'Fuck.'
Nadya wound up Xeroxing a half dozen sheets from the Oleshev murder file, then she and Lucas headed for the port. Reasons opted to go home: 'I already talked to the guy three times. If you get anything new, call me up.'
Nadya settled into the Acura, lifted an eyebrow at the video screen on the dashboard, but left it without comment; Lucas followed the onscreen map through the maze of streets around I-35, and made it down to Garfield Avenue. At the TDX terminal, they found the entrance, a tiny white door in the otherwise faceless tower. Inside, they found a small two-man office, everything with a patina of dust. A man sat with his back to them, typing on a manual typewriter that sat on a government-style gray metal desk with a broken leg set on a two-by- four block. Lucas hadn't seen a typewriter like it in twenty years. The man didn't turn when they came in. He said, 'Chris called, he wants you to call back.'
'Wrong guys,' Lucas said.
Then man turned from the typewriter: 'Ah… you must be the state police guy.'
Lucas nodded, introduced himself and Nadya. 'Are you Harry Kellogg?'
'No, no, Harry doesn't work here, he works for the port. He's supposed to be here to meet you…' They heard a truck outside and the guy said, 'That's probably him.'
They went back outside, and found a portly, red-faced man in a yellow hard hat, just climbed out of his red- and-black GMC pickup. He shook hands with Lucas, and nodded at Nadya.
'I didn't see much. I just finished filling the number-two hold and I walked out to the bow to have a cigarette- can't have one right by the hold because there's dust in the air, and you could have an explosion,' Kellogg said. 'So I light up and I look over the bow. I wasn't sure what I was seeing, because… I don't know, I haven't seen that many dead people, and I didn't expect to see one there. I mean, it took a few seconds. Then I saw this other guy, not exactly running, but he was in a hurry, moving off into the dark. Into the weeds way back there… and I realized the guy on the ground was probably dead, or maybe unconscious. I yelled and the one guy started running away, and that's the last I saw of him. The dead guy was just layin' there. I ran down to the gangway and down to my truck and got my baseball bat and ran down to the dead guy. I used my cell phone and I called the ambulance…'
'The guy who ran away… you didn't see him shoot the dead man, you didn't see a gun?'
'No. And the thing is, I never even heard the shots, even though we were on deck not more than a couple of hundred feet away. There was some noise, you know, but it's not loud, the hold filling up. The cops, the police, said there were a bunch of shots, but I didn't hear a thing. Neither did the crew.'
'So then what?'
'So then nothin'. The cops came and looked all over the place, and picked up the dead guy, and took a statement from me. Looked around in the weeds.'
'You didn't see anybody in the weeds.'
'No, I never did. The thing is, I had a couple of cigarettes-I had one about fifteen minutes before, and I went up to the bow and there was nobody in sight. The whole thing happened in that fifteen minutes. Then…' He glanced at Nadya and colored a bit.
'What?' Lucas asked.
'The Russian guys… this was years ago, mostly, we don't see many Russians anymore. The thing is, it used to be that every time a Russian boat came in, you'd see carloads of girls coming out here. They'd go on the boat and you know, take care of the guys. Sometimes, when we were loading, and there was a lot of dust and guys banging around, they'd get a blanket and go out in the weeds. I don't think there were any women aboard, but… there might have been some guys down in the weeds earlier in the night.'
'Did you see any women at all?'
'No, I didn't. I just thought, with the weeds all crushed down… sometimes you'd see that. But that was years ago.'
'Okay,' Lucas said.
'How many of the crew did you see? Up on the deck?' Nadya asked.
'Just the captain and the loader, the guy who was helping with the loading. The rest of them were all asleep.'
'So you don't think somebody from the crew might have met Oleshev on the dock…'
Kellogg was shaking his head: 'No. The guy I saw ran away, and there was no way to get back past me on the boat. As soon as the cops got here, they sealed off the boat so nobody could come or go. I was here all that time, and pretty soon, all of the crew was up, when they heard the commotion, the sirens and all. The captain did a head count, and they were all accounted for. Nobody came or went. Besides, the guy I saw didn't look like a Russian.'
' 'Didn't look like a Russian,' ' Nadya repeated.
Kellogg shook his head. 'The crew are blue-collar guys. Beefy, strong guys. Gorillas. The guy I saw was small. I think he was small. He looked… you know, thin. He had on that long coat and the Russian guys, you never saw them in long coats. They wore jackets. Leather jackets, or just regular cloth jackets, or rain suits, but I never saw one in a long coat. This looked… old-fashioned.'
They talked a few minutes more, but Kellogg had nothing else that was relevant. They said good-bye and walked down to the end of the slip where Lucas had parked the Acura.
'Where was this weeds place, where Jerry thought there was a chase?' Nadya asked.
'Over here…' Lucas took her out into the weeds. 'Right around here. From the lake, back this far. He said you could see what looked like pathways crushed into the weeds… You can see where we walked this morning. Same thing.'
'Mmm.' She looked around. 'This does not look like so good a place for sex.'
'Depends on how bad you want the sex,' Lucas said. 'I suppose.'
The ground underfoot was rough, as though it had been dug over a few times, rutted by heavy equipment and
