'Another possibility,' Andreno said. 'How about some kind of analysis of the telephone records of the two families you already have? Who'd they call? If they're spies, and they're all hooked together, I bet there's been a long history of calling each other.'
'Mmm. I don't know how far that stuff goes back,' Lucas said. 'The FBI could figure it out.'
'How do we get all this stuff going?'
'Make some phone calls,' Lucas said. He added, 'Micky, I think you should hang around with Nadya, at least when I'm not. Maybe, when we're driving around, you oughta follow, about six cars back. See if you can spot somebody looking at us.'
'How did they find us here?' Nadya asked.
'When the woman called from St. Paul, the woman from the shack, she said she figured this is the hotel we'd stay at. Maybe everybody figures that. They just call up and asked for you. If the front desk put the call through, they'd just hang up. Then they'd know where you were… Not that many big hotels in Duluth.'
'Maybe we should move,' Andreno said.
'I think so,' Lucas said. 'You guys, anyway. Get adjoining rooms somewhere, go in under a different name. Ask the desk to notify you if anybody asks under your real name.'
'We can do that,' Andreno said, looking at Nadya. 'What do you think, honey?'
'What is this 'honey'?' Nadya asked.
Before Andreno and Nadya left to find a new place, Lucas took Nadya aside and said, 'Before the fight, you were wondering about telling your bosses about this… liaison.'
'Yes.'
He shook his head: 'I wouldn't. If you tell them, you're in trouble. If you don't tell them, you're in a little more trouble, but what are they gonna do, shoot you? So the spread in penalty isn't that much if they find out one way or the other. But if we crack the case, and they never find out-you're gold.'
She looked at him for a long time, and then asked, 'Have you been in trouble much, with your agency?'
'Not with this one. I once got fired from another one, but they hired me back.'
'Why did they fire you?'
'I beat up a guy. A pimp. Maybe I was too enthusiastic.'
'Why'd they hire you back?'
'Couldn't live without me,' Lucas said.
She looked at him for another long moment, then smiled just a little, and said, 'I think maybe you were… this is a phrase Jerry used for some people… a big pain in the ass.'
Lucas hadn't known Reasons very well-they had spent a few hours together over a couple of days, enough that Lucas knew that they would never have been good friends. But the murder hung over his head; he didn't have any trouble functioning, didn't feel any great sorrow or terrible regret for things left undone or unsaid… but the death hung there. For one thing, he thought he should feel worse than he did. When his friend Del had been shot in the leg the previous winter, Lucas had spent a couple of hours a day at the hospital, then more time at Del's home, had worked out with him in rehab. With Reasons, he could hardly remember what his voice sounded like. And when he stopped to think about it, that made him feel bad. Reasons was a mote in the eye…
After Nadya and Andreno left, Lucas spent the rest of the morning and afternoon harassing people in St. Paul, trying to pull people into work on a Saturday. He called up Neil Mitford, the governor's top aide, and had him wade in, asked Rose Marie Roux to call downtown and kick butt. Generating the list of licenses was not a problem, but pulling the vital records essentially had to be done by hand. He tried to get twenty people working at it.
He'd worked this out: there were more or less forty thousand people in the Range cities. According to an almanac he carried in his laptop, only about 1 percent of the American population was male and eighty years old or older. The Range might have an older population than the country as a whole, because young people had been fleeing the area for decades-still, even if there were twice as many eighty-plus males, that'd only be eight hundred. With twenty people working on it, they would have to check only forty records each.
At four in the afternoon, a young man named Joshua called and said he'd found the name of a ninety-one- year-old man named Lou Witold who showed a baptismal certificate in Mahnomen County, and a notation that his original birth certificate, issued by the Catholic hospital, had been destroyed.
'That's the guy,' Lucas said.
'He's dead,' Joshua said. 'He died six years ago.'
'That's not the guy,' Lucas said. 'Got anything else on him?'
'He was married to an Anne Witold, whose records were destroyed in the same fire. She's also dead.'
'Okay. You said it's, uh, Joshua? Listen, Joshua, start tracking Witolds. Pull all the Witold driver's licenses from St. Louis County, and see if you can build a genealogy, okay?'
'Okay. Do you want it today?'
'Yes. Tell your supervisor that all the overtime was authorized by the governor.'
'Really?'
'Really,' Lucas said. 'You don't want to piss off the governor, not with these reductions in force going on.'
'I need the overtime,' Joshua said earnestly. 'I'll work as long as the computers are turned on.'
'Atta boy,' Lucas said; he sounded like Andreno.
The early news had Reasons all over the place. First cop killed in years-died trying to save a Russian. Every news channel that Lucas looked at had bought the bodyguard line.
At five twenty, a woman named Romany called: 'I've got another one of these Mahnomen-fire birth certificates, issued to a Burt and Melodie Walther. Both still alive-Burt still has a driver's license. He's ninety-two. You want me to do the genealogy thing, like Josh?'
'Yeah. This could be the guy we want… How's Joshua doing?'
'Let me check,' she said.
Joshua came back. 'Lou and Anne Witold had two children, both boys, Leon and Duane. Duane married somebody named Karen Hafner, and we have driver's licenses for them up to nineteen seventy-eight, and then no more. It's like they moved. The other kid, Leon, married a Wanda Lindsey, and they're still in Hibbing. And they've got a couple of kids, named John and Sarah, and Sarah I can't find, but John is living in Rochester-he's twenty- eight, and I don't know if he's married or not, or if he has any kids. I'm still looking.'
'Keep going,' Lucas said. He hung up, took his notes on Witold over to the Oleshev genealogy, and slipped it into one of the two remaining charts, three generations.
'Goddamnit,' he said, looking at it. Too good to be true? They'd get a test with Bert and Melodie Walther.
He called Nadya, who'd moved to the Harbor Lodge: 'What'd you tell the bosses?'
'I told them that Jerry was shot while guarding me.'
'Atta girl,' he said.
'That's what Micky says. Atta girl.''
'We've got some new people for our genealogy,' he said.
He filled her in, and she said, 'We need a picture of this man,' she said. 'This Walther. We can show it to the woman in the aluminum house with the horses, who saw the old man at Spivak's…'
'Maisy Reynolds,' Lucas said. 'We can do that. I'll talk to the chief up there about getting a picture. What are you doing?'
'Watching a movie. Legally Blonde. This is a very peculiar movie.'
'Actually, it's based on a true story,' Lucas said. 'It's kind of a documentary.'
'Really?'
'True. This can be a very unusual country, sometimes.'
Lucas was smiling when he hung up. Weather had made him watch Legally Blonde, and he'd loathed it. Then she made him watch Legally Blonde II, and he'd wanted to pluck out his eyeballs. The idea of Legally Blonde going back to the KGB, or whatever the fuck it was, as a documentary…
That made him laugh, and then he thought of the mote in the eye, Jerry Reasons, and he stopped laughing.
Maybe laugh tomorrow, he thought.
