Andreno looked at his face and said, 'What?'
'She's in there,' Lucas said.
'She's dead,' Nadya said.
'Yes. Shot in the forehead.'
'This is nuts,' Andreno said.
Lucas called Terry back: 'We got a problem out here, Chief. Who covers this area?'
'St. Louis County sheriff. What do you got?'
Lucas told him, and Terry said, 'Jesus Christ, Davenport, you're some kind of death angel.'
'Yeah, yeah…'
'I'll get the sheriff started, and we'll get a couple cars out there-we got a mutual aid pact. Ten minutes.'
Lucas hung up and Andreno said, 'Roger Walther.'
'Didn't take her with him,' Lucas said. 'I hope somebody has a picture.'
'His wife…'
Lucas said to Nadya: 'Okay. We've got a lot of stuff to do now. We've got to put out a bulletin on this guy, and since he might have been working with somebody from Russia, we'll have to make it international. Can you call your embassy…'
They were making up a list of must-do tasks when they heard the first siren coming in: Lucas turned toward the siren, then back to the other two.
'We'll hit Janet Walther first, ask if she's seen him. Then hit the old man again-Nadya thinks he might have been fucking with us with the Alzheimer's act. Start the cops looking either for his car, or Harbinson's. Check the state registrations for both of them, get the tag numbers out to the highway patrol and everybody else. Get the name to the security people at the airports…'
'If these cells were set up to move people, then he could be hard to locate,' Nadya said. 'They would have protected routes out.'
'I don't know-all I know is what we can do,' Lucas said. He turned and looked toward the incoming cop car, and then back to Nadya. 'There's something not quite right with this whole thing. You say the group wasn't active as far as you know… if they were active, would somebody have told you? Warned you off?'
'Yes. And nobody did. There would be some indication that while they wanted enthusiasm, they did not want success. I never got that. It was the other way around-that I should learn what is happening, and we should not spare ourselves. That is why Piotr is dead.'
Lucas said, 'I'm just not sure how far I can trust you.'
'That's for you to decide,' she said. 'But-we are breaking this case. We will join you in the hunt for Roger Walther, and if he is running to us, we will tell you.'
'You will give him back?'
She shrugged. 'That's not for me to decide. He did murder a popular diplomat.'
He looked at her for a long moment, and then as the cop car turned into the yard, and he saw John Terry's face in the window, he nodded and said, 'Okay. For now, anyway.'
Chapter 26
Lucas pushed relentlessly through their list. They were on the scene of the killing for two hours, handed it over first to the Virginia cops, then to a sheriff's deputy named Max Anderson. They were there long enough for an assistant medical examiner to guess that Harbinson had been dead for twelve hours, or less.
'That's just a guess based on body temp,' he said. He was a young man, thin with blond shaggy hair; prematurely shabby and quite earnest. 'The temperature in here is actually fairly low, and she hadn't gotten down to room temp. So… last night.'
A sheriff's technician said, 'I saw that shell from the shooting down in Hibbing. The one at the Greyhound Museum. The shells we picked up back there…' He nodded toward the bedroom.
'They look the same to me. That's just eyeballing it, but the firing-pin depth looks about the same, and it's round, and it's off center on the primer, just a hair, like the one from the museum.'
'When will we know for sure?'
'I've got digital microphotographs on my computer back at the office. If I could get these back there, I could tell you ninety-nine percent in an hour, but I'm working on the scene here…'
'Screw the scene. Let me get you a car,' Lucas said.
Terry, the Virginia chief, came out of the bedroom and noticed Lucas looking into a front-room closet, and asked, 'Everything under control?'
'No.' And Lucas asked, 'Did it rain all night?'
'Pretty much. Why?'
'Walther didn't take his raincoat,' Lucas said, pulling a trench-coat sleeve out of the closet. 'Not a bad coat, either.'
'Maybe he had a rain suit.'
When Lucas pulled the coat sleeve out of the closet, Nadya looked that way from across the room. She frowned, walked to the closet, squatted, and pushed the trench coat to one side.
'What?' Lucas asked.
'Look.' She pointed, and Lucas squatted beside her. A single blaze orange hunter's glove was lying in the back of the closet.
'Sonofabitch.'
Lucas called Andy Harmon. 'We've broken it down. The killer was a guy named Roger Walther. That's the Walther family on the chart I gave you. We'll send you the details on him, and we've got all the local cops looking for him, but it's time you guys got in on the act. He's running, and he's got twelve hours on us, and he's probably headed for Russia down the old spy route. Could be in Canada, so somebody's got to talk to the Mounties.'
'Got a picture?' the FBI man asked.
'I'll get one, and we'll scan it and send it to you. We've got a driver's-license photo that's three years old, not too good, but I'm gonna hit his wife in a few minutes, assuming she's still there and still alive, and I'll get whatever I can and send it along.'
'Excellent. Excellent job, Davenport. I'll put it in my report.'
Lucas hung up. 'Fuckhead,' he said.
'Let's go,' Lucas told Nadya. 'Let's go talk to Janet Walther.' Andreno went to get his jacket, and as he did, another car pulled off the road outside. A middle-aged woman got out with a plastic sack in her hand, and walked down toward the house and talked to a deputy parked on the road at the end of the walk.
The deputy came to the house and said to Lucas, 'It's Harbinson's stepsister. Corine Maples. She's got a picture of Harbinson with Roger Walther.'
'Bring her in.'
The woman, dry-eyed but nervous, asked Lucas, 'Is she still here?'
'Yes. I'm afraid we can't let you in.'
'No, no, I don't want to see her… But I have a funeral home, the name of the funeral home.'
'See the guy over there?' Lucas asked, pointing to a deputy. 'That's Max Anderson; he's the deputy in charge of the scene. Give it to him. She'll be taken to the medical school first, for an autopsy, and then… Well, talk to Max.'
'Okay,' she said. 'I knew Roger was bad news, the first time I met him.'
'You have a photograph?'
She fumbled in her plastic bag and pulled out a photograph taken in a backyard with a wooden fence, a summer scene with a flower bed and, partly visible to one side, a plaster Virgin Mary with her hands spread over a pond the size of a garbage-can lid. Two people stood in the foreground, squinting into the sun and the camera.
