and then said, 'If there was a chase over here, who got chased? Why was Oleshev in the middle of this big concrete? He couldn't run after he was shot, that's for sure. He was shot in the heart and the head… Does it make any sense?'
Lucas was looking at the remnants of a broken wine bottle. He picked it up and read the label: Holiday Arbor, and below that, a price tag: $2.99. He rubbed his face and Nadya said again, 'Does it make any sense?'
Lucas thought about the pictures of the old woman in the police file, and the shot of her on the street that he'd seen in the newspaper. In the police pictures, she'd been lying on her back, her arms flung out to the side, a long coat beneath her, like a black puddle in the camera's strobe light. In the newspaper pictures, she looked small, round-shouldered.
'What?' Nadya asked, her hands on her hips.
Lucas looked at the bottle. Two ninety-nine. Mary Wheaton had been a street person. Street people wore long coats on warm nights in the summer, and they drank cheap. She'd been killed in a way he'd never seen on the street, but he had seen. He'd been wrong when he told the Duluth cops that he'd never seen it before. He'd seen it in the movies, when the Navy SEAL sneaks up on a lazy sentry and zut-the neck is cut. Was it a spy thing, a military technique? He'd assumed it was simply dramatic bullshit…
He looked back at the fragment of wine bottle. Holiday Arbor, $2.99. The paper label on the bottle looked new, as though it hadn't been long in the weeds.
'Come on,' he said to Nadya. He started walking fast toward the elevator.
'To where?' She jogged along behind him.
'Back to the morgue. The medical examiner's.'
'You have an idea?' She was looking at the chunk of glass in his hand. He carried it by the sharp edges.
'Maybe,' Lucas said. 'We need one.'
Dr. Chu had gone home, but the night man in pathology called the campus cops, who came with the keys, and when Lucas explained what he wanted, the night man called Dr. Chu, who gave the go-ahead.
'Everything's here,' the night man said. He put a box of clothing on the counter. Much of it was soaked in now-black and dried blood. 'I'll get it out for you, if you want.'
'That'd be good…'
The night man slipped on plastic gloves and took Mary Wheaton's clothing out of the box piece by piece. At the bottom was an olive-green military-style coat with a red-white-and-blue patch on the shoulder. The night man held it up and said, 'That what you want to see?'
'Long green coat,' Nadya said. 'With a Czechoslovakian flag on the shoulder.'
'Is that what that is?' Lucas looked at the coat for another minute, and then said, 'I think we better call Reasons.'
Reasons came down, looked at the coat. 'Could be,' he said. He didn't sound skeptical; he sounded neutral. 'What do you want to do?'
'See if we can get some prints off the piece of bottle I found, see if the prints match the old lady's. See if we can find more bottle. Try to figure out what she might have been doing over there.'
'I might be able to tell you what she was doing,' Reasons said. 'There's a Goodwill store maybe two blocks from there. It's just about the only thing around, I mean, that's not a warehouse. This coat, this looks like something from Goodwill.'
'But it wouldn't have been open in the middle of the night,' Lucas said.
'No…'
'Is the place still open? Now?'
Reasons looked at his watch: 'I think so. Let me make a call.'
Twenty minutes later, Maxine Just, the manager at the Goodwill, led them back through the store to a clothing rack, where three Czech Army coats hung from wire hangers. 'We had about five of them. A surplus place up in town, caters to college kids, got a bunch of them a couple of years ago. They couldn't sell them all, and finally gave them to us. Tax write-off. We put them up for eight dollars each.'
'So you sold two.'
'Two or three, yeah. We got five or six.'
'Do you know who you sold them to?'
Just shrugged. 'People who wanted long wool coats. The wool's pretty good. Some people buy them to make rugs-they dye the wool, do these folky kind of rugs for people's cabins. College students used to buy them, when grunge was big, but they went out of style… I suppose they mostly went to people who couldn't afford better. Most of our clientele.'
'But you wouldn't know specifically.'
'No. I could ask some of our cashiers, maybe somebody would remember.'
Reasons asked her to contact the cashiers, and they agreed that he would stop by in the morning to talk with them. They talked for a couple of more minutes, then said thanks to Just, and wandered back outside. The Goodwill store was a long walk from the city center, Lucas thought-he pointed it out to Reasons and asked, 'How would she get down here?'
'Bus, probably. Cheap ride, by bus. I'll have the guys check with the drivers.'
They were drifting back toward the cars when a dark-complected young man with a Latino accent stepped outside and called, 'Excuse.'
Reasons called back, 'Yeah?' The young man walked across the parking lot. He was wearing worn jeans, an Iowa Wrestling sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off at the biceps, and pointed-toe black dress shoes caked with mud. He had a sterling-silver earring in his left earlobe and a small black mustache.
'Mrs. Just said you were looking for the lady with the coat?'
'Yeah.'
He pointed across the street. 'I see her every day, catch the bus there.'
They all looked at the bus stop.
'Every morning, she get on, every night, she get off. I think she lived around there somewhere. I see her in the Dumpster in the back. When she see me, she run across the street into the bushes.' He said booshes.
'Where would she live?' Lucas asked. But they were all looking at a small cube-shape shed across the street. 'You think in the shed?'
The man shrugged. 'I don't know. But every morning, every night, I see her. All summer.'
'Wearing the coat.'
'Two or three days only, in the coat,' he said. 'We only get the coats one month ago mostly.'
'Could I get your name?' Reasons said. 'Where do you live?'
As Reasons talked to the man, Lucas and Nadya walked across the street and through a ring of knee-high weeds to the shed. The place was a plywood cube, with boarded-over windows on two sides, a windowless, padlocked door at the front. An abandoned storage shed, Lucas thought, probably for the railroad.
'How do we look in?' Nadya asked.
'Have to talk to Reasons,' Lucas said. Reasons and the Latino man were walking toward them, and when Lucas asked about breaking in the shed, Reasons said, 'Let me make a call.'
He stepped away again. The Latino man said, 'She goes around back. I never see her open this door.'
Lucas and Nadya walked around to the back of the shed and found a blank wall-but the weeds next to one part of the cinder-block foundation were worn and scuffed, almost like an animal trail that went nowhere, ending at the foundation. Lucas stooped, pushed on a block, and it moved. A few seconds later, he'd pulled out four blocks, and kneeling, and cranking his head around, he could see a man-sized hole in the floor.
'Somebody's been going in and out,' he said.
'You want me to go in?' asked the Latino.
'No, no-let's do it right.' He pushed the block back into place.
Reasons came back with his cell phone and said, 'The city engineer says it's been condemned as an eyesore. The railroad's agreed to tear it down, but just hasn't gotten around to it yet. Bacon-the city engineer-he's calling the railroad guy who knows about it, to get the okay to go inside. There's something around back?'
'Yeah, somebody's been going in and out,' Lucas said. He explained about the foundation.
Reasons went around to look and then went back to his phone. When he got off, they stood around looking at the shed, and at the port, and Lucas started talking to the Latino man about Mexico, and Reasons started
