'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.
Chapter 21
Andreno and Nadya arrived at nine o'clock the next morning, Nadya still red and puffy around the eyes. She'd been having crying jags, Andreno told him, but not as often anymore. Andreno was solemn and attentive when he was beside her, but he winked at Lucas when her back was turned. Andreno was wearing a green-and-white baseball jacket with a hammerless. 38 hanging in a holster under his arm. 'What's happening?'
'The Hibbing cops got a picture of the old man this morning,' Lucas said. 'They phoned it in to St. Paul, and St. Paul e-mailed it to me. I've got it in my laptop.'
'Christ, you're a computer weenie,' Andreno said. 'But I knew that.'
'Look, here's where we're at,' Lucas said. 'We know that who-ever's doing the shooting isn't ninety years old and is probably hooked into these families-unless the shooter is from completely outside.' He looked at Nadya. 'Like a shooter out of the embassy.'
She shook her head: 'Absolutely no.'
'I buy that,' Lucas said to Andreno. 'The only reason to go after the Russian Mafia guy, the Russian embassy guy, and Nadya is that these people are trying to protect themselves from everybody. So we're looking for somebody tied into these families, but young and healthy enough to run away from me. Spivak's kids would be candidates, except that we know where they were when the killings took place.'
'Maybe not the daughter…'
'That wasn't the daughter running from me the other night,' Lucas said. 'That was a guy. Anyway: it's gotta be somebody young enough to run, which means not more than my age. I'm in good shape, for my age, and I wasn't gaining on him.'
'So if we look at everybody related, everybody young enough to run away from you…'
'Unless the families have brought somebody in,' Nadya said. 'They were spies. They have resources. They would have some hidden money-gold, even. They would have some criminal contacts to perform their duties.'
'Yeah…' They all thought about it for a few seconds. 'If they were moving people out of the country through
