Well. Read the report.' She stepped back to her desk and touched a file folder, and nudged it an inch closer to Lucas.
He didn't move. 'Okay. What then?'
'Nothing much, for a while,' she sat down again, heavily. 'The Russians denied everything, and the case was being handled by some Joe Blow at their consulate as a routine misadventure. The investigation was a dead end. Then, out of the blue, two days ago, the Russians call up the FBI and start screaming for action. Turns out that the dead guy's father is a big shot in the oil ministry-it took them that long to figure out who Oleshev really was. The father talked to Putin and now their embassy is jumping up and down and the State Department's got the vapors. The Russians are sending an observer to see what the FBI and the Duluth cops have been doing. He's scheduled into Duluth on Monday afternoon.'
'What's everybody been doing?'
'The usual workup, but the case isn't going anywhere,' Rose Marie said. 'It looks like a planned ambush. The feds, the local guys in Duluth, think it's Russian on Russian. And they don't care about the State Department. Not much, anyway.'
'A cluster fuck.'
'Exactly. Nobody knows who's doing what to whom. Mitford and I thought you could go up there. When this Russian arrives, take him on a tour of the crime scene and fill him in on what everybody's done.'
'Mitford wants it fixed.' Mitford was the governor's top aide, what the newspaper called his go-to guy.
'He wants everything made nice,' Rose Marie said. 'He wants people to cooperate with each other, and to shake hands and agree that this was a tragedy, and that what could be done, was done.'
Rose Marie stopped talking, and for a moment, they examined each other across her desk: the years really were piling up, Lucas thought. Rose Marie had crossed the physical border that comes in the late fifties or early sixties, when people begin to look old. Not that she'd particularly worry about it. Like Lucas and Weather, she worked all the time.
'So you want me to do PR,' Lucas said into the silence.
'Do me a favor,' Rose Marie said. She nudged the file another inch closer to Lucas. 'Go up and look around. See if you can figure something out. If you can, that's fine. If not, fuck it-just make us look good. Right now, we look bad and everybody's annoyed. And we've got this budget thing on our back. The goddamned legislature…'
There was no big hurry to the job. Lucas called Duluth from Rose Marie's outer office, talked to the cop who was covering the homicide, and made arrangements to meet him on Monday morning. Then he called the Minneapolis office of the FBI, left a message for the special agent in charge, who was, he was told, 'in Kenora, discussing border problems with his opposite number in the RCMP.'
'In an office or out in a boat?' Lucas asked. The SAC had been in the newspaper for taking a fly-fishing record for northern pike on one-pound tippet.
'I have no information about boats, nor would I rule boats out,' said the fed who'd answered the phone. 'I am simply designated to answer phone calls on a weekend when the temperature is eighty-four degrees, the skies are partly cloudy, and there is little or no wind to influence the flight of a golf ball. He'll be in the office Monday.'
Lucas and Weather spent a quiet Saturday at home. The missing garage door was a constant irritant. The house looked as though somebody had punched out one of its teeth.
'Big New House looks hurt,' Weather said, as they went out for croissants in the morning, leaving Sam with the housekeeper. Later, they spent an hour at a pottery show given by one of Lucas's old flames-Weather only cared what he was doing now, she claimed. So they looked at pots and had a nice chat with Jael, the flame, who was looking very good, and who made goo-goo noises at Sam. Sometime during the tour, it occurred to Lucas that maybe he was being shown off with a baby on his back… then he thought, nah, Weather wouldn't do that.
That afternoon, Lucas took Sam for a stroll. Actually, he took him for a five-mile run on the bike path that ran along the top of the river valley. Sam was tucked in a high-tech, big-wheeled, three-hundred-dollar tricycle stroller, designed, Weather said, expressly for yuppies. A few minutes after he got back, Letty called from canoe camp. Her school had an introductory week, involving four days of consciousness-raising in canoes, which is what you get from Episcopalian private schools, and said that her group was headed into the Boundary Waters the next morning, right after church.
Late in the afternoon, Lucas read the file that Rose Marie had given him. The file had been compiled by the FBI, and included findings both by local FBI agents and the Duluth police. There was a narrative on the discovery of the body, and the search of the area around the dock, as well as interviews with the elevator worker who'd discovered the body and with members of the ship's crew. There were photos of the victim both at the scene and at the medical examiner's office.
The dead man had been shot three times and fragments of two hollow-point slugs had been recovered from the body, enough to establish the killer's weapon as a nine millimeter. The fragments were too badly damaged to match to a particular gun. One interesting note was that three shells had been found, and the shells were old- 1950s vintage. They'd been polished: there were no prints.
A man was spotted running from the dock area just as the body was discovered by a worker at the grain terminal. The man was reported as wearing a long coat. A scrawled note by the Duluth investigator, on the edge of the typed report, said, 'Kid? What was coat? Check temp.'
The report noted that the dead man's body apparently had been searched. The Russian's wallet and papers were missing, and maybe a money belt from around his waist-the man's pants had been loosened, and the medical examiner found elastic-band marks in the skin around his waist that were not consistent with his underpants, and which might have been consistent with a money belt.
There were details: the Duluth cops had found a fresh trail through the weeds along the lakeshore, which showed signs of a number of falls, which they thought might represent a chase, which seemed odd, in what otherwise looked like an execution. There was no question that the dead man had been killed where he was found: there were bullet impressions on the concrete under his head.
Lucas mulled it all over: there was information to work with, which wasn't always the case. He began to put together a list of questions.
Saturday evening, they barbecued: Sloan and his wife came over, and Del and his wife-Del worked in Lucas's office and was investigating the McDonald's thefts. Sister Mary Joseph, wearing street clothes, showed up with a post-doc student in psychology, who'd wanted to meet Weather and talk about cranial-facial surgery.
Earlier in the summer, Lucas had met a white-haired Georgia man on a flight between Chicago and Atlanta. The man was wearing a burgundy-colored baseball cap that said Big Pig Jig on the front, and it turned out that he was a barbecue judge.
In the ensuing conversation, James Lever of Tifton, Georgia, recommended that Lucas try his special competition Pig Jig spareribs. Getting the ingredients together had been a pain in the ass, cutting the membrane off the bone with a dull knife had been a pain in the ass, marinating the ribs for two hours had been in a pain in the ass, and Weather had insisted that they go the whole route and grind their own spices, which had been interesting in its own way, leaving the kitchen redolent with garlic, fennel, ginger, oregano, basil, and marjoram. And though she'd insisted on going the whole way, Weather quailed at the idea of mixing the two cans of Coca- Cola with a bottle of Chianti, but Lucas, in his turn, had insisted.
Just before getting off the plane, Lever had said that the ribs should be accompanied by Miller Genuine Draft beer, 'because if you drink some fruity Mexican beer with these ribs, you'll be fart'n' up a storm.'
Lucas refused to drink Miller Genuine Draft on moral grounds, and so they made do with a case of Leinie's.
While Lucas was barbecuing, Weather roasted sweet corn, still in the husk, in the oven; at the end of it, the kitchen looked like Anzio Beach, but everybody agreed the food was wonderful.
Sunday was even slower than Saturday, but still a great day: blue skies, cool enough to make your face and skin feel good. On Sunday afternoon, Lucas and Weather took a long walk down to a bookstore off Ford Parkway and along the way talked about what he should do.
'I like working for Rose Marie, but the governor… the governor. After a while, it feels a little like prostitution,' Lucas said. 'This is the first time I've felt sleazy. Chasing people down for political reasons.'
'You're putting the same old assholes into jail,' Weather pointed out.
'Yeah, but not because anybody gives a shit-it's because the politicians don't want the TV people talking about
