crime waves, or because some out-state sheriff fucked it up and we go bail them out so he'll owe us.'
'If you go back to school…'
'Jesus, Weather.'
'Listen, you've got a B.A.'
'Yeah. Not worth the paper it's printed on.'
'Sure it is, because it means you don't have to go through a lot of other shit to study something you're interested in. I was thinking: you really liked building the Big New House. That's the happiest I've ever seen you, when you were doing that. You drove everybody a little crazy, but look at the house. What a great house.'
'Not that great. If I find the guy that sold me the front door, I'll cut his nuts off. And how in the hell…?'
'Shut up for a minute. You loved doing it. Building the house. Have you ever thought about doing something in construction? Building custom houses or something?'
They walked along for a few seconds, and then Lucas said, 'No, I never thought about it.'
'You'd be good at it. And I think you'd be interested in it. You'd be… building something. Think about driving around town in your old age, looking at the neat houses you'd built.'
They walked along a bit more and Lucas finally sighed and said, 'Something to think about.'
Weather said, 'That's encouraging.'
'What?'
'Ever since you've gotten into this mood, you've pushed away everything I've suggested. This is the first time you said anything remotely positive.'
'Houses.'
'Think about it.'
By Sunday evening, Lucas was ready to go. As the evening news ended, the FBI's special agent in charge called. 'Got back from Kenora an hour ago, I just picked up my messages,' he said. 'You're heading up to Duluth?'
'Yeah. Whattaya got going up there?'
'That's what I want to talk to you about. Could you come by in an hour or so?'
'I'm leaving tonight…'
'Just need a few minutes. We've got a guy in from Washington who wants to hook up with you.'
'It can't wait?'
'Not really.'
'See you in an hour,' Lucas said.
Lucas had always had an ambiguous relationship with the FBI. They were supposed to be the elite-and they did do some good work-and they acted that way. Even their offices reminded Lucas of their superior status. The offices were like spaceship interiors seen in the movies; sealed airlocks with only the initiated allowed inside.
The FBI's attitudes, their separateness, their secrecy, their military ethic, had filtered down to state and local cops, and eventually were taken for granted. Police stations, once relatively open, had become fortresses, places that people feared and that they hurried past.
But local cops weren't the FBI, and they didn't do what the FBI did. FBI agents worked in offices and did intricate investigations; they weren't on the street. But as cops began to develop FBI-like attitudes, and to build FBI-like fortresses, as they sealed themselves away in patrol cars, as they fended off contact with the public, they began to resemble a paramilitary force, rather than peace officers.
When Lucas was a kid, cops were part of his neighborhood, with jobs just like the mailman and the teacher. By the time Lucas had joined the Minneapolis cops, that old workaday attitude was disappearing-cops were creating their own bars, holding their own cop parties, picking up privileges that weren't available to outsiders.
That all began, Lucas thought, with the spreading influence of the feds, and he didn't like it. It was bad for the country and bad for cops, he thought. And he thought it again as he checked through the airlock and was buzzed into the FBI offices in Minneapolis.
Charles Peyton was a small man, thin, blue eyed, wind-burned with chapped lips. He wore jeans and a long- sleeved outdoorsy blue shirt, with the sleeves rolled up over the elbows, the rolls held in place by a little buttoned tab on each sleeve; nobody ever called him Charley.
His feet, in expensive-looking leather ankle boots, were up on one corner of his desk. He stood up when Lucas was ushered into the office, said, 'Lucas, how're you doing?' and reached across his desk to shake hands. Another man, heavier, lazy eyed, red faced, and blond, sat off to the right on a leather chair, and said, 'Barney Howard,' and lifted a hand.
Peyton pointed at a visitor's chair and asked, 'Can I get you a coffee or a Coke?'
Lucas settled down in the chair and said, 'No, thanks… What's going on?'
'Have you read the file? We sent a Xerox over to Rose Marie.'
'Yeah,' Lucas said. 'Mostly forensics.'
'We did what we could, on the technical end, but there wasn't much,' Peyton said. 'Nothing moving.'
'How many investigators are working it?'
Peyton leaned back, as if chewing over what he was going to say, then leaned forward again. 'Look, you're a smart guy. That's not moonshine, that's the fact of the matter, and you've worked with some of our big guys…'
'Louis Mallard,' Howard chipped in. 'He says you're a friend.'
Lucas tipped his head: Maybe. Then again, maybe not.
'We've got some people up there. Some counterintelligence people,' Peyton said. 'They're working the case, but not as criminal investigators. They're not homicide cops.'
'They work with you?' Lucas asked Howard.
'Yeah.' Howard nodded, smiled, and showed large square teeth. 'They're doing a lot of analysis, looking at people coming and going through the port, that sort of thing. Computer stuff. Looking at people we know who are close to the Russians. We've been keeping up with the Duluth police through the office here, in Minneapolis-but when we heard that you were going up there, we thought we'd talk to you directly.'
'About?'
'About what you find, if anything. What you think. What you suppose. We're interested in speculation,' he said. 'We won't interfere with your investigation and if you catch the killer, that's fine. But if you find anything else that might suggest a Russian intelligence operation-if you find anything at all-we'd like to hear about it before the newspapers. For your protection and the protection of our people up there.'
'Have your guys picked up anything on the murder?'
'We poke around and hear all this stuff,' Peyton said. 'We hear that the dead guy was an intelligence agent. We hear that he really was a sailor. We hear that he may have had a connection with the Russian Mafia, or that he was operating for his old man in the oil business. We hear all this stuff, and I'd give you even money that he picked up the wrong woman in some beer joint and got himself shot. But we just don't know.'
'The shells that Duluth picked up were older than I am,' Lucas said. 'That does sound like a beer-joint job.'
'But it was one in the heart and two in the head, dead-on, and that sounds like a pro,' Howard replied. 'There was no heat-of-passion. He was ambushed. He was hit.'
'But if it was an assassination, why'd they roll him?' Peyton asked Howard. 'Computer disks? What?'
'I don't know,' Howard said. 'Could be anything. But if they were planning to roll him, why'd they take him in the middle of the biggest lit-up area out there? The cab driver says he dropped him off in the dark, where that track ended. If they'd hit him there, they might not have found him yet. They could have rolled him in peace.'
Silence.
Then Peyton said, 'Americans didn't like nine-millimeter pistols in the fifties, back when the shells were made. I mean, there were war souvenirs around, Lugers and P-38s and so on, but not many Americans were buying nine millimeters as new guns.'
'What does that mean?' Lucas asked.
'It means that if an American did it, it was an odd gun to have around. But the Russians had a lot of nines, especially after the war. Maybe one was stashed on the ship, but never used. The ship was almost as old as the shells. That makes some kind of sense to me,' Peyton said.
