Free Hidden Prey by John Sandford

passenger seat.
    “What first?” Reasons asked over his shoulder.
    “I would like to see the body,” she said. “If this is possible.”
    “We can do that,” Reasons said. “You want to freshen up first? Check into your hotel?”
    “No, I’m afraid it would be wasted, if then I went to see the body,” she said.
    “No problem.”
     
    T HE MORGUE WAS at the University of Minnesota–Duluth medical school. They talked about the weather on the way over; in Moscow,Nadya said, it was no different than here in Duluth. And they talked about the length of her trip: it was not so much the hours in the air, as the shift in time, she said. She would be disoriented for a while. “At home, we are nine hours ahead of your time. Right now, I am okay. At seven o’clock tonight, I will fall asleep. For sure.”
    “What exactly is your job back home?” Lucas asked.
    “I am a police officer, a major in the Federal Security Service—like your FBI,” she said. “If I help with this case, I will have some good hopes of becoming a colonel. If I don’t help, I will have some good hopes of becoming a lieutenant.” She smiled to show that she was joking.
    “So this is a big deal.” Reasons looked at her in the rearview mirror.
    “Yes, big deal,” she said. “What is a Dairy Queen?”
     
    T HEY EXPLAINED Dairy Queen, and then rode in silence for a bit until Lucas asked Reasons, “You gonna stay with us? Or are you gonna get pulled for this old lady?”
    “I don’t know. I’d like to work with you guys, but there might not be much to do. And politics gets into it. Nobody cares much about the Russian, but folks are gonna be kinda pissed about Wheaton.”
    “What is this?” Nadya asked, from the backseat.
    “Ah, we had another murder here . . .” Reasons went on to regale her with the facts of the murder. Lucas was watching her face, the play of emotions running across them as Reasons got into the details. When he finished, Nadya touched three fingers to her lips and asked, “Does this happen often?”
    “Nope. Hardly anybody ever gets killed up here. We got maybe two or three murders a year. Four in a good year.”
    “Only Russians and old women alcoholics,” she said.
    “The first Russian in memory,” Reasons said. “As a matter of fact, that was the first Russian boat to come in for quite a while.”
    “Really,” Lucas said. “I didn’t know that.”
    “Lots of Russians back in the seventies; not many anymore,” Reasons said. He looked over the seat at Nadya.
    She shrugged, and said, “As far as I know, that . . . would not be connected to this death. That the boat would come here.”
    “So you think it was just a coincidence?” Lucas asked.
    “I believe in coincidences,” she said, “As long as there are not too many of them.”
     
    T HE MORGUE WAS in the medical school’s loading dock; a convenience, Reasons said. “You just back the ambulance up to the dock, open up the garage door, wheel the deceased over to the cooler, and put him or her inside.”
    They’d called ahead, and were met in the dock by the pathologist on duty, a Chinese-American man with a pleasant accent who introduced himself as Doctor Chu. He unlocked the door to the cooler, and rolled the dead man out. Oleshev was covered with a hospital sheet, and the pathologist pulled it back.
    Nadya turned away, just an inch or two, a flinch, Lucas thought, and then she turned back. Oleshev looked as though he’d been carved out of a piece of chipboard. Nadya gazed at him for a moment, then dipped into her bag and took out a brown envelope, slipped out three glossy photographs, looked at the photos and then at the face. After a moment, she showed them to Lucas and Reasons. The photos didn’t look exactly like the dead man, but resembled him; resembled him the way flesh resembles wood.
    Lucas asked, “You know him?” Behind Nadya, Reasons’s eyes cut to Lucas.
    “No.” To Chu she said, “It looks like him. Rodion