"Did you see any women at all?"

"No, I didn't. I just thought, with the weeds all crushed down… sometimes you'd see that. But that was years ago."

"Okay," Lucas said.

"How many of the crew did you see? Up on the deck?" Nadya asked.

"Just the captain and the loader, the guy who was helping with the loading. The rest of them were all asleep."

"So you don't think somebody from the crew might have met Oleshev on the dock…"

Kellogg was shaking his head: "No. The guy I saw ran away, and there was no way to get back past me on the boat. As soon as the cops got here, they sealed off the boat so nobody could come or go. I was here all that time, and pretty soon, all of the crew was up, when they heard the commotion, the sirens and all. The captain did a head count, and they were all accounted for. Nobody came or went. Besides, the guy I saw didn't look like a Russian."

" 'Didn't look like a Russian,' " Nadya repeated.

Kellogg shook his head. "The crew are blue-collar guys. Beefy, strong guys. Gorillas. The guy I saw was small. I think he was small. He looked… you know, thin. He had on that long coat and the Russian guys, you never saw them in long coats. They wore jackets. Leather jackets, or just regular cloth jackets, or rain suits, but I never saw one in a long coat. This looked… old-fashioned."

They talked a few minutes more, but Kellogg had nothing else that was relevant. They said good-bye and walked down to the end of the slip where Lucas had parked the Acura.

"Where was this weeds place, where Jerry thought there was a chase?" Nadya asked.

"Over here…" Lucas took her out into the weeds. "Right around here. From the lake, back this far. He said you could see what looked like pathways crushed into the weeds… You can see where we walked this morning. Same thing."

"Mmm." She looked around. "This does not look like so good a place for sex."

"Depends on how bad you want the sex," Lucas said. "I suppose."

The ground underfoot was rough, as though it had been dug over a few times, rutted by heavy equipment and trucks. Here and there were piles of broken concrete. Nadya tramped through the weeds for a few more minutes, 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.