"Barbara knows all the street people," he said. "She works for Catholic Charities."

"Doesn't have a hell of a lot of Catholic charity, though," Reasons grumbled.

"It all depends on what you want, doesn't it Jerry?" Langersham said, and Lucas thought, Oops.

Only four of them could fit in the booth, so Reasons and Lucas pulled up chairs and they all ordered beer, and Kelly said, "Barbara: Mary Wheaton, you've read about it."

"Yes." She poured her beer expertly into a pilsner glass, so the head came just over the top, not too thick. "I heard her head was almost cut off."

"Yeah. Now-we think there's a possibility that whoever killed her was the same guy who killed the Russian last week. But they got the wrong woman. Was there another woman street person around here, who walked around in a long green army coat?"

"Ah… shoot." She thought for a moment. "I don't remember one. But I think Mary only had that coat for a day or two. I only saw her with it once. Like she just got it. I remember thinking it was too hot."

"We're looking for a woman who might have lived across the street from the Goodwill store," Lucas said. "Might have been a redhead, or sort of reddish hair, maybe forty."

"Somebody saw her?"

"Yeah, but not somebody who could give us any information," Reasons said. "He just saw her."

Langersham licked a bit of foam off her upper lip, then said, to Reasons, "You know I don't like to talk to cops."

"But you do, when you need something," Reasons said. "The fact is, this other woman is in trouble. If the killer knows he got the wrong woman…"

They didn't have to draw a picture. Langersham said, "There was another woman. I think her name was Trey, but I don't know her last name. She wasn't forty-she was more like early thirties. I suppose, when she had a little dirt on her, she could go for forty. I saw her, I don't know, a couple of weeks ago, panhandling up at Miller Hill Mall. I haven't seen her since. I did see her, earlier this summer, a couple of times, maybe three times, on the Garfield Avenue bus. This was at night, I saw the bus going by, so she might have been going out Garfield. Toward the Goodwill."

"Tray, like ashtray," Kelly said.

"I think it was Trey, like a three-card," Langersham said. "I don't think she interacted too much with the cops, or anybody, for that matter. She pretty much stayed to herself."

"Anything else?" Lucas asked. "You know if she was ever arrested… ?"

Langersham shook her head. "I just don't know. She was well-spoken, like she'd had some schooling. I mean, she wasn't a dropout, or anything. I think she probably took a lot of dope sometime or other; she knew all the words, and she had that doper sense of humor. She was very good at picking out guys who'd cough up a buck."

"We can look through arrest reports; try to look her up in the nickname file," Reasons said.

They sat and talked and ate potato chips for a half hour, much of the conversation between Nadya and Langersham as the men sat back and listened. Nadya was fascinated by the underage-hooker world that Langersham worked: "We have the same problems in Moscow, but we don't even know how to start with it," she said.

"Look to your religious people," Langersham said. "Cops won't work, because they're in the crime life. The only thing that attracts these kids is the belief that somebody actually cares about them."

"But not police," Nadya said.

"Not police. You can't pretend to care about them. You've actually got to care. About them, personally, one-on-one. So-recruit the religious. It'll give them something worthwhile to do, instead of shaking their beads at some bishop. You got bishops in Russia?"

"Everywhere," Nadya said. "More than anyone could need."

Langersham nodded: "That's a problem. You've got to get your religious people away from the bishops. Get them out in the streets. If everybody saved just one person… we'd all be saved. And it'd do wonders for both sides."

They sat in silence for a minute, and then Reasons said, "Right on. Pass the joint."

"Fuck you, Jerry," Langersham said; but she was smiling when she said it. "Your turn to buy a round."

Chapter 7

Trey sat in a Country Kitchen in Hudson, Wisconsin, eating French toast with link sausage, reading a copy of the St. Paul Pioneer Press, a story out of Duluth:

Mary Wheaton lies in the county morgue, a few doors down from Rodion Oleshev, a Russian sailor-or perhaps a spy-who was executed at the TDX grain terminal two weeks ago.

Nobody has been arrested in the murders-but now a top state investigator and a Russian policewoman, teamed with Duluth police, may have forged a link between the two brutal killings.

"We believe that somebody killed Mary Wheaton to silence her," said Duluth Police Sgt. Jerry Reasons. "We believe that she may have witnessed the murder of Mr. Oleshev."

Reasons said that police have developed specific information to link the two killings, but would not elaborate. Sources at the police department, however, said that fibers found in a hut where Wheaton was believed to have lived were matched with the military coat that Wheaton was wearing when she was killed-and the hut contained papers that appeared to have been taken from the body of Rodion Oleshev.

Reasons said that he and Lucas Davenport, an agent for the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, and Nadya Kalin, an officer of the Russian…

The story went on, but Trey's eyes had gone watery: she wasn't seeing it. The killer had come back for her, and he must have found Mary, thinking she was Trey.

For just an instant, the wary, feral, traveling Trey felt a pulse of victory: if the police knew there was a witness to the murder-and they must have known that because somebody at the grain terminal had seen her, had shouted at her-and if they thought that person was dead… she was safe.

Then the Annabelle Ramford lawyer brain clicked over: it wouldn't happen. Too many people knew her, and too many knew Mary. If they checked with Tony on the bus route, he would tell them that Mary hadn't lived in the hut, and that another woman had worn the coat.

The cashier at the Goodwill store who'd sold her the coat-she'd remember, too. She'd tried to wipe out the prints in the shack, but there must have been hair left behind-and if they compared the hair from the hut with Mary's hair, they'd know that there was another woman.

A live witness. They'd come looking.

Trey had always viewed her life as a strange trip: strange from the time she'd been old enough to understand the concept. The last years of high school, all of college, the crack years, the traveling time, all strange. She seemed at times to be standing outside of her body, watching herself doing something crazy. A rational, coldly realistic Annabelle standing to one side, watching a mindless, pleasure-hungry Trey fire up a crack pipe. An intelligent, skeptical, upper-middle-class lawyer watching an out-of-control freak eating discarded pizza from a garbage can on the Santa Monica Mall.

Life had always been strange, but nothing, she thought, had ever matched the strangeness of the past few days.

Squatting there in the shack, stuffing money into her backpack, scrubbing all the wooden surfaces with a rag-get rid of the fingerprints, her only thought-she'd been aware that the world had shifted. There'd been an earthquake. She was no longer a bum; she was back in the middle class, a woman of substance. A woman with liquidity.

When the cops came, their sirens seemed aimed at her hideout-but then they turned away, bumping across the rough road down to the TDX terminal. When God gave her the few minutes she needed to finish cleaning the shack, she slid beneath the floorboards, pulling her pack behind her. The pack was stuffed with money and her clothes.