"Nobody here… we're out there now," Lucas said.

Off the phone, Lucas looked at the house and said, "Let's check all the windows. See what we can see."

"Maybe they took off," Andreno said.

"That's what I'm afraid of."

They walked around the left side of the house; most of the windows had Venetian blinds, and they could see through the string holes in the sides, and the corners where the blinds weren't quite straight. They saw nothing useful until they'd circled the house. From there, a blind looked into the bedroom, and they could see a pile of clothes on the floor by what must have been a closet, and more strewn in the hallway beyond.

"Goddamnit," Lucas said.

Andreno tried the front door. "It's unlocked," he said.

"Let me do this," Lucas said. He pushed the door open and called, "Hello? Anybody home?"

No answer. He pushed the door open another foot. The place was messy inside, and smelled like tomato soup and nicotine, but there was no law against any of that.

There wasn't room on the porch for Nadya, but Andreno had moved up behind Lucas and he said, "There's a butcher knife on the floor."

"Where?"

"Right there in front of the TV" There was nothing in front of the TV except an oval braided rug.

"I better check the place," Lucas said. He stepped inside, again called, "Hello?" Nothing. He went through the living room, looked into the kitchen, checked a bedroom, which was empty, the bath, empty but in disarray, then the second bedroom, where the pile of clothes sat in front of the closet.

He almost didn't see her-nothing was visible but her head. The rest of her body was buried under a pile of clothes that had been thrown across the bed. Lucas took another step: her forehead had a hole in it.

Lucas retreated, went into the kitchen, took a tissue from a box on the counter, picked up a butcher knife, dropped it on the floor in front of the television, and went back to the porch.

Andreno looked at his face and said, "What?"

"She's in there," Lucas said.

"She's dead," Nadya said.

"Yes. Shot in the forehead."

"This is nuts," Andreno said.

Lucas called Terry back: "We got a problem out here, Chief. Who covers this area?"

"St. Louis County sheriff. What do you got?"

Lucas told him, and Terry said, "Jesus Christ, Davenport, you're some kind of death angel."

"Yeah, yeah…"

"I'll get the sheriff started, and we'll get a couple cars out there-we got a mutual aid pact. Ten minutes."

Lucas hung up and Andreno said, "Roger Walther."

"Didn't take her with him," Lucas said. "I hope somebody has a picture."

"His wife…"

Lucas said to Nadya: "Okay. We've got a lot of stuff to do now. We've got to put out a bulletin on this guy, and since he might have been working with somebody from Russia, we'll have to make it international. Can you call your embassy…"

They were making up a list of must-do tasks when they heard the first siren coming in: Lucas turned toward the siren, then back to the other two.

"We'll hit Janet Walther first, ask if she's seen him. Then hit the old man again-Nadya thinks he might have been fucking with us with the Alzheimer's act. Start the cops looking either for his car, or Harbinson's. Check the state registrations for both of them, get the tag numbers out to the highway patrol and everybody else. Get the name to the security people at the airports…"

"If these cells were set up to move people, then he could be hard to locate," Nadya said. "They would have protected routes out."

"I don't know-all I know is what we can do," Lucas said. He turned and looked toward the incoming cop car, and then back to Nadya. "There's something not quite right with this whole thing. You say the group wasn't active as far as you know… if they were active, would somebody have told you? Warned you off?"

"Yes. And nobody did. There would be some indication that while they wanted enthusiasm, they did not want success. I never got that. It was the other way around-that I should learn what is happening, and we should not spare ourselves. That is why Piotr is dead."

Lucas said, "I'm just not sure how far I can trust you."

"That's for you to decide," she said. "But-we are breaking this case. We will join you in the hunt for Roger Walther, and if he is running to us, we will tell you."

"You will give him back?"

She shrugged. "That's not for me to decide. He did murder a popular diplomat."

He looked at her for a long moment, and then as the cop car turned into the yard, and he saw John Terry's face in the window, he nodded and said, "Okay. For now, anyway."

Chapter 26

Lucas pushed relentlessly through their list. They were on the scene of the killing for two hours, handed it over first to the Virginia cops, then to a sheriff's deputy named Max Anderson. They were there long enough for an assistant medical examiner to guess that Harbinson had been dead for twelve hours, or less.

"That's just a guess based on body temp," he said. He was a young man, thin with blond shaggy hair; prematurely shabby and quite earnest. "The temperature in here is actually fairly low, and she hadn't gotten down to room temp. So… last night."

A sheriff's technician said, "I saw that shell from the shooting down in Hibbing. The one at the Greyhound Museum. The shells we picked up back there…" He nodded toward the bedroom.

"They look the same to me. That's just eyeballing it, but the firing-pin depth looks about the same, and it's round, and it's off center on the primer, just a hair, like the one from the museum."

"When will we know for sure?"

"I've got digital microphotographs on my computer back at the office. If I could get these back there, I could tell you ninety-nine percent in an hour, but I'm working on the scene here…"

"Screw the scene. Let me get you a car," Lucas said.

Terry, the Virginia chief, came out of the bedroom and noticed Lucas looking into a front-room closet, and asked, "Everything under control?"

"No." And Lucas asked, "Did it rain all night?"

"Pretty much. Why?"

"Walther didn't take his raincoat," Lucas said, pulling a trench-coat sleeve out of the closet. "Not a bad coat, either."

"Maybe he had a rain suit."

When Lucas pulled the coat sleeve out of the closet, Nadya looked that way from across the room. She frowned, walked to the closet, squatted, and pushed the trench coat to one side.

"What?" Lucas asked.

"Look." She pointed, and Lucas squatted beside her. A single blaze orange hunter's glove was lying in the back of the closet.

"Sonofabitch."

Lucas called Andy Harmon. "We've broken it down. The killer was a guy named Roger Walther. That's the Walther family on the chart I gave you. We'll send you the details on him, and we've got all the local cops looking for him, but it's time you guys got in on the act. He's running, and he's got twelve hours on us, and he's probably headed for Russia down the old spy route. Could be in Canada, so somebody's got to talk to the Mounties."

"Got a picture?" the FBI man asked.

"I'll get one, and we'll scan it and send it to you. We've got a driver's-license photo that's three years old, not too good, but I'm gonna hit his wife in a few minutes, assuming she's still there and still alive, and I'll get whatever I can and send it along."

"Excellent. Excellent job, Davenport. I'll put it in my report."

Lucas hung up. "Fuckhead," he said.

"Let's go," Lucas told Nadya. "Let's go talk to Janet Walther." Andreno went to get his jacket, and as he did, another car pulled off the road outside. A middle-aged woman got out with a plastic sack in her hand, and walked down toward the house and talked to a deputy parked on the road at the end of the walk.