Secret Prey

by John Sandford

  ‘‘Okay. And tell your boss to hold off any speeches to the Feminist Fife and Drum Club, about it being an obvious case of self-defense.’’

  ‘‘Okay. But if something happens, call me, so we know which way to lean,’’ Kirk said.

  ‘‘I’ll call.’’

  ‘‘Goddamnit, Davenport, you’re old enough to know . . .’’

  ‘‘What?’’

  ‘‘That too much investigation will screw up a perfectly good case.’’

  TWENTY-FIVE

  MORGAN BITE HAD SUCH A BEATIFIC LOOK ON HIS face as he stood at the edge of the Bite Brothers parking lot, at the end of the line of black Cadillac limousines, still holding the check, that Audrey McDonald actually thought of killing him; actually thought that after she received all the money she was due, after all the legal matters were cleared away, after all the police were gone, she might come back some night and murder the man, for the simple pleasure of doing it.

  Bite was speaking in cliche

  ´s: ‘‘. . . able to achieve such a natural appearance that the loved one seems to be undoubtedly present among us . . .’’

  She wanted to say, ‘‘Yes-yes-yes,’’ and run away down the sidewalk; she limped instead, putting on a stunned expression, as though she might at any moment suffer a relapse. Though, now that she thought of it, Bite might find a relapse attractive, given his profession.

  ‘‘. . . not regret this in any way, and do not hesitate for a moment to call me at any time, day or night, with any concerns . . .’’

  She’d just given him a blank check to handle Wilson’s funeral—well, blank to the tune of twenty-five thousand dollars, which he thought would be adequate to protect Wilson’s image in the business community. Whenever she’d mentioned anything having to do with Wilson’s death, Bite had seemed intimately aware of every detail, while somehow remaining unaware that she’d had anything to do with it. Come to think of it, she sort of liked that. Maybe she wouldn’t kill him.

  Well: She could decide that some other time.

  Audrey McDonald came with a full set of the negative emotions: hate, anguish and anger, pain, fear, dread and loathing were her daily bread, illuminated by an active imagination. Love and pleasure were not quite a mystery. She thought she might have loved Wilson, and her parents, and even Helen. She felt pleasure with the prospect of money—not with what it could buy, but the lucre itself; she loved handling it, reading account statements. She had talked Wilson into buying a hundred gold coins, American Eagles, which she kept in a box in a cubbyhole in the kitchen. Once a week she would take them out and handle them, so smooth, so beautiful and cool to the touch.

  And she certainly felt pleasure with the prospect of killing.

  Killing was the most interesting thing she’d ever done, and that alone was a powerful attraction. Added to the attraction was the simple reality that a killing was always done to decrease her own fear—fear of poverty, fear of helplessness, fear of low status—and to increase the amount of money she would someday have. So far, she hadn’t killed idly: so far, she’d always made a profit on her killings.

  But it was dread that hung over her fifteen minutes after she left Bite Brothers, as she pulled the car to the curb in front of her sister’s house. Helen had been talking to Davenport again: she’d called to confess it, and to admit that she’d written to Davenport that Wilson had killed people.

  But Wilson hadn’t. She had. And if Davenport was still sniffing around, he might trip over something inconvenient. She was beginning to fear the man, not because he seemed to be particularly bright, or especially hard-driving, or even mean, but because he simply wouldn’t go away. Now he was visiting Helen. This was all supposed to be done with. What did he want?

  Helen was standing in the doorway as she limped up the sidewalk. Putting on the limp.

  ‘‘I’m sorry,’’ Helen said. ‘‘He was hurting you so badly that I don’t think I had a choice.’’

  Audrey nodded abruptly and let Helen take her coat at the door. ‘‘Still hurt,’’ she mumbled. And she looked terrible. The bruises were going yellow, and her hair, unwashed since the attack, looked like sticky pieces of dirty brown kite string.

  ‘‘Let me get you a coffee,’’ Helen said, bustling around.

  ‘‘Why aren’t you working?’’ Audrey asked. Audrey hadn’t worked since Wilson’s second promotion, the one that carried him into mortgages. She’d always talked about Helen’s having a ‘‘career’’ in a way that made both Helen and her ex-husband feel like rag-pickers.

  ‘‘I had personal time coming, and since the fight with Wilson, I thought . . . I just thought I ought to be around,’’ Helen said from the kitchen. She appeared a moment later with the coffee. ‘‘How are you?’’

  Audrey shook her head: ‘‘I still hurt. I still feel like I’ve been in an auto accident . . . and Wilson . . .’’ She sniffed.

  ‘‘When’s the funeral?’’

  ‘‘They released him today. His father’s secretary called and said his father wanted to handle the funeral, but I said no, I would handle it. It’s at Bite Brothers, day after tomorrow, at two o’clock.’’

  ‘‘I’ll take you,’’ Helen said.

  ‘‘Thank you. I think we should go in Wilson’s Lexus, though.’’

  ‘‘No problem; I’ll come over to your place with Connie, and we’ll all go together in the Lexus.’’

  They talked for a few minutes about the funeral, sipping the coffee as they talked. Then Audrey asked, ‘‘What all did Detective Davenport want to talk about?’’

  ‘‘Oh, he just figured out that I was the one who wrote the letter about Wilson,’’ Helen said. ‘‘And he wanted to know why I thought Wilson did it.’’

  ‘‘You know, I’m not sure Wilson did all those things,’’ Audrey said tentatively.

  Helen looked away, flushing just a bit; this embarrassed her. ‘‘Oh, Audrey . . . I know you loved him.’’

  ‘‘Yes. And sometimes . . . I don’t know.’’

  ‘‘What?’’ Helen asked. Audrey almost never opened up. Now she seemed about to.

  ‘‘I sometimes wondered myself. Something you don’t know—and please don’t tell Detective Davenport this, I mean, Wilson is gone—but I began to wonder myself. And after Andy Ingall disappeared on his boat, well, Wilson was gone the night before. He came home at three o’clock in the morning, and he’d been drinking, and we had an awful fight. And the next day, Andy sailed away. That’s when I began to wonder.’’

  ‘‘You should have said something,’’ Helen said.

  ‘‘I . . . really did love him,’’ Audrey said. ‘‘And he loved me. Nobody ever loved me before, no man did. I’m not so good-looking as you are . . .’’

  ‘‘Oh, shut up, Audrey,’’ Helen said. ‘‘As soon as this is all over with, we’ll take you to a friend of mine for a makeover, and you’ll be amazed. You’ll have guys coming around. You’ve got the whole rest of your life to look forward to.’’

  ‘‘Unless they send me to jail,’’ Audrey said piteously.

  ‘‘No way,’’ Helen declared. ‘‘I asked Detective Davenport about that, and he said that the county attorney was ready to declare that it was self-defense. Which it obviously was . . .’’

  Audrey perked up a bit at that. ‘‘Maybe I could do a makeover,’’ she said, brushing some of her sticky hair away from her face. ‘‘That would be good . . .’’

  ‘‘So you’ll be okay?’’

  ‘‘I think so. I have to go now, there’s more funeral things to be done. I talked to Wilson’s father; he seemed to think the whole thing was like a bad business deal. I was afraid he’d hate me. But he didn’t seem any different.’’

  ‘‘Well, you know the old man,’’ Helen said. She’d met him two or three times at the McDonalds’ house; he was, she thought, a spectacular horse’s ass. ‘‘Though usually, they say, having a child die is the worst thing that can happen to a person.’’

  ‘‘Not for that old man
; he is a monster,’’ Audrey said.

  ‘‘I was just talking about our folks with Detective Davenport,’’ Helen said. She’d gone to get Audrey’s coat from a chair, and didn’t see her sister jerk around toward her.

  ‘‘What?’’

  ‘‘Oh, you know, we were just talking, nothing serious,’’ Helen said, as she held the coat.

  ‘‘I mean, about them dying, or just that they were gone?’’

  ‘‘Nothing, really—just something that came up in passing.’’

  He was sniffing around. Audrey didn’t push it, because it seemed unlikely to produce much, and she didn’t want Helen wondering about the conversation. But she would have to think about this. Go after Davenport directly? That was one possibility, as long as it wouldn’t push more investigators her way. As for Helen, she had to do something to interrupt this relationship with Davenport, which was altogether too cozy.

  All this was going through her head as she went through the forms of departure, ending with, ‘‘So you’ll be at the house at noon?’’

  ‘‘Noon,’’ Helen said. ‘‘And if you need anything before then, call me. Please. This is the reason I took the time off.’’

  When Audrey pulled away from the curb, Helen was still at the door. Audrey touched the horn, emitting a polite Japanese tone, and thought, ‘‘Connie.’’

  AND NO TIME LIKE THE PRESENT.

  She drove to a Rainbow supermarket, looked up Child Protection in the phone book. ‘‘I don’t want to give you my name—I’m a teacher at South High and I’m going out of channels here—but there’s a student named Connie Bell who has been smoking a great deal of marijuana and I’ve heard from another student that she gets it from her mother; and I’ve heard that she and her mother have been fighting, and that Connie has been beaten up several times by the men who hang around with her mother. Thank you.’’

  She hung up.

  Connie smoked marijuana—Helen had confessed that; she had told Audrey weeks before that she’d slapped Connie after an argument over marijuana. There was just enough truth in her call to cause Helen some inconvenience. That was all Audrey needed for now: for Helen to look away from Davenport.

  TWENTY-SIX

  MARCY SHERRILL WAS BANGING ON LUCAS’S DOOR AT seven o’clock. He stumbled out to open up, his hair still a mess from the night, wearing a T-shirt and jeans, one sock on, one sock off; his alarm had gone off ten minutes earlier.

  ‘‘You look terrible,’’ she said cheerfully. ‘‘I got up early and went for a run.’’

  ‘‘God will someday strike you dead for that kind of behavior,’’ he said. He was not a morning person. ‘‘If I could only get the glue out of my eyes.’’

  ‘‘Quit pissing around; let’s get going,’’ Sherrill said. ‘‘I’ll drive. You can sleep, if you want.’’

  He perked up, but just slightly. ‘‘If you drive, I might survive.’’

  ‘‘So, I’ll drive,’’ she said. ‘‘C’mon, c’mon. Go.’’ He turned back to the bedroom and she slapped him on the butt.

  ‘‘Christ, it’s like having a coach,’’ he grumbled, but he tried to hurry.

  MINNESOTA IS A TALL STATE; AUDREY MCDONALD’S hometown, Oxford, was in the Red River Valley in the northwest corner, on land as flat as the Everglades. They took Lucas’s Porsche out I-94, Sherrill driving the first two hours, giving it to Lucas, then taking the car back four hours out. Sherrill was a cheerful companion, not given to long stretches of silence. As she chattered away about the landscape, the various road signs and small towns, the river crossings, animals dead on the road, Lucas began to wonder what, exactly, he was doing with her. He began to check her from the corner of his eye, little peeks at her profile, at her face as she talked. Over the years, he’d had relationships, longer or shorter, with a number of women, and in the transition zone between them, had often felt ties to the last woman even as the ties to the new woman were forming.

  In this case, there were more than simple ties back to Weather. Weather had been something different—the love of his life, if Elle Kruger wasn’t—while Sherrill was much more like the other women he’d dated: pretty, smart, interesting, and eventually, moving on.

  He wasn’t sure that he wanted a relationship with a woman who’d be moving on, especially when she really wouldn’t be out of sight. Sherrill was a cop, who had a desk right down the hall from his office: even when he wasn’t trying to see her, he saw her four or five times a day.

  ‘‘You sighed,’’ she said.

  ‘‘What?’’

  ‘‘You just sighed.’’

  ‘‘A lot of shit going on,’’ Lucas said. She patted him on the leg. ‘‘You worry too much. It’s all gonna work out.’’

  They followed the interstate northwest to Fargo, crossed the Red River into North Dakota, took I-29 north past Grand Forks, then recrossed the Red into Minnesota on a state highway to Oxford.

  ‘‘Starting to feel it in my back,’’ Sherrill said to Lucas. Lucas was behind the wheel again. ‘‘Probably would’ve been more comfortable in my car.’’

  ‘‘Yeah, I’m getting too old for this thing, I need something a little smoother,’’ Lucas said. ‘‘Good car, though.’’

  ‘‘Too small for you.Though you’ll probably start to shrink a little, as the age comes on. You know, your vertebrae start to collapse, your hair thins out and sits lower on your head, your muscle tone goes . . .’’

  ‘‘You go from a 34-C to a 34-long . . .’’

  ‘‘Oooh. That’s mean. But I kinda like it,’’ she said.

  They passed a sign warning of a reduction of speed limits; Lucas dropped from eighty to sixty as they went past the 45 sign. Past a farm implement dealer with a field of new John Deeres and Bobcats and antique Fords and International Harvesters; past competing Polaris and Yamaha snowmobile dealerships, both in unpainted steel Quonset huts; past a closed Dairy Queen and an open Hardee’s, past a Christian Revelation church and a SuperAmerica; and then into town, Lucas letting the car roll down to forty-five by the time they got to the 25 sign. Past a redbrick Catholic church and a fieldstone Lutheran church and then a liquor store that may once have been a bank, built of both fieldstone and brick.

  ‘‘Just like Lake fuckin’ Wobegon,’’ Sherrill said.

  ‘‘No lake,’’ Lucas said. ‘‘Nothing but dirt.’’

  ‘‘If I had to live here, I’d shoot myself just for the entertainment value,’’ Sherrill said.

  ‘‘Ah, there’re lots of good things out here,’’ Lucas said.

  ‘‘Name one.’’

  Lucas thought for a moment. ‘‘You can see a long way,’’ he said finally, and they both started to laugh. Then Sherrill pointed out the windshield at the left side of the street, to a white arrow-sign that said, ‘‘Proper County–Oxford Government Center.’’

  The Proper County Courthouse and Oxford City Hall had been combined in a building that resembled a very large Standard Oil station—low red brick, lots of glass, an oversized nylon American flag, and a large parking lot where a grassy town square may once have been. Lucas spotted three police cruisers at one corner of the parking lot, and headed that way.

  ‘‘Watch your mouth with these people, huh?’’ Lucas said, as they got out of the car.

  ‘‘Like you’re Mr. Diplomat.’’

  ‘‘I try harder when I’m out in the countryside,’’ he said. ‘‘They sometimes resent it when big-city cops show up in their territory.’’

  THE OXFORD POLICE DEPARTMENT WAS A STARKLY utilitarian collection of beige cubicles wedged into a departmental office suite twenty-four feet square. The chief’s office, the only private space in the suite, was at the back; the department itself seemed deserted when Lucas and Sherrill pushed through the outer door.

  ‘‘A fire drill?’’ Sherrill asked.

  ‘‘I don’t know. What’s that?’’ An odd, almost musical sound came from the back; they walked back between the small cubicles, and spotted a man in the chief’s priva
te office, hovering over a computer. As they got closer, they could hear the boop-beep-thwack-arrghh of a computer action game. Sherrill gave Lucas an elbow in the ribs, but Lucas pushed her back down the row, walking quietly away. Then: ‘‘Hello? Anybody home?’’

  The boop-beep-thwack stopped, and a second later a young man with a round face and a short black mustache stepped out of the chief’s office.

  ‘‘Help you folks?’’

  ‘‘We’re looking for the chief of police, or the duty officer . . .’’

  ‘‘I’m Chief Mason.’’ The young man hitched up his pants when he saw Sherrill, and walked down toward them. Lucas took out his ID and handed it over. ‘‘I’m Deputy Chief Lucas Davenport from Minneapolis, and this is Detective Sherrill . . .’’

  He explained that they had come up to review documents and interview people who might have any information about the death of George Lamb, Audrey McDonald’s father, twenty-four years earlier. The chief, who had been staring almost pensively at Sherrill’s breasts, started shaking his head. ‘‘I been a cop here for four years; nobody in the department has been here more than twelve. Better you should go up and talk to the county clerk, she might be able to point you at some death records or something.’’

  ‘‘Second floor?’’ Lucas asked.

  ‘‘Yee-up,’’ the chief said.

  THE COUNTY CLERK WAS EVEN YOUNGER THAN THE chief, her hair dyed an unsuccessful orange: ‘‘Okay, twenty-four years. About this time of year, you say?’’

  ‘‘About this time.’’

  ‘‘Okay . . . We’re computerizing, you know, but all this old paper is hard to get on-line,’’ she said, as she dug through a file cabinet. ‘‘Here we go. George Lamb? Here it is.’’

  ‘‘You got anything in there on an Amelia Lamb? George’s wife? Four years after George?’’

  She went back to the cabinet, dug around, then shook her head. ‘‘Nothing on an Amelia.’’

  She straightened up, stepped to the counter, pushed a mimeographed form across the counter at them, said to Marcy, ‘‘I really like your hair,’’ and Marcy said, ‘‘Thanks. I just got it changed and I was a little worried about doing it . . . used to be longer.’’