Secret Prey ld-9

by John Sandford

  He would lie there for a while, head downhill, would Daniel S. Kresge, a hole in his chest, with a mouth full of dirt and oak leaves. Nobody would run to see what the gunshot was about. There would be no calls to 911. No snoops. Just another day on the hunt.

  A real bad day for the chairman of the board.

  TWO

  Looking as though he’d been dragged through hell by the ankles, a disheveled Del Capslock stumbled out of the men’s room in the basement of City Hall, fumbling with the buttons on the fly of his jeans. Footsteps echoed in the dark hallway behind him, and he turned his head to see Sloan coming through the gloom, a thin smile on his narrow face.

  "Playing with yourself," Sloan said, his voice echoing in the weekend emptiness. Sloan was neatly but colorlessly dressed in khaki slacks and a tan mountain parka with a zip-in fleece liner. "I should have expected it; I knew you were a pervert. I just didn’t know you had enough to play with."

  "The old lady bought me these Calvin Kleins," Dell said, hitching up the jeans. "They got buttons instead of zippers."

  "The theory of buttons is very simple," Sloan began. "You take the round, flat thing…"

  "Yeah, fuck you," Del said. "The thing is, Calvin makes pants for fat guys. These supposedly got a thirtyfour waist. They’re really about thirty-eight. I can’t get them buttoned, and when I do, I can’t keep the fuckin’ things up."

  "Yeah?" Sloan wasn’t interested. His eyes drifted down the hall as Del continued to struggle with the buttons. "Seen Lucas?"

  "No." Del got one of the buttons. "See, the advantage of buttons is, you don’t get your dick caught in a zipper."

  "Okay, if you don’t get it caught in a buttonhole." Del started to laugh, which made it harder to button the pants, and he said, "Shut up. I only got one more… maybe you could give me a hand here."

  "I don’t think so; it’s too nice a day to get busted for aggravated faggotry."

  "You can always tell who your friends are," Del grumbled. "What’s going on with Lucas?" He got the fly buttoned finally and they started up the stairs toward Lucas’s new first-floor office.

  "Fat cat got killed," Sloan said. "Dan Kresge, from over at Polaris Bank."

  "Never heard of him."

  "You heard of Polaris Bank?"

  "Yeah. That’s the big black-glass one."

  "He runs it. Or did, until somebody shot his ass up in Garfield County. The sheriff called Rose Marie, who called Lucas, and Lucas called me to ride along."

  "Just friends, or overtime?"

  "I’m putting in for it," Sloan said comfortably. He had a daughter in college; nothing was ever said, but Davenport had been arranging easy overtime for him. "Great day for it-though the colors are mostly gone. From the trees, I mean."

  "Fuck trees. Kresge… it’s a murder?"

  "Don’t know yet," Sloan said. "This is opening day of deer season. He was shot out of a tree stand."

  "If I was gonna kill somebody, I might do it that way," Del said.

  "Yeah. Everybody says that." Davenport’s office was empty, but unlocked. "Rose Marie’s in," Sloan said as they went inside. "Lucas said if he wasn’t here, just wait."

  As Lucas stood up to leave, he asked Rose Marie Roux, the chief of police, why she didn’t do something simple, like use the Patch.

  " ’Cause I’d have to put patches all over my body to get enough nicotine. I’d have to put them on the bottom of my feet."

  She was on day three, and was chewing her way through a pack of nicotine gum. Lucas picked up his jacket, grinned faintly, and said, "A little speed might help. You get the buzz, but not the nicotine."

  "Great idea, get me hooked on speed," Roux said. "Course, I’d probably lose weight. I’m gonna gain nine hundred pounds if I don’t do something." She leaned across her desk, a woman already too heavy, getting her taste buds back from Marlboro Country. "Listen, call me back and tell me as soon as you get there. And I want you to tell me it’s an accident. I don’t want to hear any murder bullshit."

  "I’ll do what I can," Lucas said. He stepped toward the door.

  "Are you all right?" Roux asked.

  "No." He stopped and half turned.

  "I’m worried about you. You sit around with a cloud over your head."

  "I’m getting stuff done…"

  "I’m not worried about that-I’m worried about you," she said. "I’ve had the problem-you know that. I’ve been through it three times, now, and doctors help. A lot."

  "I’m not sure it’s coming back," Lucas said. "I haven’t tipped over the edge yet. I can still… stop things."

  "All right," Roux said, nodding skeptically. "But if you need the name of a doc, mine’s a good guy."

  "Thanks." Lucas closed her office door as he left and turned down the hall, by himself, suddenly gone morose. He didn’t like to think about the depression that hovered at the edge of his consciousness. The thing was like some kind of rodent, like a rat, nibbling on his brain.

  He wouldn’t go through it again. A doctor, maybe; and maybe not. But he wouldn’t go through it again.

  Del sat in one of Lucas’s visitor’s chairs, one foot on Lucas’s desk, blew smoke at the ceiling and said, "So what’re you suggesting? We send him a fruitcake?"

  Lucas’s office smelled of new carpet and paint, and looked out on Fourth Street; a great fall day, crisp, blue skies, young blond women with rosy cheeks and long fuzzy coats heading down the street with their boyfriends, toward the Metrodome and a University of Minnesota football game.

  Sloan, who was sitting in Davenport’s swivel chair, said, "The guy’s hurting. We could… I don’t know. Go out with him. Keep him busy at night."

  Del groaned. "Right. We get our wives, we go out to eat. We talk the same bullshit we talk at the office all day, because we can’t talk about Weather. Then we finish eating and go home with our old ladies. He goes home and sits in the dark with his dick in his hand."

  "So what’re you saying?" Sloan demanded.

  "What I’m saying is that he’s all alone, and that’s the fuckin’ problem…" Then Del lifted a finger to his lips and dropped his voice. "He’s coming."

  Lucas stepped into the office a moment later, with the feeling he’d entered a sudden silence. He’d felt that a lot, lately.

  Lucas was a tall man, hard-faced, broad-shouldered, showing the remnants of a summer tan. A thin line of a scar dropped through one eyebrow onto a cheek, like a piece of fishing line. Another scar slashed across his throat, where a friend had done a tracheotomy with a jackknife.

  His hair was dark, touched by the first few flecks of gray, and his eyes were an unexpectedly intense blue. He was wearing a black silk sweatshirt showing the collar of a French-blue shirt beneath it, jeans, and a.45 in an inside the pants rig. He carried a leather jacket.

  He nodded at Del, and to Sloan said, "Get out of my chair or I’ll kill you."

  Sloan yawned, then eased out of the chair. "You get your jeans dry-cleaned?" he asked.

  "What?" Lucas looked down at his jeans.

  "They look so crisp," Sloan said. "They almost got a crease. When I wear jeans, I look like I’m gonna paint something."

  "When you wear a tuxedo, you look like you’re gonna paint something," Del said.

  "Mr. Fashion Plate speaking," Sloan said.

  Del was already wearing his winter parka, olive drab with an East German army patch on one shoulder, an Eat More Muffin sweatshirt, fire-engine-red sneaks with holes over the joints of his big toes, through which were visible thin black dress socks-Del had bunion problems-and the oversized Calvin Kleins. "Fuck you," he said.

  "So what’s happening?" Lucas asked, looking at Del. He circled behind the desk and dropped into the chair vacated by Sloan. He turned a yellow legal pad around, glanced at it, ripped off the top sheet and wadded the paper in his fist.

  "We’re trying to figure how to snap you out of it," Del said bluntly.

  Lucas looked up, then shrugged. "Nothing to do."

  "Weather’s co
ming back," Sloan said. "She’s got too much sense to stay away."

  Lucas shook his head. "She’s not coming back, and it doesn’t have anything to do with good sense."

  "You guys are so fucked," Del said.

  "You say ‘fuck’ way too much," Sloan said.

  "Hey, fuck you, pal," Del said, joking, but with an edge in his voice.

  Lucas cut it off: "Ready to go, Sloan?"

  Sloan nodded. "Yeah."

  Lucas looked at Del: "What’re you doing here?"

  "Seeking guidance from my superiors," Del said. "I’ve got an opium ring with fifty-seven members spread all over Minneapolis and the western suburbs, especially the rich ones like Edina and Wayzata. One or two in St. Paul. Grow the stuff right here. Process it. Use it themselves-maybe sell a little."

  Lucas frowned. "How solid?"

  "Absolutely solid."

  "So tell me." Lucas poked a finger at Del. "Wait a minute… you’re not telling me that fuckin’ Genesse is back? I thought he was gone for fifteen."

  Del was shaking his head: "Nah."

  "So…"

  "It’s fifty-seven old ladies in the Mountbatten Garden Club," Del said. "I got the club list."

  Sloan and Lucas looked at each other; then Sloan said, "What?"

  And Lucas asked, "Where’d you get the list?"

  "From an old lady," Del said. "There being nothing but old ladies in the club."

  "What the hell are you talking about?" Lucas asked.

  "When I went over to Hennepin to get my finger sewed up after the pinking shears thing, this doc told me he’d treated this old-lady junkie. She was coming down from the opium, but she thought she had the flu or something. It turns out they’ve been growing poppies for years. The whole club. They collect the heads at the end of the summer and make tea. Opium tea. A bunch of them are fairly well hooked, brewing up three or four times a day."

  Lucas rubbed his forehead. "Del…"

  "What?" Del looked at Sloan, defensively. "What? Should I ignore it?"

  "I don’t know," Lucas said. "Where’re they getting the seeds?"

  "Seed stores," Del said.

  "Bullshit," Lucas said. "You can’t buy opium seeds from seed stores."

  "I did," Del said. He dug in his parka pocket, pulled out a half-dozen seed packets. Lucas, no gardener, recognized the brand names and the envelopes.

  "That’s not-"

  "Yes, it is. They got fancy names, but I talked to a guy at the university, and brother…" He tossed them on Lucas’s desk. "… them’s opium poppies."

  "Aw, man." Now Lucas was rubbing his face. Tired. Always tired now.

  "The hell with the old ladies," Sloan said. "Let’s get out of here."

  "I’ll talk to you later," Lucas said to Del. "In the meantime, find something dangerous to do, for Christ’s sake."

  Lucas and Sloan took Lucas’s new Chevy Tahoe: Kresge’s body, they’d been told, was off-road.

  "I’m not gonna push you about being fucked up," Sloan said. "Just let me know if there’s anything I can do."

  "Yeah, I will," Lucas said.

  "And you oughta think about medication…"

  "Yeah, yeah, yeah…"

  "Is… How’s Weather?"

  "Still in therapy. She’s better without me, and gets worse when I’m around. And she’s making more friends that I’m cut off from. She’s putting together a new life and I’m out of it," Lucas said.

  "Christ."

  "When she moved out," Lucas said, "she left her dress in the closet. The green one, three thousand bucks. The wedding dress."

  "Maybe it means she’s coming back."

  "I don’t think so. I think she abandoned it." Much of the trip north was made in gloomy silence, through the remnants of the autumn’s glorious color change; but the end was coming, the dead season.

  Jacob Krause, the Garfield County Sheriff, was squatting next to the body, talking to an assistant medical examiner, when he saw Lucas and Sloan walking down the ridge toward them. They were accompanied by a fat man in a blaze-orange hunting coat and a uniformed deputy with a German shepherd. The deputy pointed at Krause, and turned and went back toward the house.

  "Is this him?" Krause asked.

  The AME turned his head and said, "Yeah. Davenport’s the big guy. The guy in the tan coat is Sloan, he’s one of the heavyweights in Homicide. I don’t know the fat guy."

  "He’s one of ours," the sheriff said. He had the mournful face of a blue-eyed bloodhound, and had a small brown mole, a beauty mark, on the right end of his upper lip. He sighed and added, "Unfortunately."

  A few feet away, two crime scene guys were packing up a case of lab samples; up the hill, two funeral home assistants waited with a gurney. The body would be taken to Hennepin County for autopsy. Krause looked a last time at Kresge’s paper-white face, then stood up and headed back up the path. He took it slowly, watching as Davenport and Sloan and the fat man dropped down the trail like Holmes and Watson on a Sunday stroll with Oliver Hardy. When they got closer, Krause noticed that Davenport was wearing loafers with tassels, that his socks were a black and white diamond pattern, and that the loafers matched his leather jacket. He sighed again, the quick judgment adding to his general irritation.

  "Hello. I’m Lucas Davenport…" Lucas stuck out his hand and the sheriff took it, a little surprised at the heft and hardness of it; and the sadness in Davenport’s eyes. "And Detective Sloan," the sheriff finished, shaking hands with Sloan. "I’m Jake Krause, the sheriff." He looked past them at the fat man. "I see you’ve met Arne."

  "Back by the cars," the fat man said. "What do we got, Jake?"

  "Crime scene, Arne. I’d just as soon you don’t come up too close. We’re trying to minimize the damage to the immediate area."

  "Okay," the fat man said. He craned his neck a little, down toward the orange-clad body, the AME hovering over it, the crime scene boys with their case.

  "Accident?" Lucas asked.

  Krause shrugged. "C’mon and take a look, give me an opinion. Arne, you better wait."

  "Sure thing…"

  On the way down to the body, Lucas asked, ‘Arne’s a problem?"

  "He’s the county commission chairman. He got the job because nobody trusted him to actually supervise a department or the budget," Krause said. "He’s also a reserve deputy. He’s not a bad guy, just a pain in the ass. And he likes hanging around dead people."

  "I know guys like that," Lucas said. He looked up at the tree stand as they approached the body and asked, "Kresge was shot out of the stand?"

  "Yup. The bullet took him square in the heart," Krause said. "I doubt he lived for ten seconds."

  "Any chance of finding the slug?" Sloan asked.

  "Nah. It’s out in the swamp somewhere. It’s gone."

  "But you think he was shot out of the tree stand," Sloan said.

  "For sure," Krause said. "There’s some blood splatter on the guardrail and threads from his coveralls are hanging from the edge of the floorboards up there-no way they should be there unless they snagged when he fell over the edge."

  Lucas stepped over next to the body, which lay faceup a foot and a half from a pad of blood-soaked oak leaves. Kresge didn’t look surprised or sad or any of the other things he might have looked. He looked dead, like a wadded-up piece of wastepaper. "Who moved him?"

  "The first time, other members of the hunting party. They opened up his coat to listen to his heart, wanted to make sure he wasn’t still alive. He wasn’t. Then me and the doc here"-Krause nodded at the AME-"rolled him up to look at the exit wound."

  Lucas nodded to the assistant medical examiner, said, "Hey, Dick, I heard you guys were coming up," and the AME said, "Yup," and Lucas said, "Roll him up on his side, will you?"

  "Sure."

  The AME grabbed Kresge’s coat and rolled him up. Lucas and Sloan looked at the back, where a narrow hole-a moth might have made it-was surrounded by a hand-sized bloodstain just above the shoulder blade. Lucas said, "Huh," and he
and Sloan moved left to look at the entry, then back at the exit. They both turned at the same time to look at the slope, then at each other, and Lucas said, "Okay," and the AME let the body drop back into place.

  Lucas stood and brushed his hands together and grinned at the sheriff. The grin was so cold that the sheriff revised his earlier, quick, judgment. "Good one," Lucas said.

  "What do you think?" Krause asked.

  "The shooter got close," Lucas said.

  "You wouldn’t get that angle through the body, upward like that, unless the shooter was below him," Sloan explained. "And if the shooter’s below him"-they all looked back up the slope-"he couldn’t have been more than thirty or forty yards away. Of course, we don’t know how Kresge was sitting. He could have been looking out sideways. Or he could have been leaning back when the slug hit."

  Krause said, "I don’t think so."

  "I don’t either," Lucas said.

  "So it’s a murder," Krause said. He shook his head and looked from the body to Lucas. "I wish you’d keep this shit down in the Cities."

  "Mind if I check the tree?" Lucas asked the crime scene cops.

  One of them said, "We’re done, if it’s okay with the sheriff."

  "Go ahead," Krause said.

  Lucas began climbing the spikes, looked down just as he reached the platform, and asked, "What about motive?"

  Krause nodded. "I asked those people down at the cabin about that. Instead of a name, I got an estimate. Fifteen hundred, maybe two thousand people."

  Sloan said, "Yeah?"

  "There’s this merger going on…"

  Lucas listened to Krause’s explanation of the merger as he carefully probed the backpack hung on the tree. He remembered seeing bank-merger stories in the Star-Tribune.He hadn’t paid much attention-more corporate jive, as far as he could tell.

  "Anyway, he was up here hunting with a bunch of big shots from the bank," Krause said, unwinding his story. "Some of them, maybe all of them, are set to lose their big shot jobs."