Secret Prey ld-9

by John Sandford

  "Those are the people we saw down at the cabin?" Lucas asked. He’d finished with the backpack, left it hanging where he found it, and dropped back down the tree.

  "Yeah," Krause said sourly. "They filled me in on the merger business."

  "Shooting him seems a little extreme," Sloan said.

  "Why?" Krause asked. The question was genuine, and Sloan glanced at Lucas and then looked back at the sheriff, who said, "Close as I can tell, he was about to mess up the lives of hundreds of people. Some of them-hell, maybe most of them-will never get as good a job again, ever in their lives. And he was doing it just so he could make more money than he already had, and he had a pile of it. Shooting him seems pretty rational to me. Long as you didn’t get caught."

  "I wouldn’t express that opinion to the press," Lucas said mildly. He went back to the body, knelt on one knee, and began going through Kresge’s pockets.

  "I never say anything to the press that I haven’t run past my old lady," Krause grunted, as he watched. "She hasn’t turned me wrong yet." A second later, he added, "There is one other possibility. For the shooting. His wife. He’s right in the middle of a divorce."

  "That could be something," Lucas agreed. He squeezed both of Kresge’s hands through their gloves, then stood up and rubbed his hands together.

  "These folks at the cabin said the divorce is signed, sealed, and delivered, that the wife really took a chunk out of his ass."

  "Makes it sound less likely," Sloan said.

  "Yeah, unless she hates him," Lucas said. "Which she might."

  Sloan opened his mouth to say something, then shut it, thinking suddenly of Weather. Krause asked, "Find anything new in the backpack?"

  "Couple of Snickers, couple packs of peanut M and M’s, half-dozen hand-heater packs."

  "Same thing I found," Krause said.

  "Do you deer hunt, Sheriff?" Lucas asked.

  "Nope. I’m a fisherman. I was gonna close out the muskie season this afternoon, beat the ice-up. I was loading my truck when they called me. Why?"

  "It gets as cold on a tree stand as it does on a November day out muskie fishing," Lucas said.

  "Colder’n hell," Krause said.

  "That’s right. But he hadn’t eaten anything and hadn’t used any heat packs, even though he brought them along and must’ve intended to use them," Lucas said. "So he was probably shot pretty soon after he got to the stand."

  "Did anyone hear any early shots?" Sloan asked.

  "I asked the other people about unusual shots, but nobody said anything was out of order. Bone said he thought either Kresge or one of the other guys, a guy named Robles, had fired a shot just after the opening. But Robles said he didn’t, and his rifle is clean, and so’s Kresge’s."

  "How long had they been sitting?"

  "About forty-five minutes."

  Lucas nodded: "Then that was probably the killing shot. He’d still have been pretty warm up to that point."

  They talked for a few more minutes, then left the AME with the body and headed back through the woods toward the cabin. As they passed the mortuary attendants, now sitting n the gurney, Krause said, "He’s all yours, boys."

  "Been a nice month, up to now," the sheriff said, rambling a bit. "No killings, no rapes, no robberies, only a half-dozen domestics, a few drunk-driving accidents, and a couple of small-time burglaries. This sort of blots the record."

  Lucas said, "The killer had to find the place in the dark-so he had to know where it was, exactly."

  "Unless he came after daylight," Krause said. "That’s possible."

  "Yeah, but when we were coming in, your deputy-the one with the dog? — pointed out where this Robles guy was sitting, and generally where the other people were. So the killer would have to take a chance on being seen, unless he really knew the layout."

  "And if he knew all that, he’d probably be recognized by the others," Sloan said. "Which means he probably came in when it was dark."

  "Unless he’s one of these guys," Krause said. "These guys would have all the information, plus an excuse for walking around with guns… and they’d know that nobody would come looking at the sound of a shot."

  "It could be one of these guys," Lucas said. "But it’d take guts."

  "Or a crazy man," Sloan said.

  At the end of the track they could see a half-dozen people sitting and standing on the cabin porch, a man in a red plaid shirt talking animatedly to the others. A short man in a blue suit sat apart from them.

  "What’s the situation with these people?" Lucas asked as they started down the slope toward the cabin. "Who questioned them?"

  "I did, and one of our investigators, Ralph-that’s Ralph in the blue suit."

  "Is he good?" Lucas asked.

  The sheriff thought for a minute and then said, "Ralphcouldn’t pour piss out of a boot with the instructions written on the heel."

  Sloan asked, "So how come…?"

  "I try to keep him out of the way, but he was at the office and answered the phone this morning."

  "Did he collect all the guns?" Lucas asked.

  "No, but I did," Krause said. "Two of them had been fired-both people had deer to show for it. The others look clean."

  "I saw the deer hanging down by the cabin…" Lucas said. Then: "Get your crime scene guys to check their hands and faces for powder traces. And count shells-find out what they claim to have fired, and do a count."

  "I’m doing all that, except for the shells," Krause said. He looked up at Lucas. "I’m going by the book. The whole book. My problem is more along the lines of interrogation and so on. Expertise."

  Lucas tipped his head at Sloan: "Sloan is the best interrogator in the state."

  Sloan grinned at the sheriff and said, "That’s true."

  "Then we’d like to borrow you for a while," Krause said. "If you got the time."

  "Fine with me," Sloan said. "Overtime is overtime."

  "Is there any possibility that you could do some running around Minneapolis for me?" Krause asked.

  Sloan looked at Lucas. "I’ve got a couple of things going

  … Sherrill is doing research on that Shack thing, but she’s not getting much. Maybe she could do some running around."

  Lucas nodded. "I’ll call her this afternoon, on my way back. Anything you break out of these guys, call it down to her. I’ll have her talk to Kresge’s wife, check for girlfriends…"

  "Or boyfriends," Sloan said.

  "Or boyfriends. And I’ll have her start talking to people in his office-secretaries and so on." Lucas looked at Krause. "I don’t want to take over your investigation…"

  "No-no-no, don’t worry about that," Krause said hastily.

  "The more you can do, the better. My best guys are busier’n two-dick dogs in a breeding kennel… And my other guys would have a hard time finding Minneapolis, much less anybody in it."

  "Sounds like you have some problems," Sloan said. "First Arne, then Ralph…"

  "We’re going through a transitional period," Krause said grimly. Then: "Look, I’m the new guy up here. I was with the highway patrol for twenty-five years, and then last fall I got myself elected sheriff. The office is about fifty years out of date, full of deadwood, and all the deadwood is related to somebody. I’m cutting it down, but it takes time. I’ll take any help I can get."

  "Whatever we can do," Lucas said.

  Krause nodded. "Thanks." He’d been prepared to dislike the Minneapolis guys, but it hadn’t turned out that way. Actually, he sort of liked them, for city people. Sloan especially, but even Davenport, with his shoe tassels and expensive clothes. He glanced at Davenport again, quickly. From a little bit of a distance you might thinkpussy. You didn’t think that when you got closer to him. Not after you’d seen his smile.

  He added, "I don’t think I’m gonna get too far up here. Matter of fact, I don’t think I’m going to get anywhere- everything about this shooting was set up in the Cities."

  They were coming up to the porch, and Sloan said
, quietly, "So let’s go jack up these city folks. See if anybody gets nervous."

  THREE

  The four surviving hunters sat on the porch in the afternoon sunlight, in rustic wooden chairs with peeling bark and waterproof plastic seat cushions. They all had cups of microwaved coffee: Wilson McDonald’s was fortified with two ounces of brandy. James T. Bone sat politely downwind of the others, smoking a cheroot.

  The sheriff’s investigator perched on a stool at the other end of the porch, like the class dummy, looking away from them. If one of the bankers suddenly broke for the woods, what was he supposed to do? Shoot him? But the sheriff had told him to keep an eye on them. What’d that mean?

  And the bankers were annoyed, and their annoyance was not something his worn nerves could deal with. He could handle trailer-home fights and farm kids hustling toot, but people who’d gone to Harvard, who drove Lincoln and Lexus sport-utes and wore eight-hundred-dollar apre`s-hunt tweed jackets, undoubtedly woven by licensed leprechauns in the Auld Country-well, they made him nervous. Especially when one of them might be a killer.

  "Davenport is the bad dog,"Bone said from downwind, as they watched Krause lead his parade down through the woods toward the cabin. He bit off a sixteenth-inch of the cheroot and spit it out into the fescue at the bottom of the porch. "He oughta be able to tell us something."

  "Mean sonofabitch, by reputation," O’Dell said. She said it casually, looking through the steam of the coffee. She wasn’t impressed. She was surrounded by mean sonsofbitches. She might even be one herself.

  "Just another c-cop," Robles stuttered. Robles was scared: they could smell it on him. They liked it. Robles was the macho killer, and his fear was oddly pleasing.

  "I talked to him a couple of times on the transfers with his IPO-you all know he used to be Davenport Simulations?" Bone said. They all nodded; that was the kind of thing they all knew. "He sold the company to management and walked with better’n ten, AT." He meant ten million dollars, after taxes.

  "So why doesn’t he quit and move to Palm Springs?" Robles asked.

  " ’Cause he likes what he does," Bone said.

  "I wish he’d get his bureaucratic ass down here and do what we have to do; I wanna get back to town," McDonald grumbled. Back to a nice smooth single-malt; but he’d stay here as long as the others did. Sooner or later, they’d start talking about who’d be running the bank. "No point in keeping us here. We’ve told them everything we know."

  "Unless one of us killed him," Bone said lazily.

  "Gotta be an accident," Robles said, nervously. " Opening day of deer season… I bet there’re twenty of them. Accidents."

  "No, there aren’t," Bone said. "There are usually one or two, and most of the time, they know on the spot who did the shooting."

  "Besides, it wasn’t an accident," O’Dell said positively.

  "How do you know?" McDonald asked. He finished the loaded coffee and rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand. He could use another.

  "Maybe she did it," Robles said. He tried to laugh, but instead made a small squeaking noise, a titter.

  O’Dell ignored him. "Karma’s wrong for an accident," she said.

  "Great: we’re talking karma," McDonald said. " Superstitious hippie nonsense."

  Bone slumped a little lower in his chair and a thin grin slipped across his dry face: "But she’s right," he said. "Dan was a half-mile onto his own property. Who’s going to shoot him through the heart from more’n half a mile away? Nope. I figure it was one of us. We all had guns and good reasons."

  "Bullshit," McDonald said.

  As they watched the parade approaching, O’Dell said, "We should decide who’ll speak for the bank. The board’ll have to appoint a CEO, but somebody should take over for the moment. Somebody in top management."

  "I thought Wilson might do it-until a decision is made on a CEO," Bone said. He looked over at Wilson Mc-Donald, whose eyes went flat, hiding any reaction; and past him at O’Dell. The top job, Bone thought, would go either to himself or O’Dell, unless the board did something weird. Robles didn’t have the background, McDonald wasn’t smart or skilled enough. "If you think so," McDonald said carefully. This was the moment he’d been waiting for.

  O’Dell had done her calculations as well as Bone, and she nodded. "Then you’ve got it," she said. She put her battered hunting boots up on the porch railing and looked past McDonald at Bone: "Until the police figure out if one of us did it. And the board has a chance to meet."

  After a moment’s silence, Robles said, "My gun wasn’t fired."

  Bone rolled his eyes up to the heavens: "I’ll tell you what, Terry. It would take me about three seconds to figure a way to kill Kresge and walk out of the woods with a clean weapon." He took a final drag on the cheroot, dropped the stub end on the porch, ground it out with his boot, and flipped it out into the yard with his toe. "No sir: I figure a fired weapon is purely proof of innocence."

  He was breaking Robles’s balls. Bone and O’Dell had the two dirty rifles, while McDonald and Robles were clean. Usually, Bone wouldn’t have bothered: Robles wasn’t much sport. But Bone was in a mood. Davenport and the others were dropping the last few yards down the trail to the clearing around the house, and Bone muttered to the others, "Bad dog."

  Lucas led the parade up the porch steps, with Krause and Sloan just behind, and the four bankers all stood up to meet them. Lucas recognized Bone and nodded: "Mr. Bone," he said. "Did Sally get the Spanish credit?"

  Bone’s forehead wrinkled for a second; then he remembered and nodded, smiling: "Sure did. She graduated in June… Are you running things here?"

  "No, I was just about to leave, in fact. Sheriff Krause runs things up here. We’ll be cooperating down in Minneapolis, if he needs the backup."

  "So why did you come up?" O’Dell asked. She put a little wood-rasp in her voice, a little annoyance, so he’d understand her status here.

  Lucas grinned at her, mild-voiced and friendly: "Mr. Kresge carried a lot of clout in Minneapolis, so it’s possible the motive for the shooting will be found there. Quite possibly with the bank, from what I hear about this merger. Detective Sloan"-Lucas looked at Sloan, who raised a hand in greeting-"has been assigned to help Sheriff Krause with his interviews, so we can get you folks on your way home."

  "Are you's-s-sure it wasn’t an accident?" Robles stuttered.

  Lucas shook his head and Krause said, "He was murdered."

  "So that’s it," O’Dell said, and the bankers all looked at each other for a moment, and then Bone broke the silence: "Damn it. That’ll tangle things up."

  McDonald, ignoring Krause, asked Lucas, "Do you think… one of us…?"

  Lucas looked at Krause. "We have no reason to think so, in particular. Since we know you were here, we’ve got to talk to you," Krause said. "But we’ve got no suspects."

  Sloan suggested that he would prefer to talk to the four of them individually, inside, while the others waited on the porch. "Nice day, anyway," he said, pleasantly. "And it shouldn’t take long."

  "Let me go first," McDonald grunted, pushing up from his chair. "I want to get back and start talking to the PR people. We’ll need a press release ASAP. God, what a disaster."

  "Fine," Sloan said. He turned to Lucas: "You gonna take off?"

  "Yeah. The sheriff’ll send you back with a deputy."

  "See you later then," Sloan said. "Mr. McDonald?"

  McDonald followed Sloan and Krause into the cabin. When they’d gone, Bone said to Lucas, "I’d feel better about this if you were running things."

  "Krause is a pretty sharp cookie, I think," Lucas said. "He’ll take care of it."

  "Still, it’s not something where you want a mistake made," Bone said. "A murder, I mean-when you’re a suspect, but you’re innocent."

  "I appreciate that," Lucas said. He glanced at the other two, then took a card case from his jacket pocket, extracted four business cards and passed them around. "If any of you need any information about the course of
the investigation, or need any help at all, call me directly, any time, night or day. There’s a home phone listed as well as my office phone. Ms. O’Dell, if you could give one to Mr. McDonald."

  "Very nice of you," O’Dell said, looking at the cards. "We just want to get this over with."

  "You shot one of the deer, didn’t you?" Lucas asked her. The two gutted deer were hanging head down from the cabin’s deer pole in the side yard.

  "The bigger of the two," she said.

  "I like mine tender," Bone said dryly. "Always go for a doe."

  "Good shot," Lucas said to O’Dell. "Broke his shoulder, wiped out his heart; I bet he didn’t go ten feet from where you shot him."

  She didn’t feel any insinuation; he was just being polite. "Do you hunt?" she asked.

  He smiled and nodded: "Quite a bit."

  When Lucas had gone, O’Dell said to Bone, "That’s not a bad dog. That’s a pussycat."

  Bone took another cheroot out of his jacket pocket, along with a kitchen match, which he scratch-lit on the porch railing; an affectation he acknowledged and enjoyed. "He’s killed four or five guys, I think, in the line of duty. He built a software company from nothing to a ten-million AT buyout in about six years. In his spare time. And I’ll tell you something else…"

  He took a long drag on the cheroot, and blew a thin stream of smoke out into the warming afternoon air, irritating O’Dell. "What?"

  Bone said, "When we did the transfers on the IPO, I talked to him for ten minutes. While we were doing it, my daughter called on my private line, from school. All upset. She was having a problem with a language credit, and she was afraid they’d hold up her graduation. I mentioned it to him, in passing-just explaining the phone call. This was seven months ago. He remembered me, he remembered Sally’s name, and he remembered the language she was taking."

  Bone looked at O’Dell. "You can take him lightly, if you want. I wouldn’t. Especially if you pulled the trigger twice this morning."