Secret Prey ld-9

by John Sandford

  "So I can ask-"

  "Ask," Lucas said. He held out a business card, and Knox took it. "Four hours."

  "We’re spinning our wheels,"Lucas said, as he settled behind the wheel of the Porsche.

  "You know what you gotta do?" Del asked.

  Lucas shook his head and started the car.

  "You gotta talk to Weather," Del said. "We gotta know that it’s not coming from her direction, instead of ours."

  "Can’t do it," Lucas said.

  "Get Sherrill to do it," Del said. "Another woman, that oughta be okay."

  "I’ll think about it," Lucas said.

  "Gotta do it, unless something comes up," Del said. "I told the old lady to hang out at her mom’s tonight. Until we find out."

  Del had an improbably good marriage, and Lucas nodded. "Good… Goddamnit, I can’t go see Weather."

  Del didn’t answer. He simply stared out the passenger side window, watching the darkening fall landscape go by. "Hate this time of year, waiting for winter," he said finally. "Cold coming. Wish it was August."

  Cops were wandering in and out of Lucas’s office-nobody had anything-when Knox called back.

  "You owe me," Knox said. "I came down on everybody, hard."

  "I said four hours, it’s been six," Lucas said.

  "Fuck four hours," Knox said. "I had to take six, because in four I wasn’t getting anything."

  Lucas sat up: "So what’d you get in six?"

  "Same thing: nothing," Knox said. "And that makes me think that whoever did it is nuts. This isn’t aguy, this is some freak. Bet it was a neighborhood kid has the hots for her, or something like that. ’Cause it’s coming out of nowhere."

  "Thanks for nothing," Lucas said.

  "Hey: I didn’t give you nothing," Knox objected. "I’m telling you serious: There’s nothing on the street. Nothing. Zippo. This was not a pro job, not a gang job, not bikers. This had to be one guy, for his own reasons. Or we woulda heard."

  Lucas thought about it for a minute, said, "Okay," and dropped the phone on the hook.

  "What?" Sherrill asked. She was parked in a chair across the desk and looked dead tired.

  "Knox got nothing, says there’s nothing on the street."

  "He’s right."

  "Damn it." He turned in his chair, staring out the window at the early darkness.

  "Want me to talk to Weather? Del mentioned something…"

  "Damn it…" He didn’t answer for a moment, then sighed and said, "I’m gonna do it."

  "Want me to come along?"

  "No… well, maybe. Let me talk to her shrink."

  Andi Manette was angry about the interview: "You’re not helping anything."

  Lucas’s anger flashed right back: "Not everything can be resolved by counseling, Dr. Manette. We’ve got somebody throwing firebombs, and I’ve got cops hiding their wives and kids. They’re afraid it’s another comeback from the crazies. I gotta talk to her."

  After a moment: "I can understand that. Weather’s probably at her house right now, salvaging what she can- there’s smoke in everything. It’d be better if you talked to her here, at my place."

  "All right. When? But it’s gotta be soon."

  "I’ll call her. How about… Give us two hours."

  "Do you want me to bring another cop? I can bring Marcy Sherrill if that’d help-maybe it’d make it seem more official and less personal. If that’d be good."

  "I don’t know if it’d make any difference, but bring her along. Maybe it’ll help."

  He hadn’t seen weather in almost a month; and when Lucas walked in the door of Andi Manette’s house, trailed by Sherrill, the sight of her stopped him cold. She was curled in a living room chair, a physical gesture that he knew too well. She was a small woman, and often curled in chairs like a cat, her feet pulled up, her nose in a book- and when she turned toward him, she smiled reflexively and it was almost like everything was… okay.

  Then the smile faded, and Sherrill bumped him from the back. He stepped forward and nothing was okay.

  "How’ve you been?" he mumbled.

  "Well: the firebomb…"

  "Sorry; stupid question. But you know."

  "I know: I’ve been okay." The smile was long gone now, and her face was tense, her voice controlled. "But the firebomb-do you think it might be the Seed?"

  Lucas shook his head, found a chair, sat down. Sherrill was wearing a leather jacket, and she pulled it off to reveal a very large cherry-stocked.357 Magnum in a black leather shoulder rig. She looked like an S-and-M magazine’s cover girl. "Not the Seed," Lucas said. "I talked to their head guy, and we’ve had feelers out everywhere. It’s not the Seed."

  "A crazy man?"

  "That’s the consensus right now."

  "Unless you’ve got something going on that we don’t know about," Sherrill interjected. "Have you had any serious problems with unhappy patients, or relatives of unhappy patients, or maybe state cases from the psycho hospitals… like that?"

  Weather frowned, thought for a moment, then shook her head: "Not that I know of."

  Sherrill leaned forward a bit: "I only know you a little bit, and I don’t want to step on either your feet or Lucas’s feet. But how about new relationships? Or men who think you might be interested, who you blew off? There’s usually some kind of emotional basis for a nut attack."

  Weather was shaking her head: "Nothing like that."

  "Any kids?" Lucas asked. "Any teenage boys trying to cut your grass for you, water your lawn? Just hanging around?"

  "No… Lucas, I’ve been racking my brains trying to think of anybody who might do this. Any hint. People from back home, people from the hospital, from the university, cops, but… there’s nobody. Not to just come walking up some evening and throw a bomb through the window."

  "Goddamnit," Lucas said.

  "My best idea was that somebody was trying to get at you through me," Weather said. "Remember that newspaper article after the thing with Andi and John Mail? ‘The Pals of Lucas Davenport’? Maybe somebody who goes way back read that article-maybe somebody in prison at the time-and decided to come after me. There’d be no way for an outsider to know that we’d broken off the relationship. So… I think you might look at your past, more than mine. That is, if it’s not just some random crazy man."

  "How about the landlords? Would they-"

  "Oh God, Lucas, no. They’re the nicest people in the world. I called to tell them about the house, and they were worried about me. No. Not them."

  "All right." Lucas looked at Sherrill: "Anything else?"

  "Not if she’s sure she’s not the target. But Weather, if you think of anything…"

  "I’ll call Lucas the next minute," she said.

  "So is that it?" Andi Manette asked.

  Lucas looked at Weather for a long five seconds, then to Manette: "Yeah, that’s it."

  Outside on the sidewalk, with the door closing behind them, Sherrill pulled on her jacket and said, "Whew."

  "What?"

  "She said that thing about breaking off the relationship, and you never even flinched. And she just said it like…"

  "It was done."

  "Yeah."

  "I flinched," Lucas said.

  "God," Sherrill said. Then, after a while, "Bad day."

  Real bad day.

  That night, a little after ten-thirty, Wilson McDonald was shaking his hand in James T. Bone’s face, sputtering, "Vice chairman. That’s nothing! Nothing! You’re treating me like a piece of shit."

  Bone said, "Look, Wilson-you’re not gonna get the top spot. You’re just not. I can commit to leaving you as top guy in the mortgage company. I can get you the vice chairman’s job with the merged bank. But I can’t say what’ll happen after the merger."

  "Not gonna be any fuckin’ merger," McDonald said. He’d never taken off his coat. He headed for the door, turned when he got there, and said, "And you’re never gonna run the goddamned bank. Maybe I can’t get it myself, but I can fuck you up."

/>   And he was gone.

  Kerin Baki said, "If they go to O’Dell, we may have a problem."

  Bone shook his head. "Not necessarily. O’Dell needs ten. I can’t see more than seven or eight. And frankly, I don’t think McDonald can swing votes. Why should people swing on his say-so? He’s gone."

  "It’s not all power and money equations," Baki said. "Some of it’s family and friendship. And all he has to do is swing maybe two votes…"

  "I don’t think he can do it," Bone said.

  "You’re underestimating O’Dell," Baki said.

  "No. I just know what I’m willing to do, and what I’m not. If she gets it-so be it. But I don’t think she will."

  Real bad day.

  Susan O’Dell took a small red diabetic candy from a bowl on her coffee table, unrolled the cellophane with her fingertips, popped the candy in her mouth, and said, "I’m sure about Anderson, Bunde, Sanderson, Eirich, Sojen, and Goff. If you can give me Spartz, Rondeau, Young, and Brandt, then we’ve got it: we’ve got ten."

  "We can. Wilson talked to his father today, and he’s got Rondeau’s commitment. Spartz, Young, and Brandt have already committed to whatever Wilson wants to do," Audrey McDonald said. Audrey was sitting on a love seat, her feet squarely on the floor, her purse squarely on her lap. Her whole body hurt, but nothing had been broken. When Wilson beat you, he did it carefully. Thoroughly, but carefully.

  "We’ve got to be sure," O’Dell said.

  "I’ll get written commitments if you wish," Audrey said stiffly. She hated O’Dell, but this was necessary.

  "That’s absurd," O’Dell said. "Nobody would do that. And it’s not necessary. No-I want to talk to them. It’ll all be very pleasant, but we have to talk."

  "I’ll arrange it," Audrey said. "But we do want your commitment in writing. We won’t be able to show it to anyone, of course, if you go through with your end… but if you don’t do what you say, we’ll… hurt you with it."

  O’Dell shook her head. "Can’t do it."

  "You can if you want the job," Audrey said. She twisted slightly, trying to ease a cramp in her back. He really had hurt her.

  O’Dell sat silently for a moment. Then: "Can I call you tomorrow? First thing?"

  "First thing," Audrey said. "There’s not a lot of time left."

  Audrey looked old, O’Dell thought, looking after her as she scuttled away toward the elevator. They were of an age, but already Audrey was bent over, stiff.

  O’Dell worked out, both for strength and flexibility. She was a long-range planner, and had every intention of living to a nice ripe ninety.

  After letting Audrey out, O'Dell went to the refrigerator, got a bottle of Dos Equis, popped the top, and sat down on the couch to think about it. Five minutes later the telephone burped from the end table, a single half-ring. She waited, but whoever it was had rung off. She took a couple of sips of the beer, leaned sideways and picked up the phone, punched in Louise Compton’s number.

  Compton picked it up on the third ring, and O’Dell said, "Audrey McDonald was just here. She said she can deliver Spartz, Rondeau, Young, and Brandt. But there are some conditions."

  "Like what?"

  "Like they want a written statement: I’m president and CEO, but Wilson gets the chairman’s job. He’d just be a figurehead, but the salaries would be the same."

  "That sounds…"

  "Illegal. It might be."

  "Why don’t you see if you could commit yourself with a couple of witnesses-maybe a couple of the board members-rather than putting it in writing. Then in a couple of years, when we’ve got the place under control…"

  "We bump him off."

  "Exactly."

  "I like your thinking," O’Dell said. The doorbell rang, and she turned, frowned. "Somebody at the door. Hang on."

  O’Dell hopped off the couch and hurried across the living room, looked through the peephole into the hallway, frowned, and opened the door.

  "I…" Then she saw the muzzle of the gun. "No," she said.

  In the narrow space of the reception hall, the shot sounded like the end of the world, and for O’Dell, it was. The slug hit her in the eye, and knocked out the back of her skull.

  She went down on her back, and a second later another shot hit her in the forehead: but she was already dead.

  The telephone lay on the couch, and a tiny, tinny voice screamed "Susan? Susan, what was that? Susan?"

  A real bad day for Susan O’Dell.

  THIRTEEN

  Lucas stepped out of the elevator, brushed past a couple of uniformed cops in the hallway, stopped in O’Dell’s door and looked down at the body. She was lying flat on her back, her feet toed in, her nose pointed straight up. Her face had been ruined by the two gunshots; a small bloodstain was visible in the carpet below her skull. He could smell the blood.

  "What the fuck is this?" Lucas asked in anger and utter disgust. "What the fuck is it?"

  An older plainclothes cop named Swanson was sitting in a ladder-back chair, flipping through an appointment book. "Same old shit," he said. Swanson had seen maybe six hundred murders in his career. "Watch your feet, nothing’s been processed."

  His partner, who was named Riley, said, "We got that McDonald woman coming over. She was here just before the shooting."

  "Audrey McDonald? How do we know that?" Lucas asked. He was walking around O’Dell, peering down at the body as though a clue might be written on it.

  "O’Dell was on the phone with a friend from the bank when she was killed. The friend-uh, let me see, Louise Compton-called us, called 911. But anyway, just before O’Dell was killed, she told this Compton that Audrey McDonald had just left. We understand you’ve been talking to her. Audrey McDonald."

  "Never laid eyes on her," Lucas said. "Talked to her husband." He squatted next to O’Dell, picked out the powder burns on her face. Small- to medium-caliber pistol, fired from a few inches away, he thought. "Got a slug?"

  Swanson pointed a pistol at an entryway wall. "Right there… we’ll get it. And it looks like maybe the second shot was fired when she was already down, so it might be right under her head. Wooden floors."

  "What about this friend? Compton?"

  "She’s on her way-ought to be here any minute, actually."

  "Let’s get something over her then," Lucas said. "Cover her up."

  "I’ll get it," Riley said.

  "What time we got?" Lucas asked.

  "Compton called 911 at eleven-oh-four," Swanson said. "She say she was on the phone, heard the shots, and when O’Dell didn’t come to the phone after she screamed for a few seconds, she called. So we figure it was a minute or two after eleven o’clock."

  "You know, Sloan and Sherrill have already interviewed everybody involved," Lucas said. "Maybe you ought to get them up here."

  "All right I’ll give ’em a ring."

  "Christ, what a mess," Lucas said, turning away from the body. "She opens the door and bang. That’s all."

  "That’s about the way we see it… We called you because you’re up-to-date on this bank thing-we figured if it’s a goofball knocking off the top guys…"

  "Doesn’t make sense," Lucas said. "She’s the wrong one to get shot."

  "Huh?"

  "We thought Kresge was shot because he was pushing a merge with a bigger bank. But O’Dell was going after his job on the basis of stopping the merger."

  Swanson said, "Maybe the merger doesn’t have anything to do with it. Maybe they were killed for some bank reason, but nothing to do with the merger."

  Lucas said, "I don’t know."

  "Whatever happened with the firebomb business?" Swanson asked.

  "Nothing. Just fuckin’ nothin’," Lucas said. His mind switched tracks to the firebomb. And Knox, the Caterpillar man, was probably right, he thought. A kid in the neighborhood who liked to watch fires. But not a street action.

  Riley pulled a rubber sheet over O’Dell’s body and stood up and turned. People in the hall. Then Wilson McDonald stepped thr
ough the door, jerked to a halt when he saw the figure on the floor, and said, "My God, is that her?" Audrey McDonald followed reluctantly, a foot or two behind, and peeked around her husband at the covered body. She reminded Lucas of a small, brown hen.

  Swanson was just punching off his cell phone: Sloan was on the way. "Who’re you?" Swanson asked.

  "Wilson and Audrey McDonald…" McDonald spotted Lucas emerging from the kitchen hallway. Lucas had taken a quick tour of the apartment after talking to Swanson, but had found nothing that meant anything to him. "Officer Davenport… what happened?"

  "Somebody shot O’Dell," Lucas said flatly. He examined McDonald, then his wife, then said, "Where were you tonight at eleven o’clock?"

  McDonald flushed: "Are you questioning me?"

  "Do you have an answer to the question?"

  McDonald looked at his wife, then said, "I was driving home. I’d just left Jim Bone’s place."

  "Your wife was here, and you were at Jim Bone’s?"

  "Yes. We were trying to put together a deal on the succession to Dan Kresge. We needed to talk to the two of them simultaneously."

  Lucas shifted his gaze to Audrey: "And you were driving home as well."

  "Yes." She touched her throat. "I was."

  Her voice touched a memory cell: "How long were you here?" Lucas asked. "And what did you decide?"

  "We were arranging-" Wilson McDonald started, but Lucas waved him down.

  "Please let your wife answer," Lucas said.

  McDonald looked down at Audrey, who said, falteringly, "Well, we were arranging… talking about… votes on the board of directors. The board appeared to be split three ways, and if we could arrange an alliance with one or the other of them…" She shrugged.

  And Lucas recognized the voice as the woman on the telephone earlier that day. He wasn’t absolutely positive, but he would have bet on it. The timbre of her voice and the pacing of the words were very close.

  "Did you see anyone in the hall when you left? Or downstairs?" Swanson asked, swerving off the topic.

  "There were some people downstairs, but nobody I recognized," Audrey said. "There wasn’t anybody up here. The hallway is short…" She pointed back to the hall through the open apartment door. "There’re only two apartments."