Secret Prey ld-9

by John Sandford

  Lucas pulled them back to the meeting: "What did you decide? Did you get your alliance?"

  "Well…" Audrey looked at her husband, whose lips were pressed tight in anger.

  "This has nothing to do with who killed Susan O’Dell, does it?" he asked. "You’re trying to screw me so your pal Bone gets the CEO’s job."

  "He’s not my pal," Lucas snapped back.

  "No? Who handled the money for your IPO and the management buyout? And you were in his office last week talking about me. I haven’t done anything and you’ve been spreading rumors that are killing me."

  Lucas shook his head: "Routine…"

  "Bullshit. My lawyer used to be a cop, and he says it’s nothing like routine."

  "So get your lawyer down here if you want," Lucas said. "But I want an answer: Did you strike a deal with Susan O’Dell?"

  Wilson McDonald looked down at his wife, who stared back, then nodded almost imperceptibly. Wilson turned back to Lucas: "Yes, we did. Between the two of us, we had the votes. She becomes president, I become chairman. I work on strategic issues, she works on day-to-day matters."

  "How about Bone?"

  He shook his head: "Bone is committed to the merger. We couldn’t talk."

  "So, if O’Dell hadn’t been shot, you’d have had the job."

  "And Bone would have been out," McDonald said. "Why don’t you go ask your pal about that one?"

  Swanson stepped in: "Mr. McDonald, we’re gonna ask you to step out into the hallway while we talk to your wife. No big problem, you can take a chair if you wish, but we need a statement from her, a sort of blow-by-blow account of everything that happened."

  "I thought she had a right to an attorney," McDonald blustered.

  "She does," Swanson said, "And if she wants one, we can wait until you get somebody here. But we’re not accusing her of anything at all. We just want to hear what happened."

  "Then why can’t I stay?"

  "Because you have a way of answering her questions for her. We’ve been through this before, and we’ve just gotten to the point where we ask the spouse to step outside. An attorney’s fine, if she wants one now, or she can ask for one at any time."

  McDonald looked at his wife for a moment, as if weighing the possibility that she would say something strange under questioning, then looked back at Swanson and nodded. "I’ll take a chair." And to Audrey: "The minute they push the wrong button, you come get me, and we’ll have Harrison get up here."

  "Okay," she said, swallowing nervously. "Don’t go far away."

  When Wilson McDonald had gone, Lucas said, "Detective Swanson is going to talk to you for a few minutes, then Detective Sloan will want to ask a few questions-Detective Sloan has already spoken to your husband…"

  "Up at Dan’s cabin-he told me about it," Audrey said. She seemed more assertive when her husband wasn’t around.

  "I have to leave in a minute or two, but I’d like to talk to you privately just for a moment, you and I," Lucas said. He looked at Swanson. "I just need to speak to her for a second."

  "Sure."

  Lucas escorted her into O’Dell’s kitchen, lowered his voice: "I believe I spoke to you earlier today."

  "What?" Was she really surprised? he wondered. There was an instant of surprise in her eyes. "I don’t believe so."

  "Mrs. McDonald, you have a rather nasty bruise on your leg, just above your ankle: Is that new?"

  "I just…" She looked away, groped for a word. "… bumped myself."

  "No, you didn’t," he said. "Your husband beat you up last night. Would you like a call from the domestic intervention people?"

  "No, no, we only had a little argument."

  "If we took you downtown and had one of our policewomen take a look at you, she’d find a lot of bruises, wouldn’t she?"

  "That’s illegal. I want to see my husband."

  "Okay." Lucas raised his hands. "Like I said, this is just between you and me. If you don’t want to make a complaint, I’m not going to insist on it. But you should. It never gets better, it always gets worse."

  "Things will get better. Wilson’s been under a lot of stress. This job…"

  "Just a job," Lucas said.

  "Oh, no." She was shocked. "This… this is everything."

  Before he left, Lucas Took Swanson aside: "Treat her very carefully. Get as much as you can on her- personal history, everything-and tell Sloan that I want her wrung out, but not scared. Don’t push her into getting an attorney."

  "Are we trying for anything in particular?" Swanson asked. He turned half sideways to look at Audrey, who was perched on a chair in O’Dell’s home office.

  "If we can do it-very gently-it’d be nice to get a wedge between her and her husband. Don’t be obvious, but if the opportunity comes up, it’d be good to let her know that her interests and her husband’s are not necessarily the same."

  Back in his car, Lucas picked up the car phone and called St. Anne’s College, which was located a few blocks from his house in St. Paul. He told the St. Anne’s operator that he knew it was late and nuns commonly don’t take calls from men in the middle of the night, that this was an emergency and perhaps a matter of life and death, that he was with the police department… and he got his nun.

  Sister Mary Joseph, a psychology professor and childhood friend he’d always known as Elle Kruger: "Lucas? Is somebody hurt?" A sharp, somewhat astringent voice, becoming more so as they got older.

  "Nothing like that, Elle. I’m sorry to disturb you, but I have a couple of questions on a case."

  "Oh, good. I was afraid… Anyway, have you read the Iliad lately?"

  "Uh, no, actually." He looked at his watch. Had to get to Bone’s place.

  "Have you ever read it?"

  "That’s the one… No, that’s the Odyssey. I guess not. Same guy, though, right?"

  "Lucas…" She sounded exasperated. "I keep forgetting you were a jock. Listen, go down and get theIliad, the one that’s translated by Robert Fagles, that’s the one I’m reading now, and I’ll tell you what parts to read if you don’t want to read the whole thing."

  "Elle…"

  "The thing is, this translation is much coarser, in all the right places, than the old ones-my goodness, the Trojan War resembled one of your gang wars. That was always obscured by the language of the other translations, but this one… the language is brilliantly apt."

  "Elle, Elle-tell me later. I’m calling from my car and I’ve got a serious question."

  She stopped with the Iliad: "Which is?"

  "If a woman is routinely beaten by her husband, is it likely that she might betray him behind his back, while defending him when he was around?"

  "Of course-wouldn’t you if you were in her shoes?"

  "No."

  "No, you probably wouldn’t. You’d probably go after him with a baseball bat… But yes, a woman might do that."

  "I’m not talking about some kind of pro form a defense. I’m talking about really believing in the defense. But at the same time, betraying him to the police anonymously, then denying it even to the police."

  "This isn’t a theoretical question."

  "No."

  "Then you’re dealing with a badly abused woman who needs treatment-if it’s not too late for treatment. Some people, if they’re abused badly enough, will identify with and even love their abusers, while another side of their personality is desperately trying to get out of the relationship. Just to use a kind of layman’s terminology, you could say you have a condition of… mmm… stress-induced multiple-personality disorder. The part of her personality that sincerely defends her husband may not even know that the other part of her personality is betraying him.??

  "Shit… Excuse me," Lucas said. "So even if I broke her out from her husband in, say, a murder case, she could be impeached as being nuts."

  " ‘Nuts’ is not accepted terminology, Lucas," she said.

  "But she could be impeached…"

  "Worse than that. If she were required to tes
tify in the presence of her husband, she might flip over and start defending him-lying-because he so dominates her personality."

  "All right."

  "Will I be meeting this woman?"

  "Probably not, Elle. I’ll tell you about it next time we talk. Right now, I’m running."

  "Take care."

  "You too."

  Bone lived in a high-security building much like O’Dell’s, and not more than a five-minute walk away. Lucas dumped the Porsche in a no-parking zone outside the glass front doors, and when a security guard came to the doors, flashed his ID and was admitted to the lobby.

  "I need to talk to James T. Bone," Lucas said.

  "Don’t know if Mr. Bone is in. He often goes out at night," the guard said, moving behind the security console.

  "Ring him and let it ring about fifty times," Lucas said.

  The guard did that, and after a few seconds, said into the phone, "Mr. Bone, this is William downstairs. I’m sorry to bother you, but there’s a police officer here asking to see you… Yes, Deputy Chief Davenport, and he says it’s urgent. Yes sir."

  He hung up the phone: "Mr. Bone is on fourteen," he said. "Take the elevator on the right."

  Bone was waiting in the hallway outside his apartment door: as Lucas got off the elevator, he realized that this hallway also had only two doors, as had O’Dell’s. Something ticked at the back of his mind, but the thought was gone as Bone stepped out and said, "What’s going on?"

  Bone was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, but was barefoot.

  "You alone?"

  "No, actually, I have a friend here… Come on in. What happened?"

  Lucas stepped inside. A woman, about Bone’s age, was sitting on the couch.

  "This is Marcia Kresge, Dan Kresge’s wife. We were just talking strategy."

  "Was Wilson McDonald here an hour ago?" Lucas asked.

  Bone looked at his watch: "Well, more than an hour. He left here probably at ten-thirty or ten forty-five."

  "Ten-thirty. Have you been here ever since?"

  "Yes… Marcia got here about…"

  "About eleven-twenty," said Kresge.

  "So what happened to McDonald?" Bone demanded.

  "Did you make a deal with McDonald?" Lucas asked, ignoring the question.

  Bone looked at Kresge, then back at Lucas: "No. What’s he done?"

  "So you’re out of the job. Because he made a deal with Susan O’Dell."

  "Oh, no, I’m not out of it at all." Bone shook his head. "Wilson thinks he can deliver several votes to Susan. He doesn’t know it, but he can’t. Well, maybe one. The rest are still up for grabs. Now what the hell happened?"

  Lucas looked at Kresge, then back at Bone, interested in their reactions. "A couple of minutes after eleven o’clock, somebody rang the doorbell at Susan O’Dell’s apartment, and when she opened the door, shot her twice in the head with a handgun. O’Dell’s dead."

  And they were, as far as Lucas could tell, stunned. Astonished.

  Bone, who didn’t seem given to sputtering, sputtered, "That’s not possible. I just talked to her tonight."

  "What time?"

  "Seven o’clock or so." He looked at Kresge. "About the Community College deal."

  Kresge was solemn: "You know what? It’s a crazy man. We could be next."

  "Mr. Bone, I don’t want to imply anything, but you’re the obvious beneficiary of all this-the top job is opened up by a murder, then the main competition is eliminated. Again, I don’t mean to imply anything, but we really have to pin down where you were, and what you were doing all evening." He turned to the woman. "And the same with you, I’m afraid."

  "Do you really think I’d do this?" Bone asked. He sounded more curious than afraid.

  Lucas thought for a moment and then said, "I don’t know you well enough to say. But even if I didn’t, I have to make sure. If McDonald left here a little after ten-thirty, and you were here alone, and the woman didn’t get here until eleven-thirty… who has an alibi?"

  "I wasn’t alone," Bone said. "I’m sorry, I should have said so… My assistant, I think you met her at the bank, the blonde? Kerin Baki? She was here. We were working on a presentation for the board."

  "When did she leave?"

  "A few minutes after Wilson-she was heading down to the bank. She’s probably still there," Bone said. "And between the time she left and the time Marcia got here, I made a half-dozen phone calls. There must be some way to get at phone records."

  Lucas nodded. "We’ll get those."

  And Bone said, "I’ll tell you something else: We know exactly how many votes I’ve got, which is nine. And we know how many Susan had, which is seven. I’m one vote away. At least three votes are uncommitted, and we were just working out ways to get one of those three. Because when we get one, all the others will come." He hopped off the couch, and started to prowl the apartment as he talked. "So what I’m saying is, I think I had the top job. This might knock me out-or slow things down. If the board thinks there’s the slightest chance that I’m implicated, I’m dead meat. Better to hire somebody else, and apologize to me later, if I’m innocent, than get stuck with a CEO who turns out to be a killer."

  "You know who the real beneficiary is?" Kresge said. "Wilson McDonald."

  "He made a deal with her," Lucas said.

  Kresge made a rude noise: "She might have made a tactical agreement with him, just to grab the top slot. But after she’d gotten rid of Bone and a few other people, she’d have gotten rid of McDonald. She and Jim were actually friends, in a way-but she hated McDonald."

  "But everybody says McDonald’s out of it."

  "Not if there’s nobody else left," Kresge said. She looked at Bone. "Jim darling, I’d be very careful if I were you. Very careful."

  Bone and Kresge agreed to stay at the apartment until Sloan got there. Lucas talked to Sloan by phone, and Sloan said he was nearly done with the McDonalds.

  "What do you think?" Lucas asked.

  "When I talk to Mrs. McDonald alone, she’s pretty straight," Sloan said. "When I get her around her old man, she’s a fucking ventriloquist’s dummy."

  "I talked to Elle Kruger about that. She said severely abused women can get like that."

  "We need to give McDonald a good look," Sloan said. "Something tells me he’s involved. I don’t know if I think that because he’s really involved, or because I just don’t like the sonofabitch."

  "Listen, when you get to Bone’s… get him aside and talk to him about his sex life. Who he’s screwing. Because I think that tip about him sleeping with Kresge is right. You’ll understand what I mean when you see them together. And find out if he’s screwing his assistant. She’s a little chilly, but that’s probably just me. Maybe Bone can warm her up."

  "I’ll do that," Sloan said.

  "And you’ll need to talk to the assistant. I’ll give you her name and you can call her, and get her over to Bone’s."

  "Where’re you going?"

  "Home to make a list," Lucas said. "This fuckin’ thing is starting to confuse me."

  FOURTEEN

  Lucas lived in a ranch-style house in St. Paul, on a road that ran along the top of a Mississippi River bluff. From his front window he could see the lights of Minneapolis across the river. The neighborhood was quiet, fine for walking, and he and Weather had walked a lot when they were together.

  Weather.

  Why would somebody hit Weather? The Edina cops had exactly nothing. Zero. Zip. No likely neighborhood kids. One of the Edina guys had checked on Lucas-would he do it, why wouldn’t he do it. He’d been told emphatically that Lucas would not, and the cops had gone away.

  But Lucas couldn’t accept it as a nutcase. Nutcases didn’t pick out random houses to bomb; or if they did, the chances of hitting someone with Weather’s history were…

  Impossible. Not just slim. Impossible.

  He’d once converted the master bedroom to use as a den, but after Weather arrived, he’d converted it back to a bedroom, and moved
his drawing table into one of the smaller bedrooms. He hadn’t worked on a commercial game for years now: everything had gone to computers, and while he might still develop ideas and scenarios, he was rapidly moving away from game development.

  Too much money, he thought sometimes. He’d made too much money, almost inadvertently, as sometimes happened in the computer age. He’d drifted from writing tabletop war games to writing game scenarios, which a University of Minnesota computer freak turned into games, to writing simulations of police emergencies to be played out on police computers. And his company had simply grown, first run out of his hip pocket, then with the computer freak, and finally by a professional businessman who’d taken the company public.

  And now that he really didn’t need to write games, didn’t need to sit up until three in the morning thinking of new sci-fi beasts to challenge computer geekdom… he didn’t. He missed it, but he didn’t do it.

  Now he sat at his drawing table, cleared away detritus from earlier skull sessions, pulled out a sheet of heavy paper and started making a chart.

  The situation at the bank was too complicated. There were too many suspects, and all of them had motives. He needed to simplify and clarify.

  But the firebombing prowled around the edge of his consciousness: that’s what he needed to settle. The bank killings were almost technical problems, problems that cops solved. The firebombing was personal. What if it was aimed at him rather than Weather? But why would it be?

  What if Weather had a new boyfriend, a freak of some kind? Naw. That wasn’t Weather. She had a built-in bullshit detector, and nobody would get past that. Maybe she snubbed somebody…

  Goddamnit. Work. The suspects:

  Wilson and Audrey McDonald. What appeared to be a possibly explosive relationship; who knew what might be brewing in that little perfecta? And the more he thought of it, the more he thought that Audrey McDonald was the woman who’d called him-who was pointing the finger at her own husband.