Secret Prey ld-9

by John Sandford

  "You don’t have to," he said, hastily. He took a step back. "You gotta think about this."

  "I have thought about it," she said. "I would have had to do it sooner or later anyway."

  "You goddamn hillbilly," he said, taking another step back.

  "You…" She couldn’t think of an answer to that, so she fired the shotgun, the load of buckshot blowing straight through the broken golf trophy McDonald had moved up over his chest, through an inch of yellow fat, and into McDonald’s heart. He wasn’t blown backward, the way people hit with shotguns were in the movies; he simply took another step back, tried to say something else, and then toppled.

  Audrey checked to make sure he was dead, and then called 911.

  "I killed my husband," she choked; and she really choked, because she had loved him, more or less. "I shot my husband," she moaned. "Send somebody…"

  And when they said they would, she dropped the phone, tossed the gun at McDonald’s sightless body, and staggered into the kitchen for another drink.

  NINETEEN

  Lucas woke in full light, with the phone ringing again. He hopped out of bed, nearly stumbled on cramped legs, lurched through the bedroom door to the study, picked up the extension on the sixth or seventh ring and said, "Yeah?"

  "Lucas, this is Dan Johnson." Johnson ran the overnight Homicide. "Listen, you know this McDonald guy you’ve been tracking?"

  "Yeah?"

  "We caught a call from his old lady last night. Audrey McDonald. She killed him with a shotgun."

  "What?" He heard the words, but they didn’t make sense.

  "Killed him," Johnson said. "Hit him in the chest with a goose load, range of about six feet. He’d beaten the shit out of her. There was blood all over the goddamn place."

  "Aw, man." Lucas thought for a moment. "Where is she right now? Audrey?"

  "Over at the hospital. We got a preliminary statement from her, on the way downtown. She admitted shooting him, then asked for an attorney. Her sister, Helen, is here, making a statement. She says Audrey called her, looking for help, while her old man was chasing her around the house."

  "That sounds a little strange. What’d they do, call a time-out so she could use the phone?"

  "Well, you gotta hear the whole story, but it holds together."

  "Okay."

  "So Helen called 911 and asked us to send out a car, that her sister was being beaten to death. The next thing, we get a 911 from Audrey, saying she shot her old man. They were both pretty drunk, Audrey and Wilson. We got blood alcohols on both of them, the old man was two-point-one, she was one-point-four, and big as he was, he had to drink a shitload of booze to get up to two-point-one. We got an empty fifth of scotch and another bottle with about an inch left. He had been drinking part of the afternoon and all evening."

  "You think Audrey and Helen could’ve set it up?" Lucas asked.

  "I don’t think so. You gotta see Audrey. I mean, McDonald beat the shit out of her. She’s gonna need plastic surgery. In fact, she might be getting it right now."

  "Ah, Christ. Okay, I’ll be in."

  "No rush. She won’t be able to talk for a couple hours, as close as I can tell."

  Lucas went back to the bedroom, where Sherrill was still curled under the covers. "What?" she asked.

  Lucas told her: "McDonald’s dead. Shot to death by his old lady in a drunken fight. Or maybe, while her old man was beating her. Like that."

  Sherrill sat up, letting the blankets fall away. Lucas decided she was beautiful. "How can that be right?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "It solves too many problems," she said.

  "Yeah." He nodded and remembered his talk with the St. Paul fingerprint specialist-remembered saying that the discovery of McDonald’s prints was just too easy. "But it happens that way."

  "The first time it happened to me was with that Bonnie Bonet chick. And that was on this case too. Weird case… Are you going in?"

  "Got to," he said. He dropped down on the bed next to her. "But not this exact moment."

  "Oh, God, morning sex," she said. "I never understood what men see in it. I think they just wake up with hard-ons and don’t know where else to put them." She yawned and said, "My mouth tastes really bad. Like that drawer in Sex that Rigotto used to spit into."

  "Sweet image. You oughta be a fuckin’ writer," Lucas said.

  "A fuckin’ scribe."

  "A fuckin’ hack. Anyway, I got a new toothbrush you can use," he said.

  "Yeah, you would."

  "Hey…" He was offended.

  "Sorry. I make, like, a total retraction." She rolled her eyes.

  "You should. Anyway, you could brush your teeth and then I could show you the shower again."

  She brightened. "That’s not a bad idea; I only got part of the tour last night."

  "Did we get to the soap on a rope?"

  "I don’t believe we did…"

  Lucas had never thought of himself as a cheerful person, because he wasn’t; he wasn’t usually morose either. He simply lived in a kind of police-world melange built of cynicism, brutality, and absurdity, leavened by not infrequent acts of selflessness, idealism, and sacrifice. If a cop brought a continuing attitude of good cheer to that world, there was something wrong with him, Lucas thought. His own recent problems he recognized as involving brain chemicals: he could take other chemicals to alter his mental state, but he was afraid to do that. Would the brain-altered Davenport actually be himself? Or would it be some shrink’s idea of what a good Davenport would look like?

  All that aside, he was feeling fairly cheerful when he arrived downtown, alone. Sherrill would not get in the car with him: she would not arrive downtown at the same time.

  "If we keep doing this, they’re gonna know anyway," Lucas said.

  "Yeah. Later. And that’s what I want. Later."

  "But you want to keep doing it?"

  "Oh jeez, yeah. I mean, if you do," she said. "A couple, three times a week, anyway. Don’t think I could handle every night."

  "Don’t have to worry about that," Lucas grunted, as he looked in a dresser mirror to tie his necktie. "Another night like last night’d probably kill me."

  "You’re in pretty good shape for an old fuck," Sherrill said. She was still lounging on the bed, pink as a baby.

  "If you make me think of things to say, I won’t remember how to tie a necktie," he said, fumbling the knot.

  "Who picked out your suits?" she asked. She hopped off the bed to look in the closet. Not only was she beautiful, he thought, her ass was absolutely glorious; and she knew it.

  "I did. Who else?"

  "You’ve got pretty good taste." She pulled out a suit, looked at it, put it back, pulled out another. "I can remember, you always wore good suits, good-looking suits, even before you were rich."

  "I like suits," he said. "They feel good. I like Italian suits, actually. I’ve had a couple of British suits, and they were okay, but they felt… constructed. Like I was wearing a building. But the Italians-they know how to make a suit."

  "Ever try French suits?"

  "Yeah, three or four times. They’re okay, but a little… sharp-looking. They made me feel like a watch salesman."

  "How about American suits?" she asked.

  "Efficient," he said. "Do the job; don’t feel like much. You always wear an American suit if you don’t want people to notice you."

  "Jeez. A real interest." She was being cop-sarcastic. "Never would have guessed it. Suits."

  He wasn’t having it: "Yeah, sorta," he said. "I like to watch the fashion shows on TV, sometimes, late at night."

  Now she was amazed. "Now you’re lying."

  "No, I’m not. Fashion is interesting. You can tell just about everything you need to know about somebody, by looking at their fashion."

  "What about me?"

  "Ask me some other time; like three years from now."

  "C’mon, Davenport…"

  "Nope. I’m not going to tell you," he said. "Wom
en get nervous when men have insights into their personalities, and we’re too early in this whole thing for me to reveal any."

  "You’ve had some?" Her eyebrows went up.

  "Several, over the years, and more last night," he said. "Some of them unbearably intimate; I’ll list them for you. Like, three years from now."

  "Jeez," she said. "What an enormous asshole…"

  Lucas dumped the car and strode into city Hall, jingling his car keys. Sloan spotted him in the hallway.

  "What happened to you?" Sloan asked.

  "What? Nothing."

  "You look weird," Sloan said. "You look… happy."

  "Any fuckin’ happier I’d be dancing a jig," Lucas said. "You talking to McDonald?"

  "I was just on the way."

  "I want to watch, if that’s okay."

  "Sure. It’s over on the ward, at Hennepin."

  Hennepin General hospital was just down the block and over one; Sloan and Lucas walked over in the brilliant, clear morning light, just a fresh touch of winter in the wind.

  "Her lawyer says she’ll make a statement," Sloan said, as they crossed the street. "They’re trying to hurry things along, get a bond hearing this afternoon."

  "They’re talking self-defense?"

  "Man, it was self-defense," Sloan said. "I was just out at the house, there’s blood all over the place. And wait’ll you see her. He chopped the shit out of her head with a golf trophy. She got like forty stitches in her scalp."

  "She sure sold you on it."

  "If it’s a setup, it’s the best one we’re ever going to see. The ME says he’s got her skin under his fingernails, and she’s got big stripes on her legs where he peeled it off. Her legs are a mess, her back and ribs look like she’s been in a gang fight, her face is completely blue with bruises, except where it’s cut. Her old man’s fingerprints are all over the golf trophy. In blood."

  "Okay…"

  "But just in case," said Sloan, reversing direction, "we should bump her a little. I was gonna get Loring to do it, because’s he’s such a mean-looking sonofabitch, but I can’t find him. If you’re gonna be around, after we get the statement, could you do it?"

  "Yeah, sure."

  "Bump" was Sloan’s private code word for frighten. He’d be the nice guy and get all the basic information, but even with a voluntary statement it sometimes helped to shake up the suspect. You could never tell ahead of time just what might fall out…

  A tall, white-haired attorney named Jason Glass, known for handling spousal abuse cases, a court reporter, and Sloan gathered around Audrey McDonald’s bed. She was propped half upright, with a saline solution dripping into one arm through an IV. Lucas stepped into the room and looked at her. He hadn’t seen much worse, he thought, where the woman actually survived. He stepped back outside the open door and leaned against the wall to listen.

  Sloan led McDonald through the routine, with interjections by her attorney: Yes, she was making the statement voluntarily. No, she hadn’t been offered anything in return for making the statement. No, she hadn’t been asked to answer police question before her attorney arrived, but yes, she had told police that she’d shot her husband, Wilson McDonald, with a twelve-gauge shotgun.

  As Lucas listened to her recount the sequence of violence, Frank Lester, the other deputy chief, straggled down the hall, peeked in the door, and said, "How’s it going?"

  Lucas shrugged: "She ain’t arguing. She says she did it. And McDonald was the guy: nothing she’s saying makes it seem any other way."

  "We’re getting some preliminary stuff back from the lab. Everything is consistent with what she said early on."

  "They had a history," Lucas said. "The question now is, can she live without him?"

  "She’s got a problem?"

  "When I saw her, at O’Dell’s, she was virtually a hand puppet. She had no personality left that he didn’t supply."

  "Well… you know they’re pleading self-defense," Lester said.

  "Yeah."

  "If the lab comes through, I doubt she’ll even be indicted."

  "If the lab comes through, she shouldn’t be," Lucas said. "Speaking of the lab, did we ever get that spectrographic analysis on the slug fragments?"

  "Mmm, I heard somebody say something about it. I think it’s back, but I don’t know what they said."

  "All right…"

  They listened for a minute: Audrey was telling of the pursuit down the stairs, of the panicky call to Helen. "You gonna bump her a little?" Lester asked.

  "Yeah, when she’s done. I’m starting to feel kinda bad about it, though," Lucas said.

  "I don’t know," Lester said, peering up at him. "I thought you were looking pretty cheerful."

  "Yeah?"

  "Yeah. You getting laid again?"

  "Jesus, you married guys don’t think about anything but sex."

  "That’s true," Lester said. "Well, let me know what happens."

  Lucas nodded. "I will."

  "And say hello to Sherrill for me. You know, when you see her."

  Sloan had gotten through the shooting, and now was working backward: Did Audrey McDonald know that her husband was suspected of committing a number of murders?

  "No…" A little fire now, but in a prissy way. "That ridiculous Davenport person is pushing this. Wilson would never kill anybody. He’d lose control and he’d beat me up, but sometimes I was asking for it. Last night… last night I just couldn’t help myself, I ran into the bedroom to hide and there was the shotgun and the shells on the floor and he was coming and I knew how to load it…" She started rambling down the path to the shooting again, and Sloan cut her off.

  "Did your husband own a pistol?"

  "No. Well, yes, years ago…"

  "State firearms records indicate he purchased a.380-caliber Iver Johnson semiautomatic pistol at North Woods Arms in Wayzata in 1982."

  "I’m sure you’re right. But he never used it. He called it his car gun because he had to work down in the colored area sometimes, way back when."

  "Do you know where he kept it?"

  "No, I assumed he gave it away. Or disposed of it."

  "He doesn’t have it in his car now?"

  "I don’t think so; I think I would have known…"

  "Do you remember how you heard the news that Andy Ingall was lost up on Lake Superior?"

  "Well… I think somebody from the bank called and told us."

  "Mr. McDonald was with you when you found out?"

  "Why, yes. Somebody called him, not me."

  "You don’t know if he’d been in Duluth about that time."

  "I’m sure he wasn’t; it would have stuck in my mind."

  Sloan was pushing a dead end. Lucas waited a few more minutes, listening, then breezed into the room, as though he was in a hurry. Sloan looked up and said, "Chief Davenport… Mrs. McDonald."

  She seemed to shrink away from him, what was left of her. Most of her face was black with bruises and subcutaneous bleeding around the cuts; a row of tiny black stitches marched up one cheek like a line of gnats; her hair was cut away on one side of her head, and a scalp bandage was damp from wound seepage.

  "Mrs. McDonald, I’ll be brief," Lucas said. "We’re virtually certain that your husband was involved in the deaths of Kresge, Arris, and Ingall. And we’re wondering how, if he killed all those people, you could not have known about it."

  "Why… why… he didn’t do that."

  And her attorney, Glass, was sputtering, "Hey, hey, hey… we’re not answering those kinds of questions." "You should," Lucas said. "If Mrs. McDonald doesn’t cooperate, well, Mr. Glass… you know how it looks. I mean, if a person has ambitions to resume her life in society."

  "What?" Audrey McDonald looked dazed, swinging her face from Glass to Lucas. "Resume my life?"

  "That’s a lot of horse pucky, Lucas," Glass said. To Audrey McDonald: "Ignore him."

  "At your own risk," Lucas said. "You know how people talk."

  "People," she said.
/>   Lucas added, "We will be executing a search warrant at the McDonald home this morning, looking for more evidence. But we already have substantial support for the idea that Wilson McDonald killed all three of them. And we will want to understand what your role was in the killings… if you had one."

  "You can’t…"

  "Mrs. McDonald," Lucas said, suddenly going soft. "I mentioned this the other night. I recognize your voice."

  "What?" As though she hadn’t heard him correctly. And Glass peered at her, a frown on his face.

  "You’ve called me," he said. "You knew your husband was killing people."

  "That’s utterly-" She groped for a word other than "ridiculous," but couldn’t find one. "-ridiculous."

  "What are you doing, Lucas?" Glass asked.

  And Audrey seemed so genuinely nonplussed that Lucas, puzzled-why would she deny it now? Having helped stop him could only be to her credit, now, and he wasn’t around to strike back-backed away, and tried again. "Mrs. McDonald, how often did you visit the Kresge cabin?"

  "Why, why…" She struggled to think. "It’s so hard to think with these things they are putting into me."

  "You don’t have to answer these questions," Glass said. "And I would recommend that you don’t."

  "You suggest that she not tell me how often she went to Kresge’s? Why wouldn’t she tell me that?" Lucas asked.

  "Because you might try to make your pig’s ear into a silk purse, and there’s no reason to help you do that," Glass said.

  "Maybe six times," she said.

  "Mrs. McDonald, you don’t have to answer," Glass said. "In fact, I’m telling you: Keep quiet. Lucas-Chief Davenport-if you have any more questions about Mr. McDonald, ask me first. I may advise Mrs. McDonald to answer them. But she won’t answer any more questions about herself." Glass looked at the stenographer. "Could you read that back to me?"