Secret Prey ld-9

by John Sandford

  "Sure, just a minute."

  "No need to," Lucas said. "We got it, and I’m outa here. We’ll be checking the McDonald house. And we may be back with more questions." He looked straight into Audrey McDonald’s eyes, held them for a second, then turned and walked out.

  Glass caught Lucas in the hallway. "what the hell was that all about?"

  Lucas shrugged. "Bumping her along a little."

  "Well, Jesus…" Glass scratched his head. "You don’t think she had anything to do with these things, do you? The killings? That old lady?"

  "What do you think, counselor?"

  "Don’t counselor me, butthead. This is J. B. fuckin’ Glass you’re talking to. What I want to know is, do I have to start thinking about a defense? Or were you just blowing smoke?"

  "Mostly smoke," Lucas admitted.

  "All right," Glass said. "How you been?"

  "Not too bad… You heard about Weather?"

  "Yeah, the bomb. Jesus. What do you think, a crazy?" Glass asked.

  "We don’t know. We’ve got no theory."

  "Shoot. Well, keep your ass down," Glass said, and slapped Lucas on the arm before he started back to Mc-Donald’s room.

  "Hey, J. B.-how old do you think your client is, anyway?"

  Glass spread his hands. "I never asked. Fifty… two?"

  "She’s thirty-eight," Lucas said.

  Glass looked at McDonald’s room, then said with a hushed voice, "No way."

  "She’s got some hard miles on her, J. B. And she might not be quite what she looks like."

  TWENTY

  Lucas was sitting in McDonald’s study, flipping through a batch of American Express statements that went back, apparently, forever. Both Wilson and Audrey Mc-Donald were Platinum Card holders, upgraded six years earlier from the Gold. The most interesting statement involved charges on McDonald’s card in the days before Andy Ingall sailed off on Lake Superior and vanished.

  "The day before Ingall disappears, McDonald spends four hundred bucks at Marshall Field in Chicago. That night, and the night before, he’s at the Palmer House," Lucas said to Franklin. "That means if he rigged the boat, he had to have done it at least a couple of days beforehand, or, if he came home that day, he had to go right up to Superior and rig the boat the night before. That seems tricky."

  Franklin, enormous in a plaid shirt and jeans, had been going through the check stubs and investment papers. "I ain’t finding anything here. It’s all too general. They were pretty well off, though. He’s got a trust account at Polaris with about three-point-four million divided between stocks and bonds, heavy on the bonds. Plus an account at Vanguard worth another three million, all in the stock market. And if I’m reading it right, he’s got another nine hundred thousand in stock at Merrill Lynch. Cash in bank accounts, about twenty-four thousand, plus a money market account with a hundred and seventy thousand… that’s apparently a tax account." He put the papers down, and looked at Lucas. "I don’t know. With that much-that’s gotta be more’n seven million-you think he’d be killing to get even richer?"

  "I asked the same thing," Lucas said. "The answer is, he was chasing power, not money. He was a bully in high school, he beat his wife, he killed people to eliminate competition for the promotions. He got off on power trips. He’d be running the lives of a couple thousand people if he took over the bank."

  Franklin sighed: "I’d like to get a nice killer sometime."

  A uniformed cop stuck his head in the door: "You know how you told us to find that Jag?"

  Lucas nodded without looking up. According to a file they found in the house, and confirmed by the Department of Motor Vehicles, Wilson McDonald owned a 1969 XKE, which was not in their three-car garage.

  "We talked to McDonald’s old man," the uniformed cop said. His name was Lane, and he wanted to be a detective. "The car was in a downtown parking garage, already covered up for the winter. And guess what?"

  Lucas looked up now. "What?"

  Lane stepped fully into the room, held up a transparent plastic baggie. Inside, a small automatic pistol. "Ta-da."

  "I don’t believe it," Lucas said. He took the bag, held it up, and peered at the gun. The caliber, 380, was stamped on the slide. "That’s the one… You touch it?"

  "No, of course not. The safety’s on, and we just bagged it. Figured, who knows-if he didn’t shoot it much, maybe it’s got some of the same shells from the Arris or O’Dell deals."

  "Get it downtown," Lucas said, handing it back.

  "Do I get a medal?" Lane asked.

  "Yeah. You’ll get a size eleven medal right in the ass if you don’t get it downtown."

  Lane left, and a few minutes later, Franklin, who’d fallen into an odd reverie sitting in an overstuffed chair with the bank statements in his hands, staring at an English hunting print on the wall above McDonald’s desk, suddenly said, "I know what it is."

  "I’m glad somebody does," Lucas said.

  "You know what’s wrong with this place?"

  Lucas looked around. "Looks pretty nice." "There are no fuckin’ books," Franklin said. He got up, walked around the study, checking the shelves full of ceramic figurines. "They even got a couple of bookends, with no books between them-they got these fuckin’ Keebler elves, or whatever they are."

  "Hummels," Lucas said. "But they do have a computer." He nodded at the Hewlett Packard crouched on the desk.

  "Ain’t a book," Franklin said. "I’m going to look around."

  Lucas finished the American Express statements, extracted the statement that showed McDonald in Chicago, and stacked the rest on the desk. Slow going. He’d just gotten up when Franklin came back: "I could find five books in this whole fuckin’ house. A dictionary, a cookbook, a bartender’s guide, and travel books on California and Florida."

  "Maybe they took turns reading the dictionary," Lucas said.

  "You don’t think it’s weird?"

  "The pinking shears thing with Del-that was weird," Lucas said. "No books? That’s not weird, that’s just a little unusual."

  "I think it’s weird," Franklin insisted. "People with seven million, they oughta have books." He frowned, and said, "Hey, you know what else?"

  He left the room, and Lucas trailed after him. "There’s no CD player. I don’t think they’ve got any CDs. They got no goddamn record player, Lucas."

  "Yeah, well…"

  Franklin turned and said, "These people are very strange." He looked around the room again, spotted a studio portrait of Wilson and Audrey McDonald smiling down from another knickknack shelf. The photo was so heavily retouched that the two of them looked like puppets. "Look at her eyes," Franklin said. Lucas looked. "They follow you. Man, they are very strange."

  Audrey McDonald lay in her hospital bed and thought about Davenport. He seemed to know something. To know her. The others had shaken their heads when they saw her, had essentially apologized for their maleness in view of what another male had done to her. The hospital had provided female attendants to care for her, as if a male doctor or male nurse might somehow further the damage done.

  Not Davenport. He was ready to crucify her. She would have to move on this.

  She dozed for a while, in a little pain, and woke up, calculating.

  The lawyer said she’d be here overnight, and then would be wheeled into court for a preliminary hearing on an open charge of murder. She would be allowed to enter a plea- not guilty-and bail would be set. If she was willing, he’d said, she could use her house as security. The assistant county attorney handling the case had already indicated that the state would have no objection, so the deal was as good as done, and she could go straight home from the courthouse.

  "Murder?" She’d croaked. "They’re charging…?"

  "Don’t worry: they’re already backing off," Glass had said. "When the police finish investigating, they’ll almost certainly find that it was self-defense. Right now, it’s ninety-ten for no charges at all."

  So Audrey had agreed to use the house as security, and
had given him a limited power of attorney so that he could get all the paperwork. She’d be out tomorrow afternoon.

  And that would be the time to handle the Davenport problem.

  She’d thought she was doing that when she pitched the Molotov cocktail through Weather Karkinnen’s window. From what she could tell by questioning Wilson, and careful questions to others at the bank, Davenport had been the only reason that Wilson had been looked at so closely. Audrey had attacked Karkinnen in an effort to turn Lucas around-the same tactic had worked in the past, with the McKinney situation and the Bairds. And from what she could tell of the investigation’s pace, and from stories in the newspapers, the attack had diverted him for a time. Investigators had vanished from the bank, there’d been two days of silence from the police… and then suddenly, they were back, and all over Wilson.

  Wilson.

  She sighed, and let a little tear start at the corner of her eye. She already missed Wilson. She’d known, in her heart of hearts, that someday she’d have to kill him, the love of her life. He would inevitably get in her way, or even become a danger to her. And he finally had. If the police had put pressure on him, he would’ve pointed them at her, because he was basically a coward. He had no grit. Wilson…

  She wrenched her mind back to Davenport. The problem with the Karkinnen diversion was that the police investigation hadn’t led anywhere. The newspapers said the police were simply mystified. They’d run down every single clue and they’d found nothing at all. After a while, there was nothing left to do, so they went back to Wilson and had apparently stumbled over something that pointed at the Arris killing. If they’d been preoccupied with Karkinnen a little bit longer, they might never have found whatever it was.

  Now they were looking at her. Or at least, Davenport was. She didn’t quite understand why. She’d given him an answer to his question-her own dead husband.

  She’d actually given him an earlier answer, the answer to who killed Kresge, but he either hadn’t gotten the message or had ignored it.

  The Kresge murder weapon had the fingerprints of Kresge’s caretaker all over it. He’d been the one who put it away the last time Audrey saw it. A few of the lingering partygoers had been sitting around with Kresge, talking and cleaning the guns. When they were done with each one, they’d pass it to the caretaker, who’d put it away.

  Kresge had told her, on the shooting range, that she shot the Contender better than he did. That he’d never shot it at all, after the first few times. So the caretaker’s prints should still be on it. But the papers hadn’t had a whisper about the gun, and Wilson said nobody had even bothered to interview the caretaker. Something was screwed up, she thought. Typical. Very few people could act with her intellectual rigor…

  Audrey was crazy and smart and she knew how to do research: she’d taken an undergraduate degree in English from St. Anne’s, and then, while she was pushing Wilson through law school, she’d taken a master’s degree from the University of Minnesota in library science. She was still working in the library when computers moved in, and she’d more or less kept up with them over the years, and when the bank went on-line. When Davenport became a problem, she’d looked him up in the Star-Tribune library node on the Internet.

  And there she’d found a treasure trove.

  The Star-Tribune had done a lengthy feature on Davenport after he’d cleared the kidnapping of a psychologist and her two daughters by a madman named John Mail. " Davenport and His Pals" had pictured Davenport with Weather Karkinnen, with Sister Mary Joseph-whom he’d known since their childhood together-and with a variety of cops, lawyers, TV and newspaper reporters, doctors, jocks, and street people, all friends of his.

  The two obvious targets for a diversionary attack were the nun and the surgeon-Davenport’s oldest friend and his lover. She decided on Karkinnen because Karkinnen was simpler.

  Audrey knew Sister Mary Joseph from her college days: the nun had been her instructor in basic psychology, and Audrey remembered her as an intense young woman with a face terribly scarred by adolescent acne. But the nun, who was still at St. Anne’s, lived in a communal dormitory-style setting in which intruders would be instantly noticed. And attack would be risky.

  Karkinnen, on the other hand, was out in the open. Audrey had been puzzled that the year-old article implied that Karkinnen was Davenport’s live-in lover, while Audrey’s search turned up different addresses, but she assumed there was something that she didn’t know. She considered the possibility that they’d broken up, but then found an engagement announcement only a few months old…

  So she’d gone for Karkinnen. She’d thrown the bomb through the window, concerned not a whit for the possibility that she might kill the woman, but very concerned at the possibility of being caught. The final attack-out of the car, across the lawn, throw, back in the car, ten seconds- minimized the possibility, but it had still taken nerve.

  She’d need the nerve again: but nerve had never been a problem for her. Audrey McDonald had nerve, all right.

  She thought again about the possibility of going after Davenport himself. There were two problems with that: First, he was large and tough-looking, and carried a gun. He would be difficult to get at quickly without exposing herself. She couldn’t get close enough for poison, couldn’t risk a gun attack; if she missed, she’d be dead. And he was a cop, so might be a little more wary than the average citizen. Further, she didn’t have time to research him as she had Arris and Ingall. And the second big problem was that killing him might lead the cops investigating his killing to take a harder look at his current investigations, including her.

  A diversion would lead them away from her… So it would have to be the nun.

  Her legs twitched down the bed, a kind of running motion, as she began working out a possible plan. She’d have to do it the minute she got out. She’d have to emphasize her injuries, complain of cracked ribs, something that wouldn’t show on X rays, but would keep her from doing anything heavy. She’d have to hobble and whimper and limp and make people feel sorry for her, and the instant she was alone, she had to go for the nun.

  She’d have no trouble with this. She’d been undercover for more than twenty-five years now. She might not ever come out.

  Franklin had been in a longtime 401K plan. The stocks had gone through the roof during the summer, so, like any Good American, he’d borrowed against the fund to buy a new black Ford extended-cab pickup truck, which he and Lucas walked around, Lucas shaking his head. Finally Franklin said, "So what next? Just wrap it up? We’re done?"

  "Wrap it up," Lucas said. They were standing at the curb outside McDonald’s house. "McDonald’s the man, and he’s dead: outa reach. I’ll spend a couple days trying to figure out the firebomb thing with Weather, then maybe go up to the cabin."

  "Going up alone?" Franklin asked.

  "Cut some firewood, put the snow blade on the Gator, haul the snowmobiles out and get them checked," Lucas said.

  "Going up alone?"

  "Get the batteries out of the boat, put the boat away. Maybe figure out some way to cover it. I had some squirrels get in it last year, in the shed, and the damn thing was full of decapitated acorn shells when I got it out this spring."

  "Jesus, I wish I was single again, sometimes," Franklin said. "And had a cabin up north. Nothing like a little strange pussy in November."

  "If you’d asked me, I could have advised you against getting a Ford," Lucas said. "Anyway, see you around."

  "See you around," Franklin said. Lucas walked back up the long driveway to the house, where he’d parked, while Franklin strolled once more around the truck, rubbing out a couple of imaginary blemishes with the cuff of his coat. "I love you," he said aloud. He was back at the driver’s side door, and about to get in, when Lucas arrived at the Porsche, a hundred and fifty feet away.

  "Going up alone?" Franklin bellowed.

  Lucas threw him the finger and got in the car.

  TWENTY-ONE

  When Audrey Mcdonald
opened her eyes the next morning, she knew something she hadn’t known when she closed them the night before.

  "Helen," she said.

  Helen had been talking to Davenport. Helen had always hated Wilson, and must have called Davenport anonymously. That’s how Helen would have done it, maneuvering to get rid of Wilson without damaging her relationship with her sister-and that would explain why Davenport thought he’d spoken to Audrey. Helen and Audrey spoke with the same soft Red River Valley accent, with the rounded and softened o’s of the Swedes; they said "boot" when they meant "boat."

  Davenport had picked that up, but hadn’t known of Helen.

  But this was new: Helen had realized that people were being murdered? Believed that Wilson had done it, and moved against him? Helen didn’t keep secrets very well: give her a secret, and she usually blurted it out the first chance she had.

  Audrey would have to think about this: How much did Helen know, and how much had she guessed? How early had she caught on? Had she taken any notes, mental or otherwise, that might point away from Wilson and toward herself? And did she know about all the incidents? Did she know about McKinney and the Bairds?

  When Lucas woke, he thought about Sherrill. The woman would sooner or later be a problem; maybe even a disaster. They worked too closely, on problems too complicated, for a romance to work very well. And when the word got out-and the word would get out-there would be serious sniping to deal with. He hoped Sherrill understood that: she was smart enough, she should.

  He wished she was in his bed now. He rolled over, awake, feeling fresh, pivoted and put his feet on the floor, realized that he hadn’t felt quite this good for months.

  And then he thought of Weather, and a touch of sadness came over him. He’d wanted to marry her. If she suddenly changed, and came back to him, he’d accept her in an instant.