Secret Prey

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.

Jim Bone. And Marcia Kresge and Kerin Baki.

He chewed on the end of his pencil. Baki was a little thin-what would she get out of the killings? Her job? An assistant’s job didn’t seem heavy enough, but hell, it might to the assistant. Bone, of course, had that reputation as a ladies’ man, and supposedly had been sleeping with Kresge’s wife. What if he was also sleeping with the assistant? And if he was, so what? There might be some kind of twisted connection between an illicit relationship between Bone and Marcia Kresge, and the killing of Dan Kresge, but even if they had a relationship, how could that lead to the killing of O’Dell?

Blackmail? He remembered one of Bone’s colleagues saying that Bone wouldn’t tolerate blackmail. Could O’Dell have tried? But Bone, if he wasn’t bullshitting about the phone records, pretty much had an alibi. Of course, the phones could be finessed.

Then there was Mr. X.

A Mr. X who might be killing for the reason everybody suspected-to stop the merger-either to save his job or simply as an expression of the general feeling at the bank. But if the killer was a Mr. X, he’d be almost impossible to find. And nobody knew what jobs would be lost yet. And why would he kill O’Dell, who’d taken a stand against the merger?

The killing of O’Dell, Lucas decided, had been an insane risk. Neither the McDonalds nor Bone’s group had enough to gain by killing her, to take the risk. If anybody had come along while the killer was going up and down in the elevator, they’d have been cooked…

Lucas frowned, thought about that for a minute, then called Dispatch. "Is Swanson still at the O’Dell apartment?"

"Yes, I believe so. You want his phone number?"

"Give it to me." He wrote the number at the top of his suspect sheet, then punched it into the phone.

"Yeah. Swanson."

"This is Lucas. Is Louise Compton there yet?"

"Yeah, right here, want to talk to her?"

"Put her on."

"Hello?"

"Ms. Compton, sorry to bother you… Could you tell me the exact words that Ms. O’Dell said to you when the doorbell rang? Did you actually hear the doorbell ring?"

"No, I didn’t hear the bell… She just said, ‘There’s somebody at the door,’ and the next thing I heard was the shots." Compton’s voice was breaking up under the stress of the killing, and ranged from hoarse squawks to sudden squeaks; every word was like a nail on a blackboard.

"Was she a good friend of yours?"

"No, not socially-she was my boss. Oh, God, I can’t believe…"

"You wouldn’t know who she was seeing socially… in a sexual sense, I mean."

"I… I don’t think she was seeing anyone. Not at the moment. Not for quite a while. She has a friend over at North, but he’s gay. They sort of squire each other around, when she needs an escort. Or he does."

"And she said that Audrey McDonald had already left?"

"Yes. She said she put Audrey in the elevator, and ran right back to call me."

"She put Audrey in the elevator."

"That’s what she said. And that’s what she usually does-you know, the elevator is right by her door, she steps out to see you off. Like stepping out on the porch to say goodbye to someone."

"And she always did that?"

"She always did for me."

"Thank you. Let me talk to Officer Swanson again." Swanson came back and Lucas said, "So why’d she say, ‘Somebody’s at the door’?"

"I dunno. To get to the other side?"

"I’m serious. Why’d she say that? She’s got a guard downstairs, who calls up before he lets anyone in. Or you can get up from the second floor skyway, but you’ve got to have a key card to run the elevator. At least I think you do. I noticed a key card slot when I was riding up…"

"Huh. You’re right. And I would have thought of that too in about five minutes."

"So it had to be a friend with a key card who was coming over unexpectedly."

"Or somebody else who lives in the building."

"You heard what she said about Audrey?" Lucas asked.

"Yeah, O’Dell put her in the elevator."

"The elevator dings whenever the door opens, right?"

"So if Audrey had just stood there, and let the doors open again after they closed…"

"It would’ve dinged and if O’Dell was out there she probably would’ve seen the doors opening."

"Goddamnit. See what happens if you get on there and push the door close button, or the door open button, or both at the same time. See if you can get back off the elevator…"

"Okay."

"And check and see if Audrey went out past the guard or what… what time she left the place."

"I already checked. She left at ten fifty-three."

"And the guard says that’s right?"

"That’s what he says. He checked her out."

"Shit."

"Besides, if Audrey’d just made a deal, why’d she kill O’Dell five minutes later?"

"I don’t know," Lucas said. "There could be a million fuckin’ reasons."

"I’ll tell you what," Swanson said. "I bet it’s a fuckin’ boyfriend that we don’t know about. Either somebody in the building she’d been screwing, or somebody at the bank. I vote for a key card."

"I’ve got the same problem with that as I’ve got with this firebombing of Weather. People start saying it could be random, but I’m saying if it’s random, it’s weird. Anyone could get firebombed by a random nut, but not Weather: not with her recent history. Anyone could get shot by a pissed-off boyfriend, but not O’Dell-not with her recent history."

"I see what you mean," Swanson said.

"Still: Check with the guards and see how many key cards O’Dell had, and see if you can find them."

"Do that," Swanson said. "What else?"

"Nothing else."

"I could go over and beat up Audrey McDonald for a while."

"Hell, just phone her old man and tell him to do it. Then you can drop by for the confession."

"You see her leg?" Swanson asked, his voice dropping.

"Yeah, I saw her leg."

"I once saw a stripper in a carnival who had bruises like that. Her old man beat her with a rolling pin."

"That’s some business we’re going to do after we finish with this," Lucas said. "We’re gonna haul McDonald’s blubber-butt down to City Hall and put him away."

He rang off Swanson and called Sloan. Sloan answered on the second ring: "Sloan."

"Can you talk?" Lucas asked.

"Not really. I could step outside."

"Did you ask Bone about Kresge?"

"Let me step outside."

After a moment of shuffling around and some conversation that Lucas couldn’t make out, Sloan came back and said, "Well, I’m in the can. Bone says the phone reception here is better."

"So what’d they say?"

"Yeah, they have a relationship, and it started before her old man died-but not until after the separation. At least, that’s what they say."

"How did you read it?"

"I think they’re telling the truth about that. They got together at a particular party, and a number of people know about it and know that the party is when it started. I can check all that, but I think they’re probably telling the truth.

One thing-I took Bone back in the kitchen to ask him about Kresge, and he said he’d appreciate it if I didn’t talk about Kresge around his assistant. He said he didn’t want the gossip getting around the bank, but I got the feeling that he was lying about that. I think the reason was a little more personal, and I’m wondering if he’s boning the assistant?"

"One more bone joke from anybody and they’re fired…"

"Fuck you, I’m civil service. Anyway…"

"I don’t know; she’s pretty chilly," Lucas said.

"Really? I think she’s pretty comfortable with Bone."

Now Lucas was surprised. Sloan was the personalityreading genius in the department. "Is that so? Huh."

"She also doesn’t have a completely solid alibi. Kresge does, sort of. She was talking to some other guy-and I get the feeling she may be boning this other guy too-when Bone called with the news that McDonald had left and there was no deal. But this was like on call waiting. She told Bone she’d come over, and then she switched back to this other guy and told him that something had come up with the bank, and they talked about it for a few minutes. Maybe five, ten minutes, because they talked about some other stuff too. And then she hurried right over to Bone’s place and got there about twenty after eleven, and from her place she really doesn’t have time for another stop."

"Okay."

"And to tell you the truth, she’s a pretty funky chick; I don’t think she’d kill anyone. She’s not crazy enough."

"What about Baki?" Lucas asked.

"I don’t know. I can’t read her very well. Very pretty; and she looks at Bone like a wolf looks at a sheep."

"Huh. You about done there?"

"Yeah. Unless you want me to torture somebody."

"Not tonight. I’ll see you in the morning."

"Shit’s gonna hit the fan tomorrow morning, dude. TheStar-Tribunehas the police guy standing outside of O’Dell’s, and a business guy standing downstairs here."

"Freedom of the press," Lucas said.