Secret Prey

SIXTEEN

St. Paul Police Headquarters resembles a Depression-era WPA post office, but with new windows. Lucas dumped his Porsche in a reserved-parking space at the front of the building and went inside to a glass security window, where a woman at the desk didn’t recognize him, didn’t care about his Minneapolis ID, wasn’t sure that Lieutenant Mayberry had time to see him, and told him to take a seat in the reception area next to a kid with green hair.

Lucas sat down, said, "Nice hair," crossed his legs, and stared at the opposite wall. The kid, whose brain was moving in slow motion, struggled with the sentiment for twenty seconds before he said, "Thanks, dude," with sincerity.

Lucas waited another twenty seconds, then asked, "What’re you here for?"

Another twenty seconds and the kid said, "Fuckin’ smokin’ weed."

"Were you doing it?" Lucas asked.

"Fuckin’ yeah."

The conversation withered after that; then Mayberry pushed through the security door and said, "Hey, Lucas, what’re you doing out here?" Mayberry had a head the size and shape of a gallon milk jug, right down to the handle, which was a tiny blond ponytail tied into his hair at the back. He pushed through the security door and said, "Come on back… How ya been, I haven’t seen you since that goat-fuck over at Ronnie White’s place."

"Ah, ups and downs," Lucas said. "You heard about Weather?"

"You mean the bomb? Yeah, in the paper-and somebody said you guys busted up."

"I don’t know, we’re kind of working on things."

"She’s a good one," Mayberry said. He guided Lucas to an elevator, up a couple of floors and into a meeting room with a dozen chairs with red plastic seats, a blackboard, a wide-screen color television, and a VCR.

Mayberry shoved the tape into the VCR and punched a few buttons, bringing the television up. "I looked at the tape last night… man, it’s been a long time. I could hardly remember who was who. Anyway, Arris shows up at about 224 on the dial…"

He was running through the tape; at the index number 210 he stopped the tape, then restarted it at real-time speed. They were both standing to look at the picture.

"Okay," Mayberry said, tapping the screen. "Here we have a parade of people going by… lots of women, going down to the meat rack. Half a dozen guys."

The tape was black-and-white, focused on a thin man with a mustache selling soda, cigarettes, bread, and gasoline over a small counter in a convenience store. In the background, through a window and past two pair of gas pumps, people occasionally walked by the store, most of them on the far side of the street.

"Okay," Mayberry said. "Here we come up to Arris… This woman goes by and there he is." He jabbed at the screen. Arris was wearing a light-colored shirt and what might have been tan slacks.

"Pretty blurry," Lucas said, his eyes less than a yard from the screen. "Can’t see his face."

"Not very well," Mayberry agreed. He stopped the tape, rewound it a few turns, and Arris rolled through the picture again, this time in slow motion. "We got the ID by having a bunch of his friends look at it, and they picked him out by, you know, general appearance, the flappy way he walked. And the dress was right. You can see his sleeves were rolled up, and that’s right."

"Nobody looks like McDonald," Lucas said, watching the people parade past the store.

"You sure he’s your guy?" Mayberry asked.

"He’s the guy we got a hard tip on," Lucas said.

"Most of these people were going down to the rack," Mayberry said. "But Arris was just out for a walk, and he went on beyond it. So he was just about alone when he was shot, a block and a half further on. So if you’re looking for the killer… he’s quite a bit further down."

"Jelly told me he didn’t think it was random."

"He’s usually right," Mayberry said.

"If it wasn’t random, the shooter’d almost have to be following him," Lucas said. "He couldn’t expect just to walk down the street and run into Arris at a convenient place to shoot. Especially not if Arris would recognize him. He’d want to come up behind him."

"Well, Arris walked every night. Nobody knows if he took the same route every night, but his neighbors say he usually started out the same way. You want to look at this again?"

"Nah, that’s okay. What about the print on the shell?"

"We know McDonald’s got a fingerprint file, we’ve got NCIC confirmation on that-he had a secret clearance with the National Guard," Mayberry said. "They’re supposed to be sending us something right away, but it wasn’t here five minutes ago. I had Chad Ogram pull up the print file on the shell. You know Ogram?"

"Think I met him," Lucas said.

Mayberry had been rewinding the tape, now popped it out of the VCR and handed it to Lucas. "This is for you. Let’s go see Ogram."

Ogram worked in a bathroom-sized office stuffed with filing cabinets. At least one clock sat on each flat surface in the office, and a half-dozen more hung on the walls. Ogram, a thin man with vanishing hair, bent over his green metal desk, his bald spot as pink as a newborn’s gums.

"Chad," said Mayberry, and Ogram sat up with a start. "You know Lucas."

"Yeah, hey," Ogram said vaguely, glancing at Lucas and then bending over his desk again. "I got the fax."

"What do you think?" Mayberry asked.

"Well, heck," Ogram said. "You know there’s not enough for a match."

"Yeah," Lucas said, "I was just wondering…"

"But McDonald’s right thumb matches what we’ve got," Ogram said. "We got a piece of a whorl and he’s got a whorl that looks just like our piece."

Mayberry and Lucas looked at each other. "Are you sure?" Lucas asked.

"Pretty sure: I have to rescale the fax to get an overlay, but yeah: it looks just like it."

"What are the chances it’s someone else?" Lucas asked.

Ogram scratched his bald spot with his right middle finger. "I don’t know. Ten to one against. Hundred to one. Not enough for court, but if you come to me and say we’ve got a partial and a suspect, and we get this much… I’d say we got him."

"Jesus," Lucas said to Mayberry. "This can’t be true."

"Why not?" Mayberry asked.

"It’s too easy," Lucas said. "It’s never this easy." And to Ogram: "I kind of need to pin down the odds."

"I know a guy at the FBI who could give you an idea. He fools around with that sort of math thing. Statistics and odds and chances."

"Call him," Lucas said. "And call me in Minneapolis when you find out. Wilson motherfuckin’ McDonald."

Lucas headed for the elevators with Mayberry two steps behind. Lucas pushed the call button, turned and jabbed a finger at Mayberry: "Hey: You’ve got a slug, right?"

"Piece of one, anyway."

"And the ME took a piece of one out of O’Dell-the banker woman who got shot. Let’s get them together and do an analysis and see if they match."

"Okay-you guys want to do it?"

"Sure. Send it over."

"It’ll be twenty minutes behind you," Mayberry said. "Hot dog, I love this. This case has been open forever."

Lucas called Sloan from his car, said, "We got a break in the Kresge case: get Sherrill and Del if they’re around, and meet me at my office in twenty minutes."

"Who done it?"

"Our pal, Wilson McDonald."

"You’re shittin’ me."

"I shit you not," Lucas said. "The problem is gonna be proving it."

He punched Sloan off, found his notebook, looked up the number for Bone’s office, and punched it in as he accelerated out onto I-94. Bone’s assistant took the call: "Chief Davenport: Everybody’s up in the boardroom right now. I think they may be picking a new CEO. So unless it’s a major emergency…"

"Is Wilson McDonald in there?"

"Yes, of course. He’s one of the candidates."

"Thanks. I’ll call back." She’d told him what he wanted to know: that McDonald was there, at the bank.

Sherrill was skeptical.

More than skeptical: she was absolutely nasty. "We got diddly, Lucas. I don’t care what the odds are, if it doesn’t work in court, it doesn’t work. And the goddamn killing is so old that there’s no chance of making a case."

"Helps to know who did it," Del said. Sherrill had come in wearing jeans, high-top Nikes, a suede jacket, and a slightly too tight fuzzy white sweater that showed her figure to exceptional advantage. Lucas, Sloan, and Del were resolutely meeting her eyes, though the pressure eventually got to Del and he slumped back in his chair and looked up at the ceiling.

"C’mon, Del, look at the Cat case," Sherrill said. " Everybody in the office knows George Cat killed his old lady. It doesn’t do any good, because we can’t prove it. It’s gonna be even harder with McDonald, because McDonald has every lawyer in the world."

"Still helps to know," Del muttered.

"Because we think Wilson’s done about four of them," Lucas said. "If we can put together a pattern, argue it, and have semiconvincing evidence on one, a jury’ll pack him away."

"So what do you want?" Sloan asked.

"I want to tear him apart. I want to look him over with a microscope. I want to get a search warrant and pull his house down."

"Don’t think we’ve got enough for a warrant," Del said.

"So let’s fuckin’ get it," Lucas said. "Sloan, can you break away from the Ericson case for a couple of days?"

"For a while," he said.

"Ask Frank. And if he says okay, look at O’Dell again. See if there’s any way McDonald could have finessed it to get into the apartment. Del, you look at Arris again. See if there’s anything else. Marcy, you take Ingall. I’m going up north again, right away. I want to think about the Kresge thing again. See if I can figure out how he did it. Let’s meet again tomorrow at nine o’clock. And I’ve got my car phone if you need me before then."

"Why don’t you get a real walk-around phone?" Del asked. "Everybody else has one."

" ’Cause then people would call me up," Lucas said. "And I couldn’t say I must’ve been out."

Sloan nodded and he and Del left. Sherrill lingered. "You’re going up north?"

"Yeah. I want to talk to-" His phone rang and he grabbed it, lifting a finger to Sherrill so she’d wait: " Davenport."

"Lucas this is Sergeant Ogram over in St. Paul. We talked-"

"Yeah, yeah. What’d you get?"

"I talked to my pal in the FBI and he called down to the fingerprint people and then he called me back: he says it’s maybe a hundred to one against having the wrong guy."

"So we got him."

"You got him. And listen, that slug fragment’s on the way over in a squad. Oughta be there about now."

"Thanks. See ya."

Lucas hung up: "We got him… Anyway, I want to go up north and talk to the caretaker and walk the place a little."

"Okay." She turned to go, but she was going slowly.

"You got a problem?" Lucas asked.

She stopped again, looked at him and said, "No," and turned back toward the door. Lucas thought, Uh-oh. He’d never in his life gone through a little sequence like that when the woman didn’t have something to say, and one way or another, he almost always wound up getting his ass kicked.

"Okay, if you’re sure."

"I may give you a call tonight," she said. She was nibbling the inside of her lip, as if distracted by something. "I do have something I sort of want to talk about."

Lucas called Krause at the Garfield County courthouse before he left and arranged to meet Kresge’s part-time caretaker at the cabin. The trip north was a good one: quick up the interstate, dry and fast on the back highways. The small towns were buckling down for winter: a man on a small green and yellow John Deere was mowing what must have been a glorious summer garden, now all brown stalks and dead leaves; a man in a camouflage jacket was shooting arrows across his backyard at two archery butts made of bundled wood shavings; an Arctic Cat dealership was running a special on snowmobile tune-ups and a closeout on Yamaha ATVs.

Krause was waiting at the cabin, stepped into the yard and frowned when he saw the Porsche slipping down the driveway. Lucas punched it into an open space next to a Ford truck, climbed out. Below the cabin, the small lake showed a collar of ice, now out six feet from the shoreline.

"Didn’t recognize the vehicle," Krause said. "Boy, that’s something; don’t see many of those around here."

"Had it for years," Lucas said, looking back at the 911. "I’m thinking about trading it in for something a little larger."

"Wouldn’t imagine it’d do you too much good out here in the winter."

"Not too much," Lucas agreed. A weathered, whitehaired man in his late sixties or early seventies had come around a corner of the cabin, carrying a gas-powered brush cutter. He put it down by the cabin steps and Krause said, "Marlon, this here’s Chief Davenport from Minneapolis, and Chief, this is Marlon Wiener."

They shook hands, and Lucas said, "I just sorta need to walk around the place and chat for a while…"

"I’ll leave you to it," Krause said. "I got some paperwork with me, I’m gonna sit inside with Mrs. Wiener and drink some coffee. Holler if you need me."

Lucas wanted to look at all the tree stand locations. The transcripts of Sloan’s interrogations had given the order in which the hunters had dispersed to the stands, but said nothing about the terrain itself.

"We got a six-wheeler here, we could ride up, unless you rather walk," Wiener said.

"Let’s walk," Lucas said. "They all walked the morning of the shoot, right?"

"That’s right," Wiener said.

"So tell me about Kresge," Lucas said, as they started through the fallen leaves toward the track around the lake. "Good guy, bad guy, what do you think?"

"Wouldn’t have wanted to work for him on a daily basis-you know, right next to him," Wiener said. "He was all right with me. Told me what he wanted done and sometimes I’d suggest stuff, and he usually told me to do that too. My wife’d keep the place clean, come down a couple of times a week to dust and vacuum and so on."

"That seems like quite a lot of work," Lucas said.

"Well, he liked to have cars in his driveway. He was always worried he was gonna be burglarized or something. Not saying that it couldn’t happen. He told me once that instead of working all day on a job, he’d be happier if I’d break it up so I’d be around here every day, one time or another."

"Did he have parties, or lots of guests? People coming and going?"

"No, not a lot of them-but he did have one big party every summer for management people at the bank,"

Wiener said. "They’d come up here and swim off the dock and drink and the kids’d fish for bluegills and everybody’d go down to the range and shoot for a while."

"He’s got a gun range here?"

"Just a gully, shooting against the end of it. You know, twenty-five feet to a hundred yards."

"Twenty-five feet? These are handguns?"

"Yeah, and.22 rifles for the kids. You know, just fartin’ around."

"Huh. Handguns." A handgun would be interesting, especially a big one, like a.44 Mag or a.45 Colt or a.357 Maximum. McDonald could have carried it in concealed, come back, shot Kresge, thrown the gun away. Although the ME thought the killing shot had come from a rifle, a powerful handgun might be an alternative. "The sheriff took an inventory of guns in the cabin. I didn’t see any handguns on the list."

"I don’t know, they never asked me about it. They just cleaned out the gun cabinet, and that was it."

"Was Kresge big on handguns?"

"Naw, not really. I mean, some. Most of the handguns were brought down by the guests. City people don’t get to shoot that much, and they all seemed to like it, get a few beers in them. Mr. Kresge had a handgun, because I saw it: it was a Smith and Wesson.357 Magnum, silver. But I think he brought it with him, when he came up from the Cities."

"A.357 Magnum? Or maximum?"

"Oh, I think… a Magnum. Never heard of maximum."

"And he brought it with him."

"I think. Then, it’s not exactly a handgun, or maybe it is… but he had a Contender. That should have been on the sheriff’s list. That was up here."

"A Contender?" A Contender would be perfect."

"You know, one of the-"

"I know Contenders. Scoped?"

"Yeah."

"I don’t think that was on the inventory."

"Should have been. He keeps it in the gun cabinet. At least, he did. Unless he took it back."

"We’ll check that," Lucas said. "Do you know Wilson McDonald? Big guy?"

Wiener nodded. "Yeah, I’ve seen him a time or two."

"What’d he shoot when he came up here?"

Wiener shook his head: "Couldn’t tell you. Don’t even know if he was a shooter, tell you the truth. Mr. Robles, he was a shooter: he’d help instruct the kids and shoot off his mouth about everything about guns. But I think Mr. McDonald was mostly a drinker. That’s what I remember about him."

They followed the shoreline around the lake to the first stand, where Robles had been stationed. Lucas went down to the stand, climbed the tree, and eased himself out onto the platform of two-by-fours.

"Did you build the stands?" Lucas called down to Wiener.

"Naw, a couple of boys up from Wyoming built ’em," he said. "They were joking about putting in electricity."

The tree stand was one of the more comfortable that Lucas had been in. He could stretch his legs, lean back against the tree trunk, and still look out over the hillside edging the alder swamp. The swamp itself was dotted with stands of aspen, signs of higher ground, with a big, thick island in the middle. Here and there he could see shiny lenses of ice, where a stretch of open water lay at the surface. All around, he could make out the faint telltale trails threading through the brush, signs that deer were working the place. Robles’s stand was uphill from what looked like a major deer interchange.

"There’s a finger of land goes out into the swamp from there," Wiener called. "Deer can walk right out into that stand of aspens in the middle. Man’d probably drown if he tried to follow; before freeze-up, anyway."

"Okay…"

They checked all the other stands in turn, spread out over three quarters of a mile of trail, but all focused on the swamp, and pathways into it and out of it. McDonald’s stand was uphill and not far to the left of one of the big lenses of thin ice.

Suppose, Lucas thought, McDonald had lifted the Contender from the gun cabinet in the early morning just before the group left the cabin. That would explain why it was missing. And the Contender, long for a pistol, was still short enough that he could have concealed it under a hunting parka. Then, in the dark, he walks back down the track to the hillside above Kresge’s stand, waits for the shooting to begin, fires a shot killing Kresge, walks back to his stand, and pitches the Contender into the swamp. Climbs the tree… shazam. He’s up in his tree stand just like the others, and never fired his gun…

"Let’s go," he said to Wiener, as he climbed down.

"You figure anything out?" Wiener asked.

"Maybe," Lucas said. "What time did you get here the day Kresge was shot?"

"About ten o’clock, after I heard… I was supposed to come in around noon with my trailer and we’d haul any deer carcasses into the registration station and then over to the meat locker. They figured to be out of there about noon, one way or the other," the old man said. "The sheriff asked me about the guy the telephone man saw-the one walking along the edge of the woods-but I just wasn’t around. Sorry."

The hunter in the woods. Lucas had almost forgotten. Of course, it could have been anybody, another hunter just crossing the property to get back to his car. "Damn it," he said aloud. Another hunter didn’t feel right; Lucas was a believer in coincidences, except when they explained too much. And if the man in the hunting coat was the killer, and if the telephone man had been right about his size, then McDonald wasn’t the killer.

"Beg pardon?"

"If somebody was walking in the woods like the telephone guy said, where’d he be going?"

"Sounds like he was heading back to the cabin."

"That’d be a problem," Lucas said.

Krause was working on the kitchen table when he got back, a battered leather briefcase next to his foot. Mrs. Wiener was washing dishes, and the odor that came from the cabin’s oven was so wonderful that Lucas almost fainted with the impact.

"What’s cooking?"

"Cinnamon rolls-they should be just about ready," she said, turning from the sink. She was a chubby, pink-faced woman with kinky white hair. She took a dish towel from the stove handle, dried her hands, and opened the oven. "Perfect," she said.

Krause had gotten up from the table to look. "I get the first one," he said.

"They’ve got to cool," she said firmly. "And I’ve got some frosting. You all go sit down."

Krause retreated to the table and his papers. "Anything good?" he asked Lucas.

Lucas said, "You know what a Contender is? Long pistol, single-shot, breaks open like a shotgun?"

"I’ve seen ’em," Krause said.

"You didn’t show one on the inventory of guns taken out of the house."

"There wasn’t one," Krause said. "There were three rifles and two shotguns."

"You got a diver on your staff?" Lucas asked.

"Sure. You think you know where the gun is?"

"Maybe. It’d be nice if it were right downhill from McDonald’s stand. There’s a big patch of water there… I wouldn’t be surprised if he pitched it in there."

"I don’t know about diving in swamps," Krause said doubtfully. "It might mess up the scuba gear. I can check."

"He’ll need a metal detector," Lucas said. Mrs. Wiener said, "There’s a gun just like that in the drawer in the gun cabinet."

Lucas looked at Krause and Krause closed his eyes, leaned back in his chair, and said, "Shit." Then at Mrs. Wiener, "Excuse the language," and then at Lucas: "I told Ralph to take the guns out of the cabinet. I didn’t check."

Wiener said, "Well, let’s go look," and Mrs. Wiener said, "I saw it while I was cleaning. I dusted the cabinet ’cause they left it open, and that’s one place I usually can’t dust."

The gun cabinet was built into an internal wall, behind a set of shallow shelves. A key fit into a small lock that was out of sight below one of the shelves, and the entire unit swung out. Inside was an empty gun rack with space for eight long guns, and below the rack, two closely fit drawers.

"Was this a big secret, or did everybody know about it?" Lucas asked Wiener.

"Hell, all his friends knew-all the guests. It was just supposed to hide the guns from burglars. But when he had one of those parties, the cabinet’d just be standing open."

"Okay."

"Top drawer," Mrs. Wiener said.

"Did you move the gun?" Lucas asked.

"No. I never touched it. As soon as I saw a gun in the drawer, I shut it."

"She don’t like guns," Wiener said, as Lucas gently pulled the drawer open.

And there was the Contender, with a Nikon scope, sitting neatly on a black plastic pad with two boxes of.308 ammunition off to the side.

"That goddamn Ralph," Krause said. "He never opened the drawers."

Lucas took a pen from his pocket, slipped it through the gun’s trigger guard, lifted it out of the drawer, and carried it over to the kitchen table and placed it carefully on the table. Then, using a paper napkin to unlock the barrel, and touching only the tip of the stock and the tip of the barrel, he pushed the barrel down and open. A spent shell ejected onto the table.

"Don’t touch it," Lucas said. He knelt and looked through the barrel, said, "Yeah. Fired and never cleaned." He looked at Wiener: "Do you know anything about Kresge’s gun habits?"

Wiener shrugged: "He always cleaned them. Big thing, you know, sit around and bullshit about the Army and shooting and chain saws and clean the guns."

Krause again said, "Goddamnit," and then, a moment later, "That’s the gun, you betcha. That goddamn Ralph."

"Mrs. Wiener…"

"Sophia," she said.

"Sophia, do you have any plastic bags… garbage bags or anything?"

"Sure. Right here."

Sophia produced a box of kitchen garbage bags. She stripped one out and held it open, while Lucas stuck a pencil in the barrel of the Contender and gently slipped it inside. The shell went into a sandwich bag.

"I’ll have them in the lab tonight," Lucas said. "I’ll get somebody in to look at them right away."

Krause was still fuming, pushing papers into his briefcase. "I gotta go. I’m gonna find that sonofabitch and I’m gonna choke him to death. He couldn’t-"

Sophia Wiener broke in: "You don’t have time for a roll?"

Krause’s eyes clicked to the tray of cinnamon rolls, cooling on the stovetop with the pan of warm frosting next to them.

"Well," he said. "Maybe one."