Secret Prey

FOUR

Lucas arrived at the office late Monday morning, neatly dressed, neatly shaved, dead tired. The simpler things in life could be done on automatic pilot: take the clothes to the cleaners, shower, shave, and eat. Anything more complicated was difficult. Exercise took energy, and a heavy workout was impossible after a month without sleep.

He’d been the route before. The last time over the edge, he hadn’t recognized what was happening, hadn’t seen it coming, and it’d almost killed him. This time the process felt slightly different. He could feel it out there-the depression, the breakdown, the unipolar disorder, whatever the new correct name for it was-but it didn’t seem to be marching on him with the same implacable darkness as last time.

Maybe he could fight it off, he thought. But he still dreaded the bed. The minute his head touched the pillow, the brainstorm would begin. Sleep would come only with exhaustion, and then not until after daylight…

In the winter just past, Weather Karkinnen, the woman he’d been about to marry, had been taken hostage by a killer looking for revenge against Lucas. Weather had managed her attacker: she’d talked him into surrender. She’d given him guarantees. But nobody on the outside knew.

When Lucas closed his eyes at night, he could see the two of them walking down the narrow hospital corridor toward him, Weather in front, Dick LaChaise using her as a shield, with a pistol to her head. He could also feel the pressure at his back, where a hidden police sniper, a kid from Iowa, was looking at LaChaise through a rifle scope.

Lucas’s job was to talk the gun away from Weather’s head, if only for half a second. If he could just get LaChaise to move the muzzle… And he did. The Iowa kid was cold as ice: Dick LaChaise’s head had been pulped by the mushrooming.243 slug.

Weather, whose face was only inches away from La-Chaise, had been showered with bone, brain, and blood. She had recovered, in most ways. She could work; she could even forget about it, most of the time. Unless she saw Lucas. They tried to pull the relationship back together, but three months after Dick LaChaise died in a hospital hallway, she was gone.

Gone for good, he believed.

And Lucas was staring into the darkness again.

"Hey, Lucas?"

Lucy Ghent, a secretary, was calling down the hall from the chief’s office door. She was one of the older women in the office, who competed with her peers on hairdos. "Chief Roux is down in Identification. She wants to see you right away."

"Trouble?"

Ghent flopped a hand, dismissively. "Just… weirdness."

Rose Marie Roux was sitting at a cluttered desk in Identification, chewing Nicorette, paging through a document Lucas recognized as the departmental budget. She looked up when Lucas came in and said, "I swear to God, if you killed the smartest guy on the city council, the average IQ in Minneapolis would go up two points. Don’t quote me."

"What happened?"

"The York case."

"Yeah?"

Morris York, two years on the force, found with a halfounce of Mexican bud in a Marlboro box behind his patrol car visor. His marijuana habit had been detected by a departmental mechanic who claimed he was getting a contact high off the car’s upholstery. Internal Affairs made movies of York getting mellow on the job.

"Tommy Gedja says this morning, at the council meeting, if that’s all we’re doing in our cars, why do we need new cars? I think he was serious. I think they’re gonna try to pull twelve cars out from under us."

Lucas shrugged: "Life sucks and then they cut your budget. What’re you doing down here?"

"More budget problems." A piece of white paper, wrapped in a plastic folder, lay on the desk’s otherwise empty typewriter tray. She picked it up and handed it to him. "Came in the mail, first thing this morning."

Dear Chief of Police Roux:

One week ago, Mr. Kresge sent a memo to Susan O’Dell which said that her department would not be allowed to continue with a planned expansion because of budget constraints. Mrs. O’Dell has worked on the expansion for a long time and when she got the memo, her quote was, "God Damn him, I’m going to kill him." There were three people in the room at the time: Sharon Allen (assistant to the vice president), Michelle Stephens (executive secretary), and Randall Moss (assistant head cashier). I can’t tell you my name, but I thought you should know.

"Not much here," Lucas said. He snapped the paper with his index finger. "We could interview Stephens to see how serious she thinks it is. Or if she’s just trying to torpedo O’Dell."

"Stephens?" Roux had the gene that allowed her to lift one eyebrow at a time, and her left brow went up.

Lucas nodded. "She’s probably the one who sent it- sounds like somebody who actually heard O’Dell say it, but she misuses the word ‘quote,’ which means not a lot of education. On the other hand, everything is spelled right, and secretaries spell things right. She’s very aware of titles and refers to Kresge as ‘mister,’ which means she saw him as somebody with a lot more status than she has: not an associate. She wouldn’t put herself first on the list, because that would make her nervous. And an assistant head cashier probably has a college education."

"So how’s she dressed, Sherlock?"

Lucas smiled, but a droopy, tired smile: "Navy jacket and skirt or tan jacket and skirt with an older but neatly ironed white shirt and some kind of tie. Practical heels. Single mother. Tense. Anxious. Angry with O’Dell for personal reasons. Hurting for money."

Roux said, "Smart-ass." She turned and shouted into a closet-sized office: "Beverly! Bring the other thing out so Sherlock Holmes can take a look."

The department’s document specialist, a dark-haired woman with a faint Moravian accent, bustled out of the closet with another slip of paper wrapped in plastic.

"Also in the mail," Roux said. "Beverly’s checking for fingerprints."

"There are none," the woman said. "Not on the letter or the envelope. Standard twenty-pound copier paper, no watermark. Printed with a laser printer." Lucas took the paper.

Chief Roux:

Daniel S. Kresge was shot by Wilson McDonald, who was hunting with Kresge when the shooting occurred. I have known Wilson McDonald for many years and I believe that he has killed two other people to further his career. These people were:

A man named George Arris, who was killed about 1984, in a shooting outside a restaurant in St. Paul.

Andrew Ingall, who was killed in a boating accident in 1993 on Lake Superior. (He was from North Oaks and his wife still lives there.)

I hope you catch him on this one. He can’t go on like this.

A Concerned Citizen.

Lucas looked at Roux, and she caught the small light in his eye. "Interesting?"

"More than the first one," Lucas admitted. "No waffling about the presentation. He gets right to it: Daniel S. Kresge was shot by Wilson McDonald."

"You think a man wrote it?"

Lucas hesitated for a minute, then said, "Maybe not. Could be a woman."

"When I read it, I assumed it was a woman. I don’t know why," Roux said.

"Something about the wording," said Beverly. "I think it’s a woman too."

"Would you look into it?" Roux asked Lucas. "Sort of… carefully? Lot of rich people involved."

Lucas said, "Sloan and Sherrill are on it."

"Sloan is working on the Ericson killing. That’s getting complicated. Sherrill’s doing the routine for the sheriff up there. I’d just like you to look at this letter. It sounds so… sure of itself." "You want me to look into it because you think it’s necessary?" Lucas asked. "Or because you’re worried that I’m going crazy?"

Roux nodded: "Both. It’d be nice if we could catch whoever killed Kresge."

"Are you getting pressure?"

"No, not really. Kresge was divorced, no family around here, not all that well liked. But I mean, hey, it’s what we’re supposed to do, right?"

"The paper this morning said that McDonald would be speaking for Polaris, at least until the board of directors meets," Lucas said. "The infighting could get pretty intense; something could fall out. In fact…" He tapped the first letter with the second. "Something already has."

"So catch up with Sherrill, tell her you’ll take this angle. Get away from your desk."

Lucas nodded: "Okay; I’ll look at it. And listen, I’m gonna send Del Capslock around with a problem."

"That goddamn Capslockisa problem," Roux grunted.

"Good cop," Lucas said.

"Yeah, but I can’t stand to look at him: I keep wanting to give him a buck, or send him out to get his teeth fixed… What’s the problem?"

"He turned up an opium ring."

"Drugs can’t handle it?"

"You might want to think about it first," Lucas said. Again, the droopy grin: "I suspect most of the members are friends of yours."

Sloan was drinking a cherry coke and reading a Star-Tribune story about sex in the workplace when Lucas wandered in, carrying xerox copies of the two letters. Sloan dropped the newspaper in the wastebasket, leaned back, and said, "You know what the thing is about you?"

"What?" Lucas pulled another chair around.

"You can’t have an adulterous affair, because you’re not married. So if you go down to Intelligence, say, and pick out some single chick and fuck her brains loose, well, that’s just what bachelors do. But if I did it, that would be adultery and the Star-Tribune thinks I should be fired."

"If you did it, your old lady’d kill you anyway, so you wouldn’t need a job."

"I’m talking in theory," Sloan said.

"Did you pick out the guilty guy on Saturday? In theory?"

Sloan shook his head. "They’re a pretty tough group. Robles was in a sweat, but I think he might sweat everything. Bone seemed to think that Kresge getting murdered was mildly amusing; he was cooperative, though. And he had to stop to think at all the right places. O’Dell was almost too busy figuring out the consequences to talk to me about whether she did it… and that made me think she didn’t. If she had, she’d have already figured out the consequences. I had a harder time getting a reading on Mc-Donald. He acted like the whole thing was a plot to personally inconvenience him."

"Cold? Sociopathic?"

"Mmmm." Sloan scratched his chin. "No… If he is, he covers it," he said after a minute. "I’d say he’s more like… unpleasant. Arrogant."

"So what’s it all mean?"

"If Robles did it, we might get him, eventually. If it’s one of the others, forget it. Unless the guy does something really stupid, like tell somebody else about it. Or if it was a group effort. But that’s…"

"Unlikely," Lucas said.

"More like ridiculous."

"Perfect crime?"

"Just about," Sloan said. "Lots of people probably heard the shot, but nobody thought anything about it. Nobody was looking for the shooter. Once he was off the scene… there’s no way we’re gonna get him. The only chance to get him was to have somebody see it happen, and recognize the shooter. That was it."

"But we know some stuff," Lucas said. He leaned back in the chair and put his feet on the edge of Sloan’s desk. "The shooter knew his way around there, in the dark. And he knew which tree stand Kresge would be in. That means that he was either close to Kresge or he worked for him, maybe out at the cabin. Is Krause checking any employees out there?"

"Yeah. There were only two or three people-a handyman who’d do maintenance work around the place, an old guy who patrols some of the cabins, just checking on them two or three times a day. And some guy who plows out the driveway in the winter. None of them had any apparent problem with Kresge. The sheriff doesn’t think they’re suspects."

"If this was a movie, the handyman would have done it," Lucas said, staring blankly at the ceiling. "He’d be like a Stephen King character, a secret psycho who everybody thinks is retarded…"

"… but who’s really pretty smart, but only behaves the way he does because he couldn’t get a date to the prom, which is why he burned down the high school."

"How about Sherrill? Is she around?"

"I don’t know. She was working yesterday, but I haven’t seen her today. I know she was going to try to nail down people in Kresge’s office and talk to the ex-wife."

"All right…"

"But suppose it is somebody close to Kresge," Sloan said. "Suppose we find a guy who hated Kresge, but knew the farm, knew where the tree stand was, knew Kresge would be in it, and we can prove that he has a rifle, is a great shot, and has no alibi for opening day. You know what? We got all that, and we still ain’t got shit."

"There might be one more way," Lucas said.

"Like what?"

"We build a pattern around him."

"Good luck."

"Rose Marie got some mail this morning," Lucas said. He leaned forward and slid the copies across Sloan’s desk. "One letter nominates O’Dell, the other one McDonald."

Sloan read them slowly, then read the McDonald letter a second time, and finally looked up at Lucas: "Two more dead ones, huh? But we’d need more than a pattern. We’d have to push him out in the open."

"That could be done," Lucas said. "If it’s McDonald."

"Are you buying into the case?" Sloan asked.

"Rose Marie asked me to take a look… if you don’t mind. If Sherrill doesn’t mind."

"I don’t mind," Sloan said. "I’ve got the Ericson file. I could use some extra time."

"I thought the boyfriend did it-the Ericson thing. I thought he admitted it."

"Not exactly," Sloan said. "He says he might have. He doesn’t deny it. But we can’t come up with any physical evidence, and he was so fucked up at the time, he can’t remember anything. And I’m wondering, if he was so fucked up-and he was, he had enough chemicals in him to start a factory-what’d he do with his clothes? They had to have blood all over them."

"You’ve got nothing physical? No hair or semen…"

"No semen. And he had no blood on him, under his nails or in his hair. And the problem is, she was killed on the bed and he slept there every night and half the day. So he’s all over the place… but so what? He’s gonna be. And I’m really worried about the clothes. He says he’s not missing any, and I think he might be telling the truth. He doesn’t have all that much to begin with. Couple pairs of jeans, couple T-shirts, a coat, some sneaks."

"Huh. Check the drains in the bathroom? Maybe he was naked…"

Sloan nodded: "Yeah. The lab looked at it. No blood."

"Okay. So I’ll take the McDonald thing," Lucas said. "I’ll talk to Sherrill about it."

"She’ll go along," Sloan said. He said it with atone.

"Yeah?"

"She’s got the great headlights," Sloan said.

"Not exactly a key criterion for a police investigation."

"Yeah, but…"

"You’ve been married too long; all you can think about is strange tits and adultery complaints," Lucas said.

"Not true. Sometimes I think about strange asses… Seriously, I heard them talking about you-some of the women. The idea was, don’t rush him, let him get a little distance away from Weather."

"Fuck ’em," Lucas said, pushing away from Sloan’s desk. "I’ll take McDonald. I’d like to see the interviews you did Saturday…"

"Krause tape-recorded them, he’s getting a transcript made. Probably today. He said he’d shoot a copy down as soon as it’s ready."

"All right," Lucas said. "Ship it over."

"And you’ll talk to Headlights? I mean, Sherrill?"

Lucas grinned. "Yeah. If you see her, tell her I’m looking for her; I’ll be around later in the day."