Secret Prey (20 page)

‘‘Elle . . .’’

‘‘The thing is, this translation is much coarser, in all the right places, than the old ones—my goodness, the Trojan War resembled one of your gang wars. That was always obscured by the language of the other translations, but this one . . . the language is brilliantly apt.’’

‘‘Elle, Elle—tell me later. I’m calling from my car and I’ve got a serious question.’’

She stopped with the
Iliad
: ‘‘Which is?’’

‘‘If a woman is routinely beaten by her husband, is it likely that she might betray him behind his back, while defending him when he was around?’’

‘‘Of course—wouldn’t you if you were in her shoes?’’

‘‘No.’’

‘‘No, you probably wouldn’t. You’d probably go after him with a baseball bat . . . But yes, a woman might do that.’’

‘‘I’m not talking about some kind of
pro forma
defense. I’m talking about really believing in the defense. But at the same time, betraying him to the police anonymously, then denying it even to the police.’’

‘‘This isn’t a theoretical question.’’

‘‘No.’’

‘‘Then you’re dealing with a badly abused woman who needs treatment—if it’s not too late for treatment. Some people, if they’re abused badly enough, will identify with and even love their abusers, while another side of their personality is desperately trying to get out of the relationship. Just to use a kind of layman’s terminology, you could say you have a condition of . . . mmm . . . stress-induced multiple-personality disorder. The part of her personality
that sincerely defends her husband may not even know that the other part of her personality is betraying him.’’

‘‘Shit . . . Excuse me,’’ Lucas said. ‘‘So even if I broke her out from her husband in, say, a murder case, she could be impeached as being nuts.’’

‘‘ ‘Nuts’ is not accepted terminology, Lucas,’’ she said.

‘‘But she could be impeached . . .’’

‘‘Worse than that. If she were required to testify in the presence of her husband, she might flip over and start defending him—lying—because he so dominates her personality.’’

‘‘All right.’’

‘‘Will I be meeting this woman?’’

‘‘Probably not, Elle. I’ll tell you about it next time we talk. Right now, I’m running.’’

‘‘Take care.’’

‘‘You too.’’

BONE LIVED IN A HIGH-SECURITY BUILDING MUCH
like O’Dell’s, and not more than a five-minute walk away. Lucas dumped the Porsche in a no-parking zone outside the glass front doors, and when a security guard came to the doors, flashed his ID and was admitted to the lobby.

‘‘I need to talk to James T. Bone,’’ Lucas said.

‘‘Don’t know if Mr. Bone is in. He often goes out at night,’’ the guard said, moving behind the security console.

‘‘Ring him and let it ring about fifty times,’’ Lucas said.

The guard did that, and after a few seconds, said into the phone, ‘‘Mr. Bone, this is William downstairs. I’m sorry to bother you, but there’s a police officer here asking to see you . . . Yes, Deputy Chief Davenport, and he says it’s urgent. Yes sir.’’

He hung up the phone: ‘‘Mr. Bone is on fourteen,’’ he said. ‘‘Take the elevator on the right.’’

BONE WAS WAITING IN THE HALLWAY OUTSIDE HIS
apartment door: as Lucas got off the elevator, he realized that this hallway also had only two doors, as had O’Dell’s.
Something ticked at the back of his mind, but the thought was gone as Bone stepped out and said, ‘‘What’s going on?’’

Bone was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, but was barefoot.

‘‘You alone?’’

‘‘No, actually, I have a friend here . . . Come on in. What happened?’’

Lucas stepped inside. A woman, about Bone’s age, was sitting on the couch.

‘‘This is Marcia Kresge, Dan Kresge’s wife. We were just talking strategy.’’

‘‘Was Wilson McDonald here an hour ago?’’ Lucas asked.

Bone looked at his watch: ‘‘Well, more than an hour. He left here probably at ten-thirty or ten forty-five.’’

‘‘Ten-thirty. Have you been here ever since?’’

‘‘Yes . . . Marcia got here about . . .’’

‘‘About eleven-twenty,’’ said Kresge.

‘‘So what happened to McDonald?’’ Bone demanded.

‘‘Did you make a deal with McDonald?’’ Lucas asked, ignoring the question.

Bone looked at Kresge, then back at Lucas: ‘‘No. What’s he done?’’

‘‘So you’re out of the job. Because he made a deal with Susan O’Dell.’’

‘‘Oh, no, I’m not out of it at all.’’ Bone shook his head. ‘‘Wilson thinks he can deliver several votes to Susan. He doesn’t know it, but he can’t. Well, maybe one. The rest are still up for grabs. Now what the hell happened?’’

Lucas looked at Kresge, then back at Bone, interested in their reactions. ‘‘A couple of minutes after eleven o’clock, somebody rang the doorbell at Susan O’Dell’s apartment, and when she opened the door, shot her twice in the head with a handgun. O’Dell’s dead.’’

And they were, as far as Lucas could tell, stunned. Astonished.

Bone, who didn’t seem given to sputtering, sputtered, ‘‘That’s not possible. I just talked to her tonight.’’

‘‘What time?’’

‘‘Seven o’clock or so.’’ He looked at Kresge. ‘‘About the Community College deal.’’

Kresge was solemn: ‘‘You know what? It’s a crazy man. We could be next.’’

‘‘Mr. Bone, I don’t want to imply anything, but you’re the obvious beneficiary of all this—the top job is opened up by a murder, then the main competition is eliminated. Again, I don’t mean to imply anything, but we really have to pin down where you were, and what you were doing all evening.’’ He turned to the woman. ‘‘And the same with you, I’m afraid.’’

‘‘Do you really think I’d do this?’’ Bone asked. He sounded more curious than afraid.

Lucas thought for a moment and then said, ‘‘I don’t know you well enough to say. But even if I didn’t, I have to make sure. If McDonald left here a little after ten-thirty, and you were here alone, and the woman didn’t get here until eleven-thirty . . . who has an alibi?’’

‘‘I wasn’t alone,’’ Bone said. ‘‘I’m sorry, I should have said so . . . My assistant, I think you met her at the bank, the blonde? Kerin Baki? She was here. We were working on a presentation for the board.’’

‘‘When did she leave?’’

‘‘A few minutes after Wilson—she was heading down to the bank. She’s probably still there,’’ Bone said. ‘‘And between the time she left and the time Marcia got here, I made a half-dozen phone calls. There must be some way to get at phone records.’’

Lucas nodded. ‘‘We’ll get those.’’

And Bone said, ‘‘I’ll tell you something else: We know exactly how many votes I’ve got, which is nine. And we know how many Susan had, which is seven. I’m one vote away. At least three votes are uncommitted, and we were just working out ways to get one of those three. Because when we get one, all the others will come.’’ He hopped off the couch, and started to prowl the apartment as he talked. ‘‘So what I’m saying is, I think I had the top job. This
might knock me out—or slow things down. If the board thinks there’s the slightest chance that I’m implicated, I’m dead meat. Better to hire somebody else, and apologize to me later, if I’m innocent, than get stuck with a CEO who turns out to be a killer.’’

‘‘You know who the real beneficiary is?’’ Kresge said. ‘‘Wilson McDonald.’’

‘‘He made a deal with her,’’ Lucas said.

Kresge made a rude noise: ‘‘She might have made a tactical agreement with him, just to grab the top slot. But after she’d gotten rid of Bone and a few other people, she’d have gotten rid of McDonald. She and Jim were actually friends, in a way—but she hated McDonald.’’

‘‘But everybody says McDonald’s out of it.’’

‘‘Not if there’s nobody else left,’’ Kresge said. She looked at Bone. ‘‘Jim darling, I’d be very careful if I were you. Very careful.’’

BONE AND KRESGE AGREED TO STAY AT THE APARTMENT
until Sloan got there. Lucas talked to Sloan by phone, and Sloan said he was nearly done with the McDonalds.

‘‘What do you think?’’ Lucas asked.

‘‘When I talk to Mrs. McDonald alone, she’s pretty straight,’’ Sloan said. ‘‘When I get her around her old man, she’s a fucking ventriloquist’s dummy.’’

‘‘I talked to Elle Kruger about that. She said severely abused women can get like that.’’

‘‘We need to give McDonald a good look,’’ Sloan said. ‘‘Something tells me he’s involved. I don’t know if I think that because he’s really involved, or because I just don’t like the sonofabitch.’’

‘‘Listen, when you get to Bone’s . . . get him aside and talk to him about his sex life. Who he’s screwing. Because I think that tip about him sleeping with Kresge is right. You’ll understand what I mean when you see them together. And find out if he’s screwing his assistant. She’s a little chilly, but that’s probably just me. Maybe Bone can warm her up.’’

‘‘I’ll do that,’’ Sloan said.

‘‘And you’ll need to talk to the assistant. I’ll give you her name and you can call her, and get her over to Bone’s.’’

‘‘Where’re you going?’’

‘‘Home to make a list,’’ Lucas said. ‘‘This fuckin’ thing is starting to confuse me.’’

FOURTEEN

LUCAS LIVED IN A RANCH-STYLEHOUSE 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.’’