Secret Prey (6 page)

The other dream was stranger.

A man’s face, seen from a passing car. There were small beads of rain on the window glass, so the view was slightly obscured; in his dream, Lucas could not quite get a fix on the face. The man was hard, slender, wore an ankle-length black coat and a snap-brim hat. Most curious were the almond-shaped eyes, but where the surfaces of his eyes should be—the pupils and irises—there were instead two curls of light maple-colored wood shavings. The man seemed to be hunched against a wind, and the drizzle; he seemed to be cold. And he looked at Lucas under the brim of the hat, with those eyes that had curls of wood on their surfaces.

Lucas had begun to see the almond shapes around him on the street. See them on the faces of distant men, or in random markings on buildings, or on trees. Nonsense: but this dream frightened him. He would wake with a start, sweat around the neckline of his T-shirt. And then his mind would start to run . . .

He turned up the ZZ Top yet another notch, and raced toward the Cities, looking for exhaustion.

AN HOUR AFTER LUCAS HAD PASSED THAT WAY, JAMES
T. Bone hurtled down I-35 in a large black BMW. As he crossed the I-694 beltline he picked up the cell phone and pushed the speed-dial number. The other phone rang three times before a woman answered it, her voice carrying a slight whiskey burr. ‘‘Hello?’’

‘‘This is Bone. Where are you?’’

‘‘In my car. On my way back from Southdale.’’

‘‘I’m coming over,’’ he said. ‘‘Twenty minutes.’’

‘‘Okay . . . you can’t stay long. George is—’’

‘‘Twenty minutes,’’ Bone said, and punched off. He pushed another speed-dial button, and another woman answered, this voice younger and crisper: ‘‘Kerin.’’

‘‘This is Bone. Where are you?’’

‘‘At home.’’

‘‘Dan Kresge’s been killed. Shot, probably murdered. Had you heard yet?’’

‘‘No. My God . . .’’

‘‘I’ll be at the office in an hour, or a little more. If you have the time . . .’’

‘‘I’ll be there in ten minutes. Can I get anything started before you get there?’’

‘‘Names and phone numbers of all the board members . . .’’

They talked for five minutes; then Bone punched out again.

A THREE-CAR FENDER BENDER SLOWED HIM A BIT, BUT
he pulled into the downtown parking garage a little less than a half hour after he made the first call. He’d gotten out of his hunting clothes and was wearing a Patagonia jacket with khakis and a flannel shirt. He pulled the jacket off as he rode up in the elevator.

Marcia Kresge met him at the door in a blue silk kimono. ‘‘You like it? I bought it an hour ago.’’

‘‘I hope you’re not celebrating,’’ he said.

He said it with an intensity that stopped her: ‘‘What happened?’’

‘‘Your soon-to-be-ex-husband was shot to death up at the cabin this morning. I’m undoubtedly one of the suspects.’’

Kresge looked mildly shocked for a quarter-second, then slipped a tiny smile: ‘‘So the fucker’s dead?’’

‘‘I hope to Christ you didn’t have anything to do with it.’’

‘‘
Moi?
’’ she asked mockingly, one hand going to her breast.

‘‘Yeah, Marcia, you’re really cute; I hope you’re not that cute when the cops show up.’’

‘‘The cops?’’ Finally serious.

‘‘Marcia, sit down,’’ Bone said. Kresge dropped onto a couch, showing a lot of leg. Bone looked at it for a moment, then said, ‘‘Listen, I know you think you fucked over Dan pretty thoroughly. You’re wrong. Last week the board granted him another two hundred and fifty thousand options to buy our stock at forty, as a performance award. If the merger goes through, and it’s botched, the stock’ll be worth sixty in a year. If the merger is done exactly right, it could be at eighty in a year. That’s ten million dollars, and if it’s held for a year, you’ll take out eight after taxes.’’

‘‘Me? I—’’

‘‘Marcia, shut up for a minute. The options have value. They become part of his estate. You’ll inherit. You’ll also get the rest of his estate, that you didn’t get in the divorce. No taxes at all on that. In other words, Dan gets murdered, you get ten million. I’m up there with a gun, and guess who’s fucking Marcia Kresge?’’

‘‘Jesus,’’ she said.

‘‘I seriously doubt that he’s involved.’’

‘‘But they can’t think I . . . ?’’

‘‘You didn’t, did you? You know all those crazy nightclub characters . . .’’

‘‘Bone: I had not a goddamned thing to do with it. I really
did
think I’d taken him to the cleaners . . . and I mean, I didn’t like him, but I wouldn’t kill him.’’

He knew her well enough to know she wasn’t lying. He exhaled, said, ‘‘Good.’’

‘‘You honest to God thought . . .’’

‘‘No. I didn’t think you went out and hired some asshole to kill him,’’ Bone said. ‘‘What I was afraid of is, you’d mentioned to one of your little broken-nosed pals that if
Dan died, you’d get another whole load of cash.’’

‘‘Well, I didn’t,’’ she said. ‘‘Because I didn’t know that I would.’’

‘‘Okay . . . I don’t think it would be necessary to mention to the police that we’ve been involved,’’ he said dryly.

‘‘Good thought,’’ she said, matching his tone precisely.

‘‘All right.’’ He stood up and started toward the door. ‘‘I’ve got to get down to the bank.’’

‘‘The bank? God, when you called, I thought maybe . . .’’ She’d gotten up and come around the couch.

‘‘What?’’ He knew what.

‘‘You know.’’ She slipped the belt of the kimono; she was absolutely bare and pink beneath it. ‘‘I just got out of the shower.’’

‘‘I thought George was coming over.’’

‘‘Well, not for a couple of hours . . . and you gotta at least tell me what happened.’’

‘‘Take off the kimono.’’

She took it off, tossed it on the couch. He was staring at her, like he always did, with an attention that both disturbed and excited her.

‘‘What?’’ She unconsciously touched one arm to her breastbone, covering her right breast as she did it. Bone reached out and pushed her arm down.

‘‘Put your hands behind you,’’ he said. ‘‘I want to look at you while I tell you this.’’

She blushed, the blush reaching almost to her waist. She bit her lower lip, but put her hands behind her back.

‘‘We started out like we always do, walking back into the woods. You know how that trail goes back around the lake . . .’’

As he told the story, he began to stroke her, his voice never faltering or showing emotion, but his hands always moving slowly. After a moment she slowly backed away, and he stepped after her, still talking. When her bottom touched the edge of a couch table, she braced herself against it, closed her eyes.

‘‘Are you listening?’’ he asked; his hands stopped momentarily.

‘‘Of course,’’ she said. ‘‘A few minutes before six and the shooting started.’’

‘‘That’s right,’’ he said. He pushed her back more solidly into the couch table and said, ‘‘Spread your legs a little.’’

She spread her legs a little.

‘‘A little more.’’

She spread them a little more.

‘‘Anyway,’’ he said, gently parting her with his fingertips. ‘‘Any one of us could have killed him. It was just a matter of climbing down from the tree, sneaking back up the path . . .’’

‘‘Did you do it?’’ she asked.

‘‘What do you think?’’

‘‘You could have,’’ she said. And then she said, ‘‘Oh, God.’’

‘‘Feel good?’’

‘‘Feels good.’’

‘‘Look at me . . .’’

She opened her eyes, but they were hazy, a dreamer’s eyes, looking right through him. ‘‘Don’t stop now,’’ she said.

‘‘Look at me . . .’’

She looked at him, struggled to focus on his dark, cool face. ‘‘Did you kill him?’’

‘‘Does the thought turn you on?’’

‘‘Oh, God . . .’’

SUSAN O’DELL’S APARTMENT WAS A STUDY IN BLACK
and white, glass and wood, and when she walked in, was utterly silent. She pulled off her jacket, let it fall to the floor, then her shirt and her turtlenecked underwear, and her bra. The striptease continued back through the apartment through her bedroom to the bathroom, where she went straight into the shower. She stood in the hot water for five minutes, letting it pour around her face. When she’d cleaned off the day, she stepped out, got a bath towel from
a towel rack, dried herself, dropped the towel on the floor, and walked back to the bedroom. Underpants and gray sweatsuit.

Dressed again, warm, she walked back to the study, stood on her tiptoes, and took a deck of cards off the top of the single bookshelf.

Sitting at her desk, she spread the cards, studied them.

She’d once had an affair, brief but intense, with an artist who’d taught her what he called Tarot for Scientists. A truly strange tarot method: business management through chaos theory, and he really knew about chaos. An odd thing for an artist to know, she’d thought at the time. She’d even become suspicious of him, and had done some checking. But he was a legitimate painter, all right. A gorgeous watercolor nude, which nobody but she knew was O’Dell herself, hung in her bedroom, a souvenir of their relationship.

After she realized the value of the artist’s tarot method, he’d bought her a computer version so she could install it on her computer at work—the cards themselves were a little too strange, and a little too public, for a big bank. They’d done the installation on a cold, rainy night, and afterwards had made love on the floor behind her desk. The artist had been comically inept with the computer. He’d nearly brought down the bank network, and would have, if she hadn’t been there to save him. But she could now access electronic cards at any time, protected with her own private code word.

Still. When she could, she preferred the cards themselves: the cool, collected flap of pasteboard against walnut. Hippielike, she thought. McDonald referred to her as a hippie, but she was hardly that. She simply had little time for makeup, for indulgent fashion, or for the flattering of men— all the things that Wilson McDonald expected from a woman. At the same time, she obviously enjoyed the company of men, and her relationship with the artist and a couple of other men-about-town had become known at the bank. And she was smart.

As McDonald had thumbed through his box of mental
labels, he’d been forced to discard
housewife
and
helpmeet, lesbo
and
bimbo
. When word inevitably got around about the tarot, McDonald had relaxed and stuck the
hippie
label on her. The label might not explain the hunting, or the manner in which she’d cut her way to the top at the bank . . . but it was good enough for him.

Fuckin’ moron.

O’Dell laid out the Celtic Cross; and got a jolt when the result card came up: the Tower of Destruction.

She pursed her lips.
Yes
.

She stood up, cast a backward glance at the spread of cards, the lightning bolt striking the tower, the man falling to his death: rather like Kresge, she thought, coming out of the tree stand. In fact, exactly so . . .

She shivered, pulled a cased set of books out of the bookcase, removed a small plastic box, opened it. Inside were a dozen fatties. She took one out, with the lighter, went out to her balcony, closing the glass doors behind her. Cold. She lit the joint, let the grass wrap wreaths of ideas around her brain. Okay. Kresge was dead. She’d wanted him dead— gone, at any rate, dead if necessary, and lately, as the merger deal crept closer, dead looked like the only way out.

So she’d gotten what she wanted.

Now to capitalize.

TERRANCE ROBLES HOVERED OVER HIS COMPUTER,
sweating. He typed:

‘‘Switch to crypto.’’

You’re so paranoid; and crypto’s boring

. ‘‘Switching to crypto . . .’’

Once in the cryptography program, he typed:

‘‘What have you done?’’

Why?

Oh shit. ‘‘Somebody shot Kresge today. I’m a suspect . . .’’

My, my . . .

Even with the crypto delay, the response was fast. Too
fast, and too cynically casual, he thought. More words trailed across the screen.

So, did you do it?

Robles pounded it out: ‘‘Of course not.’’

But you thought I did?

He hesitated, then typed, ‘‘No.’’

Don’t lie to me, T. You thought I did it

. ‘‘No I didn’t but I wanted you to say it.’’

I haven’t exactly said it, have I?

‘‘Come on . . .’’

Come on what? The world’s a better place with that fucking fascist out of it
.

‘‘You didn’t do it.’’

A long pause, so long that he thought she might have left him, then:
Yes I did
.