Secret Prey

by John Sandford

  ‘‘Hello. I’m Deputy Chief of Police Lucas Davenport from Minneapolis; I’m a friend of Weather’s.’’

  The frown on her face eased a bit, and she tried on a smile. ‘‘Oh, good. I’ve been trying to keep an eye on the place since last night.’’

  ‘‘Thanks. I, uh, I’m on my way to talk to your police chief out here, and I thought I’d take a look . . . Listen, do you know if anybody saw anything last night? Or heard anything?’’

  ‘‘Nobody in my house heard anything until the fire engines, but Jane Yarrow across the street heard the window break. She said she didn’t know it was a window breaking until later. She just heard something . And then she heard a car door slam, but she didn’t get up until she heard the sirens. And that was about it—nothing like this ever happened here before.’’

  THE CHIEF WAS OUT WHEN LUCAS ARRIVED AT EDINA, but he was routed to a Detective James Brown. Brown was a tall, shambling man with a shock of white hair; he wore a rough tweed sportcoat with suede elbow patches, a blue oxford cloth shirt, and khakis with boat shoes. He looked like a professor of ancient languages.

  ‘‘Not the James Brown?’’ Lucas asked.

  ‘‘Why yes, I am,’’ Brown said modestly. ‘‘This is my disguise: keeps the groupies off.’’

  ‘‘Excellent strategy,’’ Lucas said. He dropped into a chair beside Brown’s desk.

  Brown looked down at a file open on his desk, sighed, and said, ‘‘I understand you have a personal relationship with Weather Karkinnen.’’

  ‘‘Had one; she broke it off,’’ Lucas said. ‘‘I can’t prove to you where I was at three o’clock this morning, ’cause I was home in bed, alone. But . . .’’ He shrugged. ‘‘I didn’t do it.’’

  ‘‘And even if you did, that’s a pretty goddamn unbreakable alibi,’’ Brown said.

  Lucas said, ‘‘Hey . . . I didn’t do it.’’

  Brown sighed again and asked, ‘‘The chief told you about the scoring on the bottle?’’

  ‘‘Yeah. He said it looked like a pro job.’’

  ‘‘That’s what the fire guys say. You get a regular bottle, it might bounce, it might not even break. But with the scoring, it explodes when it hits the floor. Very fast, very efficient. What we think is, the bomber came in from the north, idled to a stop in front of the house, got out, leaving the car door open, walked up to the front of the house with the jug, flashed the wick with a cigarette lighter, and heaved it through the window. The whole thing, I timed it, would be ten to fifteen seconds, walking, from the time he got out of the car to the time he got back in. Then he rolled off down the street, around the corner, four blocks down to the highway, and back to Minneapolis. He was on the highway before Ms. Karkinnen even called 911.’’

  ‘‘Who owns the place?’’

  ‘‘A couple named Bartlett—they’re down in Florida. They’d rented it to a doctor for the past eight years, and then to your friend. Strictly an income property for them.’’

  ‘‘Any reason they might want to torch it?’’

  ‘‘Nothing obvious—it’s a good neighborhood, they could probably sell it for a lot more than they’d ever get from insurance. And they’re pretty reputable people.’’

  ‘‘Shit,’’ Lucas said.

  ‘‘All that stuff that was in the paper last winter . . . The LaChaises . . .’’

  ‘‘Yeah. That’s what I’m afraid of,’’ Lucas said.

  Brown tapped his desk: ‘‘But one thing doesn’t fit with that. Whoever did this wasn’t trying real hard to kill her. I mean, if it was a pro job. They didn’t even come close. She was in the back bedroom, ran out when she heard the window break, saw the fire, called 911, and if she hadn’t tried to save her pictures, she wouldn’t have been hurt at all.’’

  ‘‘She was hurt?’’ Lucas sat up, angry now. ‘‘I was told she wasn’t . . .’’

  ‘‘Not bad, not bad,’’ Brown said. ‘‘She got a couple of small cuts on her feet from broken glass, and her hair was singed, and she got some small spark burns on one hand. But she told us she has some operations tomorrow and she expects to do them.’’

  LUCAS TOOK IT SLOW DRIVING BACK TO MINNEAPOLIS, pulling threads together. Black checked in on Lucas’s car phone: ‘‘I had to do some psychotherapy on this Markham asshole, but the bottom line is, he thinks O’Dell couldn’t do it.’’

  ‘‘All right. You got another one yet?’’

  ‘‘L. Z. Drake,’’ Black said. ‘‘Went to school with McDonald.’’

  ‘‘Call when you get done.’’

  ‘‘Yeah. Hey, you know about Weather?’’

  ‘‘Yeah. How’d you hear?’’

  ‘‘They had some pictures of the house in a news brief . . . Markham had his TV on the whole time I was talking to him. They said she was okay.’’

  ‘‘Yeah, yeah . . .’’

  ‘‘You think there’s any chance it’s another comeback from LaChaise?’’

  ‘‘I don’t know what to think.’’

  ‘‘All right,’’ said Black. ‘‘I’ll call you after I talk to Drake.’’

  SLOAN AND FRANKLIN WERE WAITING OUTSIDE LUCAS’S office when Lucas got back. Both of them had been involved in the shoot-out that killed the two LaChaise women the winter before, though Sloan hadn’t fired his weapon and hadn’t been a direct target of the reprisal attacks. Franklin, on the other hand, had been shot in his own driveway.

  ‘‘We’ve been talking, man,’’ Franklin said in his booming voice. Lucas was large; Franklin dwarfed him. ‘‘We gotta look into this, unless there’s some motive for somebody hittin’ Weather.’’

  ‘‘How’d you hear about it?’’

  ‘‘It’s all over the department, it’s been on TV,’’ Sloan said.

  ‘‘You think I oughta call my folks, get them out of the house?’’ Franklin asked.

  ‘‘I don’t know,’’ Lucas said. They were milling in the hall, and he saw Sherrill starting down toward them. ‘‘I don’t know what’s going on. Nobody’s got a motive that I can figure, and there’s a possibility that it was a pro job.’’

  ‘‘Why a pro job?’’ Sloan asked. As Sherrill came up, Franklin said to her, ‘‘Could’ve been a pro job.’’

  ‘‘You’re sure?’’ Sherrill asked.

  Lucas told them about the scored bottle. ‘‘That’s it,’’ Franklin said. ‘‘I’m putting the old lady in a motel.’’

  Black arrived as they were talking about it, stood on the edge of the discussion: he hadn’t been in the shoot-out, hadn’t been a target.

  ‘‘I think what we need to do before we panic, is we need to get everybody we got out on the street,’’ Lucas said. ‘‘I’ll talk to Intelligence and Narcotics and the gang people, I’ll talk to St. Paul, and every one of us has got people . . . Let’s get out there and dig for a few hours. If this is a group, somebody’ll know.’’

  ‘‘Loring’s got the good biker contacts,’’ Franklin said. ‘‘He’s been working nights, he’s probably home asleep. You want me to roust him?’’

  ‘‘Get him moving,’’ Lucas said.

  ‘‘I’ll find Del, get him started,’’ Sloan said.

  ‘‘I’m outa here,’’ said Franklin.

  As the group started to break up, Black said, ‘‘Lucas, I talked to this guy Drake about McDonald.’’

  ‘‘Oh, yeah.’’ Old news; he wasn’t thinking about McDonald anymore.

  Black continued: ‘‘I had to push him, but he says he knew McDonald all the way through school, and he has a real violent streak. Bottom line was, Drake thinks he could kill somebody if he decided it was necessary. He said McDonald was a big guy, played a little high school football, and he and a couple of other guys stalked another kid for a couple of years, a little wimpy guy, beat him up a half-dozen times just because they knew they could make him cry in front of the girls . . .’’

  ‘‘Yeah, yeah,’’ Lucas said impatiently. ‘‘We can pick that up later.’’

  And as Black lef
t, Sherrill, who’d been drifting away, said from down the hall, ‘‘You were gonna talk to O’Dell today . . .’’

  ‘‘No time now,’’ Lucas said. He remembered the phone call about Bone sleeping with Kresge, but pushed the memory away. ‘‘Let’s get out on the street.’’

  ELEVEN

  THE POLARIS BANK TOWER WAS A RABBIT WARREN OF meeting, training, and conference rooms, but only one of them was The Room.

  The Room was on the fortieth floor, guarded by two thick oak doors.

  No Formica here, no commercial carpeting or stainless steel. The conference table was twenty feet long and made of page-cut walnut; the chairs were walnut and bronze and plush crimson cushions; the lighting was subtle and recessed. The floor was oak parquet, accented with Quashqa’i rugs.

  An alcove at one side of the room contained a refrigerator stocked with soft drinks and sparkling water. A small bar was tucked discreetly away under a countertop, and a coffeemaker kept fresh three flavors of hot coffee, as well as hot water for anyone who wanted to brew tea. A Limoges-style sugar bowl and creamer waited next to an array of delicate cups and small serving plates. On the countertop itself was a tray of sandwiches cut into equilateral triangles, cookies, and a freshly opened box of Godiva chocolates.

  Constance Rondeau probed the box of chocolates, her sharp nose moving up and down like a bird going after a worm. O’Dell watched her work over the box, and realized that she recognized individual types among the Godiva variety, and was picking out the good ones.

  O’Dell pulled herself back: she was drifting. Oakes was talking.

  ‘‘. . . do agree that somebody had to take the reins. We’ve got too much going on, and it’s too dangerous out there right now. And somebody’s got to work with Midland . . .’’ If Rondeau looked like a bird, Shelley Oakes looked like a porkpie—all puffy and round-faced.

  ‘‘But my point is,’’ said Loren Bunde, ‘‘we can’t take forever finding someone. We don’t have the time, with this merger going on. We probably ought to go over to Midland and get one of their mechanics, and just pull the thing together.’’

  ‘‘Where would his loyalty be?’’ asked Bone. ‘‘It’d have to be with Midland, because that’ll be the successor bank. He’d find a way to screw us: hell, that’d be his job. I definitely think we should go with the merger: but on our terms. They need us. We don’t really need them. We’ve got the fifty-dollar price in play, but if everything shakes out right, we’ll get seventy-five.’’

  ‘‘Nobody ever mentioned seventy-five,’’ said Rondeau, looking up from the Godiva chocolates with a light in her eye.

  ‘‘I think that would be a minimum. I don’t know what was going on between Midland and Dan Kresge, but something was going on,’’ Bone said. ‘‘Fifty dollars is ridiculous. One-for-one is ridiculous. We should get cash as well: I don’t think a hundred is out of the question.’’

  ‘‘I think it is,’’ O’Dell said bluntly. ‘‘I think seventy-five is on the outer edge of any sane possibility.’’

  ‘‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’’ Bone said.

  O’Dell ignored him, and looked around at the other board members: ‘‘Listen: We must reconsider the possibility of continuing as an independent,’’ she said. ‘‘An immediate merger on the proposed terms would turn some quick profits for all of us, myself included. But the merger talk alone has pushed the stock price, and we’ll keep most of that whether or not we merge. So that much is locked in. And the fact is, if the new management were to take what I think is a proper view of the board and its duties, and the top management and its duties, then additional compensation would be provided anyway. There are also benefits available to board members and top management that we will lose in a merger, no matter how much money we got right away.’’

  After a moment of silence, somebody asked, ‘‘Like what?’’

  O’Dell smiled and said, ‘‘There’s quite a wide range of possibilities . . . A little research on what other boards get as compensation could point to some interesting alternatives. Tax-free alternatives, I might add.’’

  McDonald sat at the far end of the table, where Kresge had always sat, watching the talk, struggling to keep up with it. Bone and O’Dell were clearly at odds, Bone pushing for the proposed merger, O’Dell resisting.

  ‘‘All these possibilities should be explored,’’ he ventured ponderously. ‘‘But I do think that we should consider Polaris’s position as a major community asset. We’ve been here for a hundred years and more, and a lot of us wouldn’t be where we are today if we hadn’t had the ear of some friendly people at Polaris . . .’’

  He droned on, losing most of the board immediately. John Goff had the right to buy almost forty thousand shares of Polaris at prices ranging from twelve dollars a share to forty-one dollars, most of it at the lower end. Using a scratch pad and a pocket calculator, he began running all the option prices against Bone’s suggestion that they might get a hundred.

  Dafne Bose was drawing an airplane on her scratch pad. The bank had a small twin-prop, mostly used for flying audit and management teams to small banks out in the countryside. But what if the bank were to buy something really nice—a small jet—and what if it were available to the board? It probably should be, anyway. A plane like that would be worth tens of thousands of dollars a year, none of it visible to the IRS. O’Dell said there were other possibilities. Bose underlined the plane and looked up at O’Dell, who smiled back.

  ‘‘Yeah, yeah, that’s all fine,’’ Goff said, when McDonald appeared to be running down. ‘‘So we’ve all got a lot to think about. I would propose that we leave everything as is: Wilson speaks for us, but we ask Susan and Jim each to prepare a report on their respective ideas, deliverable before Friday noon to each of us. That’s quick, that’s only a couple of days, but we gotta move on this. I further suggest that we meet again next Monday to consider the reports. We’d want a complete discussion of all the, uh, options, and at that time we can consider how to go forward.’’

  He looked around, got nods of assent. For just a fleeting, tiny part of a second, O’Dell and Bone locked eyes. Only two of them were left. McDonald had just been cut out. Whoever’s report was adopted would be running the place in a week.

  McDonald didn’t understand that yet. He harrumphed, allowed that the reports were probably a good idea, and after a few more minutes of talk, the board adjourned.

  O’DELL ORDERED CARLA WYTE AND LOUISE COMPTON to her office as soon as she got out of the meeting. Marcus Kent, her other major ally, was too exposed to meet with her publicly, since he technically worked for Bone.

  ‘‘Everything I said was true,’’ O’Dell told Wyte and Compton. ‘‘The trouble is, it’s not money in hand. I need exact, specific examples of the kind of payoff we can deliver to board members and top management if they adopt my approach.’’

  She turned to Wyte: ‘‘You’re the numbers person. I want you to nail down the numbers on this stuff, so they’ll know what they’ll get, and how much it’ll cost the bank, and what the tax consequences will be. Do you know Pat Zebeka?’’

  Wyte was scribbling on a yellow pad: ‘‘I’ve heard of him. A lawyer.’’

  ‘‘Tax guy, one of the best, and he’s done a lot of compensation work. Get with him—on my budget, I’ll fix it— and get a laundry list of everything we can offer that will provide tax advantages.’’

  And to Compton, who never took notes on anything, because if you never took notes, nobody could subpoena them: ‘‘I want charts from you. Get the details from Carla, and put them together in a package. It’s gotta be good, and it’s gotta be clear. Not so simple they’ll be insulted, but they’ve got to see what they’ll get. It has to be as real as the dollars they’d get from a merger. And another thing— there are some pretty big advantages to being on the Polaris board. We need to put together a list of those advantages. Social status stuff.’’

  ‘‘Good. What about polling the board?’’ Compton aske
d. ‘‘I’m talking to them, the ones I can get. And I’ve got to talk to McDonald. Tonight, if I can. I’m not sure if the idiot knows he’s out of it, but he’s got to find out sometime.’’

  ‘‘From you? Do you think that’s smart? He might be insulted.’’

  O’Dell shook her head: ‘‘Has to be done. I’ve got to get to him before Bone, and I can make him an offer Bone can’t.’’

  ‘‘What?’’ Wyte asked.

  ‘‘I’m president and CEO, but he’s board chairman. Talking is what he does best anyway. In a couple of years, when the bank’s mine . . .’’ She flipped a hand dismissively. ‘‘. . . he can go away.’’

  ‘‘Why couldn’t Bone offer him—’’ Compton stopped herself, shook her head. ‘‘Sorry. Stupid question. If Bone gets it, the bank’s gonna go away.’’

  BONE TOLD BAKI TO COORDINATE A GRAPHICS PACKAGE on how much money would be available through the merger: he would provide the details. ‘‘If you do this right, Kerin, and by that I mean if you do this perfectly . . .’’ ‘‘What?’’ Kerin Baki was like a piece of blond ironwood, he thought, brutally efficient, great to look at, but cold. Distant. A Finn, he’d heard. Sometimes she was so chilly he could feel the frost coming off her. He couldn’t see her with a southern boy, but thought she might go well with somebody like, say, Davenport.

  ‘‘You’ll be the most important person in the bank, since I can’t do shit without you.’’ She disapproved of extraneous vulgarities, which is why he sometimes used them. And what she did next surprised him—almost shocked him. She sat down across his desk and crossed her legs. Good legs. Maybe even great legs.

  ‘‘I hope you’ve talked with the board members. Privately, I mean,’’ she said.

  ‘‘I’ve started . . .’’

  ‘‘You’ve got to do better than start,’’ she said. ‘‘This is a campaign, not a party.’’

  ‘‘Well, I’ll—’’