Secret Prey ld-9

by John Sandford

  Brandt was reading the paper, put it on the table and said, "Excellent."

  "We’re going to have to tell Spacek at Midland," said Constance Rondeau.

  "I already did," Bone said. "Kicked him out of bed at seven o’clock this morning, briefed him. He’s issuing a press release that says that Midland is standing behind the merger proposal and that he has full confidence in the integrity of Polaris."

  "All right… all right," said Anderson.

  "Do you think, uh, any of the rest of us might be in danger?" Bose asked.

  Bone grinned at her and said, "That’s the first question I asked when the cops came over last night." After a bit of uneasy laughter, he said, "The police have nothing. I can’t see any connection, and no threats have been made… but then, O’Dell wasn’t threatened either."

  "You think we could use a vacation?"

  Bone shrugged. "That’s up to you."

  The board members looked at each other; then Brandt said, "I really don’t think that’s necessary. But I do think it’s necessary for this board to talk privately amongst ourselves. We have some issues."

  Several of the other board members nodded, and Bone pushed back from the table and said to McDonald, " Wilson, I think they’re kicking us out." He looked down at himself. "And I could stand a change of clothes."

  "Not kicking you out," Brandt objected. "In fact, I’d appreciate it if you both would hang around for a while. I know you’re both tired, so we’ll give you a call in a half hour or so. Get you out of here for the rest of the day."

  In the hallway outside the room, McDonald said, "You called me a dummy."

  "I apologized," Bone said. Baki was standing just behind him, prim with a bundle of papers.

  "Fuck apologies," McDonald said. "You’re going down, you prick."

  "Yeah? What’s that supposed to mean?" Bone asked. "You walking around with a little handgun, Wilson?" Bone’s voice was quiet, and he looked almost as if he might be joking. But McDonald could see his black eyes, and knew that he wasn’t.

  "Kiss my ass," McDonald said; and Bone, in his turn, took a mental step back. This was not the hail-fellow he knew. Baki caught the hem of Bone’s jacket and pulled. "No," she muttered, an inch from his ear. McDonald nodded at the two of them, then turned on his heel.

  "Fat fuckin’…"

  "Some other time," she said. "Did it work out in there?"

  "I don’t know."

  "What happened?" Audrey demanded, as soon as the door shut behind her husband.

  "I damned near punched Bone out in the hallway, the prick," McDonald said. "Christ, I could use a drink."

  "Punched him?" Audrey was confused, and her voice turned shrill. "Wilson, what are you thinking about? Punched him?"

  "Ah, shut up," McDonald rapped. He peeled off his coat and tie. "Board wants us to wait around until they’re done."

  "Are they going to pick someone? We’re not ready. We were going to work on Bose this weekend."

  "The O’Dell thing spooked them," McDonald said. "I think half of them are getting ready to leave town. Hide out until it’s over with."

  "But…" Audrey was flabbergasted. "They said next week…"

  "I don’t know." Wilson shrugged. He turned to look out his window, down at the street. "Bone turned up looking like a motorcycle bum. He sure as hell didn’t look like a CEO, so that’s something."

  "Okay," she said. She folded her skirt beneath her as she sat down on a plush chair. "So we wait."

  The wait was an hour long, and seemed to take most of the day. A few people came and went; McDonald stared at a computer screen while Audrey read Vogue. Then Jack O’Grady came down, smiled at Audrey, and said, "Wilson, could you step back into The Room for a minute?"

  Audrey patted him on the back and Wilson followed O’Grady out the door.

  "Going to the Gophers game?" O’Grady asked.

  "Always do," McDonald said brightly. "Good year, bad year, I don’t care…"

  But he trailed off when he walked through the door. Bone was already sitting at the long conference table, but this time he was wearing a dark banker’s suit with a thin chalk stripe. And he’d shaved.

  "Wilson, sit down," said Brandt, and McDonald’s stomach turned. He sat down. "Wilson, we’ve decided we need to get a new leader in place immediately; somebody who can handle the bank and give us a single voice to speak with. We’ve elected you and Jim Bone to the board of directors. I’ll be taking over as the board chairman, and if you’ll accept the job, you’ll be vice chairman, as well as maintaining the presidency of the mortgage arm. We’ve asked Jim to take over as president and chief executive officer. And we’ve directed him to continue with the merger plans."

  Brandt looked at Bone, then back to McDonald. "So that’s it. Welcome to the board."

  "I, uh…" McDonald shook his head as if he’d been struck. Vice chairman: he was dead meat. "I, uh, thank you."

  Baki met him in the hall, eyes wide, almost vibrating with caffeine and anxiety, Bone thought, and demanded, "Well?"

  He grinned. "I got it. Brandt is chairman, for now, and McDonald is vice chairman. For now."

  She smiled back and six years’ worth of frost melted for a moment: "I’m very pleased for you, Mr. Bone."

  "Jim."

  "Not yet," she said; she refrosted.

  "And we have to talk about that favor."

  "Tomorrow," she said. "I’ve got some more thinking to do, and we’ve got some work. I should call Spacek, and tell him that you’re now the man to deal with on the merger."

  "That’s the first thing," he said. "Second thing is, we’ve got to start talking about how to screw the merger."

  "That’s not entirely consistent with your previous position," she said, with absolute equanimity.

  "I didn’t used to be the CEO," he said. "So let’s go. We’re gonna need coffee and cookies. We’ve got some minor receiving to do."

  "Down in your office," she said. "I ordered everything we’ll need this morning."

  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 peop
le 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.