Secret Prey (12 page)

‘‘Did you tell anybody about it at all?’’ Lucas asked.

‘‘No, I never did,’’ Hanks said. ‘‘No reason to. Just somebody in the woods during deer season. Only saw him for a minute. And see, I was up on the south side of Kresge’s place, way around from the driveway. I didn’t even think of it being up that far . . . I never put it together.’’

‘‘So what’d he look like? The guy you saw?’’

‘‘ ’Bout what you’d expect at that time of day, that day of the year. Blaze-orange hat and coat. Carrying a rifle.’’

‘‘Couldn’t see his face?’’ Sherrill asked.

‘‘Nope. He was wearing a scarf.’’

‘‘A scarf?’’

‘‘Yeah. Covered the whole bottom part of his face. His hood covered the top part of his face, down to his forehead, and the scarf came right up to his eyes.’’

‘‘Wasn’t that a little weird?’’ Sherrill asked.

‘‘Nope. It gets damn cold out there, sitting in a tree.’’

‘‘Big guy?’’ Lucas asked.

Hanks thought for a minute, then shook his head: ‘‘Mmm, hard to tell. I only saw him from about the waist up, walking along back in the trees. Not real big. Maybe average. Maybe even smaller than average.’’

Lucas looked at Sherrill: ‘‘Have you seen McDonald?’’

She shook her head. ‘‘Not yet.’’

‘‘Six-three, six-four, maybe two-sixty.’’

‘‘Wasn’t anybody that big,’’ Hanks said, shaking his head. ‘‘With them coveralls and the blaze-orange coat, a guy that big would look like a giant.’’

‘‘Did you hear a shot before you saw him?’’

‘‘Heck, it was a shooting gallery out there. I was wearing blaze orange myself, just to stand in a ditch. I was happy to get out of there alive. But there was a shot, sort of close by, and in the right direction. About five, ten minutes before I saw him.’’

‘‘That’d be right,’’ Lucas said to Sherrill.

Sherrill nodded and went back to Hanks. ‘‘But that’s all. Just a guy in orange. Nothing distinctive?’’

Hanks shrugged. ‘‘Sorry. I told the sheriff I couldn’t help much.’’

‘‘Didn’t see any cars coming or going?’’

‘‘There were a couple of trucks and maybe a car or two. I don’t know. I wasn’t paying any attention.’’

‘‘What were you doing out there, anyway?’’ Lucas asked. ‘‘Six-thirty, on a Saturday morning?’’

‘‘Aw, there’s this place called Pilot Lake, full of city people. They got maybe fifty phones around the lake, and some idiot put their exchange right on top of a spring. About once a month, the whole damn place goes down and then they all raise hell until somebody fixes it. It’s a priority for us, until we can redo the exchange.’’

‘‘When did they go down?’’

‘‘About ten o’clock Friday night.’’

‘‘Including Kresge’s place?’’

‘‘Nope. He’d be the next exchange up the road. Like I said, I was on the south side . . .’’

‘‘Okay.’’ Lucas thought for a moment, then asked, ‘‘What’d the scarf look like? Black? Red?’’

‘‘Red,’’ Hanks said. He scratched his jaw, thinking about it. ‘‘Or pink.’’

‘‘What else? Was it wrapped on the outside, or inside . . . ?’’ ‘‘Inside—like he covered his face, then pulled the hood up over.’’

‘‘Okay . . .’’

They dug for another five minutes, running him through it again, but came up with nothing more, until they both stood up. Then Lucas asked, ‘‘Where would this guy have been walking to? Assuming he had a car?’’

‘‘I don’t know,’’ Hanks said. His eyes drifted off to the ceiling. ‘‘Probably . . . well, he could have been heading back to the Kresge cabin. He was sort of going that way, in a roundabout way.’’

‘‘Could he have been going anywhere else?’’

‘‘Not that I know of.’’

‘‘How about this Pilot Lake place?’’

‘‘Nope. I was on that corner and he was walking . . .’’ He made a hand gesture, like a time-out signal. ‘‘This way to the access road.’’

‘‘Perpendicular,’’ Sherrill suggested.

‘‘Yeah. Like that,’’ Hanks said.

‘‘You didn’t hear a car start?’’

‘‘Nope. But I was quite a way from the house, and I was wearing my hat with earflaps . . . So I probably wouldn’t have.’’

‘‘Pink scarf,’’ said Lucas.

‘‘Pink scarf,’’ Hanks said.

‘‘WHAT’S THE PINK SCARF?’’ SHERRILL ASKED, AFTER
they let Hanks go. They were sitting alone in the canteen, eating Twinkies from the coin-op.

‘‘Susan O’Dell wears a kaffiyeh as a scarf. It’s pale red and white—she was wearing it when I saw her Saturday.’’

‘‘What’s a kaffiyeh?’’

‘‘You know, one of those head wraps like Arabs wear,’’ Lucas said. ‘‘Like what’s-his-name, the Palestinian guy, always wears.’’

‘‘Oh, yeah. Him. But his is black and white.’’

‘‘There’s another kind that’s red and white. And it would look pink from a distance, or pink and white.’’

‘‘He said pink.’’

‘‘O’Dell said she never left her tree before seven-thirty, when she shot her buck,’’ Lucas said. ‘‘Then she gutted him and dragged him up to the trail and sat down next to her tree to wait until nine, which was the agreed-on time to take a break. Didn’t go anywhere.’’

‘‘I think it’s the car that’s interesting. If there wasn’t a car, it almost had to be one of those guys. Whoever it was had to know the Kresge place pretty well, and there’s no way you could walk in from very far away.’’

‘‘Yeah, but he’s pretty shaky on that car stuff,’’ Lucas
said. ‘‘O’Dell would have been walking
away
from her tree stand if she was going in the direction Hanks said she was. She was definitely at her tree when Bone came by to pick her up at nine o’clock.’’

‘‘Maybe we push Miz O’Dell,’’ Sherrill said. ‘‘See which way she goes.’’

‘‘Not yet,’’ Lucas said. ‘‘I want to go back up there, to Kresge’s, look around. And we need to know more about the bank-merger idea—of the three realistic candidates to run the bank, we have accusations against two of them, McDonald and O’Dell. All the accusations came in anonymously, from women. At least, we think the accusation pointing at McDonald came from a woman . . . So the question is, are they legit? Or are they meant to drag O’Dell and McDonald into an investigation that would eliminate them from contenders to run the bank.’’

‘‘You mean, by Bone? Or somebody working with Bone?’’

‘‘I’d hate to think so,’’ Lucas said. ‘‘Because I kinda like the guy. But all of them are smart and tough. And the stakes are pretty big. Bone would be looking for an edge.’’

‘‘So we push Bone.’’

‘‘Let’s wait before we push anyone. Just a day or two . . . Let me get back up north.’’

‘‘Want me to come?’’

Lucas looked at her as he finished his Twinkie. ‘‘If you want to. If you stay out of my goddamned life while I’m trapped in the car.’’

She flushed and said, ‘‘I meant what I started out to say, before we got sidetracked. If you still want her, you’ve got to get off your ass and go after her. If you don’t, you’ll just . . . drift away. And you’ll never know for sure that it’s over. If you go after her, you’ll know pretty soon whether there’s any hope.’’

‘‘I’ll think about it,’’ he said.

‘‘So when are we going up north?’’

‘‘Tomorrow,’’ Lucas said, looking at his watch. ‘‘We
should have some biographical stuff about the people McDonald supposedly killed: Let’s take a look at that.’’

THEY WERE SIX BLOCKS FROM POLICE HEADQUARTERS
when Sherrill’s telephone chirped. She fumbled it out of her jacket pocket one-handed, said, ‘‘Yeah?’’ and then passed the phone to Lucas. ‘‘Sloan,’’ she said.

Lucas took the phone: ‘‘What’s going on?’’

‘‘I solved the Kresge case,’’ Sloan said laconically. ‘‘I had a little break from the Ericson thing, and I thought I might as well clean it up.’’

‘‘That’s good,’’ Lucas said. ‘‘It’s a burden off my mind.’’

Sloan’s tone of voice changed: ‘‘Terrance Robles just walked in and said he may know who did it.’’

Lucas, uncertain, and not wanting to bite too hard, said, ‘‘You’re kidding.’’

‘‘I’m not kidding. He’s out sitting at my desk. Where are you?’’

‘‘About two minutes away.’’

‘‘See you in two minutes,’’ Sloan said.

EIGHT

ROBLES WAS SITTING AT SLOAN’S DESK WHEN LUCAS
and Sherrill arrived at Homicide. He was talking to Sloan, and Lucas watched for a minute. Robles was crossing and recrossing his ankles under his chair, twisting his hands together, rubbing the back of his neck, squirming in the chair. Serious stress, Lucas thought. Lucas walked up behind him, trailed by Sherrill, and when Sloan looked up, Robles turned, then got to his feet.

‘‘D-D-Detective Davenport,’’ he stuttered. ‘‘I’ve bbbeen talking to Detective Sloan, he thinks you should know about this.’’

Lucas took a chair and Sherrill pulled one out of a nearby desk.

‘‘So . . . you think you know who did it?’’ Lucas asked.

‘‘No. I know somebody who
says
she did it, but I don’t think she really did. But if I didn’t tell you, I thought . . . I don’t know what I thought.’’

‘‘So?’’ Lucas grinned at him and made a
What?
gesture with his hands.

Robles had a friend, he said, a woman, a computer freak he’d met in an Internet chat room, and then in person, when it turned out that she lived in Minneapolis. When the news hit the papers that Polaris was considering a merger, and a
large number of administrative and clerical personnel in Minneapolis could lose their jobs, she called him to ask him if the merger could be stopped.

‘‘Her mother works at Polaris, routine clerical stuff, exactly the kind of job that would probably be wiped out,’’ Robles said.

‘‘And you told her that the merger couldn’t be stopped.’’

‘‘Not exactly. I told her that nobody much wanted it except Kresge and a small majority of board members, and the only reason the board was going for it was the stock premium . . .’’

‘‘Explain that,’’ Sherrill said. ‘‘I don’t understand stocks.’’

‘‘Well, see, Midland has offered to buy all the outstanding Polaris shares by trading with their shares, one to one. When they made the offer, they were trading in the sixties—sixty-plus dollars per share—and we were trading in the upper thirties. Their stock dropped on the offer, down to about fifty-three right now. But ours went to forty-six right now, and the closer we get to the merger, and the more certain it looks, the more ours will go up. If we finally merge, and nothing else happens, it’ll probably be around fifty dollars a share. Polaris needs ten board members to okay the deal. If you look at how many board members own how much stock, the tenth biggest holder . . .’’ Robles looked at Sherrill, who seemed to be having trouble following the explanation. ‘‘What I’m saying is, of those ten members needed to approve the merger, the one with the smallest holding is Shelley Oakes. He has ninety thousand shares, plus options for fifty thousand more at an average price in the thirties. If the sale goes through at fifty bucks, he’ll make a couple of million bucks over what the stock was worth before the merger talk started.’’

‘‘Ah,’’ Sherrill said, as though she understood.

‘‘The biggest holder, Dave Brandt, has better than four hundred thousand shares, plus God only knows what he has in stock options, which he could exercise before the deal
goes down. He’ll make tens of millions. Literally tens of millions.’’

‘‘So the board and Kresge make millions, and everybody else gets fired,’’ Lucas said.

‘‘No, not exactly. Some people would make it. There’re rumors that the investment division will be kept intact, that Midland wants the division. Then there are other executives who could make a stink, but most of them have stock options.’’

‘‘Do you have options?’’ Lucas asked.

‘‘Yeah, yeah. I’ve got options on five thousand shares at a bunch of different prices that average out to about thirty-five, so if it goes to fifty, I’d make seventy-five thousand. But I’ll tell you what, that’s about six weeks’ pay for me. And the government would get most of it anyway. I mean, it’s nothing.’’

‘‘Nothing,’’ Sherrill said.

‘‘Nothing.’’

‘‘Jesus, I make forty thousand a year,’’ Sherrill said. ‘‘And I’ve been shot for it.’’

‘‘For your big shots, forty ain’t a salary,’’ Sloan said from behind Robles. ‘‘It’s more like the price tag on something they might buy next week.’’

‘‘Okay, okay,’’ Lucas said. ‘‘So this woman . . .’’

‘‘Bonnie Bonet.’’

‘‘. . . told you she killed Kresge, and she has some motive.’’

‘‘Yes.’’

‘‘Why’d she tell you?’’

‘‘Ah, God. Because I asked her.’’ He twisted his hands nervously, and Lucas noticed that he seemed to sweat all the time, and copiously. ‘‘See, the thing is, when she came on the ’net and asked if the merger could be stopped, I told her, not unless we killed Kresge. I didn’t mean it, we were just joking on the ’net. But she came right back and said, ‘Let’s do it.’ ’’

‘‘And you said . . .’’

‘‘I said maybe we could figure a way to blow his car up,’’ Robles said.

‘‘Blow his car up,’’ Sloan said, repeating the phrase as though he were astonished.

‘‘I was
joking
. I really was—I’d never hurt anyone, it was just all bullshit. We went back and forth about ways to kill him, all ridiculous, like sci-fi stuff, and then . . . we stopped.’’

‘‘Stopped?’’ Sherrill’s eyebrows went up.

‘‘Yeah. It never came up again,’’ Robles said. ‘‘It was like, a couple of nights, then we wore the subject out, and it never came up.’’

‘‘Until somebody killed him,’’ Lucas said.

‘‘Why didn’t you tell me this Saturday?’’ asked Sloan.

‘‘Because I didn’t think there was any chance she’d done it. And if she hadn’t done it, talking about it could only get me in trouble. So I wanted to check with her. I came back, and I couldn’t find her online, and I didn’t know where she lived. She’s unlisted, and I’d only gotten together with her at Uncle Tony’s. That’s a bar . . .’’

‘‘We know,’’ Sherrill said. ‘‘The one with the porno on computers.’’

‘‘Porno? You mean the TV Three story? That was all bullshit . . .’’

‘‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’’ Lucas said. ‘‘Go ahead.’’

‘‘Anyway, when I did find her, yesterday, I asked her if she’d heard about it, and she said yeah, she’d done it,’’ Robles said.

‘‘But you don’t believe her.’’

‘‘No. She’s never fired a gun. She doesn’t even go outside, for Christ’s sake. She’s white as a sheet . . . she doesn’t know about walking around in the woods. Her old man’s got something wrong with his bowel or something and never worked, and they never went anywhere when she was growing up. She said she shot him with her father’s .30–30, and I bet she doesn’t even know what a .30–30 looks like or that he has one.’’

‘‘Could be the right kind of rifle,’’ Lucas said. ‘‘The
medical examiner says Kresge was killed with a largecaliber rifle, which around here probably means thirtycaliber . . .’’

‘‘That’s why I decided to tell you,’’ Robles said plaintively. ‘‘I’m ninety-five percent sure she didn’t do it—but I’m five percent not sure.’’

‘‘And you don’t know where she lives,’’ Sloan said.

‘‘No, but she uses her driver’s license as an ID, and I figured you could get that.’’

‘‘Bonnie Bonet?’’

‘‘B-O-N-E-T,’’ Robles said, spelling it out. ‘‘Is this gonna be in the newspapers?’’

Sherrill looked at Lucas: ‘‘Want me to pick her up?’’

‘‘Yeah. Do that. Get some uniforms to back you up. Call me when you’ve got her.’’ When Sherrill had gone, Lucas turned back to Robles, looked at him for several seconds, then said, ‘‘We’ll need a statement. Detective Sloan will take it.’’

And to Sloan: ‘‘Read him his rights on the tape.’’

‘‘My rights?’’ Robles threw his head back to peer at Lucas. ‘‘To a lawyer? Do I need a lawyer?’’

Lucas shrugged: ‘‘Purely up to you . . . Anyway, talk to Sloan.’’ And to Sloan: ‘‘I’ll be down at my office. I’ve got some paper to look at.’’

TWOFILES WERE WAITING FOR HIM: FILESONTHEPEOPLE
mentioned in the anonymous letter as victims of Wilson McDonald.

Lucas took off his jacket, hung it on an antique oak coatrack, and dropped in the chair behind his desk. He picked up the first file, put his heels on his desk, and leaned back. And then let the file drop to his lap for a few seconds. He was not particularly introspective, but he was suddenly aware that the constant mental grinding in the back of his head—the grinding that had gone on for weeks, a symptom of the beast prowling around him—was fainter, barely distinguishable.

A book project, he thought:
Serial Murder: A Cure for Clinical Depression?
by Lucas Davenport.

GEORGE ARRIS WAS KILLED ON A RAINY NIGHT IN SEPTEMBER
1984 while walking down St. Paul’s Grand Avenue toward a restaurant-bar generally regarded as a meat rack. Somebody unknown had fired a single shot from a .380 semiautomatic pistol into the back of Arris’s head, and left him to die on the sidewalk.

St. Paul homicide investigators had torn the city apart looking for the killer, because Arris was only the last of four nearly identical killings, spaced about two weeks apart.

All the victims were younger white men, all relatively affluent, all walking alone at night. All of the killings were within twenty blocks of each other. A racial motivation was suspected, and black gang members were targeted as the primary suspects.

Four different pistols had been used in the killings. Two of the guns had been found.

The first, a .22-caliber Smith & Wesson revolver which had been used in the second killing, was found by a city work crew trying to open a clogged storm sewer a halfmile from the killing. That set off a general inspection of storm sewers, and the second pistol, a .25-caliber semiauto, was found three blocks from the .22. Neither of the other two pistols was found.

The lead detective on the case was George Jellman.

‘‘JELLMAN WAS RETIRED, AND IT TOOK TWO PHONE
calls to locate him. ‘‘He’s out back,’’ his wife shouted. ‘‘I’ll go get him.’’ She must have been shouting. Lucas mused, because they lived in Florida, which was a long way from Minnesota.

Jellman came to the phone a second later: ‘‘Davenport, you miserable piece of shit. I never thought I’d hear from you again.’’

‘‘How are you, Jelly?’’

‘‘Well, I’m looking out at my backyard,’’ he said.

‘‘There are two palm trees and two orange trees and a lime tree—Denise makes key lime pie from it. It’s just a bit shy of eighty degrees right now, and I can smell the ocean. About an hour from now, I’ll be hitting golf balls on the greenest golf course you ever saw in your life . . . How’s it up there?’’

‘‘Cool, but nice.’’

‘‘Right. Nice in Minnesota means the snow’s not over your boots yet . . . So what’s happening?’’

‘‘You remember a bunch of killings you handled back in ’84, four guys shot in the back of the head?’’

‘‘Oh, hell, yes,’’ Jellman said. ‘‘Never got the guys who did it.’’

‘‘I’m interested in the last one—George Arris.’’

‘‘Why him?’’

‘‘We got an anonymous letter with the name of the supposed killer.’’

‘‘I bet it ain’t no goddamn Vice Lord,’’ Jellman said.

‘‘Why is that?’’

‘‘Is it? A Vice Lord?’’

‘‘No. It’s a bank vice president.’’

‘‘Hah. I knew it. Trust the letter, Lucas—if it was a bullshitter, he would’ve said it was a Vice Lord, ’cause that was on all the media. The Vice Lords did the other three, but that fourth one, that was a copycat.’’

‘‘Are you sure?’’

‘‘Pretty sure. That was the word on the street, though nobody had any names for us. But the word was, the fourth one came out of the blue. That the Vice Lords who’d done the shooting had split for Chicago before the fourth one ever happened.’’

‘‘So it was pretty much street talk about the fourth one.’’

‘‘There was something else too—the first three were all up there in the colored section. But the last guy was down on Grand Avenue. You look on a map, it looks pretty close, but you don’t see many blacks over there. Not walking on the street—especially not then, not as tight as everybody was about the first three shootings. And there’s Wylie’s
Market used to be over there. You remember Wylie’s?’’