John Sandford - Secret Prey

"So how’s she dressed, Sherlock?"

Lucas smiled, but a droopy, tired smile: "Navy jacket and skirt or tan jacket and skirt with an older but neatly ironed white shirt and some kind of tie. Practical heels. Single mother. Tense. Anxious. Angry with O’Dell for personal reasons. Hurting for money."

Roux said, "Smart-ass." She turned and shouted into a closet-sized office: "Beverly! Bring the other thing out so Sherlock Holmes can take a look."

The department’s document specialist, a dark-haired woman with a faint Moravian accent, bustled out of the closet with another slip of paper wrapped in plastic.

"Also in the mail," Roux said. "Beverly’s checking for fingerprints."

"There are none," the woman said. "Not on the letter or the envelope. Standard twenty-pound copier paper, no watermark. Printed with a laser printer." Lucas took the paper.

Chief Roux:

Daniel S. Kresge was shot by Wilson McDonald, who was hunting with Kresge when the shooting occurred. I have known Wilson McDonald for many years and I believe that he has killed two other people to further his career. These people were:

A man named George Arris, who was killed about 1984, in a shooting outside a restaurant in St. Paul.

Andrew Ingall, who was killed in a boating accident in 1993 on Lake Superior. (He was from North Oaks and his wife still lives there.)

I hope you catch him on this one. He can’t go on like this.

A Concerned Citizen.

Lucas looked at Roux, and she caught the small light in his eye. "Interesting?"

"More than the first one," Lucas admitted. "No waffling about the presentation. He gets right to it: Daniel S. Kresge was shot by Wilson McDonald."

"You think a man wrote it?"

Lucas hesitated for a minute, then said, "Maybe not. Could be a woman."

"When I read it, I assumed it was a woman. I don’t know why," Roux said.

"Something about the wording," said Beverly. "I think it’s a woman too."

"Would you look into it?" Roux asked Lucas. "Sort of… carefully? Lot of rich people involved."

Lucas said, "Sloan and Sherrill are on it."

"Sloan is working on the Ericson killing. That’s getting complicated. Sherrill’s doing the routine for the sheriff up there. I’d just like you to look at this letter. It sounds so… sure of itself." "You want me to look into it because you think it’s necessary?" Lucas asked. "Or because you’re worried that I’m going crazy?"

Roux nodded: "Both. It’d be nice if we could catch whoever killed Kresge."

"Are you getting pressure?"

"No, not really. Kresge was divorced, no family around here, not all that well liked. But I mean, hey, it’s what we’re supposed to do, right?"

"The paper this morning said that McDonald would be speaking for Polaris, at least until the board of directors meets," Lucas said. "The infighting could get pretty intense; something could fall out. In fact…" He tapped the first letter with the second. "Something already has."

"So catch up with Sherrill, tell her you’ll take this angle. Get away from your desk."

Lucas nodded: "Okay; I’ll look at it. And listen, I’m gonna send Del Capslock around with a problem."

"That goddamn Capslock is a problem," Roux grunted.

"Good cop," Lucas said.

"Yeah, but I can’t stand to look at him: I keep wanting to give him a buck, or send him out to get his teeth fixed… What’s the problem?"

"He turned up an opium ring."

"Drugs can’t handle it?"

"You might want to think about it first," Lucas said. Again, the droopy grin: "I suspect most of the members are friends of yours."

Sloan was drinking a cherry coke and reading a Star-Tribune story about sex in the workplace when Lucas wandered in, carrying xerox copies of the two letters. Sloan dropped the newspaper in the wastebasket, leaned back, and said, "You know what the thing is about you?"

"What?" Lucas pulled another chair around.

"You can’t have an adulterous affair, because you’re not married. So if you go down to Intelligence, say, and pick out some single chick and fuck her brains loose, well, that’s just what bachelors do. But if I did it, that would be adultery and the Star-Tribune thinks I should be fired."

"If you did it, your old lady’d kill you anyway, so you wouldn’t need a job."

"I’m talking in theory," Sloan said.

"Did you pick out the guilty guy on Saturday? In theory?"

Sloan shook his head. "They’re a pretty tough group. Robles was in a sweat, but I think he might sweat everything. Bone seemed to think that Kresge getting murdered was mildly amusing; he was cooperative, though. And he had to stop to think at all the right places. O’Dell was almost too busy figuring out the consequences to talk to me about whether she did it… and that made me think she didn’t. If she had, she’d have already figured out the consequences. I had a harder time getting a reading on Mc-Donald. He acted like the whole thing was a plot to personally inconvenience him."

"Cold? Sociopathic?"

"Mmmm." Sloan scratched his chin. "No… If he is, he covers it," he said after a minute. "I’d say he’s more like… unpleasant. Arrogant."

"So what’s it all mean?"

"If Robles did it, we might get him, eventually. If it’s one of the others, forget it. Unless the guy does something really stupid, like tell somebody else about it. Or if it was a group effort. But that’s…"

"Unlikely," Lucas said.

"More like ridiculous."

"Perfect crime?"

"Just about," Sloan said. "Lots of people probably heard the shot, but nobody thought anything about it. Nobody was looking for the shooter. Once he was off the scene… there’s no way we’re gonna get him. The only chance to get him was to have somebody see it happen, and recognize the shooter. That was it."

"But we know some stuff," Lucas said. He leaned back in the chair and put his feet on the edge of Sloan’s desk. "The shooter knew his way around there, in the dark. And he knew which tree stand Kresge would be in. That means that he was either close to Kresge or he worked for him, maybe out at the cabin. Is Krause checking any employees out there?"

"Yeah. There were only two or three people-a handyman who’d do maintenance work around the place, an old guy who patrols some of the cabins, just checking on them two or three times a day. And some guy who plows out the driveway in the winter. None of them had any apparent problem with Kresge. The sheriff doesn’t think they’re suspects."

"If this was a movie, the handyman would have done it," Lucas said, staring blankly at the ceiling. "He’d be like a Stephen King character, a secret psycho who everybody thinks is retarded…"

"… but who’s really pretty smart, but only behaves the way he does because he couldn’t get a date to the prom, which is why he burned down the high school."

"How about Sherrill? Is she around?"

"I don’t know. She was working yesterday, but I haven’t seen her today. I know she was going to try to nail down people in Kresge’s office and talk to the ex-wife."

"All right…"

"But suppose it is somebody close to Kresge," Sloan said. "Suppose we find a guy who hated Kresge, but knew the farm, knew where the tree stand was, knew Kresge would be in it, and we can prove that he has a rifle, is a great shot, and has no alibi for opening day. You know what? We got all that, and we still ain’t got shit."

"There might be one more way," Lucas said.

"Like what?"

"We build a pattern around him."

"Good luck."

"Rose Marie got some mail this morning," Lucas said. He leaned forward and slid the copies across Sloan’s desk. "One letter nominates O’Dell, the other one McDonald."

Sloan read them slowly, then read the McDonald letter a second time, and finally looked up at Lucas: "Two more dead ones, huh? But we’d need more than a pattern. We’d have to push him out in the open."