John Sandford - Secret Prey

"That could be done," Lucas said. "If it’s McDonald."

"Are you buying into the case?" Sloan asked.

"Rose Marie asked me to take a look… if you don’t mind. If Sherrill doesn’t mind."

"I don’t mind," Sloan said. "I’ve got the Ericson file. I could use some extra time."

"I thought the boyfriend did it-the Ericson thing. I thought he admitted it."

"Not exactly," Sloan said. "He says he might have. He doesn’t deny it. But we can’t come up with any physical evidence, and he was so fucked up at the time, he can’t remember anything. And I’m wondering, if he was so fucked up-and he was, he had enough chemicals in him to start a factory-what’d he do with his clothes? They had to have blood all over them."

"You’ve got nothing physical? No hair or semen…"

"No semen. And he had no blood on him, under his nails or in his hair. And the problem is, she was killed on the bed and he slept there every night and half the day. So he’s all over the place… but so what? He’s gonna be. And I’m really worried about the clothes. He says he’s not missing any, and I think he might be telling the truth. He doesn’t have all that much to begin with. Couple pairs of jeans, couple T-shirts, a coat, some sneaks."

"Huh. Check the drains in the bathroom? Maybe he was naked…"

Sloan nodded: "Yeah. The lab looked at it. No blood."

"Okay. So I’ll take the McDonald thing," Lucas said. "I’ll talk to Sherrill about it."

"She’ll go along," Sloan said. He said it with a tone .

"Yeah?"

"She’s got the great headlights," Sloan said.

"Not exactly a key criterion for a police investigation."

"Yeah, but…"

"You’ve been married too long; all you can think about is strange tits and adultery complaints," Lucas said.

"Not true. Sometimes I think about strange asses… Seriously, I heard them talking about you-some of the women. The idea was, don’t rush him, let him get a little distance away from Weather."

"Fuck ’em," Lucas said, pushing away from Sloan’s desk. "I’ll take McDonald. I’d like to see the interviews you did Saturday…"

"Krause tape-recorded them, he’s getting a transcript made. Probably today. He said he’d shoot a copy down as soon as it’s ready."

"All right," Lucas said. "Ship it over."

"And you’ll talk to Headlights? I mean, Sherrill?"

Lucas grinned. "Yeah. If you see her, tell her I’m looking for her; I’ll be around later in the day."

Damascus Isley was a very smart fat man with a taste for two-thousand-dollar English bespoke suits that almost disguised his size. Lucas spotted him at a back table at the Bell Jar, hovering over a chicken breast salad that had been served in what looked like a kitchen sink. Lucas told the ma?tre d’, "I’m with the fat guy," and was nodded past the velvet rope.

"Lucas," Isley said. He made a helpless gesture with his hands, which meant, I’m too fat to get up . "Are you coming to the reunion? Gina asked me to ask."

Lucas shook his head, and took a chair across from Isley, who was sitting on the booth seat. "I don’t think so. I’ve busted too many of them."

"Mary Big Jo’s gonna be there," Isley said.

"Fuck Mary Big Jo."

"I certainly did," Isley said cheerfully. "Made all the more glorious by your abject failure to do the same."

Lucas grinned: "No accounting for taste," he said. Isley was six-five, a bit taller than Lucas. He’d once been a rope instead of a mountain, a basketball forward when six-five was a big man; Lucas had been hockey, and they’d chased several of the same women through high school and college.

A waitress stepped up behind Lucas, slipped a menu in front of him, and said, "Cocktail, sir?"

"Ah no, I just want…" He thought for a second, then said, "Hell, give me a martini. Beefeater, up, two olives."

"I could give you three olives, if you need more vegetables in your diet," the waitress said.

"All right, three," Lucas said; she was pretty in a dark-Irish way.

The waitress went to get the drink, and Isley, following her with his eyes, said, "The way she looked at you, something would be possible. Maybe you’d have to come back a couple of times, get to know her, but it’d be possible." He looked down at the vast salad, the chunks of chicken breast, avocado, egg, tomato, cheese, and lettuce, covered with a bucket of creamy herb dressing, then back up at Lucas. "You know how long it’s been since that was possible with me? With all this fuckin’…" He couldn’t say "fat" "… lard?"

Lucas tried to put him off: "So you work out for a couple months."

"Lucas… when I was playing ball, my last year, I weighed two-oh-five. So I go to this fat doctor and say, ‘Give me a diet I can stay on, something simple, that’ll get me back to two-oh-five.’ He says, ‘Okay, do this: Go to lunch every day and eat one Big Mac with all the fixings. And as much popcorn as you want, all day. Nothing else.’ I say, ‘Jesus Christ, I’ll starve.’ He says, ‘No you won’t, but you’ll lose a lot of weight.’ "

Isley looked at Lucas. "You know how long he said it would take to get to two-oh-five?" Lucas shook his head. "A year and a half. A fuckin’ year and a half, Lucas…"

"I’ll tell you what, Dama," Lucas said bluntly. "You’re either gonna lose it, or you’re gonna die. Simple as that."

"Not that simple," Isley said.

"Oh yeah it is," Lucas said. "After all the bullshit, that’s what it comes down to."

"I don’t even like food that much… and I’d like to live awhile longer," Isley said wistfully. "I’d like to quit the company, go to London and study money… find out what it really is."

"Money."

"Yeah, you know. Money ," he said. "Not many people really know what it is, how it works. I’d like to spend some time finding out."

"So start hitting the McDonald’s," Lucas said.

"Fat chance."

The waitress arrived with the martini, and Isley’s wistfulness disappeared, replaced by the steel-trap investment banker. "So what’s going on? Starting another business?"

"No." Lucas sipped the martini. "When you took my company public, we ran some of the money stuff through Jim Bone over at Polaris. You seemed to know him pretty well. He was hunting with Kresge when Kresge got shot, and I need a reading on him. Bone, I mean. And Susan O’Dell, if you know her. And Wilson McDonald."

Isley’s face went cautious: "Is this official?"

"No, of course not. I’m just trying to get a reading. Nobody’ll be coming back to you."

Isley nodded. "Okay. I know them all pretty well- socially and business, both. Either Bone or O’Dell has the guts to shoot Kresge, but I don’t think either one did. These people are very smart and very serious. If they’d wanted to lose Kresge badly enough, they would have done it another way."

"What about Robles or McDonald?"

"Robles is a software genius. He does the math. But he’s more of a technician than a manager. He also doesn’t have the motive. With his math, he could go about anywhere. McDonald…" Isley looked away from Lucas, pursed his fat lips, then turned back. "There are McDonalds who are good friends of mine-same family. Not Wilson, though. There’ve been rumors…" Again, he paused.

"What?" Lucas asked.

"No comebacks?"

"No comebacks."

"There’re rumors that he occasionally beats the shit out of his wife," Isley said. "I mean, she goes to the hospital."

"Huh."

"Alcohol, is what you hear," Isley said. "He’s a binge drinker. Sober for two months, then has to take a few days off."

"Smart?"

"Pretty smart. Not world-class, but he got through law school with no problem."

"I didn’t know he was a lawyer."