John Sandford - Secret Prey

"Back by the cars," the fat man said. "What do we got, Jake?"

"Crime scene, Arne. I’d just as soon you don’t come up too close. We’re trying to minimize the damage to the immediate area."

"Okay," the fat man said. He craned his neck a little, down toward the orange-clad body, the AME hovering over it, the crime scene boys with their case.

"Accident?" Lucas asked.

Krause shrugged. "C’mon and take a look, give me an opinion. Arne, you better wait."

"Sure thing…"

On the way down to the body, Lucas asked, ‘Arne’s a problem?"

"He’s the county commission chairman. He got the job because nobody trusted him to actually supervise a department or the budget," Krause said. "He’s also a reserve deputy. He’s not a bad guy, just a pain in the ass. And he likes hanging around dead people."

"I know guys like that," Lucas said. He looked up at the tree stand as they approached the body and asked, "Kresge was shot out of the stand?"

"Yup. The bullet took him square in the heart," Krause said. "I doubt he lived for ten seconds."

"Any chance of finding the slug?" Sloan asked.

"Nah. It’s out in the swamp somewhere. It’s gone."

"But you think he was shot out of the tree stand," Sloan said.

"For sure," Krause said. "There’s some blood splatter on the guardrail and threads from his coveralls are hanging from the edge of the floorboards up there-no way they should be there unless they snagged when he fell over the edge."

Lucas stepped over next to the body, which lay faceup a foot and a half from a pad of blood-soaked oak leaves. Kresge didn’t look surprised or sad or any of the other things he might have looked. He looked dead, like a wadded-up piece of wastepaper. "Who moved him?"

"The first time, other members of the hunting party. They opened up his coat to listen to his heart, wanted to make sure he wasn’t still alive. He wasn’t. Then me and the doc here"-Krause nodded at the AME-"rolled him up to look at the exit wound."

Lucas nodded to the assistant medical examiner, said, "Hey, Dick, I heard you guys were coming up," and the AME said, "Yup," and Lucas said, "Roll him up on his side, will you?"

"Sure."

The AME grabbed Kresge’s coat and rolled him up. Lucas and Sloan looked at the back, where a narrow hole-a moth might have made it-was surrounded by a hand-sized bloodstain just above the shoulder blade. Lucas said, "Huh," and he and Sloan moved left to look at the entry, then back at the exit. They both turned at the same time to look at the slope, then at each other, and Lucas said, "Okay," and the AME let the body drop back into place.

Lucas stood and brushed his hands together and grinned at the sheriff. The grin was so cold that the sheriff revised his earlier, quick, judgment. "Good one," Lucas said.

"What do you think?" Krause asked.

"The shooter got close," Lucas said.

"You wouldn’t get that angle through the body, upward like that, unless the shooter was below him," Sloan explained. "And if the shooter’s below him"-they all looked back up the slope-"he couldn’t have been more than thirty or forty yards away. Of course, we don’t know how Kresge was sitting. He could have been looking out sideways. Or he could have been leaning back when the slug hit."

Krause said, "I don’t think so."

"I don’t either," Lucas said.

"So it’s a murder," Krause said. He shook his head and looked from the body to Lucas. "I wish you’d keep this shit down in the Cities."

"Mind if I check the tree?" Lucas asked the crime scene cops.

One of them said, "We’re done, if it’s okay with the sheriff."

"Go ahead," Krause said.

Lucas began climbing the spikes, looked down just as he reached the platform, and asked, "What about motive?"

Krause nodded. "I asked those people down at the cabin about that. Instead of a name, I got an estimate. Fifteen hundred, maybe two thousand people."

Sloan said, "Yeah?"

"There’s this merger going on…"

Lucas listened to Krause’s explanation of the merger as he carefully probed the backpack hung on the tree. He remembered seeing bank-merger stories in the Star-Tribune. He hadn’t paid much attention-more corporate jive, as far as he could tell.

"Anyway, he was up here hunting with a bunch of big shots from the bank," Krause said, unwinding his story. "Some of them, maybe all of them, are set to lose their big shot jobs."

"Those are the people we saw down at the cabin?" Lucas asked. He’d finished with the backpack, left it hanging where he found it, and dropped back down the tree.

"Yeah," Krause said sourly. "They filled me in on the merger business."

"Shooting him seems a little extreme," Sloan said.

"Why?" Krause asked. The question was genuine, and Sloan glanced at Lucas and then looked back at the sheriff, who said, "Close as I can tell, he was about to mess up the lives of hundreds of people. Some of them-hell, maybe most of them-will never get as good a job again, ever in their lives. And he was doing it just so he could make more money than he already had, and he had a pile of it. Shooting him seems pretty rational to me. Long as you didn’t get caught."

"I wouldn’t express that opinion to the press," Lucas said mildly. He went back to the body, knelt on one knee, and began going through Kresge’s pockets.

"I never say anything to the press that I haven’t run past my old lady," Krause grunted, as he watched. "She hasn’t turned me wrong yet." A second later, he added, "There is one other possibility. For the shooting. His wife. He’s right in the middle of a divorce."

"That could be something," Lucas agreed. He squeezed both of Kresge’s hands through their gloves, then stood up and rubbed his hands together.

"These folks at the cabin said the divorce is signed, sealed, and delivered, that the wife really took a chunk out of his ass."

"Makes it sound less likely," Sloan said.

"Yeah, unless she hates him," Lucas said. "Which she might."

Sloan opened his mouth to say something, then shut it, thinking suddenly of Weather. Krause asked, "Find anything new in the backpack?"

"Couple of Snickers, couple packs of peanut M and M’s, half-dozen hand-heater packs."

"Same thing I found," Krause said.

"Do you deer hunt, Sheriff?" Lucas asked.

"Nope. I’m a fisherman. I was gonna close out the muskie season this afternoon, beat the ice-up. I was loading my truck when they called me. Why?"

"It gets as cold on a tree stand as it does on a November day out muskie fishing," Lucas said.

"Colder’n hell," Krause said.

"That’s right. But he hadn’t eaten anything and hadn’t used any heat packs, even though he brought them along and must’ve intended to use them," Lucas said. "So he was probably shot pretty soon after he got to the stand."

"Did anyone hear any early shots?" Sloan asked.

"I asked the other people about unusual shots, but nobody said anything was out of order. Bone said he thought either Kresge or one of the other guys, a guy named Robles, had fired a shot just after the opening. But Robles said he didn’t, and his rifle is clean, and so’s Kresge’s."

"How long had they been sitting?"

"About forty-five minutes."

Lucas nodded: "Then that was probably the killing shot. He’d still have been pretty warm up to that point."

They talked for a few more minutes, then left the AME with the body and headed back through the woods toward the cabin. As they passed the mortuary attendants, now sitting n the gurney, Krause said, "He’s all yours, boys."

"Been a nice month, up to now," the sheriff said, rambling a bit. "No killings, no rapes, no robberies, only a half-dozen domestics, a few drunk-driving accidents, and a couple of small-time burglaries. This sort of blots the record."