John Sandford - Secret Prey

"I was lead investigator," the deputy said. "I pretty much know it all."

"I understand it was a firebombing," Lucas said. "A Molotov cocktail."

"Yeah, that’s right. A mix of gas and oil in a gallon jug," the deputy said.

"Was there anything weird about the bottle?" Lucas asked.

After a moment of pregnant silence, the deputy said, "Like what?"

"Like scoring? Like with a glass cutter?"

Another beat. Then, "How’n the hell did you know about that? We never put it in the report…"

When he was done with the memos, Lucas printed them and walked them down to Roux’s office and left them with the secretary. Homicide was just down the hall, so he stopped by.

Sherrill was at her desk: "Lunch?"

She was sitting next to Sloan, who was eating a corned beef sandwich. "If you don’t think people’ll think you’re fucking me," she said, just loud enough for Sloan to hear.

Sloan never flinched. "Let’s go," Lucas said. And to Sloan: "Have you got an hour, in an hour or so? To go over to O’Dell’s place, and look around?"

"Sure."

Lucas and Sherrill walked down the street to a cop hangout, got sandwiches, and Sherrill said, "I hope I can get past this wise-mouth stuff with you. I’ve been a wise-ass ever since we got together, and I’m having a hard time getting off that wavelength."

"I’ll recite you a poem sometime," Lucas said. "It makes women feel all gushy and tender; they roll right over on their backs."

"You just did it to me."

"What?"

"Wise-assed me. I heard you read poetry. I always thought it was neat. Now you wise-assed it."

"Yeah." He looked up at her, serious now. "I’m sorry I wise-assed it. I do like poetry, and I do like reading some of it to women."

"Say a poem to me."

He thought, and then said, slowly, " ‘It was Din, Din, Din you limpin’ lump of-’ "

"Get the fuck out of here," she said. "You did it again."

"We gotta do something about this," he said, grinning at her. "I really am serious. We’ve got to have at least one honest talk. Penalties for any wise-ass remarks."

"Tomorrow night. For dinner."

"Tomorrow," he agreed.

Sherrill’s phone rang, and she took it out of her purse, listened, and handed it to him: "Rose Marie. Christ, she knew right where to call."

Lucas put the phone to his ear. "Yeah?"

"I didn’t interrupt a tender moment, did I?"

"Yeah. I was about to bite into a cheeseburger."

"I called Towson about your memo. He wants to meet."

"It’s too soon."

"No it’s not. I’m sending a copy over for him to read. You should get over there at two o’clock. Frank is gonna go along. From the memo, I don’t think we’re likely to get her unless she kills somebody else. So you guys are gonna have to figure something out."

Lucas dropped Sherrill back at the office, picked up Sloan, and they walked together over to O’Dell’s apartment building. The security guard recognized Sloan and sent them up.

"The basic problem is, if you go down in the elevator, you can’t get back up without a key card," Sloan said. "Even if you have a key card, there’s a monitor camera in the elevator, so a guard might recognize you… not that they spend a lot of time looking at the monitor," Sloan said, as they got in the elevator.

"So she gets off at another floor…"

"Nope. Can’t get off at another floor. If you get in at the lobby, you can go to any one floor. If you get in at any other floor, you can only go down to the lobby. Unless you have a key card."

"How about the fire stairs?"

"The doors are locked in the lobby and the skyway. From those floors, you can’t get in without a key, you can only get out. And you can’t get out on any floor except the lobby or the skyway, even if you have a key."

"A key, not a key card," Lucas said.

"That’s right-like a Schlage."

"How close do they track the cards?"

"They know how many each person is signed out for. O’Dell had three, two for herself, and one for her father, who lives way the hell out in South Dakota. We found her two cards, and her father still had his when he was here to pick up the body. So that was all of hers. But somebody else in the building? Who knows? There are almost three hundred cards out. I suppose we could try to find all of them… I’d guess a few are missing. The problem is figuring out how the McDonalds might have gotten one."

"Huh. If it was all arranged ahead of time, we’re fucked anyway. What if she had to do it off the top of her head? Maybe a day’s thought?"

Sloan shrugged. "You figure it out."

They got off on O’Dell’s floor, and Lucas stood with his back to the door of her apartment. "She went down first, then she had to get back up to kill her."

"Right."

Lucas looked at the elevator: "Even if she’s got a key card, there’s a problem coming back up to kill O’Dell. She can’t guarantee the guard won’t look at the monitor out of sheer boredom, if he sees movement on the screen. If he does, she’s dead meat. He’s just seen her leave, and now she’s going up to kill somebody. Therefore…"

"She doesn’t use the elevator, she uses the stairwell," Sloan said. "She has a Schlage key for the door in the skyway. She signs out of the building, runs across the street to the skyway, goes up, walks across the skyway to the skyway fire door, uses her Schlage to get into the stairwell, walks up here. Where you have a problem: she can’t get out of the stairwell. There’s no key at all that’ll get you out of the stairwell onto another floor. You can only get out in the skyway or the lobby."

Lucas worked on it for a moment. "Like this," he said finally. "She knows she doesn’t have the votes to make a real deal with O’Dell: she claims she’s got them, but Bone says she didn’t, and she knows she doesn’t. She’s come here specifically to kill O’Dell-she knows that when she gets here. She can’t just sneak up and do it, because she doesn’t have any key. She doesn’t have anything. So she calls O’Dell to talk about making a deal, and her only purpose is to get into the building. So she gets out of the elevator, and right when she arrives, before she talks to O’Dell, she walks over to the fire door, opens it, takes some duct tape out of her purse, tapes the lock, walks down the stairs to the skyway, opens that door, tapes it, and then comes back up here and rings the doorbell."

"O’Dell answers it, they talk, the deal falls through, and she leaves. O’Dell sees her into the elevator, and she goes down through the lobby and signs out," Sloan said.

"Then she runs across the street, comes up into the skyway, goes in through the taped door, runs up the stairs, knocks on the door, and boom. She has to do it then-even though she knows we’ll look at her-because she can’t count on the tape being left on the door for more than a short time."

"Which explains something," Sloan said. "O’Dell told Louise Compton that there was ‘somebody at the door,’ which meant that she didn’t know who was at the door, which meant that she didn’t know who’d be arriving. She wasn’t expecting anyone, like a boyfriend. There was no easy explanation for that knock, at least not in her mind."

"So Audrey shoots her, checks her to make sure she’s dead, runs back down the stairs, carefully pulling the tape off the locks… and goes home."

"Fuckin’ cold, man," Sloan said.

"She is cold. I wonder if she was cold enough to wash the sticky stuff off the doors when she pulled off the tape? She’d need acetone, or something," Lucas said.

They were both staring at the fire door. Sloan reached out to the doorknob, pulled the door open, bent forward to look at the lock tongue, then knelt. Lucas squatted beside him.

"Looks like sticky stuff," Sloan said. He tapped his index finger next to what looked like gray tape residue.