John Sandford - Secret Prey

O’Dell ignored him. "Karma’s wrong for an accident," she said.

"Great: we’re talking karma," McDonald said. " Superstitious hippie nonsense."

Bone slumped a little lower in his chair and a thin grin slipped across his dry face: "But she’s right," he said. "Dan was a half-mile onto his own property. Who’s going to shoot him through the heart from more’n half a mile away? Nope. I figure it was one of us. We all had guns and good reasons."

"Bullshit," McDonald said.

As they watched the parade approaching, O’Dell said, "We should decide who’ll speak for the bank. The board’ll have to appoint a CEO, but somebody should take over for the moment. Somebody in top management."

"I thought Wilson might do it-until a decision is made on a CEO," Bone said. He looked over at Wilson Mc-Donald, whose eyes went flat, hiding any reaction; and past him at O’Dell. The top job, Bone thought, would go either to himself or O’Dell, unless the board did something weird. Robles didn’t have the background, McDonald wasn’t smart or skilled enough. "If you think so," McDonald said carefully. This was the moment he’d been waiting for.

O’Dell had done her calculations as well as Bone, and she nodded. "Then you’ve got it," she said. She put her battered hunting boots up on the porch railing and looked past McDonald at Bone: "Until the police figure out if one of us did it. And the board has a chance to meet."

After a moment’s silence, Robles said, "My gun wasn’t fired."

Bone rolled his eyes up to the heavens: "I’ll tell you what, Terry. It would take me about three seconds to figure a way to kill Kresge and walk out of the woods with a clean weapon." He took a final drag on the cheroot, dropped the stub end on the porch, ground it out with his boot, and flipped it out into the yard with his toe. "No sir: I figure a fired weapon is purely proof of innocence."

He was breaking Robles’s balls. Bone and O’Dell had the two dirty rifles, while McDonald and Robles were clean. Usually, Bone wouldn’t have bothered: Robles wasn’t much sport. But Bone was in a mood. Davenport and the others were dropping the last few yards down the trail to the clearing around the house, and Bone muttered to the others, "Bad dog."

Lucas led the parade up the porch steps, with Krause and Sloan just behind, and the four bankers all stood up to meet them. Lucas recognized Bone and nodded: "Mr. Bone," he said. "Did Sally get the Spanish credit?"

Bone’s forehead wrinkled for a second; then he remembered and nodded, smiling: "Sure did. She graduated in June… Are you running things here?"

"No, I was just about to leave, in fact. Sheriff Krause runs things up here. We’ll be cooperating down in Minneapolis, if he needs the backup."

"So why did you come up?" O’Dell asked. She put a little wood-rasp in her voice, a little annoyance, so he’d understand her status here.

Lucas grinned at her, mild-voiced and friendly: "Mr. Kresge carried a lot of clout in Minneapolis, so it’s possible the motive for the shooting will be found there. Quite possibly with the bank, from what I hear about this merger. Detective Sloan"-Lucas looked at Sloan, who raised a hand in greeting-"has been assigned to help Sheriff Krause with his interviews, so we can get you folks on your way home."

"Are you's-s-sure it wasn’t an accident?" Robles stuttered.

Lucas shook his head and Krause said, "He was murdered."

"So that’s it," O’Dell said, and the bankers all looked at each other for a moment, and then Bone broke the silence: "Damn it. That’ll tangle things up."

McDonald, ignoring Krause, asked Lucas, "Do you think… one of us…?"

Lucas looked at Krause. "We have no reason to think so, in particular. Since we know you were here, we’ve got to talk to you," Krause said. "But we’ve got no suspects."

Sloan suggested that he would prefer to talk to the four of them individually, inside, while the others waited on the porch. "Nice day, anyway," he said, pleasantly. "And it shouldn’t take long."

"Let me go first," McDonald grunted, pushing up from his chair. "I want to get back and start talking to the PR people. We’ll need a press release ASAP. God, what a disaster."

"Fine," Sloan said. He turned to Lucas: "You gonna take off?"

"Yeah. The sheriff’ll send you back with a deputy."

"See you later then," Sloan said. "Mr. McDonald?"

McDonald followed Sloan and Krause into the cabin. When they’d gone, Bone said to Lucas, "I’d feel better about this if you were running things."

"Krause is a pretty sharp cookie, I think," Lucas said. "He’ll take care of it."

"Still, it’s not something where you want a mistake made," Bone said. "A murder, I mean-when you’re a suspect, but you’re innocent."

"I appreciate that," Lucas said. He glanced at the other two, then took a card case from his jacket pocket, extracted four business cards and passed them around. "If any of you need any information about the course of the investigation, or need any help at all, call me directly, any time, night or day. There’s a home phone listed as well as my office phone. Ms. O’Dell, if you could give one to Mr. McDonald."

"Very nice of you," O’Dell said, looking at the cards. "We just want to get this over with."

"You shot one of the deer, didn’t you?" Lucas asked her. The two gutted deer were hanging head down from the cabin’s deer pole in the side yard.

"The bigger of the two," she said.

"I like mine tender," Bone said dryly. "Always go for a doe."

"Good shot," Lucas said to O’Dell. "Broke his shoulder, wiped out his heart; I bet he didn’t go ten feet from where you shot him."

She didn’t feel any insinuation; he was just being polite. "Do you hunt?" she asked.

He smiled and nodded: "Quite a bit."

When Lucas had gone, O’Dell said to Bone, "That’s not a bad dog. That’s a pussycat."

Bone took another cheroot out of his jacket pocket, along with a kitchen match, which he scratch-lit on the porch railing; an affectation he acknowledged and enjoyed. "He’s killed four or five guys, I think, in the line of duty. He built a software company from nothing to a ten-million AT buyout in about six years. In his spare time. And I’ll tell you something else…"

He took a long drag on the cheroot, and blew a thin stream of smoke out into the warming afternoon air, irritating O’Dell. "What?"

Bone said, "When we did the transfers on the IPO, I talked to him for ten minutes. While we were doing it, my daughter called on my private line, from school. All upset. She was having a problem with a language credit, and she was afraid they’d hold up her graduation. I mentioned it to him, in passing-just explaining the phone call. This was seven months ago. He remembered me, he remembered Sally’s name, and he remembered the language she was taking."

Bone looked at O’Dell. "You can take him lightly, if you want. I wouldn’t. Especially if you pulled the trigger twice this morning."

"Don’t be absurd," she said. But she looked after Lucas, down by the parking area, just getting into his truck. "Nice shoulders," she said, thinking the comment would irritate just about everybody on the porch.

The truck was very quiet without Sloan: Lucas didn’t need the quiet-in the quiet, his mind would begin to churn, and that would lead…

He wasn’t sure where it would lead.

He was tired, but he needed to be more tired. He needed to be so tired that when he got back home, he could lie down and sleep before the churning began. He put a tape in the tape player, ZZ Top, the Greatest Hits album, and turned it up. Interference. Can’t churn when there’s too much interference.

The killing at the hunting camp was not particularly interesting: one possible motive, the bank merger, was already fairly clear. Others of a more personal nature might pop up later-Kresge was in the process of getting a divorce, so there might be other women. Or his wife might have something to do with it.