John Sandford - Secret Prey

"I wish I’d said that," Lester said.

"Part of a speech I’m writing," Towson said. " Seriously, Lucas, do you think she’s gonna kill anyone else in the next few days?"

"I don’t know who’d it be," Lucas said. "Me maybe- but I’m careful."

"You be careful," Towson said. "She apparently likes guns… Now listen. I’m looking through this memo, and I’m convinced. A trial is something else. Give me another few days’ work on this thing. Nail down that stuff about O’Dell. Give me something harder. Work out a really tight timetable, and find a way we can put her there to pull the trigger. And anything else. Even people willing to suggest that she did it. We need more hard evidence: anything would help."

"What’re you going to do?"

"I’m thinking that we might charge her with everything," Towson said. "All the murder counts, all the ag assaults. Put all the evidence together, argue the pattern. Then, probably, we’ll lose most of them. But we’ll have a chance of getting her for killing her husband, if we can make it part of the pattern. Because she’s admitted it. The jury might let her go on the other ones, for lack of specific evidence, but we might get her on at least second degree, and maybe first, on her husband."

"She was pretty beat up," Lucas said. "They took pictures."

"We can handle that, if we can make the other things clear enough. If we get her on just second degree on her husband, and then whisper sweet nothings to the judge, he could blow off the guidelines, depart upward on the sentence, and put her away for twenty."

They all looked at each other; then Kirk said, "Right now, Lucas, I’d say it’s sixty-forty against. It’d be nice if you could come up with something a little stronger. Give us another twenty percent, or so."

"It’d be nice," Towson said.

"I’ll hit her tonight with a search warrant on the duct tape, maybe look for a glass cutter," Lucas said.

"Talk to us," Towson said. "We want to know every move from here on out."

Audrey McDonald was packing Wilson’s suits into cardboard boxes, after carefully noting labels, estimated cost-which she’d have to confirm with the tailor- and condition, all toward a tax deduction. The accountant had recommended a donation to Goodwill.

She didn’t like the idea of Goodwill, but she did like the idea of the tax deduction. Still, she was muttering to herself as she did it. Shaking her head. Wilson had spent a fortune on clothing, and now she’d get only a fraction of it back. Nothing for the underwear. Perfectly good boxer shorts, and some bum was going to get them.

"So reckless," she muttered. "Just didn’t care. Just didn’t care what you spent on this. Look at this. Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen pairs of undershorts. Why would you need all those undershorts? You could have gotten by with three pairs, or five pairs. Sixteen pairs of undershorts. Look at this. This is silk. Silk undershorts?"

She was counting them again when the headlights swung into the driveway, glowing through the bedroom drapes. Helen? She hadn’t called. She always called before she came. But who else? She went to the window and looked down.

Lucas and Sherrill waited as Sloan pulled into the driveway with Del in the passenger seat; a squad car followed a few seconds behind Sloan, with two uniformed cops. Lights shone from several windows in the house, both upstairs and down, and Lucas handed the warrant papers to one of the uniformed cops, who walked up the stoop, rang the doorbell, and knocked.

"All glass cutters, all packages of tape, all one-gallon glass jugs, all guns, cartridges and/or cartridge parts, to include gunpowder, primers, brass, and bullets, all credit card records or billing statements involving gasoline purchases," he read, in the light coming through the window in the door. There was no answer, so he rang again, then opened the storm door and pounded. Still no answer.

"What do you want to do?" he asked.

"We’re going in," Lucas said. "Let’s not break anything yet. Let’s check the garage doors."

The front door rattled and the cop at the door stepped back. A moment later, Audrey McDonald stuck her head out. "What?" she croaked. She looked worse than she’d looked in court: the bruises on her face were a sickly bluish yellow, with small reddish splotches. She still wore the bandages on her head, and her visible hair looked like broom straw.

"I’m sorry, ma’am," the cop said. "We have a search warrant for your house, for certain items."

He handed her the papers, and she took them, peered at them querulously. "A search warrant? Can you wait until I call my lawyer?"

"No ma’am. You’re welcome to call your attorney, of course, but the warrant is served and we’ll have to come in."

Her eyes drifted past the cop to Lucas, who’d begun to feel sorry for the woman: but when her eyes landed on him, they hardened into small black diamonds, like a cobra’s, and he leaned back, though he was ten feet from her. "Okay," she muttered, breaking her eyes away. "But do I have to do anything? I feel awfully bad."

"You just go sit down, and we’ll do all of it," the cop said.

She disappeared inside and the cop looked over his shoulder at Lucas. Lucas said quietly, "Keep an eye on her. She’s not what she looks like."

The McDonalds had a small cluttered workshop area in one corner of the basement, nothing more than an old chest of drawers with two two-by-eight-foot sheets of three-quarter-inch plywood screwed together to make the top of a small workbench, and a couple of steel shelving units with plastic boxes for storage.

Lucas had seen the workshop the first time in the house, after Wilson McDonald was shot. He went straight to it, checked all the tools. No glass cutter. He found a roll of black plastic electricians’ tape, which he bagged, but that seemed unlikely to be the tape they wanted. He walked once around the basement, looking behind the water heater, the furnace, through racks of paint cans and a pile of hoses and miscellaneous gardening equipment: no gallon glass jugs.

Del was working the kitchen. When Lucas came back up the stairs, he said, "Got lots of tape. Duct, plastic mending, bunch of it."

"Good. Bag it up," Lucas said. "Check the wastebaskets and her car, see if you come across any small balls of tape that might be the right length. Two would be good." He went on through the living room, found that the carpet had been removed. Wilson McDonald’s blood hadn’t seeped through to the wooden floor, which looked freshly waxed.

Sloan had run quickly through the bedroom, not expecting to find much, and had moved on to a large, first-floor guest room which had a walk-in closet the McDonalds used for general storage. This was where Audrey McDonald had gotten the shotgun with which she’d killed her husband. The closet was jammed with motoring, golf, and boating equipment, all of it apparently belonging to Wilson McDonald. The homicide cops investigating the shooting of Wilson McDonald had taken the gun and shells, but hadn’t dug into the back of the closet. Sloan hauled everything out, found nothing of special interest, and then, as an afterthought, was patting down the weather gear, life jackets, golf and hunting jackets.

Just as Lucas walked in, he felt a heavy lump in the pocket of a golf jacket, and manipulated it out through the layers of cloth. Box of cartridges.

"Gimme a bag," he said to Lucas.

"What is it?"

"Boo-lets," he said.

Lucas held the transparent plastic bag and Sloan manipulated the box into it. Lucas turned the box on its side and read: ".38 Remington. Excellent."

Sloan stood up and said, "It’d be nice if her prints were on the box."

"Yeah, but I’m not holding my breath."