John Sandford - Secret Prey

One of the uniformed cops stuck his head in the door: "Del says no glass cutter in the kitchen. No gallon jugs either."

"Okay… check the garage."

At the end of an hour, they still had no glass cutter or gallon jugs, but did have nine rolls of tape and the box of cartridges. Sherrill had been going through the house files again, and had pulled out a stack of Amoco credit card receipts; the McDonalds shared a single account, but the cards had separate numbers. "If they go back far enough, look for credit card charges in the Duluth area in the days before Ingall disappeared," Lucas said. "We found an Amex charge in Chicago, the day before, for Wilson…"

"They go back that far…" She started flipping through them.

A little more than an hour after the search started, McDonald’s attorney showed up. "What’s going on?"

Lucas said, "Search warrant. Mrs. McDonald has a copy. She’s in the TV room." He pointed him through to the TV room, and Glass asked, "You really think there’s something going on here?"

"I ain’t doing it for the exercise," Lucas said. "You’ve got a problem, I think."

Glass wandered off to find McDonald, and the uniformed cop came back from the garage: "No jugs, no glass cutter."

"Gonna have to give up on the jugs," Lucas said. "The glass cutter could be anywhere, if she didn’t throw it away. Anybody look in the silverware drawer?"

Del looked at the cop, and they both shook their heads.

"Watch this," Lucas said. He pulled open drawers nears the sink, until he found the silverware drawer, then pulled that out all the way and stirred through the contents.

Nothing. Same with the cooking utensils drawer. Nothing.

"Fuck it," he said, pushing the drawers shut.

"The guy is a genius," the uniformed cop said to Del, who nodded.

Sherrill came out of the back, carrying an Amoco billing statement. "Got something," she said.

"Duluth?" Lucas asked hopefully.

"No. But Audrey filled up on successive mornings, the day before Ingall disappeared, and the day he disappeared. So sometime in that twenty-four hours, she drove off a tank of gas."

"Huh," Lucas said. "She could’ve been filling somebody else’s car, or Wilson’s car."

"Wilson filled up that night."

Lucas nodded: "All right. That’s something. That’s a straw, and we need straws."

"And that’s about all we got," Del said. "I’d bet you anything that door in O’Dell’s apartment was taped with duct tape, and we found duct tape, but I bet there’s a roll of duct tape in every goddamn house in the city. A jury’s gonna blow that off."

Glass had been walking back through the house, Audrey McDonald limping along a step behind him, and he heard Del’s last comment: "Jury’s gonna blow off what?" he asked.

"Just… nothing," Del muttered.

"Mrs. McDonald says she thinks you, specifically, Chief Davenport, have targeted her for a personal attack. We’d hate to think that was true."

"You know that’s bullshit," Lucas said to Glass-and then his eyes skipped beyond Glass to Audrey McDonald, who was peering at him with her snake’s eye.

"It is true, and I know why," she said. "Because if you can pin something on me, then Wilson’s father will inherit, and his father and his father’s friends run everything down there at City Hall."

Lucas was shaking his head: "I don’t even know Wilson’s father."

"Oh, bullshit," she snapped, picking up Lucas’s word. But she looked so gray, so old-lady-like, that hearing the vulgarity tripping so easily from her tongue was almost shocking. "There’s no way that he’s going to let McDonald money get out of that goddamned family."

"Mrs. McDonald…" Glass cautioned, but Lucas was becoming interested. Audrey McDonald was not quite visibly shaking, but he could sense it in her: she was very close to the boil. But he didn’t know what would happen if she did tip over the edge. So he pushed a little.

"Mrs. McDonald-can I call you Audrey?"

"No, you may not."

"Audrey, we know you killed your father, and we know why. We even know why you killed your mother, I’m sorry to say. For the money. It’s not so clear that you killed all the others, but we think we’ve got a pretty good list, and stuff is beginning to turn up." He picked up a bag on the kitchen counter, with a roll of duct tape sealed inside. "You didn’t use this duct tape on Susan O’Dell’s doors, did you? Because if you did, our lab will be able to tell…"

"Lucas, Lucas…" Glass was sputtering, but Lucas wasn’t looking at him. He was watching Audrey, the grayfaced, self-effacing little brown beetle, who was shuffling up to her attorney’s elbow, then past him, and she said, "My parents, my parents…"

"… and we know you went to Duluth the day before Andy Ingall disappeared, and that you fired that Contender pistol of Kresge’s, the one that killed him, and-"

And Audrey launched herself at him, so quickly that Lucas was surprised, unable to quite fend her off without hurting her. Her right hand, hard and bony as a crow’s foot, caught the skin at the side of his throat and when he wrenched away he felt her fingernails slicing through the skin; then Sherrill had Audrey around the waist and heaved her back, and Glass wrapped her up. "You fucking…" Audrey growled, still struggling to get at him, her black eyes fixed on Lucas. "You fucking… You talk to that fucking sister of mine…"

"Jesus, Lucas, you’re bleeding," Sherrill said.

"Get me some toilet paper or something," Lucas said, watching Audrey McDonald as her struggles subsided.

"Gonna ruin your shirt," Sherrill said, coming back with a box of tissues. She pulled out a wad and pressed it against his neck.

"Worth it," he said, watching Glass wrestle Audrey McDonald back toward the TV room. He looked around. "Are we about done here?"

"Another hour, if we really think that glass cutter is here somewhere," Del said.

"Keep looking," Lucas said. "I’m gonna take off."

"I better come along," Sherrill said. "You’re pretty cut up."

"All right," Lucas said. To Dell, "You and Sloan figure it out from here."

"You going home?" Del asked.

Lucas could feel the blood seeping through the tissue. "No. I’m gonna go talk to that fucking sister of hers."

Helen and Connie Bell were watching television when Lucas and Sherrill arrived. Helen opened the door, smiled at Lucas, nodded at Sherrill, then frowned and said, "Good God, what happened to you? Are you hurt?"

"Um… your sister scratched me. Sort of blew up."

"Why? Well… come in. Why were you talking to Audrey?"

Connie Bell turned backward on an easy chair to listen to the conversation: Lucas, Sherrill, and Helen were standing in the entryway, and Lucas said, "I’ve got some fairly bad news, I think. Uh, maybe you’d rather get it in a more formal way…"

"No-no-no, tell me."

Lucas nodded. "We think it’s possible that, uh, your sister may have committed some of the murders you listed in your letter to me."

Helen took a step back, one hand going to her throat. "Audrey? Oh, no."

"Could we, uh, could we sit down, I just have a couple of things," Lucas said.

"The couch."

They stepped into the front room, and Lucas and Sherrill sat on the couch while Helen leaned against the chair where Connie was sitting. Lucas said, "If you want Connie to go do homework or something…"

"No way," Connie said. To her mother: "I’m old enough to stay."

Her mother looked at her for a moment, then nodded. "You can stay."

Lucas looked at Sherrill, and then asked, "When you were younger, was there ever anything… Did you think anything was odd about the way your father died? Or your mother?"

Helen looked at them in stunned silence, then said, "My father was an evil man. We don’t talk about him."