John Sandford - Secret Prey

Routine investigation would dredge it all up, and either the killer would be caught or he wouldn’t. Whichever, Lucas felt fairly distant from the process. He’d been through it dozens of times, and the routine greed, love, and stupidity killings no longer held much interest.

Evil was interesting, he would still admit; this a residue from his term in Catholic schools. But so far he detected no evil in the killing. Spite, probably; stupidity, possibly. Greed. Anger. But not real evil…

He rode mindlessly for a while, the winter fields and woods rolling by, holsteins out catching a few uncommon November rays, horses dancing through hillside pastures; a few thousand doomed turkeys… Then he glanced out the side window, caught the boles on the oaks, recognized them, shivered. Turned up the tape.

He’d been dreaming again, lately; he hated the dreams, because they woke him up, and when he woke, in the night, his mind would begin running. And the dreams always woke him…

One dream had an odd quality of science fiction. He was being lowered, on some kind of platform, into a huge steel ylinder. Nearby was a steel cap, two feet thick, with enormous threads, which would be screwed into place after he was inside, sealing him in. The process was industrial: there were other people running around, making preparations for whatever was about to happen. He was cooperating with them, standing on the platform obviously expectant. But for what? Why was he about to be sealed inside the cylinder? He didn’t know, but he wasn’t frightened by the prospect. He was engaged by it, though. He’d start thinking about it, and then he’d wake up, his mind churning…

The other dream was stranger.

A man’s face, seen from a passing car. There were small beads of rain on the window glass, so the view was slightly obscured; in his dream, Lucas could not quite get a fix on the face. The man was hard, slender, wore an ankle-length black coat and a snap-brim hat. Most curious were the almond-shaped eyes, but where the surfaces of his eyes should be-the pupils and irises-there were instead two curls of light maple-colored wood shavings. The man seemed to be hunched against a wind, and the drizzle; he seemed to be cold. And he looked at Lucas under the brim of the hat, with those eyes that had curls of wood on their surfaces.

Lucas had begun to see the almond shapes around him on the street. See them on the faces of distant men, or in random markings on buildings, or on trees. Nonsense: but this dream frightened him. He would wake with a start, sweat around the neckline of his T-shirt. And then his mind would start to run…

He turned up the ZZ Top yet another notch, and raced toward the Cities, looking for exhaustion.

An hour after Lucas had passed that way, Jamest. Bone hurtled down I-35 in a large black BMW. As he crossed the I-694 beltline he picked up the cell phone and pushed the speed-dial number. The other phone rang three times before a woman answered it, her voice carrying a slight whiskey burr. "Hello?"

"This is Bone. Where are you?"

"In my car. On my way back from Southdale."

"I’m coming over," he said. "Twenty minutes."

"Okay… you can’t stay long. George is-"

"Twenty minutes," Bone said, and punched off. He pushed another speed-dial button, and another woman answered, this voice younger and crisper: "Kerin."

"This is Bone. Where are you?"

"At home."

"Dan Kresge’s been killed. Shot, probably murdered. Had you heard yet?"

"No. My God…"

"I’ll be at the office in an hour, or a little more. If you have the time…"

"I’ll be there in ten minutes. Can I get anything started before you get there?"

"Names and phone numbers of all the board members…"

They talked for five minutes; then Bone punched out again.

A three-car fender bender slowed him a bit, but he pulled into the downtown parking garage a little less than a half hour after he made the first call. He’d gotten out of his hunting clothes and was wearing a Patagonia jacket with khakis and a flannel shirt. He pulled the jacket off as he rode up in the elevator.

Marcia Kresge met him at the door in a blue silk kimono. "You like it? I bought it an hour ago."

"I hope you’re not celebrating," he said.

He said it with an intensity that stopped her: "What happened?"

"Your soon-to-be-ex-husband was shot to death up at the cabin this morning. I’m undoubtedly one of the suspects."

Kresge looked mildly shocked for a quarter-second, then slipped a tiny smile: "So the fucker’s dead?"

"I hope to Christ you didn’t have anything to do with it."

" Moi? " she asked mockingly, one hand going to her breast.

"Yeah, Marcia, you’re really cute; I hope you’re not that cute when the cops show up."

"The cops?" Finally serious.

"Marcia, sit down," Bone said. Kresge dropped onto a couch, showing a lot of leg. Bone looked at it for a moment, then said, "Listen, I know you think you fucked over Dan pretty thoroughly. You’re wrong. Last week the board granted him another two hundred and fifty thousand options to buy our stock at forty, as a performance award. If the merger goes through, and it’s botched, the stock’ll be worth sixty in a year. If the merger is done exactly right, it could be at eighty in a year. That’s ten million dollars, and if it’s held for a year, you’ll take out eight after taxes."

"Me? I-"

"Marcia, shut up for a minute. The options have value. They become part of his estate. You’ll inherit. You’ll also get the rest of his estate, that you didn’t get in the divorce. No taxes at all on that. In other words, Dan gets murdered, you get ten million. I’m up there with a gun, and guess who’s fucking Marcia Kresge?"

"Jesus," she said.

"I seriously doubt that he’s involved."

"But they can’t think I…?"

"You didn’t, did you? You know all those crazy nightclub characters…"

"Bone: I had not a goddamned thing to do with it. I really did think I’d taken him to the cleaners… and I mean, I didn’t like him, but I wouldn’t kill him."

He knew her well enough to know she wasn’t lying. He exhaled, said, "Good."

"You honest to God thought…"

"No. I didn’t think you went out and hired some asshole to kill him," Bone said. "What I was afraid of is, you’d mentioned to one of your little broken-nosed pals that if Dan died, you’d get another whole load of cash."

"Well, I didn’t," she said. "Because I didn’t know that I would."

"Okay… I don’t think it would be necessary to mention to the police that we’ve been involved," he said dryly.

"Good thought," she said, matching his tone precisely.

"All right." He stood up and started toward the door. "I’ve got to get down to the bank."

"The bank? God, when you called, I thought maybe…" She’d gotten up and come around the couch.

"What?" He knew what.

"You know." She slipped the belt of the kimono; she was absolutely bare and pink beneath it. "I just got out of the shower."

"I thought George was coming over."

"Well, not for a couple of hours… and you gotta at least tell me what happened."

"Take off the kimono."

She took it off, tossed it on the couch. He was staring at her, like he always did, with an attention that both disturbed and excited her.

"What?" She unconsciously touched one arm to her breastbone, covering her right breast as she did it. Bone reached out and pushed her arm down.

"Put your hands behind you," he said. "I want to look at you while I tell you this."

She blushed, the blush reaching almost to her waist. She bit her lower lip, but put her hands behind her back.

"We started out like we always do, walking back into the woods. You know how that trail goes back around the lake…"