John Sandford - Secret Prey

As he told the story, he began to stroke her, his voice never faltering or showing emotion, but his hands always moving slowly. After a moment she slowly backed away, and he stepped after her, still talking. When her bottom touched the edge of a couch table, she braced herself against it, closed her eyes.

"Are you listening?" he asked; his hands stopped momentarily.

"Of course," she said. "A few minutes before six and the shooting started."

"That’s right," he said. He pushed her back more solidly into the couch table and said, "Spread your legs a little."

She spread her legs a little.

"A little more."

She spread them a little more.

"Anyway," he said, gently parting her with his fingertips. "Any one of us could have killed him. It was just a matter of climbing down from the tree, sneaking back up the path…"

"Did you do it?" she asked.

"What do you think?"

"You could have," she said. And then she said, "Oh, God."

"Feel good?"

"Feels good."

"Look at me…"

She opened her eyes, but they were hazy, a dreamer’s eyes, looking right through him. "Don’t stop now," she said.

"Look at me…"

She looked at him, struggled to focus on his dark, cool face. "Did you kill him?"

"Does the thought turn you on?"

"Oh, God…"

Susan O’Dell’s apartment was a study in black and white, glass and wood, and when she walked in, was utterly silent. She pulled off her jacket, let it fall to the floor, then her shirt and her turtlenecked underwear, and her bra. The striptease continued back through the apartment through her bedroom to the bathroom, where she went straight into the shower. She stood in the hot water for five minutes, letting it pour around her face. When she’d cleaned off the day, she stepped out, got a bath towel from towel rack, dried herself, dropped the towel on the floor, and walked back to the bedroom. Underpants and gray sweatsuit.

Dressed again, warm, she walked back to the study, stood on her tiptoes, and took a deck of cards off the top of the single bookshelf.

Sitting at her desk, she spread the cards, studied them.

She’d once had an affair, brief but intense, with an artist who’d taught her what he called Tarot for Scientists. A truly strange tarot method: business management through chaos theory, and he really knew about chaos. An odd thing for an artist to know, she’d thought at the time. She’d even become suspicious of him, and had done some checking. But he was a legitimate painter, all right. A gorgeous watercolor nude, which nobody but she knew was O’Dell herself, hung in her bedroom, a souvenir of their relationship.

After she realized the value of the artist’s tarot method, he’d bought her a computer version so she could install it on her computer at work-the cards themselves were a little too strange, and a little too public, for a big bank. They’d done the installation on a cold, rainy night, and afterwards had made love on the floor behind her desk. The artist had been comically inept with the computer. He’d nearly brought down the bank network, and would have, if she hadn’t been there to save him. But she could now access electronic cards at any time, protected with her own private code word.

Still. When she could, she preferred the cards themselves: the cool, collected flap of pasteboard against walnut. Hippielike, she thought. McDonald referred to her as a hippie, but she was hardly that. She simply had little time for makeup, for indulgent fashion, or for the flattering of men- all the things that Wilson McDonald expected from a woman. At the same time, she obviously enjoyed the company of men, and her relationship with the artist and a couple of other men-about-town had become known at the bank. And she was smart.

As McDonald had thumbed through his box of mental labels, he’d been forced to discard housewife and help meet, lesbo and bimbo . When word inevitably got around about the tarot, McDonald had relaxed and stuck the hippie abel on her. The label might not explain the hunting, or the manner in which she’d cut her way to the top at the bank… but it was good enough for him.

Fuckin’ moron.

O’Dell laid out the Celtic Cross; and got a jolt when the result card came up: the Tower of Destruction.

She pursed her lips. Yes .

She stood up, cast a backward glance at the spread of cards, the lightning bolt striking the tower, the man falling to his death: rather like Kresge, she thought, coming out of the tree stand. In fact, exactly so…

She shivered, pulled a cased set of books out of the bookcase, removed a small plastic box, opened it. Inside were a dozen fatties. She took one out, with the lighter, went out to her balcony, closing the glass doors behind her. Cold. She lit the joint, let the grass wrap wreaths of ideas around her brain. Okay. Kresge was dead. She’d wanted him dead- gone, at any rate, dead if necessary, and lately, as the merger deal crept closer, dead looked like the only way out.

So she’d gotten what she wanted.

Now to capitalize.

Terrance Robles hovered over his computer, sweating. He typed:

"Switch to crypto."

You’re so paranoid; and crypto’s boring

"Switching to crypto…"

Once in the cryptography program, he typed:

"What have you done?"

Why?

Oh shit. "Somebody shot Kresge today. I’m a suspect…"

My, my…

Even with the crypto delay, the response was fast. Too fast, and too cynically casual, he thought. More words trailed across the screen.

So, did you do it?

Robles pounded it out: "Of course not."

But you thought I did?

He hesitated, then typed, "No."

Don’t lie to me, T. You thought I did it

"No I didn’t but I wanted you to say it."

I haven’t exactly said it, have I?

"Come on…"

Come on what? The world’s a better place with that fucking fascist out of it .

"You didn’t do it."

A long pause, so long that he thought she might have left him, then: Yes I did .

"No you didn’t…"

No reply. Nothing but the earlier words, half scrolled up the screen.

"Come on…" A label popped up:

The room is empty .

"Bitch," he groaned. He bit his thumbnail, chewing at it. What was he going to do? Looking up at the screen, he saw the words.

Yes I did .

Marcia Kresge opened her apartment door and found two uniformed cops standing in the hallway.

"Yes?"

"Mrs. Kresge?" The cops looked her over. Late thirties, early forties, they thought. Very nice looking in a rich-bitch way. She was wearing a black fluffy dress that showed some skin, and was holding a lipstick in a gold tube. She had a lazy look about her, as though she’d just gotten out of bed, not alone.

"Yes?"

They kept it straightforward: her husband had been killed in a hunting accident.

"Yeah, I heard," she said, leaning against the doorpost. Her eyes hadn’t even flickered; and to the older cop they looked so blue he thought he might fall in. "Should I do something?"

The cops looked at each other. "Well, he’s at the county medical examiner’s office. We thought you’d want to make, er, the funeral arrangements."

She sighed. "Yeah, I suppose that would be the thing to do. Okay. I’ll call them. The medical examiner."

The older of the two cops, his experience prodding him, tried to keep the conversation going. "You don’t seem too upset."

She thought about that for a moment. "No, I’d have to say that I’m not. Upset. But I’m surprised." She put one hand on her breast, in a parody of a woman taken aback. "I thought the asshole was too mean to get killed. Anyway, I just don’t… mmm, what that’s colorful redneck phrase you policemen always use in the movies? I don’t give a large shit."