Secret Prey (31 page)

TWENTY-FOUR

MOST OF THE FILE ON AUDREY MCDONALD HAD BEEN
developed since she killed Wilson: name, age, weight, distinguishing marks. She had a number of scars; too many, Lucas thought. Her only prior contact with police had been two traffic tickets, one for speeding, one for failure to yield, which had resulted in a minor collision.

He made quick calls to the Department of Natural Resources and the Department of Public Safety: she’d never had a hunting license, never taken gun safety training, never applied for a handgun permit.

She’d graduated from St. Anne’s. That was interesting— she’d know her way around out there, she’d know what would happen if she called the Residence. She might even have overlapped with Elle Kruger, if just barely. He made a note to ask. After college, she’d worked as a librarian, then with a couple of charitable organizations.

He mulled over the file for a few minutes, then glanced at his watch. Almost time to see Elle. But first he picked up the phone book and looked up Helen Bell, Audrey’s sister. She was listed in South Minneapolis. Not expecting too much, he punched in her phone number. She answered on the second ring.

‘‘I’d like to come talk to you about the whole case,’’ he said, after he introduced himself.

‘‘I . . . thought it was just about done,’’ Bell said. He noticed her voice immediately: she sounded like Audrey, who sounded like the woman who’d called him to press him on McDonald.

‘‘Well, we haven’t settled the Kresge thing,’’ Lucas said. ‘‘I just want to come over and chat. Get some opinions.’’

‘‘Okay. I’ll be here the rest of the day.’’

THREE NUNS, ALL IN TRADITIONAL DRESS, WERE
perched on chairs in Elle’s room, watching a young nurse change a saline drip. When Lucas stepped in, easing the door closed, one of them chirped, ‘‘Hi, Lucas. She’s awake.’’

Lucas stepped around the beige curtain that masked Elle’s bed from the outside, and looked down at his oldest friend. They’d gone to Catholic grade school together, goofing along the sidewalk, her long golden hair shimmering in the autumn sunlight, her blue eyes happy, smiling at him . . . His first clear memory of a female other than his mother. Now, her head was swathed with bandages, her face bruised, showing yellow disinfectant, her eyelids drooping over blue eyes that seemed more hazy than happy. She smiled weakly and he thought she looked wonderful.

‘‘You look terrible,’’ he said. ‘‘Like somebody beat the daylights out of you.’’

‘‘That’s funny,’’ she mumbled. ‘‘I sort of feel that way too.’’

He touched her foot. ‘‘You’re gonna make it.’’

‘‘Yes, probably. Do you know what happened?’’

‘‘Pretty much. You got a phony phone call. Somebody pulled you out of the building, and ambushed you.’’

‘‘I don’t know,’’ she said. ‘‘I can’t remember much after about six o’clock, but that’s what I’ve been told.’’

‘‘How bad is the memory thing?’’ He swallowed as he said it: he didn’t need bad news, not about Elle.

Again she smiled weakly: ‘‘Just a couple hours of amnesia
nothing unusual. I’ve taken a few tests: there’s no impairment. Permanent impairment.’’

‘‘All right,’’ he said. ‘‘All right.’’

‘‘The girl . . .’’

The girl would live. She smelled vanilla when a nurse wiped her arm with an alcohol swab; smelled fried eggs in a glass of apple juice, celery in oatmeal. When asked to read aloud from a chart, she’d read quite well—except that she’d read some words backward, pronouncing them correctly in their backward form.

‘‘She could recover,’’ Elle said. ‘‘I feel so bad that she was running after me . . .’’

‘‘Nothing you could do,’’ Lucas said.

‘‘Does anybody have any idea who might’ve done it?’’ A shadow of fear in her eyes, something he’d never seen before.

He shook his head. ‘‘Not yet.’’

They talked for ten minutes before Elle’s eyelids grew heavy; Lucas kissed her on the cheek, with much approval from the squad of nuns who perched like blackbirds on their row of red leatherette chairs. Before he left the hospital, he talked to her doctor for a minute, picked up a pack of X rays and some preoperative photos at the radiology department.

THE HENNEPIN COUNTY MEDICAL EXAMINER’S OFFICE
was just down the street from police headquarters, connected by what the cops half seriously referred to as the secret tunnel. Lucas dumped his car in one of the cop slots on the street and then took the tunnel to the ME’s office. He showed the photos and films to one of the forensic pathologists.

‘‘Probably right-handed, and probably not too tall,’’ the ME said, sucking on an illegal Winston. ‘‘The blows all hit on the side and back of her head, rather than coming down on top. But if it were a man, swinging flat, like a baseball bat, he would’ve knocked her head off. This looks more
like somebody coming down, but from a relatively low swinging position.’’

‘‘Possibly a woman?’’

The ME pushed his lips out and blew a capital O. ‘‘Could be. Whoever it was, wasn’t all that strong. Jumping somebody from behind, with a club—a strong guy would have killed her, hitting her like that.’’

‘‘Huh.’’

LUCAS HAD SEEN HELEN BELL AT THE ARRAIGNMENT
of her sister, and had been struck by how little they resembled each other, in the sense of a total package, for two women who looked so much alike. Audrey at thirty-eight was a beetle, hunched, fussy, dressed all in earth colors, her movements small and nervous. Bell at thirty-four was not exactly a butterfly, but seemed even in the restrictive circumstances of a legal hearing to be much more outgoing, much more like a woman in her thirties. Her hair was touched with color, she wore a bit of makeup, and at the arraignment, she’d worn a pretty red silk scarf with a conservative blue business suit; and she smiled.

Helen Bell lived in a small white house with green shutters, backed onto an alley, a shaky-looking garage standing behind the house. Lucas left his car in the street and walked up the narrow seventy-year-old sidewalk to the front door and knocked. Bell was there in a minute, smiling nervously when she opened her door and said, ‘‘Chief Davenport? Come in.’’

The living room had a just vacuumed look, and magazines, mostly about homemaking, were stacked carefully on a coffee table. ‘‘Coffee?’’ she asked. ‘‘It’s only microwave instant.’’

‘‘Yes, that’d be nice.’’ The voice again: this was the tipster, all right. Lucas mentally kicked himself: he’d known that Audrey McDonald had a sister.

‘‘Decaf or regular?’’ She was bustling around, making sure he was comfortable; he felt as though he were on a first date.

‘‘Whatever you have . . . Regular is fine.’’ She went to get it, and he looked around the small living room, checked a shelf of paperbacks: self-help, mostly. How to succeed in business. ‘‘Where do you work?’’ he called.

He heard the door slam on the microwave: ‘‘Fisher Specialties down in Bloomington. You know—truck accessories. I’m in charge of the orders department.’’ She came out of the kitchen carrying two mugs of coffee. ‘‘Sit on the couch—I’ll take the easy chair.’’

‘‘Any children?’’

‘‘A daughter. Connie. She should be home from school any minute.’’

‘‘I wanted to talk to you about some background involving the death of Dan Kresge and then later, of Wilson McDonald . . .’’

‘‘Are they going to drop the charges against Audrey?’’

‘‘I don’t know, I don’t work in that area,’’ Lucas said. ‘‘Mrs. Bell . . . did you write to us about your brother-inlaw? Call me on the phone?’’

She looked too surprised by the question; she wasn’t surprised, but she acted as though she were, her eyebrows going up, her head cocking to one side. ‘‘Why . . .’’

‘‘I can get phone records, if I want to,’’ Lucas said. ‘‘And there’s nothing at all illegal about what you did. You were simply recommending an investigation.’’

She took a sip of coffee, then ran the index finger of her free hand around the rim of the cup. After a second, she said, ‘‘Yes, that was me. You’d already figured it out, I guess. But it couldn’t be from the phone—I called from Rainbow.’’

Rainbow was a supermarket. Lucas shook his head: ‘‘It’s just your voice. You sound a little, I don’t know— Canadian.’’

‘‘Aboot,’’ she said.

He nodded. ‘‘The first time I talked to your sister, I thought she was the one who called. So: How long ago did you decide Wilson McDonald was killing people?’’

‘‘I . . . thought there’d been a lot of deaths, to get him where he’d gotten. But it was only when Mr. Kresge was shot that I was really sure. You know that Mr. Kresge was going to merge the bank . . .’’

‘‘Yes.’’

‘‘And Wilson’s job was gone. I mean,
gone
. Then Mr. Kresge gets killed, and Wilson’s job was saved. And maybe he’s even in line for Mr. Kresge’s job. That was too much. There’d been too many of these things.’’

‘‘How long had he been beating your sister?’’

‘‘He beat her up before they got married,’’ Helen said. ‘‘She told me that later.’’

‘‘Then why’d she marry him?’’

‘‘Because she loved him,’’ Bell said simply. ‘‘She still loves him.’’

‘‘That’s a very odd relationship.’’

‘‘A kind of codependency,’’ Bell said. ‘‘You know . . . Never mind.’’

‘‘No. Say it.’’

‘‘My father, before he died, used to beat up my mother. And Audrey. And he would’ve started on me, if I’d been old enough. And somehow, I think that did something to Audrey’s brain—she thinks women
deserve
to get beaten. I mean, she’d never say that, but way deep down, I think she might
feel
it. I used to plead with her to leave the man.’’

‘‘Where do you come from? You and Audrey?’’ He knew, but if he could get her rolling, anything might come out.

‘‘Oxford. It’s up in the Red River Valley,’’ she said.‘‘The closest big town is Grand Forks.’’

‘‘Sugar beets?’’

‘‘No, we never really farmed. We lived just outside Oxford—we could walk to school—and my dad was a mail carrier. Both of my grandfathers were farmers, though. Dad grew up on a farm, and so did Mom, but he just wasn’t interested.’’

‘‘Your folks still live up there?’’

‘‘No, they both died. My father died when I was little,
when I was ten, that was . . . twenty-four years ago, now. Just about this time of year. Mom died four years later. In the spring. After Mom died, I went to live with my aunt Judy in Lakeville and Audrey went to college. She went to St. Anne’s.’’

‘‘I know . . . Listen, I assume that you didn’t talk to us directly because you didn’t want to offend your sister. Or alienate her. Is that right?’’

Bell nodded. ‘‘You know, she kept talking about how she loved him and what a great provider he was, but I really thought he was an animal and that sooner or later, he’d kill her. He
was
a killer. You said on the phone that the Kresge thing wasn’t finished yet, but you know, it really is. Wilson killed him. Maybe I should have come forward earlier, but . . . I wasn’t sure. And he was my sister’s husband.’’

‘‘The good provider.’’

‘‘Easy to laugh off if you’re a police officer, down here in Minneapolis,’’ Bell said. ‘‘But if you were poor in Oxford, Minnesota, and we pretty much were, then ‘good provider’ isn’t something you laugh at.’’

Lucas glanced around: ‘‘Are you married? Or . . .’’

‘‘Divorced,’’ she said. ‘‘Four years now.’’ She shook her head at the unstated question. ‘‘Larry never laid a hand on me. We just found out that we weren’t very much interested in each other. We were dating when I got pregnant, and we got married because we were supposed to.’’

‘‘All right,’’ he said.

They talked for a few more minutes, then Lucas stood up. ‘‘Thanks.’’

‘‘What about Dan Kresge? Are you all done now?’’

Lucas shrugged. ‘‘I don’t know. There doesn’t seem much more to look at. We’ll keep picking at little corners, but there’s not much left.’’

‘‘I’m glad that man’s gone—Wilson, not Mr. Kresge. I know it’s a sin, but I’m glad he’s gone.’’

LUCAS HAD JUST TAKEN A STEP TOWARD THE FRONT
door when the door opened and a slender teenager stepped
in, dressed head to foot in black, carrying a black bookbag. Her hair was blond, no more than an inch long, and a tiny gold ring pierced one eyebrow. She looked quickly at her mother, then to Lucas, gave him an assessing smile and said, ‘‘My. This is a studly one.’’