"Perpendicular," Sherrill suggested.
"Yeah. Like that," Hanks said.
"You didn’t hear a car start?"
"Nope. But I was quite a way from the house, and I was wearing my hat with earflaps… So I probably wouldn’t have."
"Pink scarf," said Lucas.
"Pink scarf," Hanks said.
"What’s the pink scarf?" Sherrill asked, after they let Hanks go. They were sitting alone in the canteen, eating Twinkies from the coin-op.
"Susan O’Dell wears a kaffiyeh as a scarf. It’s pale red and white-she was wearing it when I saw her Saturday."
"What’s a kaffiyeh?"
"You know, one of those head wraps like Arabs wear," Lucas said. "Like what’s-his-name, the Palestinian guy, always wears."
"Oh, yeah. Him. But his is black and white."
"There’s another kind that’s red and white. And it would look pink from a distance, or pink and white."
"He said pink."
"O’Dell said she never left her tree before seven-thirty, when she shot her buck," Lucas said. "Then she gutted him and dragged him up to the trail and sat down next to her tree to wait until nine, which was the agreed-on time to take a break. Didn’t go anywhere."
"I think it’s the car that’s interesting. If there wasn’t a car, it almost had to be one of those guys. Whoever it was had to know the Kresge place pretty well, and there’s no way you could walk in from very far away."
"Yeah, but he’s pretty shaky on that car stuff," Lucas said. "O’Dell would have been walkingawayfrom her tree stand if she was going in the direction Hanks said she was. She was definitely at her tree when Bone came by to pick her up at nine o’clock."
"Maybe we push Miz O’Dell," Sherrill said. "See which way she goes."
"Not yet," Lucas said. "I want to go back up there, to Kresge’s, look around. And we need to know more about the bank-merger idea-of the three realistic candidates to run the bank, we have accusations against two of them, McDonald and O’Dell. All the accusations came in anonymously, from women. At least, we think the accusation pointing at McDonald came from a woman… So the question is, are they legit? Or are they meant to drag O’Dell and McDonald into an investigation that would eliminate them from contenders to run the bank."
"You mean, by Bone? Or somebody working with Bone?"
"I’d hate to think so," Lucas said. "Because I kinda like the guy. But all of them are smart and tough. And the stakes are pretty big. Bone would be looking for an edge."
"So we push Bone."
"Let’s wait before we push anyone. Just a day or two… Let me get back up north."
"Want me to come?"
Lucas looked at her as he finished his Twinkie. "If you want to. If you stay out of my goddamned life while I’m trapped in the car."
She flushed and said, "I meant what I started out to say, before we got sidetracked. If you still want her, you’ve got to get off your ass and go after her. If you don’t, you’ll just… drift away. And you’ll never know for sure that it’s over. If you go after her, you’ll know pretty soon whether there’s any hope."
"I’ll think about it," he said.
"So when are we going up north?"
"Tomorrow," Lucas said, looking at his watch. "We should have some biographical stuff about the people McDonald supposedly killed: Let’s take a look at that."
They were six blocks from police headquarters when Sherrill’s telephone chirped. She fumbled it out of her jacket pocket one-handed, said, "Yeah?" and then passed the phone to Lucas. "Sloan," she said.
Lucas took the phone: "What’s going on?"
"I solved the Kresge case," Sloan said laconically. "I had a little break from the Ericson thing, and I thought I might as well clean it up."
"That’s good," Lucas said. "It’s a burden off my mind."
Sloan’s tone of voice changed: "Terrance Robles just walked in and said he may know who did it."
Lucas, uncertain, and not wanting to bite too hard, said, "You’re kidding."
"I’m not kidding. He’s out sitting at my desk. Where are you?"
"About two minutes away."
"See you in two minutes," Sloan said.
EIGHT
Robles was sitting at Sloan’s desk when Lucas and Sherrill arrived at Homicide. He was talking to Sloan, and Lucas watched for a minute. Robles was crossing and recrossing his ankles under his chair, twisting his hands together, rubbing the back of his neck, squirming in the chair. Serious stress, Lucas thought. Lucas walked up behind him, trailed by Sherrill, and when Sloan looked up, Robles turned, then got to his feet.
"D-D-Detective Davenport," he stuttered. "I’ve bbbeen talking to Detective Sloan, he thinks you should know about this."
Lucas took a chair and Sherrill pulled one out of a nearby desk.
"So… you think you know who did it?" Lucas asked.
"No. I know somebody who says she did it, but I don’t think she really did. But if I didn’t tell you, I thought… I don’t know what I thought."
"So?" Lucas grinned at him and made a What? gesture with his hands.
Robles had a friend, he said, a woman, a computer freak he’d met in an Internet chat room, and then in person, when it turned out that she lived in Minneapolis. When the news hit the papers that Polaris was considering a merger, and a large number of administrative and clerical personnel in Minneapolis could lose their jobs, she called him to ask him if the merger could be stopped.
"Her mother works at Polaris, routine clerical stuff, exactly the kind of job that would probably be wiped out," Robles said.
"And you told her that the merger couldn’t be stopped."
"Not exactly. I told her that nobody much wanted it except Kresge and a small majority of board members, and the only reason the board was going for it was the stock premium…"
"Explain that," Sherrill said. "I don’t understand stocks."
"Well, see, Midland has offered to buy all the outstanding Polaris shares by trading with their shares, one to one. When they made the offer, they were trading in the sixties-sixty-plus dollars per share-and we were trading in the upper thirties. Their stock dropped on the offer, down to about fifty-three right now. But ours went to forty-six right now, and the closer we get to the merger, and the more certain it looks, the more ours will go up. If we finally merge, and nothing else happens, it’ll probably be around fifty dollars a share. Polaris needs ten board members to okay the deal. If you look at how many board members own how much stock, the tenth biggest holder…" Robles looked at Sherrill, who seemed to be having trouble following the explanation. "What I’m saying is, of those ten members needed to approve the merger, the one with the smallest holding is Shelley Oakes. He has ninety thousand shares, plus options for fifty thousand more at an average price in the thirties. If the sale goes through at fifty bucks, he’ll make a couple of million bucks over what the stock was worth before the merger talk started."
"Ah," Sherrill said, as though she understood.
"The biggest holder, Dave Brandt, has better than four hundred thousand shares, plus God only knows what he has in stock options, which he could exercise before the deal goes down. He’ll make tens of millions. Literally tens of millions."
"So the board and Kresge make millions, and everybody else gets fired," Lucas said.
"No, not exactly. Some people would make it. There’re rumors that the investment division will be kept intact, that Midland wants the division. Then there are other executives who could make a stink, but most of them have stock options."
"Do you have options?" Lucas asked.
"Yeah, yeah. I’ve got options on five thousand shares at a bunch of different prices that average out to about thirty-five, so if it goes to fifty, I’d make seventy-five thousand. But I’ll tell you what, that’s about six weeks’ pay for me. And the government would get most of it anyway. I mean, it’s nothing."