Back in his car, Lucas picked up the car phone and called St. Anne’s College, which was located a few blocks from his house in St. Paul. He told the St. Anne’s operator that he knew it was late and nuns commonly don’t take calls from men in the middle of the night, that this was an emergency and perhaps a matter of life and death, that he was with the police department… and he got his nun.
Sister Mary Joseph, a psychology professor and childhood friend he’d always known as Elle Kruger: "Lucas? Is somebody hurt?" A sharp, somewhat astringent voice, becoming more so as they got older.
"Nothing like that, Elle. I’m sorry to disturb you, but I have a couple of questions on a case."
"Oh, good. I was afraid… Anyway, have you read the Iliad lately?"
"Uh, no, actually." He looked at his watch. Had to get to Bone’s place.
"Have you ever read it?"
"That’s the one… No, that’s the Odyssey. I guess not. Same guy, though, right?"
"Lucas…" She sounded exasperated. "I keep forgetting you were a jock. Listen, go down and get theIliad, the one that’s translated by Robert Fagles, that’s the one I’m reading now, and I’ll tell you what parts to read if you don’t want to read the whole thing."
"Elle…"
"The thing is, this translation is much coarser, in all the right places, than the old ones-my goodness, the Trojan War resembled one of your gang wars. That was always obscured by the language of the other translations, but this one… the language is brilliantly apt."
"Elle, Elle-tell me later. I’m calling from my car and I’ve got a serious question."
She stopped with the Iliad: "Which is?"
"If a woman is routinely beaten by her husband, is it likely that she might betray him behind his back, while defending him when he was around?"
"Of course-wouldn’t you if you were in her shoes?"
"No."
"No, you probably wouldn’t. You’d probably go after him with a baseball bat… But yes, a woman might do that."
"I’m not talking about some kind of pro form a defense. I’m talking about really believing in the defense. But at the same time, betraying him to the police anonymously, then denying it even to the police."
"This isn’t a theoretical question."
"No."
"Then you’re dealing with a badly abused woman who needs treatment-if it’s not too late for treatment. Some people, if they’re abused badly enough, will identify with and even love their abusers, while another side of their personality is desperately trying to get out of the relationship. Just to use a kind of layman’s terminology, you could say you have a condition of… mmm… stress-induced multiple-personality disorder. The part of her personality that sincerely defends her husband may not even know that the other part of her personality is betraying him.??
"Shit… Excuse me," Lucas said. "So even if I broke her out from her husband in, say, a murder case, she could be impeached as being nuts."
" ‘Nuts’ is not accepted terminology, Lucas," she said.
"But she could be impeached…"
"Worse than that. If she were required to testify in the presence of her husband, she might flip over and start defending him-lying-because he so dominates her personality."
"All right."
"Will I be meeting this woman?"
"Probably not, Elle. I’ll tell you about it next time we talk. Right now, I’m running."
"Take care."
"You too."
Bone lived in a high-security building much like O’Dell’s, and not more than a five-minute walk away. Lucas dumped the Porsche in a no-parking zone outside the glass front doors, and when a security guard came to the doors, flashed his ID and was admitted to the lobby.
"I need to talk to James T. Bone," Lucas said.
"Don’t know if Mr. Bone is in. He often goes out at night," the guard said, moving behind the security console.
"Ring him and let it ring about fifty times," Lucas said.
The guard did that, and after a few seconds, said into the phone, "Mr. Bone, this is William downstairs. I’m sorry to bother you, but there’s a police officer here asking to see you… Yes, Deputy Chief Davenport, and he says it’s urgent. Yes sir."
He hung up the phone: "Mr. Bone is on fourteen," he said. "Take the elevator on the right."
Bone was waiting in the hallway outside his apartment door: as Lucas got off the elevator, he realized that this hallway also had only two doors, as had O’Dell’s. Something ticked at the back of his mind, but the thought was gone as Bone stepped out and said, "What’s going on?"
Bone was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, but was barefoot.
"You alone?"
"No, actually, I have a friend here… Come on in. What happened?"
Lucas stepped inside. A woman, about Bone’s age, was sitting on the couch.
"This is Marcia Kresge, Dan Kresge’s wife. We were just talking strategy."
"Was Wilson McDonald here an hour ago?" Lucas asked.
Bone looked at his watch: "Well, more than an hour. He left here probably at ten-thirty or ten forty-five."
"Ten-thirty. Have you been here ever since?"
"Yes… Marcia got here about…"
"About eleven-twenty," said Kresge.
"So what happened to McDonald?" Bone demanded.
"Did you make a deal with McDonald?" Lucas asked, ignoring the question.
Bone looked at Kresge, then back at Lucas: "No. What’s he done?"
"So you’re out of the job. Because he made a deal with Susan O’Dell."
"Oh, no, I’m not out of it at all." Bone shook his head. "Wilson thinks he can deliver several votes to Susan. He doesn’t know it, but he can’t. Well, maybe one. The rest are still up for grabs. Now what the hell happened?"
Lucas looked at Kresge, then back at Bone, interested in their reactions. "A couple of minutes after eleven o’clock, somebody rang the doorbell at Susan O’Dell’s apartment, and when she opened the door, shot her twice in the head with a handgun. O’Dell’s dead."
And they were, as far as Lucas could tell, stunned. Astonished.
Bone, who didn’t seem given to sputtering, sputtered, "That’s not possible. I just talked to her tonight."
"What time?"
"Seven o’clock or so." He looked at Kresge. "About the Community College deal."
Kresge was solemn: "You know what? It’s a crazy man. We could be next."
"Mr. Bone, I don’t want to imply anything, but you’re the obvious beneficiary of all this-the top job is opened up by a murder, then the main competition is eliminated. Again, I don’t mean to imply anything, but we really have to pin down where you were, and what you were doing all evening." He turned to the woman. "And the same with you, I’m afraid."
"Do you really think I’d do this?" Bone asked. He sounded more curious than afraid.
Lucas thought for a moment and then said, "I don’t know you well enough to say. But even if I didn’t, I have to make sure. If McDonald left here a little after ten-thirty, and you were here alone, and the woman didn’t get here until eleven-thirty… who has an alibi?"
"I wasn’t alone," Bone said. "I’m sorry, I should have said so… My assistant, I think you met her at the bank, the blonde? Kerin Baki? She was here. We were working on a presentation for the board."
"When did she leave?"
"A few minutes after Wilson-she was heading down to the bank. She’s probably still there," Bone said. "And between the time she left and the time Marcia got here, I made a half-dozen phone calls. There must be some way to get at phone records."
Lucas nodded. "We’ll get those."
And Bone said, "I’ll tell you something else: We know exactly how many votes I’ve got, which is nine. And we know how many Susan had, which is seven. I’m one vote away. At least three votes are uncommitted, and we were just working out ways to get one of those three. Because when we get one, all the others will come." He hopped off the couch, and started to prowl the apartment as he talked. "So what I’m saying is, I think I had the top job. This might knock me out-or slow things down. If the board thinks there’s the slightest chance that I’m implicated, I’m dead meat. Better to hire somebody else, and apologize to me later, if I’m innocent, than get stuck with a CEO who turns out to be a killer."