"You know who the real beneficiary is?" Kresge said. "Wilson McDonald."
"He made a deal with her," Lucas said.
Kresge made a rude noise: "She might have made a tactical agreement with him, just to grab the top slot. But after she’d gotten rid of Bone and a few other people, she’d have gotten rid of McDonald. She and Jim were actually friends, in a way-but she hated McDonald."
"But everybody says McDonald’s out of it."
"Not if there’s nobody else left," Kresge said. She looked at Bone. "Jim darling, I’d be very careful if I were you. Very careful."
Bone and Kresge agreed to stay at the apartment until Sloan got there. Lucas talked to Sloan by phone, and Sloan said he was nearly done with the McDonalds.
"What do you think?" Lucas asked.
"When I talk to Mrs. McDonald alone, she’s pretty straight," Sloan said. "When I get her around her old man, she’s a fucking ventriloquist’s dummy."
"I talked to Elle Kruger about that. She said severely abused women can get like that."
"We need to give McDonald a good look," Sloan said. "Something tells me he’s involved. I don’t know if I think that because he’s really involved, or because I just don’t like the sonofabitch."
"Listen, when you get to Bone’s… get him aside and talk to him about his sex life. Who he’s screwing. Because I think that tip about him sleeping with Kresge is right. You’ll understand what I mean when you see them together. And find out if he’s screwing his assistant. She’s a little chilly, but that’s probably just me. Maybe Bone can warm her up."
"I’ll do that," Sloan said.
"And you’ll need to talk to the assistant. I’ll give you her name and you can call her, and get her over to Bone’s."
"Where’re you going?"
"Home to make a list," Lucas said. "This fuckin’ thing is starting to confuse me."
FOURTEEN
Lucas lived in a ranch-style house in St. Paul, on a road that ran along the top of a Mississippi River bluff. From his front window he could see the lights of Minneapolis across the river. The neighborhood was quiet, fine for walking, and he and Weather had walked a lot when they were together.
Weather.
Why would somebody hit Weather? The Edina cops had exactly nothing. Zero. Zip. No likely neighborhood kids. One of the Edina guys had checked on Lucas-would he do it, why wouldn’t he do it. He’d been told emphatically that Lucas would not, and the cops had gone away.
But Lucas couldn’t accept it as a nutcase. Nutcases didn’t pick out random houses to bomb; or if they did, the chances of hitting someone with Weather’s history were…
Impossible. Not just slim. Impossible.
He’d once converted the master bedroom to use as a den, but after Weather arrived, he’d converted it back to a bedroom, and moved his drawing table into one of the smaller bedrooms. He hadn’t worked on a commercial game for years now: everything had gone to computers, and while he might still develop ideas and scenarios, he was rapidly moving away from game development.
Too much money, he thought sometimes. He’d made too much money, almost inadvertently, as sometimes happened in the computer age. He’d drifted from writing tabletop war games to writing game scenarios, which a University of Minnesota computer freak turned into games, to writing simulations of police emergencies to be played out on police computers. And his company had simply grown, first run out of his hip pocket, then with the computer freak, and finally by a professional businessman who’d taken the company public.
And now that he really didn’t need to write games, didn’t need to sit up until three in the morning thinking of new sci-fi beasts to challenge computer geekdom… he didn’t. He missed it, but he didn’t do it.
Now he sat at his drawing table, cleared away detritus from earlier skull sessions, pulled out a sheet of heavy paper and started making a chart.
The situation at the bank was too complicated. There were too many suspects, and all of them had motives. He needed to simplify and clarify.
But the firebombing prowled around the edge of his consciousness: that’s what he needed to settle. The bank killings were almost technical problems, problems that cops solved. The firebombing was personal. What if it was aimed at him rather than Weather? But why would it be?
What if Weather had a new boyfriend, a freak of some kind? Naw. That wasn’t Weather. She had a built-in bullshit detector, and nobody would get past that. Maybe she snubbed somebody…
Goddamnit. Work. The suspects:
Wilson and Audrey McDonald. What appeared to be a possibly explosive relationship; who knew what might be brewing in that little perfecta? And the more he thought of it, the more he thought that Audrey McDonald was the woman who’d called him-who was pointing the finger at her own husband.
Jim Bone. And Marcia Kresge and Kerin Baki.
He chewed on the end of his pencil. Baki was a little thin-what would she get out of the killings? Her job? An assistant’s job didn’t seem heavy enough, but hell, it might to the assistant. Bone, of course, had that reputation as a ladies’ man, and supposedly had been sleeping with Kresge’s wife. What if he was also sleeping with the assistant? And if he was, so what? There might be some kind of twisted connection between an illicit relationship between Bone and Marcia Kresge, and the killing of Dan Kresge, but even if they had a relationship, how could that lead to the killing of O’Dell?
Blackmail? He remembered one of Bone’s colleagues saying that Bone wouldn’t tolerate blackmail. Could O’Dell have tried? But Bone, if he wasn’t bullshitting about the phone records, pretty much had an alibi. Of course, the phones could be finessed.
Then there was Mr. X.
A Mr. X who might be killing for the reason everybody suspected-to stop the merger-either to save his job or simply as an expression of the general feeling at the bank. But if the killer was a Mr. X, he’d be almost impossible to find. And nobody knew what jobs would be lost yet. And why would he kill O’Dell, who’d taken a stand against the merger?
The killing of O’Dell, Lucas decided, had been an insane risk. Neither the McDonalds nor Bone’s group had enough to gain by killing her, to take the risk. If anybody had come along while the killer was going up and down in the elevator, they’d have been cooked…
Lucas frowned, thought about that for a minute, then called Dispatch. "Is Swanson still at the O’Dell apartment?"
"Yes, I believe so. You want his phone number?"
"Give it to me." He wrote the number at the top of his suspect sheet, then punched it into the phone.
"Yeah. Swanson."
"This is Lucas. Is Louise Compton there yet?"
"Yeah, right here, want to talk to her?"
"Put her on."
"Hello?"
"Ms. Compton, sorry to bother you… Could you tell me the exact words that Ms. O’Dell said to you when the doorbell rang? Did you actually hear the doorbell ring?"
"No, I didn’t hear the bell… She just said, ‘There’s somebody at the door,’ and the next thing I heard was the shots." Compton’s voice was breaking up under the stress of the killing, and ranged from hoarse squawks to sudden squeaks; every word was like a nail on a blackboard.
"Was she a good friend of yours?"
"No, not socially-she was my boss. Oh, God, I can’t believe…"
"You wouldn’t know who she was seeing socially… in a sexual sense, I mean."
"I… I don’t think she was seeing anyone. Not at the moment. Not for quite a while. She has a friend over at North, but he’s gay. They sort of squire each other around, when she needs an escort. Or he does."