"Okay…"
They checked all the other stands in turn, spread out over three quarters of a mile of trail, but all focused on the swamp, and pathways into it and out of it. McDonald’s stand was uphill and not far to the left of one of the big lenses of thin ice.
Suppose, Lucas thought, McDonald had lifted the Contender from the gun cabinet in the early morning just before the group left the cabin. That would explain why it was missing. And the Contender, long for a pistol, was still short enough that he could have concealed it under a hunting parka. Then, in the dark, he walks back down the track to the hillside above Kresge’s stand, waits for the shooting to begin, fires a shot killing Kresge, walks back to his stand, and pitches the Contender into the swamp. Climbs the tree… shazam. He’s up in his tree stand just like the others, and never fired his gun…
"Let’s go," he said to Wiener, as he climbed down.
"You figure anything out?" Wiener asked.
"Maybe," Lucas said. "What time did you get here the day Kresge was shot?"
"About ten o’clock, after I heard… I was supposed to come in around noon with my trailer and we’d haul any deer carcasses into the registration station and then over to the meat locker. They figured to be out of there about noon, one way or the other," the old man said. "The sheriff asked me about the guy the telephone man saw-the one walking along the edge of the woods-but I just wasn’t around. Sorry."
The hunter in the woods. Lucas had almost forgotten. Of course, it could have been anybody, another hunter just crossing the property to get back to his car. "Damn it," he said aloud. Another hunter didn’t feel right; Lucas was a believer in coincidences, except when they explained too much. And if the man in the hunting coat was the killer, and if the telephone man had been right about his size, then McDonald wasn’t the killer.
"Beg pardon?"
"If somebody was walking in the woods like the telephone guy said, where’d he be going?"
"Sounds like he was heading back to the cabin."
"That’d be a problem," Lucas said.
Krause was working on the kitchen table when he got back, a battered leather briefcase next to his foot. Mrs. Wiener was washing dishes, and the odor that came from the cabin’s oven was so wonderful that Lucas almost fainted with the impact.
"What’s cooking?"
"Cinnamon rolls-they should be just about ready," she said, turning from the sink. She was a chubby, pink-faced woman with kinky white hair. She took a dish towel from the stove handle, dried her hands, and opened the oven. "Perfect," she said.
Krause had gotten up from the table to look. "I get the first one," he said.
"They’ve got to cool," she said firmly. "And I’ve got some frosting. You all go sit down."
Krause retreated to the table and his papers. "Anything good?" he asked Lucas.
Lucas said, "You know what a Contender is? Long pistol, single-shot, breaks open like a shotgun?"
"I’ve seen ’em," Krause said.
"You didn’t show one on the inventory of guns taken out of the house."
"There wasn’t one," Krause said. "There were three rifles and two shotguns."
"You got a diver on your staff?" Lucas asked.
"Sure. You think you know where the gun is?"
"Maybe. It’d be nice if it were right downhill from McDonald’s stand. There’s a big patch of water there… I wouldn’t be surprised if he pitched it in there."
"I don’t know about diving in swamps," Krause said doubtfully. "It might mess up the scuba gear. I can check."
"He’ll need a metal detector," Lucas said. Mrs. Wiener said, "There’s a gun just like that in the drawer in the gun cabinet."
Lucas looked at Krause and Krause closed his eyes, leaned back in his chair, and said, "Shit." Then at Mrs. Wiener, "Excuse the language," and then at Lucas: "I told Ralph to take the guns out of the cabinet. I didn’t check."
Wiener said, "Well, let’s go look," and Mrs. Wiener said, "I saw it while I was cleaning. I dusted the cabinet ’cause they left it open, and that’s one place I usually can’t dust."
The gun cabinet was built into an internal wall, behind a set of shallow shelves. A key fit into a small lock that was out of sight below one of the shelves, and the entire unit swung out. Inside was an empty gun rack with space for eight long guns, and below the rack, two closely fit drawers.
"Was this a big secret, or did everybody know about it?" Lucas asked Wiener.
"Hell, all his friends knew-all the guests. It was just supposed to hide the guns from burglars. But when he had one of those parties, the cabinet’d just be standing open."
"Okay."
"Top drawer," Mrs. Wiener said.
"Did you move the gun?" Lucas asked.
"No. I never touched it. As soon as I saw a gun in the drawer, I shut it."
"She don’t like guns," Wiener said, as Lucas gently pulled the drawer open.
And there was the Contender, with a Nikon scope, sitting neatly on a black plastic pad with two boxes of.308 ammunition off to the side.
"That goddamn Ralph," Krause said. "He never opened the drawers."
Lucas took a pen from his pocket, slipped it through the gun’s trigger guard, lifted it out of the drawer, and carried it over to the kitchen table and placed it carefully on the table. Then, using a paper napkin to unlock the barrel, and touching only the tip of the stock and the tip of the barrel, he pushed the barrel down and open. A spent shell ejected onto the table.
"Don’t touch it," Lucas said. He knelt and looked through the barrel, said, "Yeah. Fired and never cleaned." He looked at Wiener: "Do you know anything about Kresge’s gun habits?"
Wiener shrugged: "He always cleaned them. Big thing, you know, sit around and bullshit about the Army and shooting and chain saws and clean the guns."
Krause again said, "Goddamnit," and then, a moment later, "That’s the gun, you betcha. That goddamn Ralph."
"Mrs. Wiener…"
"Sophia," she said.
"Sophia, do you have any plastic bags… garbage bags or anything?"
"Sure. Right here."
Sophia produced a box of kitchen garbage bags. She stripped one out and held it open, while Lucas stuck a pencil in the barrel of the Contender and gently slipped it inside. The shell went into a sandwich bag.
"I’ll have them in the lab tonight," Lucas said. "I’ll get somebody in to look at them right away."
Krause was still fuming, pushing papers into his briefcase. "I gotta go. I’m gonna find that sonofabitch and I’m gonna choke him to death. He couldn’t-"
Sophia Wiener broke in: "You don’t have time for a roll?"
Krause’s eyes clicked to the tray of cinnamon rolls, cooling on the stovetop with the pan of warm frosting next to them.
"Well," he said. "Maybe one."
SEVENTEEN
The days were getting shorter, two or three minutes of sunlight clipped off each afternoon; and the sky had gone dark by the time Lucas was within cell phone range of the Cities. He called the dispatcher, told her to locate the fingerprint specialist and get her down to the office. A half hour out, the car phone rang and he picked it up: "Yeah, Davenport."
"Lucas, this is Marcy… Sherrill." Her voice was tentative, as though he might not know her first name. "Are you on the way back?"
"Yeah. I’ll be at the office in a half hour. We maybe found the gun."
"What? Where?" Her voice suggested that she was on solider ground now, talking about the investigation.
"In a drawer in the gun cabinet. In the cabin."
After a moment of silence, Sherrill said, "Oh brother. I’m glad I’m not the one who missed it."
"You oughta see the sheriff: he’s talking manslaughter… Anyway what’ve you got going?" "I’d like to stop by your office and talk about it. If you’ve got a minute."