"I was just on the way."
"I want to watch, if that’s okay."
"Sure. It’s over on the ward, at Hennepin."
Hennepin General hospital was just down the block and over one; Sloan and Lucas walked over in the brilliant, clear morning light, just a fresh touch of winter in the wind.
"Her lawyer says she’ll make a statement," Sloan said, as they crossed the street. "They’re trying to hurry things along, get a bond hearing this afternoon."
"They’re talking self-defense?"
"Man, it was self-defense," Sloan said. "I was just out at the house, there’s blood all over the place. And wait’ll you see her. He chopped the shit out of her head with a golf trophy. She got like forty stitches in her scalp."
"She sure sold you on it."
"If it’s a setup, it’s the best one we’re ever going to see. The ME says he’s got her skin under his fingernails, and she’s got big stripes on her legs where he peeled it off. Her legs are a mess, her back and ribs look like she’s been in a gang fight, her face is completely blue with bruises, except where it’s cut. Her old man’s fingerprints are all over the golf trophy. In blood."
"Okay…"
"But just in case," said Sloan, reversing direction, "we should bump her a little. I was gonna get Loring to do it, because’s he’s such a mean-looking sonofabitch, but I can’t find him. If you’re gonna be around, after we get the statement, could you do it?"
"Yeah, sure."
"Bump" was Sloan’s private code word for frighten. He’d be the nice guy and get all the basic information, but even with a voluntary statement it sometimes helped to shake up the suspect. You could never tell ahead of time just what might fall out…
A tall, white-haired attorney named Jason Glass, known for handling spousal abuse cases, a court reporter, and Sloan gathered around Audrey McDonald’s bed. She was propped half upright, with a saline solution dripping into one arm through an IV. Lucas stepped into the room and looked at her. He hadn’t seen much worse, he thought, where the woman actually survived. He stepped back outside the open door and leaned against the wall to listen.
Sloan led McDonald through the routine, with interjections by her attorney: Yes, she was making the statement voluntarily. No, she hadn’t been offered anything in return for making the statement. No, she hadn’t been asked to answer police question before her attorney arrived, but yes, she had told police that she’d shot her husband, Wilson McDonald, with a twelve-gauge shotgun.
As Lucas listened to her recount the sequence of violence, Frank Lester, the other deputy chief, straggled down the hall, peeked in the door, and said, "How’s it going?"
Lucas shrugged: "She ain’t arguing. She says she did it. And McDonald was the guy: nothing she’s saying makes it seem any other way."
"We’re getting some preliminary stuff back from the lab. Everything is consistent with what she said early on."
"They had a history," Lucas said. "The question now is, can she live without him?"
"She’s got a problem?"
"When I saw her, at O’Dell’s, she was virtually a hand puppet. She had no personality left that he didn’t supply."
"Well… you know they’re pleading self-defense," Lester said.
"Yeah."
"If the lab comes through, I doubt she’ll even be indicted."
"If the lab comes through, she shouldn’t be," Lucas said. "Speaking of the lab, did we ever get that spectrographic analysis on the slug fragments?"
"Mmm, I heard somebody say something about it. I think it’s back, but I don’t know what they said."
"All right…"
They listened for a minute: Audrey was telling of the pursuit down the stairs, of the panicky call to Helen. "You gonna bump her a little?" Lester asked.
"Yeah, when she’s done. I’m starting to feel kinda bad about it, though," Lucas said.
"I don’t know," Lester said, peering up at him. "I thought you were looking pretty cheerful."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. You getting laid again?"
"Jesus, you married guys don’t think about anything but sex."
"That’s true," Lester said. "Well, let me know what happens."
Lucas nodded. "I will."
"And say hello to Sherrill for me. You know, when you see her."
Sloan had gotten through the shooting, and now was working backward: Did Audrey McDonald know that her husband was suspected of committing a number of murders?
"No…" A little fire now, but in a prissy way. "That ridiculous Davenport person is pushing this. Wilson would never kill anybody. He’d lose control and he’d beat me up, but sometimes I was asking for it. Last night… last night I just couldn’t help myself, I ran into the bedroom to hide and there was the shotgun and the shells on the floor and he was coming and I knew how to load it…" She started rambling down the path to the shooting again, and Sloan cut her off.
"Did your husband own a pistol?"
"No. Well, yes, years ago…"
"State firearms records indicate he purchased a.380-caliber Iver Johnson semiautomatic pistol at North Woods Arms in Wayzata in 1982."
"I’m sure you’re right. But he never used it. He called it his car gun because he had to work down in the colored area sometimes, way back when."
"Do you know where he kept it?"
"No, I assumed he gave it away. Or disposed of it."
"He doesn’t have it in his car now?"
"I don’t think so; I think I would have known…"
"Do you remember how you heard the news that Andy Ingall was lost up on Lake Superior?"
"Well… I think somebody from the bank called and told us."
"Mr. McDonald was with you when you found out?"
"Why, yes. Somebody called him, not me."
"You don’t know if he’d been in Duluth about that time."
"I’m sure he wasn’t; it would have stuck in my mind."
Sloan was pushing a dead end. Lucas waited a few more minutes, listening, then breezed into the room, as though he was in a hurry. Sloan looked up and said, "Chief Davenport… Mrs. McDonald."
She seemed to shrink away from him, what was left of her. Most of her face was black with bruises and subcutaneous bleeding around the cuts; a row of tiny black stitches marched up one cheek like a line of gnats; her hair was cut away on one side of her head, and a scalp bandage was damp from wound seepage.
"Mrs. McDonald, I’ll be brief," Lucas said. "We’re virtually certain that your husband was involved in the deaths of Kresge, Arris, and Ingall. And we’re wondering how, if he killed all those people, you could not have known about it."
"Why… why… he didn’t do that."
And her attorney, Glass, was sputtering, "Hey, hey, hey… we’re not answering those kinds of questions." "You should," Lucas said. "If Mrs. McDonald doesn’t cooperate, well, Mr. Glass… you know how it looks. I mean, if a person has ambitions to resume her life in society."
"What?" Audrey McDonald looked dazed, swinging her face from Glass to Lucas. "Resume my life?"
"That’s a lot of horse pucky, Lucas," Glass said. To Audrey McDonald: "Ignore him."
"At your own risk," Lucas said. "You know how people talk."
"People," she said.
Lucas added, "We will be executing a search warrant at the McDonald home this morning, looking for more evidence. But we already have substantial support for the idea that Wilson McDonald killed all three of them. And we will want to understand what your role was in the killings… if you had one."
"You can’t…"
"Mrs. McDonald," Lucas said, suddenly going soft. "I mentioned this the other night. I recognize your voice."
"What?" As though she hadn’t heard him correctly. And Glass peered at her, a frown on his face.
"You’ve called me," he said. "You knew your husband was killing people."
"That’s utterly-" She groped for a word other than "ridiculous," but couldn’t find one. "-ridiculous."
"What are you doing, Lucas?" Glass asked.