Secret Prey

  ‘‘Jeez,’’ Connie said.

  ‘‘Do you remember the night your father died?’’ Lucas asked.

  Again, Helen seemed stunned. Then she nodded, slowly. ‘‘I didn’t know what was going on until the sheriff came— Mom wouldn’t let me get out of bed. But I knew my father was sick, that’s what they said up the stairs to me, Mom and Audrey.’’

  ‘‘Was he sick for a while, or was it a sudden attack?’’ Lucas asked.

  ‘‘He was sick for a long time, I think, more than a week . . . I don’t know, exactly, I was only ten . . . but for a long time. Then the night that he died . . . God, it was cold, it was already snowing up there, that’s one thing I remember about it. The wind used to whistle through that old farmhouse. It was a bad place. And I heard him having a terrible argument with Audrey, before I went to bed. We slept in the same bedroom, Audrey and I . . . Then, I don’t think anybody went to bed. I heard him groaning, and in the bathroom, that’s the last thing I remember about him— being in the bathroom. Then he was quiet, and then I think I went to sleep, and the next thing I knew, people were banging around and cars were coming, and he was dead.’’

  ‘‘Had Audrey ever come up to bed?’’

  Helen looked down at her daughter, then at Lucas. ‘‘I don’t think so. I don’t think she ever came upstairs that night. She was downstairs, I think, taking care of him . . .’’

  ‘‘Huh. Okay. What about your mother?’’

  ‘‘Mother was . . . ruined . . . by my father. It was like there was no person left. I used to think, this is what a slave would be like, after they beat all the resistance out of him. ‘Do this,’ ‘Yes, master,’ ‘Do that,’ ‘Yes, master.’ She was like a rag.’’

  ‘‘And she died . . . Was Audrey there when she died?’’

  ‘‘Yes. We both were. I think she had the flu, she was sick to her stomach, and sometimes she’d start vomiting, and Audrey would keep her in bed and spoon-feed her. And then one night she passed out, and Audrey called the hospital. She died on the way.’’

  ‘‘Your mother and father were both cremated,’’ Lucas said. ‘‘Was that Audrey’s idea?’’

  ‘‘Yes.’’

  ‘‘You didn’t keep the ashes, by any chance.’’

  ‘‘No . . . Mom used to walk over to a park that was a mile or so from our house, down here in Lakeville, and we didn’t know any cemeteries, so Audrey just said it would be nice to sprinkle her around the trees in the park, she’d be there forever as part of the trees.’’

  After a moment of silence, she said, ‘‘You think she killed them? Poisoned them, or something?’’

  Lucas nodded. ‘‘I think it’s very possible. The insurance payments . . .’’

  Helen shook her head: ‘‘There wasn’t any insurance, as far as I know.’’

  Lucas said, ‘‘Huh.’’ Then, ‘‘What happened after your mother died?’’

  ‘‘Well, we couldn’t stay together. Audrey was barely eighteen, and so I went off to my aunt’s home until I was of age. She got a scholarship and went to college. I worked my way through a tech school, a business course . . . and then she married Wilson and everything.’’

  Lucas said, ‘‘I know this probably comes as a shock. But, if it would be possible . . . and I honest to God think you should do this . . . if I come over with a stenographer and an assistant county attorney, could we sit here some night this week and go over the whole thing? Your whole history? In a really detailed way.’’

  Helen said, ‘‘I can’t believe that Audrey . . .’’

  ‘‘Yes, you can,’’ said Connie. ‘‘I told you, she’s a mean old witch under all of that pretend stuff.’’

  ‘‘Connie . . .’’ Her mother looked a warning at her.

  But Connie said to Lucas, ‘‘Why’d you want to know about Grandma’s ashes?’’

  ‘‘Well, just a thing,’’ Lucas said.

  ‘‘What thing?’’ Connie persisted.

  ‘‘If your grandmother was poisoned, a lab analysis of ashes might turn something up.’’

  Connie looked up at her mother, and Helen frowned at her and said, ‘‘What?’’

  ‘‘How about that lock of hair on her picture? You said you cut it off the day she died.’’

  Helen put her fingertips to her mouth. ‘‘Oh, that’s right. I’d forgotten; completely.’’ To Lucas: ‘‘Would a lock of hair help?’’

  Lucas shrugged. ‘‘I don’t know.’’

  Sherrill, who’d been sitting quietly, finally chipped in. ‘‘The doc up in Oxford thought George Lamb was killed with arsenic. If Amelia was killed the same way, and it sounds pretty similar, then it would show up in hair.’’ They all looked at her, and she said, ‘‘I read about it.’’

  Lucas turned back to Helen.

  ‘‘Could we have the hair?’’

  THIRTY

  AT TEN MINUTES AFTER MIDNIGHT, AUDREY WAS STILL packing. The cops had gone, taking a small box of miscellaneous junk with them. It wouldn’t amount to anything, she thought. Tape? Everybody had tape—though she wished she’d taken a minute to clean those doors after killing O’Dell. But she’d never even thought of it.

  On the bright side, she had thrown away the glass cutter. It was lying somewhere on the shoulder of I-94, gone forever. On the down side, she hadn’t thrown it away after she bombed the Bairds. She’d thrown it away after she hit Karkinnen, but only because she hadn’t thought she’d need it again. She hadn’t thought about evidence.

  She hadn’t thought about it since the cremation of her mother. With all the other killings, if she’d been caught, she would’ve been caught, and that would have been that. There hadn’t seemed any point in worrying about evidence, except in the most gross ways—don’t leave any fingerprints, don’t buy any guns.

  She’d have to start thinking.

  She’d gotten to Wilson’s sweaters. He’d spent a fortune on sweaters, though they made him look the size of an oil tanker. He thought they made him look like a football lineman; in fact, they made him look even fatter than he was. ‘‘Three hundred dollars for a sweater. I remember when you told me that, I couldn’t believe it. Three hundred dollars. And it’s not just the three hundred dollars; if we’d saved it, if we’d put it in Vanguard, it would have tripled by now.’’

  Lights in the driveway. She froze. Cops again? She drifted for a few seconds: She hated the police: that Davenport, he was the devil in this deal. A year from now, if she could find a gun, she’d take care of him, all right. Give it a year or a little more, and then one night, maybe in January, when people’s doors were shut and windows were closed, she’d wait by his house. If she could find a gun like the one she’d used on Kresge: now that was a wonderful gun. Wonderful . . .

  And snapped back. A car in the driveway. She hurried to the window, looked down, and saw Helen walking across the driveway toward the front door. Helen? She hadn’t called.

  A thought stuck her. Helen had been talking to Davenport again. She turned and hurried toward the stairway, as the doorbell rang downstairs.

  HELEN LOOKED STRANGE: ORDINARILY NEAT, HER hair was in disarray, her face pinched, her mouth tight. She didn’t take off her coat, but simply stood in the entryway.

  ‘‘I don’t really know how to ask you this, Audrey. I’ll just tell you what Chief Davenport told me. He thinks you killed Mom and Dad. Poisoned them. I told him I didn’t think you did, and then I thought about it all evening and finally thought I better come over.’’

  ‘‘Mom and Dad? Mom and Dad? Do you think I killed Mom and Dad?’’ Audrey was horrified, even as the small kernel in the back of her brain hardened around her secret knowledge.

  ‘‘I . . . don’t think so,’’ Helen said, but her eyes drifted away. When they came back, she said, ‘‘Chief Davenport thinks that’s why they were cremated. To cover up.’’

  ‘‘That’s ludicrous,’’ Audrey snapped. ‘‘Davenport is all tied up with Wilson’s father; they’re trying to keep me from the money. Wilso
n’s money will go to his father, you know, if they decide I’ve committed a crime. That’s all it is: it’s about money.’’

  Helen looked at her for another moment, a little too coolly, Audrey thought, then said, ‘‘Okay. I just had to ask. Chief Davenport asked me not to talk to you, so please don’t mention it—but I had to come over and ask you.’’

  Audrey turned away, and started wandering back toward the kitchen, as though disoriented, as though saddened by this sisterly betrayal. ‘‘You must talk to him all the time,’’ she said.

  ‘‘Only three times,’’ Helen said. ‘‘He doesn’t seem like a bad man.’’

  Audrey spun: ‘‘Oh, snap out of it, Helen,’’ she snarled. ‘‘You never figured out how things work. You sit down there and sort your little auto parts and the world just goes by. You should ask yourself someday, ‘What happens when I get old? What happens when I’m trying to live on Social Security, when nobody wants me anymore?’ Helen, you just don’t have any idea.’’

  Helen turned to the door. ‘‘Don’t worry about me; just worry about yourself, Audrey . . . By the way, after Mom died—did you know this? I think you did—I took a lock of her hair to put with her picture on the piano. Chief Davenport took it with him. He’s going to have it analyzed by the laboratory.’’

  ‘‘Well: I’m sorry to see you lose your precious lock, but at least it’ll show she wasn’t poisoned,’’ Audrey snapped.

  ‘‘I hope so,’’ Helen said. ‘‘Audrey, when all this is done, we’ve got to sit down and talk. So much stuff happened when I was a kid, I never got it straight.’’

  ‘‘I’ll set you straight,’’ Audrey said. ‘‘Come back when it’s done.’’

  Helen left, the heavy door wheezing shut behind her: Wilson had insisted on the special door, three inches thick, saying, ‘‘It’s the first thing people will know about us.’’ Two thousand dollars for a door . . .

  ‘‘Fuck,’’ she said aloud, wrenching her mind away from Wilson. A lock of hair! Could it really be analyzed, or was it a game that Davenport was playing with her? Was there any way to find out?

  Maybe the Internet, though it seemed far-fetched. She went to the library, waited impatiently to get on-line, brought up the Alta Vista search engine, and typed in: ‘‘ARSENIC HAIR.’’

  Almost immediately, she got back a list of articles, and her heart sank. The first one was, improbably, on Napoleon. She opened it, and it referred to arsenic content in Napoleon’s hair. Shit. She went to the next one, something to do with analysis, and it also mentioned arsenic in hair. Hair.

  She punched the off button on the computer, and the computer’s fan moaned as it closed down. The computer didn’t like that, she thought. Didn’t like to be up and running, and then cut off.

  Fuck the computer.

  Arsenic and hair. She had to do something, and do it quickly.

  THIRTY-ONE

  LUCAS WENT TO LUNCH WITH DEL, WHOSAID, ‘‘I CAN’T shake free of this opium thing. A couple of the old ladies have been calling every day, wanting to know what we’re gonna do.’’

  ‘‘That’s your problem, thank God,’’ Lucas said. ‘‘Go over and talk to Towson or one of his guys, see what they want to do.’’

  ‘‘They want it to go away,’’ Del said. ‘‘So does Rose Marie. Nobody wants to deal with it. I don’t want to deal with it anymore. Hell, I’m going on vacation in two weeks. I’m finally getting my shot at Cancu

  ´n. But now these old ladies, they want something done.’’

  ‘‘Why? Tell them to keep their mouths shut, and everybody’ll forget it,’’ Lucas said.

  ‘‘They’re not thinking that way. They’ve all been getting together in these fuckin’ . . . covens. They think they’ve got to pay their debt to society,’’ Del said morosely.

  ‘‘Jesus. Well, you asked for it,’’ Lucas said brightly. ‘‘I feel for you, pal. But when that doc told you about it, you coulda walked away.’’

  ‘‘Ah, man, you gotta find a way to help.’’

  ‘‘Not me.’’ Lucas laughed, and thought, My God, I think I just chortled . ‘‘I’m not Narcotics. Go talk to the guys down there.’’

  ‘‘They treat me like I got the plague . . .’’

  ‘‘That’s ’cause you got the plague,’’ Lucas said. ‘‘I don’t want to hear about it.’’

  ‘‘Fuck me,’’ Del said, moodily. ‘‘I wasn’t cut out for this.’’

  Lucas laughed again, said, ‘‘Nobody is. Sixty old ladies? Is that what it is? You poor fuck. You’re dead meat.’’

  Del looked at his watch. ‘‘That lab report is about due.’’

  ‘‘Let’s get back,’’ Lucas said.

  ‘‘You think you got her?’’

  ‘‘It’s almost too much to hope for,’’ Lucas said. ‘‘When Helen said she had a hair sample, my teeth almost fell out.’’

  LUCAS HAD A MESSAGE WHEN HE GOT BACK: ‘‘CALL DAVIS.’’ Davis Ericson worked in the state crime lab. He punched in the number, and Ericson picked up.

  ‘‘What’d you get?’’

  ‘‘Lucas. Tell you what, I’ve never seen this before. Not in real life.’’

  ‘‘What? You got arsenic?’’

  ‘‘The hair is stiff with it,’’ Ericson said. ‘‘She must’ve been eating it for a month before she croaked.’’

  ‘‘Goddamnit, Davis.’’

  LUCAS PUNCHED IN THE COUNTY ATTORNEY’S NUMBER, waited for three minutes, and Kirk, the chief of the criminal division, picked up. Lucas explained about the lock of hair.

  ‘‘If Helen can swear that it came from her mother, then that might do it,’’ Kirk said.

  ‘‘That’s where Helen says it comes from.’’

  ‘‘Give me her name and address. We’ll set up an appointment for a deposition.’’

  ‘‘What about Audrey?’’

  ‘‘Easiest way to do it is, we’ll talk to the judge, and have bail revoked on the killing of her husband. And then before tomorrow’s bail hearing, we’d get an arrest affidavit put together on her mother, and arrest her on that. Maybe boost the charge on her husband to first degree.’’

  ‘‘So how long is that gonna take? The bail revocation?’’

  ‘‘Mmm . . . we’ll have to get some stuff in writing. If you’ll set out the circumstances of obtaining the hair sample, and describe the lab test—just in general terms—and walk it over here, I’ll have a secretary put together an affidavit and we’ll have the judge sign it this afternoon. If you can get your memo over here in an hour, we’ll have it done by the end of the day.’’

  ‘‘And then we pick her up.’’

  ‘‘Yup. We could have her inside for supper.’’

  ‘‘Excellent,’’ Lucas said.

  AUDREY HAD BEEN UP MOST OF THE NIGHT, PACKING. She wanted to have it done in case she was rearrested, so that Wilson’s clothing wouldn’t still be hanging in the closets when she got back. She was eradicating the sight of him.

  And she would probably be rearrested, she thought. If Davenport really had that hair, he would probably be coming for her in the next day or two. How long would a lab take? She had no idea. But she was certain it couldn’t be done before nine o’clock in the morning.

  By seven-thirty, with four hours out for sleep, she was done with the packing. After a last quick check around, she hauled the boxes down to the front entry, and stacked them. After a quick shower and a change of clothes, she went to the library, fired up the computer, brought up Word, and wrote for half an hour, editing and reediting as she worked. Satisfied, she dumped the document to a floppy disk, put it in her purse.

  At nine o’clock, she was out of the house.

  THE GOLD BUG WAS A CUSTOM JEWELRY BOUTIQUEON the south side of Minneapolis. A half-dozen craftsmen worked out of a small common smelting area, with actual fabrication of jewelry done in separate shops on a wing off the smelting area. She’d been there once before, with a ladies’ tour group from the country club, to look at gold
jewelry and how it was made.

  She hadn’t bought any gold, but she’d found the tour interesting.

  A tall, bony redheaded woman was working at the desk, looked up and said a cheery ‘‘Hello’’ as Audrey tentatively poked her nose through the door.

  ‘‘Hello. Are the shops open?’’

  ‘‘Sure. Go on down. Do you know . . . ?’’

  ‘‘Yes. I’ve been here before.’’

  Audrey scuttled away down the wing, walked past the open fire door that led to the smelting area, slowed, looked inside. A sign beside the door said, ‘‘Please come in and watch; but please be quiet.’’

  One man was working at an exhaust hood; three other hoods were vacant. He looked up, focused on her.

  ‘‘I’m sorry,’’ she said. ‘‘Is it . . . okay?’’

  ‘‘Sure. Come on in. I’m just smelting a little gold, here.’’ She walked in with her purse clutched in front of her, an old lady. She’d have to work on this image, a little, she thought. If she got in the newspapers, perhaps she should look younger . . .

  The goldsmith had gone back to his work, a small crucible that he worked with a torch; she couldn’t see exactly what he was doing, but didn’t particularly care. She wasn’t interested in goldwork. With her eyes fixed on the torch, she drifted to another one of the exhaust hoods. The table beside it was empty. Goddamnit. She passed behind him, now looking around at the equipment, then turned so she could watch him from the other side. He was vaguely aware of her, she thought, but he was used to being watched, and paid no real attention.

  She moved up to the next exhaust hood, and saw the bottle.

  That was it. She stood next to the table, and when he momentarily turned away, his back more toward her, she reached carefully out, picked it up, and slipped it into her coat pocket. It was small, no bigger than a shotgun shell or an old iodine bottle. With the bottle in her hand, she moved closer to him.

  ‘‘Very interesting,’’ she said finally, as he finished a small pour into what looked like a lump of plaster.