‘‘Simple enough, after you’ve done it awhile,’’ he said.
She had no idea of what was going on, said, ‘‘Thank you,’’ and still looking carefully around the smelting room, drifted out the door. She stopped at two of the shops, looking at their small display cases. Then, glancing at her watch—it was already past ten o’clock—she headed for the door.
‘‘Have a nice day,’’ the redhead said, as she left.
You betcha .
TWENTY MINUTES LATER, AFTER A QUICK STOP AT A drugstore to buy a pack of razor blades, she fixed the pill in the parking lot of a Burger King. First, she took one of the Prozac capsules she’d gotten from Helen, carefully pulled the cap apart, spilled the drug into the palm of her hand and flicked it out the car window. Then she took out the bottle she’d stolen from the Gold Bug and looked at it. The simple label said, CAUTION , and below that, in small letters, Sodium Cyanide . And below that, Poison: If ingested, get physician’s help immediately. For industrial use only .
When the club ladies had visited the gold workshop, one of the goldsmiths had joked about using the cyanide to purify recycled gold. The same stuff Hitler’s boys had used to kill themselves, he’d said. She hadn’t known exactly what he was talking about—purifying the gold—but she remembered what he’d said about Hitler’s boys.
The cyanide was an off-white powder, innocent enough. She poured a little on the sandwich box, cut it up with the razor blade, then carefully refilled the Prozac cap with the cyanide. Then she slipped the top back on the cap: not bad. If you looked at it closely, it wasn’t quite right. But who looked at pills that closely?
She wrapped the pill in a napkin and put it on the car seat; the sandwich box she carried to a trash can and pushed it inside. A pay phone hung on the wall just inside the Burger King door, and she went in and dialed Helen’s number. Helen should be working, Connie should be at school. No answer. As a double check, she got the number of the auto parts place from directory assistance, called, and asked for Helen. Helen answered a second later, and Audrey clicked off as soon as she recognized her sister’s voice.
Helen’s house was no more than ten minutes away. If she tried to do something subtle, to sneak in, she’d probably draw more attention in the neighborhood than if she barged right in. She parked on the street, waited until she could see no one on the sidewalk, then hurried up the walk, through the outer porch, and rang the doorbell. No answer. She leaned on it the next time, ringing for a solid minute. Nothing.
Good.
She took her keys from her purse, found the key for Helen’s house, opened the door and went inside. The house was deathly quiet. She went straight through to Helen’s bedroom, to the corner where she kept her computer. Switched it on, took the floppy disk from her pocket, went to the My Documents folder. Helen had written a note to herself two months earlier, but the computer would update the time to show the last entry. Audrey slipped the floppy in the drive, brought up the text she’d written that morning, pasted it into the earlier note. Then she cut the text of the note itself, and checked her work.
If I die . . . the note began.
I’m sorry about everything! I killed those people, not Audrey! But Audrey was my only support, and I had to do something if Wilson was going to move up at the bank! If Wilson had lost his job all those years ago, what would have happened to Connie and me? Without the money from Audrey, we would have been on the street! My former ‘‘husband’’ is good for NOTHING!!! But I didn’t kill Mr. Kresge! I think that must have been an accident! And Chief Davenport, if somebody shows this to you, yes, I called you. I could no longer stand the way Wilson was treating Audrey! I was afraid he would kill her! I thought you would do an investigation and his treatment of her would come out and nobody would ever know it was me that called you, and Audrey could keep helping me, because now, if they got divorced, she’d get all kinds of money! Connie—I love you. You go stay with your aunt Audrey, because she really loves you. I’m sorry for all of this!!
And at the bottom of the note, she’d left all the fragments of sentences that she’d pushed while editing: I fearedilling heraaacidentkill treeting Wil;slonMisterKresgeWithout money I got from Audrey .
It would, she hoped, look like a practice note; she was especially proud of all the exclamation points. Helen used them everywhere, as though they were periods.
She closed the file, shut down the machine, put the disk in her purse, and headed for the bedroom. Helen carried a pill case with a chiming clock to remind her to take the pills; she took one at noon every day. The Prozac bottle itself she kept in the bedroom, in her bureau drawer. Audrey found the bottle, unscrewed the top, looked inside. A dozen pills. Carefully unwrapping the cyanide pill in the napkin, she let it drop on top of the pills in the bottle, and replaced the bottle, shut the drawer.
Out of the house: she’d been inside no more than ten minutes, she thought. As she drove away, she moved in the car seat and felt the cyanide bottle in her pocket. She should ditch it somewhere, she thought. But she liked the idea of it. A bottle of death. She thought about it for a while, then stopped in a park, where a thin shell of woods surrounded a small drainage lake. She stepped just inside the tree line, picked out a good-sized oak, walked over to it and sat down. Probed the ground with her car key: Damn. Frozen.
She looked around, spotted a culvert protruding from the edge of an embankment. She walked over to it, pushed the bottle well under the culvert. The bottle should be safe for years, she thought. Did cold weather affect cyanide? She had no idea.
Now , she thought, standing up.
Where are you, Davenport?
THIRTY-TWO
TWO UNIFORMED COPS WITH A WARRANT STOPPED by the McDonald house at four o’clock, and found it empty. Audrey McDonald’s car license-plate number was put on the air, along with a description. She was eating at Baker’s Square Restaurant, having waited impatiently all afternoon. Two cops went by while she was inside, but she missed them all going back home. At seven, the uniformed cops swung by her house again, and saw lights.
Audrey McDonald came to the door.
SHERRILL CALLED: ‘‘WE’RE SUPPOSED TO GO OUT TO dinner tonight.’’
‘‘Damn it, I’m sorry—but we’re busting Audrey Mc-Donald right now,’’ Lucas said.
‘‘All right. Tomorrow for sure.’’
‘‘Tomorrow.’’
AUDREY WAS PROCESSED THROUGHTHE COUNTYJAIL, then taken to an interview room to wait for her attorney.
J. B. Glass arrived a half hour later, a little white wine under his belt. He found Lucas waiting outside the interview room with Sloan, and said, ‘‘What the hell happened?’’
‘‘Your client’s a serial killer,’’ Sloan said laconically.
‘‘What, Sugar Pops or shredded wheat?’’ Glass said.
‘‘Her mother and father for starters,’’ Lucas said.
‘‘You’re really telling me I’ve got a millionaire client who might be a serial killer?’’ Glass asked in a hushed voice. He rolled his eyes to the heavens, the view toward which extended twenty-eight inches to the basement ceiling. ‘‘I don’t want to seem cynical, but . . . thank you, Jesus.’’
Then he was all business: ‘‘I want privacy with my client.’’
‘‘She’s in the room,’’ Lucas said.
‘‘Have you talked to her?’’
‘‘Nobody’s talked to her,’’ Lucas said. ‘‘She opened the door to her house and said, ‘I want my attorney.’ Nobody’s said a word to her since, except ‘Stand up, sit down, turn to the right.’ ’’
‘‘Good.’’ Glass nodded. ‘‘I’ll tell you, though, it’s gonna be a while before you can see her.’’
‘‘We can wait,’’ Lucas said.
THEY WAITED. GLASS TALKED TO HER FOR A HALF hour, asked Lucas if he could get a couple of cans of Diet Pepsi for them. Lucas walked through the dark hallways to a Pepsi machine, got two cans, walked back, passed them through the door.
‘‘Th
anks,’’ Glass said, as he shut the door.
Another twenty minutes passed, and then Glass opened the door and said, ‘‘Come in.’’
Sloan led the way, carrying a portable tape recorder. Lucas nodded at Audrey. She fixed him for a moment with her cobra eyes, then broke off and looked down at the table. When Sloan was ready, and had a cassette running, he said, ‘‘This is a preliminary interview with Mrs. Audrey Mc-Donald, in the presence of her attorney, Jason Glass, conducted by Detectives Sloan and Davenport.’’
He ran the machine back to make sure it was working, replayed the statement, pushed record again, added the time and date, and turned to McDonald.
‘‘Mrs. McDonald, you have been rearrested after the revocation of your bail granted after the killing of your husband, Wilson McDonald . . . The bail revocation, however, is based on what we believe was the murder of your mother, Amelia Lamb.’’
‘‘I did no such thing. I loved my mother,’’ she said, calmly.
‘‘Mrs. McDonald, did you know that your sister saved a lock of your mother’s hair after she died?’’
‘‘Yes, I knew that.’’
‘‘We had the hair sample analyzed by the state crime laboratory, Mrs. McDonald, and the hair was found to contain amounts of arsenic which would be lethal to a human being.’’
‘‘I don’t know anything about that,’’ she said.
‘‘Um, do you know where she lived—Mrs. Lamb—at the time she died?’’ Glass asked Lucas.
‘‘In Lakeville.’’
‘‘Have the police inspected the house they lived in?’’
‘‘Not yet.’’
‘‘It was a very old house—you find arsenic all over the place in those old houses. It’s in the wallpaper, the paint, people used it all the time to spray for bugs. Mrs. Lamb may have had arsenic in her hair, but there’s no reason to think that my client put it there. In fact, she did not.’’
‘‘Did you get large insurance payments from both the death of your father and your mother, Mrs. McDonald?’’ Sloan asked.
‘‘She won’t answer that,’’ Glass said. He looked down at Audrey. ‘‘That’s something we’ve got to look into ourselves, before we start discussing it.’’
‘‘Did you use the insurance payments to put yourself through St. Anne’s, where you met Sister Mary Joseph?’’ Lucas asked.
Glass shook his head: ‘‘We’ll refuse to answer that.’’
‘‘We have gray duct tape from your house with only one set of fingerprints on it,’’ said Sloan. ‘‘The adhesive on the duct tape matches exactly adhesive taken off the door locks outside Susan O’Dell’s apartment. Did you put that tape there, Mrs. McDonald?’’
‘‘No, I did not.’’
The questioning went on for half an hour, Audrey growing more and more angry. Finally, she turned to Glass and said, ‘‘How much longer do we have to do this?’’
‘‘You want to stop now?’’
‘‘Yes.’’
‘‘Then we’re done,’’ Glass said. To Sloan, ‘‘No more questions.’’ Sloan looked at Lucas, reached out to the recorder. Before he could turn it off, Audrey hissed at Lucas. ‘‘You think you’re so smart, but you just don’t understand anything.’’
Sloan froze, then, as unobtrusively as possible, let his arm slide sideways and rest on the table next to the recorder. Sometimes you got the best stuff after the formal questioning was done.
‘‘I think I do,’’ Lucas said. ‘‘I’ve talked to your friends, I’ve talked to your sister. We don’t have every piece, because you got rid of some of them. But there’s enough left to hang you, Audrey.’’
‘‘So dumb,’’ she said. She stood up, and turned toward Glass. ‘‘Will there be another bond hearing?’’
‘‘Yes, tomorrow morning.’’
‘‘Gonna cost you a little more, this time,’’ Lucas said. ‘‘And when we finish all the paper on your mother, we’ll just pick you up again. It’d be easier just to stay put. Mr. Glass could arrange for your sister to watch your house.’’
‘‘My sister . . . my sister,’’ she said. She pushed her hands up through her hair, as though she were about to tear it out. ‘‘My sister gave you a lock of Mother’s hair?’’
‘‘Yes.’’
‘‘That was good of her. And my sister told you about this whole murder idea in the first place, didn’t she?’’
Lucas looked at Sloan, then nodded. Glass opened his mouth to say something, then shut it.
‘‘And did my sister tell you that all those years when I was supposedly killing these people, her sole support came from us? From Wilson and me? That we gave her cash to keep her head above water? That if Wilson didn’t do well, if he lost his job or lost a promotion, she’d be hurt as much as we would? Did she tell you about our father feeling her up, about finding a box of rat poison in the machine shed and pouring it into Dad’s whiskey? Did my sister tell you all of that? Did she tell you about fighting with Mom about screwing boys out by the cornfield in Lakeville? And more than that, screwing them for money? Did you look at everything you have, and ask, ‘What if her sister did it?’ And did you ask, if you send little Audrey McDonald off to prison, if she could tolerate it? I’ll answer that for you: I’m claustrophobic. I wouldn’t last a year in a prison. I’d find some way to hang myself. And then who gets my share of the money? My sister? That’s what she thinks . . .’’
Lucas was astonished: at that moment, he believed that Audrey believed. She was utterly convincing, a beetle-hard, scuttling young-old woman. ‘‘Jesus,’’ he said.
‘‘We gotta stop,’’ Glass said convulsively. ‘‘We gotta stop this.’’
He put an arm around Audrey to stop her: and for a moment, the woman’s dead cobra eyes gave something away, a spark, something almost like humor. Then the moment passed, and she was as sullen as ever.
Lucas looked after her as she left: What was this all about?
LUCAS AND SLOAN STOPPED AT A GREASY SPOON ON the way home, Lucas following Sloan out in separate cars. As they walked inside, Sloan said, ‘‘What if the sister did it?’’
Lucas shook his head: ‘‘No way.’’
‘‘Why not?’’
‘‘She was too young to kill her old man; I don’t care if he was groping her. But the big thing is, why would she ever risk calling attention to that whole string of killings?
Even if she blamed them on McDonald, there was always the possibility that McDonald would be able to prove that he didn’t do it . . . and if he could prove he couldn’t do any one of them, then all of them would be in question. Nope. Whoever killed these people—Audrey—is too smart to have called attention to them.’’
‘‘But what . . . what if she saw Wilson McDonald going down, and shot Kresge specifically to pull McDonald down, so that Audrey would get his money? And then, when you get on top of Audrey, she decides to sacrifice Audrey? I mean, what if she’s three layers back, waiting for Audrey to die in prison? Or even planning to poison her if she’s acquitted?’’
‘‘No fuckin’ way,’’ Lucas said. ‘‘You gotta know the people.’’
They found a booth, ordered beer and fries: ‘‘She scared the shit out of me, man. And I’ll tell you what, Glass was looking at that tape machine like it was solid gold,’’ Sloan said. ‘‘Anybody who listens to that tape is gonna believe her too. Like a jury.’’
Lucas shook his head again: ‘‘Not if they listen to Helen at the same time. Helen is just . . . an innocent. She picked up on McDonald because the pattern became so clear to her over the years. She talked to them often enough that she knew when a promotion was up, and then she’d read about some guy from the bank being killed, and then it’d turn out to be a guy in McDonald’s department. Nope. She even waited longer than she should have. And why in God’s name would she offer her mother’s hair? If she knew her mother had been poisoned . . .’’
They ran over it for another hour, building the case against Audrey. In the end, Sloa
n said, ‘‘You’ll have to admit, most of it could be built the other way.’’
‘‘Naw: jury’d never go for it. And remember, she killed her old man.’’
Sloan shook his head. ‘‘Just wish there was some way to pry the sisters apart. Put one of them in Kansas while somebody’s getting killed in Minnesota.’’
As Lucas put the beer bottle to his mouth, the light went off in his head: ‘‘Oh, shit,’’ he said, the bottle frozen in front of his face.
‘‘What?’’
‘‘In the Arris killing. We never looked at that tape for women.’’
‘‘Huh. Where’s the tape?’’
‘‘My place. St. Paul gave me a copy of it, and I left it at my place.’’
‘‘Can I come along?’’
THEY STUCK THE TAPE IN LUCAS’S VCR, AND THE BAD picture came up on the screen. They watched Arris go by, followed by several women, and then, a minute later, another woman, walking rigidly down the hill. ‘‘There she is,’’ Lucas said.
‘‘That’s fuckin’ Helen,’’ Sloan said.
‘‘No, no, that’s fuckin’ Audrey,’’ said Lucas. He ran the tape back. ‘‘Look at the way she walks.’’
‘‘Looks like fuckin’ Helen to me.’’
‘‘Remember, this is eight years ago. Audrey’d be thirty. Helen would only be in her mid-twenties . . . They look alike, but that woman is not twenty-six.’’
Sloan was on his hands and knees, peering at the screen. ‘‘Goddamn. Could be Audrey.’’
‘‘Is Audrey,’’ Lucas said.
‘‘Selling it to a jury’ll be hard,’’ Sloan said. ‘‘You’ll get one dumb shit on there who’ll believe nothing but his own eyes, and his eyes’ll say it’s Helen.’’
‘‘I wonder if we can get this enhanced somehow,’’ Lucas said. ‘‘Maybe the Feebs?’’
‘‘I don’t know . . . Tell you the truth, if there was a way to ditch the tape, I’d do it. It confuses things. But now that I keep looking at it, I think you’re right. She moves like Audrey does. She scuttles .’’