‘‘Which, if we could drive a wedge between Audrey and her sister, we might get the sister to refute . . . Is the sister as wacko as Audrey?’’
‘‘No. But there was a complaint filed with Child Protection a couple of days ago that she beat her daughter and gave her dope,’’ Lucas said.
‘‘Aw, Jesus.’’
‘‘But not justified,’’ Lucas said. ‘‘In fact, I think Audrey filed it.’’
‘‘Goddamn this woman.’’
‘‘I’m sure he will,’’ Lester said dryly. ‘‘But it’d be nice if we could get a few whacks in first.’’
Towson leaned over his desk, looking at his deputy and the head of his criminal division: ‘‘I’ll tell you what, boys. We’re faced here with the usual sloppy police work that virtually ties us hand and foot, even as we have to take our cases before drooling liberal judges who don’t wish for anything finer than putting criminals back on the street where they can rape our Cub Scouts. However . . .’’
‘‘I wish I’d said that,’’ Lester said.
‘‘Part of a speech I’m writing,’’ Towson said. ‘‘ Seriously, Lucas, do you think she’s gonna kill anyone else in the next few days?’’
‘‘I don’t know who’d it be,’’ Lucas said. ‘‘Me maybe— but I’m careful.’’
‘‘You be careful,’’ Towson said. ‘‘She apparently likes guns . . . Now listen. I’m looking through this memo, and I’m convinced. A trial is something else. Give me another few days’ work on this thing. Nail down that stuff about O’Dell. Give me something harder. Work out a really tight timetable, and find a way we can put her there to pull the trigger. And anything else. Even people willing to suggest that she did it. We need more hard evidence: anything would help.’’
‘‘What’re you going to do?’’
‘‘I’m thinking that we might charge her with everything,’’ Towson said. ‘‘All the murder counts, all the ag assaults. Put all the evidence together, argue the pattern. Then, probably, we’ll lose most of them. But we’ll have a chance of getting her for killing her husband, if we can make it part of the pattern. Because she’s admitted it. The jury might let her go on the other ones, for lack of specific evidence, but we might get her on at least second degree, and maybe first, on her husband.’’
‘‘She was pretty beat up,’’ Lucas said. ‘‘They took pictures.’’
‘‘We can handle that, if we can make the other things clear enough. If we get her on just second degree on her husband, and then whisper sweet nothings to the judge, he could blow off the guidelines, depart upward on the sentence, and put her away for twenty.’’
They all looked at each other; then Kirk said, ‘‘Right now, Lucas, I’d say it’s sixty-forty against. It’d be nice if you could come up with something a little stronger. Give us another twenty percent, or so.’’
‘‘It’d be nice,’’ Towson said.
‘‘I’ll hit her tonight with a search warrant on the duct tape, maybe look for a glass cutter,’’ Lucas said.
‘‘Talk to us,’’ Towson said. ‘‘We want to know every move from here on out.’’
TWENTY-NINE
AUDREY MCDONALD WAS PACKING WILSON’S SUITS into cardboard boxes, after carefully noting labels, estimated cost—which she’d have to confirm with the tailor— and condition, all toward a tax deduction. The accountant had recommended a donation to Goodwill.
She didn’t like the idea of Goodwill, but she did like the idea of the tax deduction. Still, she was muttering to herself as she did it. Shaking her head. Wilson had spent a fortune on clothing, and now she’d get only a fraction of it back. Nothing for the underwear. Perfectly good boxer shorts, and some bum was going to get them.
‘‘So reckless,’’ she muttered. ‘‘Just didn’t care. Just didn’t care what you spent on this. Look at this. Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen pairs of undershorts. Why would you need all those undershorts? You could have gotten by with three pairs, or five pairs. Sixteen pairs of undershorts. Look at this. This is silk. Silk undershorts?’’
She was counting them again when the headlights swung into the driveway, glowing through the bedroom drapes. Helen? She hadn’t called. She always called before she came. But who else? She went to the window and looked down.
• • •
LUCAS AND SHERRILL WAITED AS SLOAN PULLED INTO the driveway with Del in the passenger seat; a squad car followed a few seconds behind Sloan, with two uniformed cops. Lights shone from several windows in the house, both upstairs and down, and Lucas handed the warrant papers to one of the uniformed cops, who walked up the stoop, rang the doorbell, and knocked.
‘‘All glass cutters, all packages of tape, all one-gallon glass jugs, all guns, cartridges and/or cartridge parts, to include gunpowder, primers, brass, and bullets, all credit card records or billing statements involving gasoline purchases,’’ he read, in the light coming through the window in the door. There was no answer, so he rang again, then opened the storm door and pounded. Still no answer.
‘‘What do you want to do?’’ he asked.
‘‘We’re going in,’’ Lucas said. ‘‘Let’s not break anything yet. Let’s check the garage doors.’’
The front door rattled and the cop at the door stepped back. A moment later, Audrey McDonald stuck her head out. ‘‘What?’’ she croaked. She looked worse than she’d looked in court: the bruises on her face were a sickly bluish yellow, with small reddish splotches. She still wore the bandages on her head, and her visible hair looked like broom straw.
‘‘I’m sorry, ma’am,’’ the cop said. ‘‘We have a search warrant for your house, for certain items.’’
He handed her the papers, and she took them, peered at them querulously. ‘‘A search warrant? Can you wait until I call my lawyer?’’
‘‘No ma’am. You’re welcome to call your attorney, of course, but the warrant is served and we’ll have to come in.’’
Her eyes drifted past the cop to Lucas, who’d begun to feel sorry for the woman: but when her eyes landed on him, they hardened into small black diamonds, like a cobra’s, and he leaned back, though he was ten feet from her. ‘‘Okay,’’ she muttered, breaking her eyes away. ‘‘But do I have to do anything? I feel awfully bad.’’
‘‘You just go sit down, and we’ll do all of it,’’ the cop said.
She disappeared inside and the cop looked over his shoulder at Lucas. Lucas said quietly, ‘‘Keep an eye on her. She’s not what she looks like.’’
THE MCDONALDS HAD A SMALL CLUTTERED WORKSHOP area in one corner of the basement, nothing more than an old chest of drawers with two two-by-eight-foot sheets of three-quarter-inch plywood screwed together to make the top of a small workbench, and a couple of steel shelving units with plastic boxes for storage.
Lucas had seen the workshop the first time in the house, after Wilson McDonald was shot. He went straight to it, checked all the tools. No glass cutter. He found a roll of black plastic electricians’ tape, which he bagged, but that seemed unlikely to be the tape they wanted. He walked once around the basement, looking behind the water heater, the furnace, through racks of paint cans and a pile of hoses and miscellaneous gardening equipment: no gallon glass jugs.
Del was working the kitchen. When Lucas came back up the stairs, he said, ‘‘Got lots of tape. Duct, plastic mending, bunch of it.’’
‘‘Good. Bag it up,’’ Lucas said. ‘‘Check the wastebaskets and her car, see if you come across any small balls of tape that might be the right length. Two would be good.’’ He went on through the living room, found that the carpet had been removed. Wilson McDonald’s blood hadn’t seeped through to the wooden floor, which looked freshly waxed.
Sloan had run quickly through the bedroom, not expecting to find much, and had moved on to a large, first-floor guest room which had a walk-in closet the McDonalds used for general storage. This was where Audrey McDonald had gotten the shotgun with which she’d killed her husband. The closet was jammed with mot
oring, golf, and boating equipment, all of it apparently belonging to Wilson McDonald. The homicide cops investigating the shooting of Wilson McDonald had taken the gun and shells, but hadn’t dug into the back of the closet. Sloan hauled everything out, found nothing of special interest, and then, as an afterthought, was patting down the weather gear, life jackets, golf and hunting jackets.
Just as Lucas walked in, he felt a heavy lump in the pocket of a golf jacket, and manipulated it out through the layers of cloth. Box of cartridges.
‘‘Gimme a bag,’’ he said to Lucas.
‘‘What is it?’’
‘‘Boo-lets,’’ he said.
Lucas held the transparent plastic bag and Sloan manipulated the box into it. Lucas turned the box on its side and read: ‘‘.38 Remington. Excellent.’’
Sloan stood up and said, ‘‘It’d be nice if her prints were on the box.’’
‘‘Yeah, but I’m not holding my breath.’’
One of the uniformed cops stuck his head in the door: ‘‘Del says no glass cutter in the kitchen. No gallon jugs either.’’
‘‘Okay . . . check the garage.’’
At the end of an hour, they still had no glass cutter or gallon jugs, but did have nine rolls of tape and the box of cartridges. Sherrill had been going through the house files again, and had pulled out a stack of Amoco credit card receipts; the McDonalds shared a single account, but the cards had separate numbers. ‘‘If they go back far enough, look for credit card charges in the Duluth area in the days before Ingall disappeared,’’ Lucas said. ‘‘We found an Amex charge in Chicago, the day before, for Wilson . . .’’
‘‘They go back that far . . .’’ She started flipping through them.
A little more than an hour after the search started, McDonald’s attorney showed up. ‘‘What’s going on?’’
Lucas said, ‘‘Search warrant. Mrs. McDonald has a copy. She’s in the TV room.’’ He pointed him through to the TV room, and Glass asked, ‘‘You really think there’s something going on here?’’
‘‘I ain’t doing it for the exercise,’’ Lucas said. ‘‘You’ve got a problem, I think.’’
Glass wandered off to find McDonald, and the uniformed cop came back from the garage: ‘‘No jugs, no glass cutter.’’
‘‘Gonna have to give up on the jugs,’’ Lucas said. ‘‘The glass cutter could be anywhere, if she didn’t throw it away. Anybody look in the silverware drawer?’’
Del looked at the cop, and they both shook their heads.
‘‘Watch this,’’ Lucas said. He pulled open drawers nears the sink, until he found the silverware drawer, then pulled that out all the way and stirred through the contents.
Nothing. Same with the cooking utensils drawer. Nothing.
‘‘Fuck it,’’ he said, pushing the drawers shut.
‘‘The guy is a genius,’’ the uniformed cop said to Del, who nodded.
Sherrill came out of the back, carrying an Amoco billing statement. ‘‘Got something,’’ she said.
‘‘Duluth?’’ Lucas asked hopefully.
‘‘No. But Audrey filled up on successive mornings, the day before Ingall disappeared, and the day he disappeared. So sometime in that twenty-four hours, she drove off a tank of gas.’’
‘‘Huh,’’ Lucas said. ‘‘She could’ve been filling somebody else’s car, or Wilson’s car.’’
‘‘Wilson filled up that night.’’
Lucas nodded: ‘‘All right. That’s something. That’s a straw, and we need straws.’’
‘‘And that’s about all we got,’’ Del said. ‘‘I’d bet you anything that door in O’Dell’s apartment was taped with duct tape, and we found duct tape, but I bet there’s a roll of duct tape in every goddamn house in the city. A jury’s gonna blow that off.’’
GLASS HAD BEEN WALKING BACK THROUGH THE house, Audrey McDonald limping along a step behind him, and he heard Del’s last comment: ‘‘Jury’s gonna blow off what?’’ he asked.
‘‘Just . . . nothing,’’ Del muttered.
‘‘Mrs. McDonald says she thinks you, specifically, Chief Davenport, have targeted her for a personal attack. We’d hate to think that was true.’’
‘‘You know that’s bullshit,’’ Lucas said to Glass—and then his eyes skipped beyond Glass to Audrey McDonald, who was peering at him with her snake’s eye.
‘‘It is true, and I know why,’’ she said. ‘‘Because if you can pin something on me, then Wilson’s father will inherit, and his father and his father’s friends run everything down there at City Hall.’’
Lucas was shaking his head: ‘‘I don’t even know Wilson’s father.’’
‘‘Oh, bullshit,’’ she snapped, picking up Lucas’s word. But she looked so gray, so old-lady-like, that hearing the vulgarity tripping so easily from her tongue was almost shocking. ‘‘There’s no way that he’s going to let McDonald money get out of that goddamned family.’’
‘‘Mrs. McDonald . . .’’ Glass cautioned, but Lucas was becoming interested. Audrey McDonald was not quite visibly shaking, but he could sense it in her: she was very close to the boil. But he didn’t know what would happen if she did tip over the edge. So he pushed a little.
‘‘Mrs. McDonald—can I call you Audrey?’’
‘‘No, you may not.’’
‘‘Audrey, we know you killed your father, and we know why. We even know why you killed your mother, I’m sorry to say. For the money. It’s not so clear that you killed all the others, but we think we’ve got a pretty good list, and stuff is beginning to turn up.’’ He picked up a bag on the kitchen counter, with a roll of duct tape sealed inside. ‘‘You didn’t use this duct tape on Susan O’Dell’s doors, did you? Because if you did, our lab will be able to tell . . .’’
‘‘Lucas, Lucas . . .’’ Glass was sputtering, but Lucas wasn’t looking at him. He was watching Audrey, the grayfaced, self-effacing little brown beetle, who was shuffling up to her attorney’s elbow, then past him, and she said, ‘‘My parents, my parents . . .’’
‘‘. . . and we know you went to Duluth the day before Andy Ingall disappeared, and that you fired that Contender pistol of Kresge’s, the one that killed him, and—’’
And Audrey launched herself at him, so quickly that Lucas was surprised, unable to quite fend her off without hurting her. Her right hand, hard and bony as a crow’s foot, caught the skin at the side of his throat and when he wrenched away he felt her fingernails slicing through the skin; then Sherrill had Audrey around the waist and heaved her back, and Glass wrapped her up. ‘‘You fucking . . .’’ Audrey growled, still struggling to get at him, her black eyes fixed on Lucas. ‘‘You fucking . . . You talk to that fucking sister of mine . . .’’
‘‘Jesus, Lucas, you’re bleeding,’’ Sherrill said.
‘‘Get me some toilet paper or something,’’ Lucas said, watching Audrey McDonald as her struggles subsided.
‘‘Gonna ruin your shirt,’’ Sherrill said, coming back with a box of tissues. She pulled out a wad and pressed it against his neck.
‘‘Worth it,’’ he said, watching Glass wrestle Audrey McDonald back toward the TV room. He looked around. ‘‘Are we about done here?’’
‘‘Another hour, if we really think that glass cutter is here somewhere,’’ Del said.
‘‘Keep looking,’’ Lucas said. ‘‘I’m gonna take off.’’
‘‘I better come along,’’ Sherrill said. ‘‘You’re pretty cut up.’’
‘‘All right,’’ Lucas said. To Dell, ‘‘You and Sloan figure it out from here.’’
‘‘You going home?’’ Del asked.
Lucas could feel the blood seeping through the tissue. ‘‘No. I’m gonna go talk to that fucking sister of hers.’’
HELEN AND CONNIE BELL WERE WATCHING TELEVISION when Lucas and Sherrill arrived. Helen opened the door, smiled at Lucas, nodded at Sherrill, then frowned and said, ‘‘Good God, what happened to you? Are you hurt?’’
‘‘Um
. . . your sister scratched me. Sort of blew up.’’
‘‘Why? Well . . . come in. Why were you talking to Audrey?’’
Connie Bell turned backward on an easy chair to listen to the conversation: Lucas, Sherrill, and Helen were standing in the entryway, and Lucas said, ‘‘I’ve got some fairly bad news, I think. Uh, maybe you’d rather get it in a more formal way . . .’’
‘‘No-no-no, tell me.’’
Lucas nodded. ‘‘We think it’s possible that, uh, your sister may have committed some of the murders you listed in your letter to me.’’
Helen took a step back, one hand going to her throat. ‘‘Audrey? Oh, no.’’
‘‘Could we, uh, could we sit down, I just have a couple of things,’’ Lucas said.
‘‘The couch.’’
They stepped into the front room, and Lucas and Sherrill sat on the couch while Helen leaned against the chair where Connie was sitting. Lucas said, ‘‘If you want Connie to go do homework or something . . .’’
‘‘No way,’’ Connie said. To her mother: ‘‘I’m old enough to stay.’’
Her mother looked at her for a moment, then nodded. ‘‘You can stay.’’
Lucas looked at Sherrill, and then asked, ‘‘When you were younger, was there ever anything . . . Did you think anything was odd about the way your father died? Or your mother?’’
Helen looked at them in stunned silence, then said, ‘‘My father was an evil man. We don’t talk about him.’’
‘‘We know about, uh . . . we know about Audrey,’’ Lucas said.
‘‘What about Audrey?’’ Connie asked.
Lucas looked at Helen, who blinked rapidly, shook her head, then turned to Connie and said, ‘‘My father molested us when we were children. Audrey mostly, but I got some of it too. He never made me do anything with him, like he did with Audrey, but it was coming. He’d . . . handle me. But Audrey was four years older and that protected me.’’