Do I get a medal? Lane asked.
Yeah. Youll get a size eleven medal right in the ass if you dont get it downtown.
Lane left, and a few minutes later, Franklin, whod fallen into an odd reverie sitting in an overstuffed chair with the bank statements in his hands, staring at an English hunting print on the wall above McDonalds desk, suddenly said, I know what it is.
Im glad somebody does, Lucas said.
You know whats wrong with this place?
Lucas looked around. Looks pretty nice. There are no fuckin books, Franklin said. He got up, walked around the study, checking the shelves full of ceramic figurines. They even got a couple of bookends, with no books between themthey got these fuckin Keebler elves, or whatever they are.
Hummels, Lucas said. But they do have a computer. He nodded at the Hewlett Packard crouched on the desk.
Aint a book, Franklin said. Im going to look around.
Lucas finished the American Express statements, extracted the statement that showed McDonald in Chicago, and stacked the rest on the desk. Slow going. Hed just gotten up when Franklin came back: I could find five books in this whole fuckin house. A dictionary, a cookbook, a bartenders guide, and travel books on California and Florida.
Maybe they took turns reading the dictionary, Lucas said.
You dont think its weird?
The pinking shears thing with Delthat was weird, Lucas said. No books? Thats not weird, thats just a little unusual.
I think its weird, Franklin insisted. People with seven million, they oughta have books. He frowned, and said, Hey, you know what else?
He left the room, and Lucas trailed after him. Theres no CD player. I dont think theyve got any CDs. They got no goddamn record player, Lucas.
Yeah, well…
Franklin turned and said, These people are very strange. He looked around the room again, spotted a studio portrait of Wilson and Audrey McDonald smiling down from another knickknack shelf. The photo was so heavily retouched that the two of them looked like puppets. Look at her eyes, Franklin said. Lucas looked. They follow you. Man, they areverystrange.
AUDREY MCDONALD LAY IN HER HOSPITAL BED AND thought about Davenport. He seemed to know something. To knowher. The others had shaken their heads when they saw her, had essentially apologized for their maleness in view of what another male had done to her. The hospital had provided female attendants to care for her, as if a male doctor or male nurse might somehow further the damage done.
Not Davenport. He was ready to crucify her. She would have to move on this.
She dozed for a while, in a little pain, and woke up, calculating.
The lawyer said shed be here overnight, and then would be wheeled into court for a preliminary hearing on an open charge of murder. She would be allowed to enter a plea not guiltyand bail would be set. If she was willing, hed said, she could use her house as security. The assistant county attorney handling the case had already indicated that the state would have no objection, so the deal was as good as done, and she could go straight home from the courthouse.
Murder? Shed croaked. They're charging…?
Dont worry: theyre already backing off, Glass had said. When the police finish investigating, theyll almost certainly find that it was self-defense. Right now, its ninety-ten for no charges at all.
So Audrey had agreed to use the house as security, and had given him a limited power of attorney so that he could get all the paperwork. Shed be out tomorrow afternoon.
And that would be the time to handle the Davenport problem.
Shed thought she was doing that when she pitched the Molotov cocktail through Weather Karkinnens window. From what she could tell by questioning Wilson, and careful questions to others at the bank, Davenport had been the only reason that Wilson had been looked at so closely. Audrey had attacked Karkinnen in an effort to turn Lucas aroundthe same tactic had worked in the past, with the McKinney situation and the Bairds. And from what she could tell of the investigations pace, and from stories in the newspapers, the attackhaddiverted him for a time. Investigators had vanished from the bank, thered been two days of silence from the police… and then suddenly, they were back, and all over Wilson.
Wilson.
She sighed, and let a little tear start at the corner of her eye. She already missed Wilson. Shed known, in her heart of hearts, that someday shed have to kill him, the love of her life. He would inevitably get in her way, or even become a danger to her. And he finally had. If the police had put pressure on him, he wouldve pointed them at her, because he was basically a coward. He had no grit. Wilson
…
She wrenched her mind back to Davenport. The problem with the Karkinnen diversion was that the police investigation hadnt led anywhere. The newspapers said the police were simply mystified. Theyd run down every single clue and theyd found nothing at all. After a while, there was nothing left to do, so they went back to Wilson and had apparently stumbled over something that pointed at the Arris killing. If theyd been preoccupied with Karkinnen a little bit longer, they might never have found whatever it was.
Now they were looking at her. Or at least, Davenport was. She didnt quite understand why. Shed given him an answer to his questionher own dead husband.
Shed actually given him an earlier answer, the answerto who killed Kresge, but he either hadnt gotten the message or had ignored it.
The Kresge murder weapon had the fingerprints of Kresges caretaker all over it. Hed been the one who put it away the last time Audrey saw it. A few of the lingering partygoers had been sitting around with Kresge, talking and cleaning the guns. When they were done with each one, theyd pass it to the caretaker, whod put it away.
Kresge had told her, on the shooting range, that she shot the Contender better than he did. That hed never shot it at all, after the first few times. So the caretakers prints should still be on it. But the papers hadnt had a whisper about the gun, and Wilson said nobody had even bothered to interview the caretaker. Something was screwed up, she thought. Typical. Very few people could act with her intellectual rigor…
Audrey was crazy and smart and she knew how to do research: shed taken an undergraduate degree in English from St. Annes, and then, while she was pushing Wilson through law school, shed taken a masters degree from the University of Minnesota in library science. She was still working in the library when computers moved in, and shed more or less kept up with them over the years, and when the bank went on-line. When Davenport became a problem, shed looked him up in theStar-Tribunelibrary node on the Internet.
And there shed found a treasure trove.
TheStar-Tribunehad done a lengthy feature on Davenport after hed cleared the kidnapping of a psychologist and her two daughters by a madman named John Mail. Davenport and His Pals had pictured Davenport with Weather Karkinnen, with Sister Mary Josephwhom hed known since their childhood togetherand with a variety of cops, lawyers, TV and newspaper reporters, doctors, jocks, and street people, all friends of his.
The two obvious targets for a diversionary attack were the nun and the surgeonDavenports oldest friend and hislover. She decided on Karkinnen because Karkinnen was simpler.
Audrey knew Sister Mary Joseph from her college days: the nun had been her instructor in basic psychology, and Audrey remembered her as an intense young woman with a face terribly scarred by adolescent acne. But the nun, who was still at St. Annes, lived in a communal dormitory-style setting in which intruders would be instantly noticed. And attack would be risky.
Karkinnen, on the other hand, was out in the open. Audrey had been puzzled that the year-old article implied that Karkinnen was Davenports live-in lover, while Audreys search turned up different addresses, but she assumed there was something that she didnt know. She considered the possibility that theyd broken up, but then found an engagement announcement only a few months old…