Certain Prey

pads until the sun got high. The weight of the world dissolved in the mirror flashes of the smooth black water, the smell of the summer pollen, hot in the sun—the sun on his shoulders—and the stillness of the woods. B ARBARA A LLEN had been killed on a Thursday. Lucas tucked the memory of her sightless, upside-down body into a large mental file stuffed with similar images, and closed the file. On Thursday night, he left for the cabin. He missed Friday’s paper, but saw a Pioneer Press in a Hayward store window on Saturday morning: the main page one story was headlined “Husband Questioned in Heiress Slaying.”
    On Sunday, the Star-Tribune’s front-page piece started under a headline that said “Allen Murder Baffles Police” while the Pioneer Press went with “Allen Murder Puzzles Cops.” Lucas said to himself, “Uh-oh.”
    On Monday morning, he walked, whistling, into City Hall and bumped into Sherrill and Black. “You were gonna keep me updated,” he said.
    “That’s right,” Black said as they clustered in the hall. “We were. Here’s your update: we ain’t got dick.”
    “That’s not entirely true,” Sherrill said, with an edge of impatience. “There’s a really really good chance that Hale Allen did it. Paid for it.”
    “Well, good,” Lucas said, jingling his office keys. This was somebody else’s job. “Ship his ass out to Stillwater. I’ll call ahead and reserve a cell.”
    “I’m serious,” Sherrill said. “We looked at him all weekend and we found out three things. One, the first thing he did after we talked to him is, he called Carmel Loan.”
    “Ouch,” Lucas said. He knew Carmel. If you were a cop pushing a marginal case, or a difficult one, you didn’t want Carmel on the other side.
    “Which doesn’t make him guilty of anything but common sense,” Black observed mildly.
    “Second,” Sherrill said, “he’s gonna inherit something like thirty or forty million dollars, tax free. So much that we can’t even find out how much it is. Her parents say the marriage was in trouble and that divorce was a possibility.”
    “Nothing solid on the divorce?” Lucas asked. “The way you said that . . .”
    “Nothing solid,” Sherrill said grudgingly.
    “The thing is, if Hale Allen is convicted of killing his wife, he can’t inherit. The moneywould probably go to her parents, who don’t need it, but would definitely like it,” Black said. “Can’t ever be too rich or too thin, as the Duchess ofWindsor once told me, in a personal communication.”
    “The money didn’t come from them in the first place?” Lucas asked.
    Black shook his head. “Nope. The great-grandparents were timber barons here and land speculators in Florida. The money comes down through a whole bunch of trusts. It’s hers. Her parents got theirs the same way. Hasn’t one of them worked a day in their lives.”
    “Third?” Lucas asked, looking at Sherrill. He added, “The first two weren’t so good.”
    Sherrill said, “Three, he’s fuckin’ a secretary in his firm. He’s been doing it for a couple of years, and push was coming to shove. She was gonna go see the old lady, and tell her about the affair. Allen was stalling, but the hammer was comin’ down.”
    Lucas looked at Black. “Now that’s something.”
    Black shrugged. “Yeah. That’s something.”
    “Though they usually kill the girlfriend, not the wife,” Lucas said, going back to Sherrill.
    Sherrill shrugged it off. “Not always.”
    “You look at the girlfriend?”
    “Yeah. She was working when Barbara Allen was hit. Taking shorthand in a conference about some guy’s will. She’s got about six hundred and fifty dollars in her bank account, so we figure she probably didn’t hire a pro.”
    “Maybe she saw a movie,” Lucas said.
    “Or read one of those Murder for Dummies books,” said Black.
    “What about Allen? You hit him with the girlfriend?” Lucas asked.
    “Not yet,” Sherrill said. She looked at her watch. “We’re gonna do it in about ten minutes.”
    “By the way,” Black added. “We should also update you on the Feebs.”
    “The Feebs? Are they in this?” Lucas’s eyebrows went up.
    “Maybe. They want a meet, so we’re walking over this afternoon,” Black said. “Got some guy in from Washington.”
    “The nation’s capital,” Sherrill said.
    “You wanna come?” Black asked. “We could use some of that deputy chief bullshit. That special shine.”
    “They love you so much