Secret Prey

body and asked, ‘‘Kresge was shot out of the stand?’’
    ‘‘Yup. The bullet took him square in the heart,’’ Krause said. ‘‘I doubt he lived for ten seconds.’’
    ‘‘Any chance of finding the slug?’’ Sloan asked.
    ‘‘Nah. It’s out in the swamp somewhere. It’s gone.’’
    ‘‘But you think he was shot out of the tree stand,’’ Sloan said.
    ‘‘For sure,’’ Krause said. ‘‘There’s some blood splatter on the guardrail and threads from his coveralls are hanging from the edge of the floorboards up there—no way they should be there unless they snagged when he fell over the edge.’’
    Lucas stepped over next to the body, which lay faceup a foot and a half from a pad of blood-soaked oak leaves. Kresge didn’t look surprised or sad or any of the other things he might have looked. He looked dead, like a wadded-up piece of wastepaper. ‘‘Who moved him?’’
    ‘‘The first time, other members of the hunting party. They opened up his coat to listen to his heart, wanted to make sure he wasn’t still alive. He wasn’t. Then me and the doc here’’—Krause nodded at the AME—‘‘rolled him up to look at the exit wound.’’
    Lucas nodded to the assistant medical examiner, said, ‘‘Hey, Dick, I heard you guys were coming up,’’ and the AME said, ‘‘Yup,’’ and Lucas said, ‘‘Roll him up on his side, will you?’’
    ‘‘Sure.’’
    The AME grabbed Kresge’s coat and rolled him up. Lucas and Sloan looked at the back, where a narrow hole—a moth might have made it—was surrounded by a hand-sized bloodstain just above the shoulder blade. Lucas said, ‘‘Huh,’’ and he and Sloan moved left to look at the entry, then back at the exit. They both turned at the same time to look at the slope, then at each other, and Lucas said, ‘‘Okay,’’ and the AME let the body drop back into place.
    Lucas stood and brushed his hands together and grinned at the sheriff. The grin was so cold that the sheriff revised his earlier, quick, judgment. ‘‘Good one,’’ Lucas said.
    ‘‘What do you think?’’ Krause asked.
    ‘‘The shooter got close,’’ Lucas said.
    ‘‘You wouldn’t get that angle through the body, upward like that, unless the shooter was below him,’’ Sloan explained. ‘‘And if the shooter’s below him’’—they all looked back up the slope—‘‘he couldn’t have been more than thirty or forty yards away. Of course, we don’t know how Kresge was sitting. He could have been looking out sideways. Or he could have been leaning back when the slug hit.’’
    Krause said, ‘‘I don’t think so.’’
    ‘‘I don’t either,’’ Lucas said.
    ‘‘So it’s a murder,’’ Krause said. He shook his head and looked from the body to Lucas. ‘‘I wish you’d keep this shit down in the Cities.’’
    ‘‘MIND IF I CHECK THE TREE?’’ LUCAS ASKED THE CRIME scene cops.
    One of them said, ‘‘We’re done, if it’s okay with the sheriff.’’
    ‘‘Go ahead,’’ Krause said.
    Lucas began climbing the spikes, looked down just as he reached the platform, and asked, ‘‘What about motive?’’
    Krause nodded. ‘‘I asked those people down at the cabin about that. Instead of a name, I got an estimate. Fifteen hundred, maybe two thousand people.’’
    Sloan said, ‘‘Yeah?’’
    ‘‘There’s this merger going on . . .’’
    Lucas listened to Krause’s explanation of the merger as he carefully probed the backpack hung on the tree. He remembered seeing bank-merger stories in the Star-Tribune. He hadn’t paid much attention—more corporate jive, as far as he could tell.
    ‘‘Anyway, he was up here hunting with a bunch of big shots from the bank,’’ Krause said, unwinding his story. ‘‘Some of them, maybe all of them, are set to lose their big shot jobs.’’
    ‘‘Those are the people we saw down at the cabin?’’ Lucas asked. He’d finished with the backpack, left it hanging where he found it, and dropped back down the tree.
    ‘‘Yeah,’’ Krause said sourly. ‘‘They filled me in on the merger business.’’
    ‘‘Shooting him seems a little extreme,’’ Sloan said.
    ‘‘Why?’’ Krause asked. The question was genuine, and Sloan glanced at Lucas and then looked back at the sheriff, who said, ‘‘Close as I can tell, he was about to mess up the lives of hundreds of people. Some of them—hell, maybe most of them—will never get as good a job again, ever in their lives.