Secret Prey

her.
    ‘‘What?’’
    ‘‘Oh, you know, we were just talking, nothing serious,’’ Helen said, as she held the coat.
    ‘‘I mean, about them dying, or just that they were gone?’’
    ‘‘Nothing, really—just something that came up in passing.’’
    He was sniffing around. Audrey didn’t push it, because it seemed unlikely to produce much, and she didn’t want Helen wondering about the conversation. But she would have to think about this. Go after Davenport directly? That was one possibility, as long as it wouldn’t push more investigators her way. As for Helen, she had to do something to interrupt this relationship with Davenport, which was altogether too cozy.
    All this was going through her head as she went through the forms of departure, ending with, ‘‘So you’ll be at the house at noon?’’
    ‘‘Noon,’’ Helen said. ‘‘And if you need anything before then, call me. Please. This is the reason I took the time off.’’
    When Audrey pulled away from the curb, Helen was still at the door. Audrey touched the horn, emitting a polite Japanese tone, and thought, ‘‘Connie.’’
    AND NO TIME LIKE THE PRESENT.
    She drove to a Rainbow supermarket, looked up Child Protection in the phone book. ‘‘I don’t want to give you my name—I’m a teacher at South High and I’m going out of channels here—but there’s a student named Connie Bell who has been smoking a great deal of marijuana and I’ve heard from another student that she gets it from her mother; and I’ve heard that she and her mother have been fighting, and that Connie has been beaten up several times by the men who hang around with her mother. Thank you.’’
    She hung up.
    Connie smoked marijuana—Helen had confessed that; she had told Audrey weeks before that she’d slapped Connie after an argument over marijuana. There was just enough truth in her call to cause Helen some inconvenience. That was all Audrey needed for now: for Helen to look away from Davenport.

TWENTY-SIX

    MARCY SHERRILL WAS BANGING ON LUCAS’S DOOR AT seven o’clock. He stumbled out to open up, his hair still a mess from the night, wearing a T-shirt and jeans, one sock on, one sock off; his alarm had gone off ten minutes earlier.
    ‘‘You look terrible,’’ she said cheerfully. ‘‘I got up early and went for a run.’’
    ‘‘God will someday strike you dead for that kind of behavior,’’ he said. He was not a morning person. ‘‘If I could only get the glue out of my eyes.’’
    ‘‘Quit pissing around; let’s get going,’’ Sherrill said. ‘‘I’ll drive. You can sleep, if you want.’’
    He perked up, but just slightly. ‘‘If you drive, I might survive.’’
    ‘‘So, I’ll drive,’’ she said. ‘‘C’mon, c’mon. Go.’’ He turned back to the bedroom and she slapped him on the butt.
    ‘‘Christ, it’s like having a coach,’’ he grumbled, but he tried to hurry.
    MINNESOTA IS A TALL STATE; AUDREY MCDONALD’S hometown, Oxford, was in the Red River Valley in the northwest corner, on land as flat as the Everglades. They took Lucas’s Porsche out I-94, Sherrill driving the first two hours, giving it to Lucas, then taking the car back four hours out. Sherrill was a cheerful companion, not given to long stretches of silence. As she chattered away about the landscape, the various road signs and small towns, the river crossings, animals dead on the road, Lucas began to wonder what, exactly, he was doing with her. He began to check her from the corner of his eye, little peeks at her profile, at her face as she talked. Over the years, he’d had relationships, longer or shorter, with a number of women, and in the transition zone between them, had often felt ties to the last woman even as the ties to the new woman were forming.
    In this case, there were more than simple ties back to Weather. Weather had been something different—the love of his life, if Elle Kruger wasn’t—while Sherrill was much more like the other women he’d dated: pretty, smart, interesting, and eventually, moving on.
    He wasn’t sure that he wanted a relationship with a woman who’d be moving on, especially when she really wouldn’t be out of sight. Sherrill was a cop, who had a desk right down the hall from his office: even when he wasn’t trying to see her, he saw her four or five times a day.
    ‘‘You sighed,’’ she said.
    ‘‘What?’’
    ‘‘You just sighed.’’
    ‘‘A lot of shit going on,’’ Lucas said.