Secret Prey

feminine underarm deodorant. ‘‘We’re ready,’’ she said, looking around. ‘‘Put your gun over on the nightstand. That’ll look nice and grim. I’ll keep mine, but I’ll let them see it.’’ She was wearing her .357 in the small of her back.
    He nodded: ‘‘You could be good at this.’’
    She came over and stood on her tiptoes and kissed him on the lips. ‘‘Remember that,’’ she said.
    The sheriff knocked a second later. Sherrill opened the door and let them in.
    ‘‘DAMN NEAR KILLED HIM,’’ THE SHERIFF SAID. HE WAS standing in front of the dresser, looking at Lucas, who was sitting on the bed, his back to the headboard. The other three men were standing near the door, while Sherrill stood at the head end of the bed, near Lucas. ‘‘He could still be in trouble.’’
    ‘‘Bullshit. I cracked his short ribs and busted his nose. He won’t be sneezing for a month or six weeks, that’s all,’’ Lucas said.
    ‘‘That’s a fairly clinical judgment,’’ Landis said. ‘‘You must’ve done this before.’’
    ‘‘I’ve had a few fights,’’ Lucas agreed.
    ‘‘In all my time as sheriff, I haven’t had a man hurt that bad, except one who was in a car accident,’’ the sheriff said. ‘‘We’re talking to the county attorney to see if an arrest would be appropriate. We don’t want you going anyplace.’’
    ‘‘We’re leaving tomorrow, I think,’’ Lucas said. ‘‘But we’ll be available down in Minneapolis. I’m gonna talk to a couple of friends over at the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, maybe a guy in the attorney general’s office. About coming up here and deposing you people on the murder of George Lamb: to ask you why you’ve been covering it up all these years. Why you’d send a couple of cops to roust us, in the middle of a murder investigation that you’d been reading about in the Star-Trib.’’
    The sheriff shook his head: ‘‘We didn’t send anybody to roust you. These idiots thought of it themselves.’’ He tipped his head toward the lanky man, who shrugged and looked at the curtains covering the single window.
    ‘‘The thing is, we can take care of Larry,’’ the older deputy drawled. ‘‘Cops get beat up from time to time. The real question I got—not the sheriff, just me—is whether you can be talked to. Or if you’re just some big-city asshole up here to kick the rubes.’’
    ‘‘I’ve got a cabin outside a town half this size, in Wisconsin. The sheriff’s a friend of mine, and he’s been bullshitting me about moving up to run for the office when he quits, and I’ve thought about it. I’ve worked with a halfdozen sheriffs all over this state and Wisconsin, and this is the first time I’ve had trouble,’’ Lucas said. ‘‘You want some references?’’
    ‘‘Already made some calls,’’ the older man said. After a few seconds’ silence, he said, ‘‘You want to talk, or do we do this all legal?’’
    ‘‘Talk,’’ Lucas said.
    The sheriff looked at the older deputy and said, ‘‘You think?’’
    ‘‘Yeah, I think.’’
    The sheriff nodded and said, ‘‘The thing is, we don’t know whether or not George Lamb was murdered. But he might have been.’’
    ‘‘There were some problems at the time, with the way the death happened,’’ the older man said. ‘‘Happened way too early in the morning. He got up early, for his job, but not in the middle of the night. It looked to us like he’d gotten sick the evening before, and they’d let him lay there until he died.’’
    ‘‘He came to see me twice in the month before he died. He was feeling sicker and sicker, and at first I thought it was the flu. He’d had some diarrhea, he’d had some episodes of vomiting, dizzy spells, and so on. We’d had some flu going around at the time, and it fit,’’ Landis said. He pulled a chair out from the dresser/desk and sat down. ‘‘I gave him some antibiotics for a lung infection he’d developed—nothing serious, he was coughing up some phlegm with pus in it. And we had an argument the second time he came in, and he never came back. Then he dropped dead. Could have been a heart attack.’’
    ‘‘But you don’t really think so,’’ Lucas said.
    Landis shook his head. ‘‘I think maybe it was rat poison. Arsenic. The thing is, when I went out and looked at this body, he had a rash, a particular kind of rash that flakes off the skin when you’ve been taking in arsenic for a