Secret Prey

drove Lincoln and Lexus sport-utes and wore eight-hundred-dollar apre`s-hunt tweed jackets, undoubtedly woven by licensed leprechauns in the Auld Country—well, they made him nervous. Especially when one of them might be a killer.
    ‘‘DAVENPORT IS THE BAD DOG,’’ BONE SAID FROM downwind, as they watched Krause lead his parade down through the woods toward the cabin. He bit off a sixteenth- inch of the cheroot and spit it out into the fescue at the bottom of the porch. ‘‘He oughta be able to tell us something.’’
    ‘‘Mean sonofabitch, by reputation,’’ O’Dell said. She said it casually, looking through the steam of the coffee. She wasn’t impressed. She was surrounded by mean sonsofbitches. She might even be one herself.
    ‘‘Just another c-cop,’’ Robles stuttered. Robles was scared: they could smell it on him. They liked it. Robles was the macho killer, and his fear was oddly pleasing.
    ‘‘I talked to him a couple of times on the transfers with his IPO—you all know he used to be Davenport Simulations?’’ Bone said. They all nodded; that was the kind of thing they all knew. ‘‘He sold the company to management and walked with better’n ten, AT.’’ He meant ten million dollars, after taxes.
    ‘‘So why doesn’t he quit and move to Palm Springs?’’ Robles asked.
    ‘‘ ’Cause he likes what he does,’’ Bone said.
    ‘‘I wish he’d get his bureaucratic ass down here and do what we have to do; I wanna get back to town,’’ McDonald grumbled. Back to a nice smooth single-malt; but he’d stay here as long as the others did. Sooner or later, they’d start talking about who’d be running the bank. ‘‘No point in keeping us here. We’ve told them everything we know.’’
    ‘‘Unless one of us killed him,’’ Bone said lazily.
    ‘‘Gotta be an accident,’’ Robles said, nervously. ‘‘ Opening day of deer season . . . I bet there’re twenty of them. Accidents.’’
    ‘‘No, there aren’t,’’ Bone said. ‘‘There are usually one or two, and most of the time, they know on the spot who did the shooting.’’
    ‘‘Besides, it wasn’t an accident,’’ O’Dell said positively.
    ‘‘How do you know?’’ McDonald asked. He finished the loaded coffee and rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand. He could use another.
    ‘‘Maybe she did it,’’ Robles said. He tried to laugh, but instead made a small squeaking noise, a titter.
    O’Dell ignored him. ‘‘Karma’s wrong for an accident,’’ she said.
    ‘‘Great: we’re talking karma,’’ McDonald said. ‘‘ Superstitious hippie nonsense.’’
    Bone slumped a little lower in his chair and a thin grin slipped across his dry face: ‘‘But she’s right,’’ he said. ‘‘Dan was a half-mile onto his own property. Who’s going to shoot him through the heart from more’n half a mile away? Nope. I figure it was one of us. We all had guns and good reasons.’’
    ‘‘Bullshit,’’ McDonald said.
    AS THEY WATCHED THE PARADE APPROACHING, O’Dell said, ‘‘We should decide who’ll speak for the bank. The board’ll have to appoint a CEO, but somebody should take over for the moment. Somebody in top management.’’
    ‘‘I thought Wilson might do it—until a decision is made on a CEO,’’ Bone said. He looked over at Wilson Mc-Donald, whose eyes went flat, hiding any reaction; and past him at O’Dell. The top job, Bone thought, would go either to himself or O’Dell, unless the board did something weird. Robles didn’t have the background, McDonald wasn’t smart or skilled enough. ‘‘If you think so,’’ McDonald said carefully. This was the moment he’d been waiting for.
    O’Dell had done her calculations as well as Bone, and she nodded. ‘‘Then you’ve got it,’’ she said. She put her battered hunting boots up on the porch railing and looked past McDonald at Bone: ‘‘Until the police figure out if one of us did it. And the board has a chance to meet.’’
    After a moment’s silence, Robles said, ‘‘My gun wasn’t fired.’’
    Bone rolled his eyes up to the heavens: ‘‘I’ll tell you what, Terry. It would take me about three seconds to figure a way to kill Kresge and walk out of the woods with a clean weapon.’’ He took a final drag on the cheroot, dropped the stub end on the porch, ground it out with his boot, and flipped it out into the yard with his toe. ‘‘No sir: I figure a fired weapon is purely proof of