Secret Prey

out.’’
    ‘‘I think he will. He was on the diet for one week, he told me, and lost eighteen pounds. He knows that won’t keep up, but when he got on the scale after the first week, he said his wife went out to the bedroom and cried for fifteen minutes. Outa joy, I guess. He was freaked out. I don’t see any way he’ll relapse.’’
    BONE SAID, ‘‘THIS AUDREY MCDONALD THING HAS torn me up.’’
    ‘‘Yeah?’’ Lucas had an archaic typewriter tray in his desk, just the right height for feet. He pulled it out and put his feet up.
    ‘‘Yeah. I was gonna run a major bank someday. But it wouldn’t have come this soon, if Audrey hadn’t blown old Dan Kresge out of his tree stand.’’
    ‘‘Won’t you be out of a job, if the merger goes through?’’
    ‘‘Sure. But some problems are cropping up with the merger,’’ Bone said, showing a thin smile. ‘‘The road might not be as smooth as it looked. Even if it happens, once you’re running a place, you can usually go someplace else, and run that. It’s the breakthrough to the top that counts.’’
    ‘‘Sloan talked to you about your relationship with Marcia Kresge . . . I’d think that might have been a dangerous relationship for somebody trying to get to the top,’’ Lucas said.
    ‘‘Eh . . . it’s easier in a private company. You don’t have to deal with elections and all your insane bureaucratic rules. I doubt Dan would have cared; he probably would have been amused. Marcia wasn’t any more of a potential problem for me than Miss Fuzzy Sweater is for you. Besides, that’s all done.’’
    ‘‘All done?’’
    ‘‘Yeah.’’ Bone seemed mildly embarrassed and turned to look out at the street again. ‘‘You met my assistant, Kerin Baki.’’
    ‘‘The glacial blonde.’’
    ‘‘Yeah. When the whole scramble started, after Kresge was killed, she started working to get me the top job. She did everything right: pretty much managed the whole show. And when I asked her what she wanted out of it, she said she wanted a favor from me. But she wouldn’t tell me what it was until after I got the job.’’
    ‘‘And you got it.’’
    ‘‘Yeah. So after things settled down a little, when Audrey McDonald was arrested, I got her in my office and asked, ‘What’s the favor?’ ’’
    Baki had been a little uncomfortable when he pressed her, Bone said, but finally sat down and outlined what she wanted. Basically, she was tired of living alone. She wanted to find a man who was as smart as she was, who worked as hard as she did, and had similar interests. That was difficult.
    ‘‘What she wanted from me,’’ Bone said, as Lucas started smiling, ‘‘is, she wanted me to take her around— just as a friend, as an associate—and introduce her to guys I knew in the banking and investment communities who might be candidates.’’
    ‘‘Just as a friend,’’ Lucas said.
    ‘‘Yeah. ‘Mr. Bone,’ she said, ‘I don’t have a chance to meet many people like that, socially, because I’m always here. And I know this sounds a little cold and a little calculating, but I don’t have many more years to go if I want to have children and a normal home life,’ ’’ Bone said, mimicking Baki’s precise soprano. ‘‘And she pushed her glasses back up on her nose, which is about the only thing that’s ever been wrong with her—her glasses slide down.’’
    ‘‘Yeah,’’ Lucas said. ‘‘She’s, like, vulnerable.’’ ‘‘I said okay,’’ Bone said. ‘‘I could understand that. So I took her around to a couple of places, a couple of outside meetings she wouldn’t normally have gone to, and she made quite an impression on a couple of guys. I got some calls asking about her status . . . I told her about them, and she was pretty interested.’’
    ‘‘You chump.’’
    ‘‘You know how the story comes out?’’
    Lucas knitted his hands across his chest and said, ‘‘Let me guess. You decided to take her out for a dinner . . .’’
    ‘‘Dinner meeting.’’
    ‘‘And then you have to take her home afterwards.’’
    ‘‘I just went up for a minute; I’d never seen her place.’’
    ‘‘And you didn’t come out for a while.’’
    ‘‘Quite a while.’’
    ‘‘And the glacier melted.’’
    ‘‘You might say that . . . And she’s told me I’ve seen the last of Marcia Kresge,’’ Bone said. ‘‘She also mentioned a couple of other women that I had no idea she knew