Secret Prey

guys?’’
    ‘‘Shovel operators.’’
    • • •
    JAMES T. BONE’S SECRETARY SUSPECTED LUCAS OF MAKING sport of her. When she told him, peremptorily, on the phone, that Mr. Bone was making no new appointments, Lucas had answered, ‘‘Go tell Mr. Bone right now that a deputy chief of police wants to talk to him, and if he says no, I’ll have to come down and shoot him.’’
    ‘‘I beg your pardon?’’
    ‘‘I think you heard me,’’ Lucas said. He almost added, ‘‘sweetheart,’’ but decided that might push it too far.
    She went away for a moment; then another voice came on, feminine, cool: ‘‘Mr. Davenport? This is Kerin Baki, Mr. Bone’s assistant. Can I help you?’’
    ‘‘I need to talk to Mr. Bone.’’
    ‘‘When?’’
    ‘‘As soon as possible.’’
    ‘‘Come over, and we’ll get you in,’’ she said.
    BAKI WAS A CHILLY NORTHERN BLONDE, WITH AN oval face and pale blue fighter-pilot eyes. She met him without any softening smile. In the spring, Lucas thought, she probably had genetic dreams of turning her tanks toward Moscow . . .
    She led him through into Bone’s office, said, ‘‘Mr. Bone, Mr. Davenport,’’ and left them, shutting the door behind her.
    Bone was dressed in a subdued single-breasted wool suit with a crisp white shirt and an Italian necktie; but somehow the ensemble came off as a wry comment on Yankee bankertude. He had a telephone to one ear and a foot propped on the N-Z volume of the New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary , which lay flat on his desk. He waved Lucas in, and as Lucas dropped into a bent-oak chair across the desk, said into the phone, ‘‘Two? That’s as good as you can do? Last week it was one and seven . . . Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’ll get back to you, but I think we might have to talk to Bosendorfer or Beckstein . . . Yeah, yeah. By four.’’
    He hung up, made a notation on a legal pad, and said, ‘‘I can give you all the time you’d need this evening, but if you gotta talk now, you gotta talk fast. And this is all off the record at this point, right?’’
    Lucas nodded. ‘‘Yes. If we need an official statement, we’ll send you a subpoena and get a formal deposition.’’
    Bone leaned forward. ‘‘So?’’
    ‘‘So do you think McDonald did it?’’
    ‘‘If one of us did it, it was McDonald. I didn’t do it. Robles, no motive. O’Dell, too smart. Unless I’m missing something. And to tell you the truth, I don’t think it’s McDonald. Way down at the bottom, I don’t think he’s got the grit to pull it off.’’
    ‘‘Then why’s he running the place?’’
    ‘‘He’s not. He’s only speaking for it. And that’ll only last until O’Dell and I get the board sorted out. Then it’ll be one of us.’’
    Lucas said, ‘‘Huh,’’ and then, ‘‘Have you ever heard of George Arris? Does the name ring a bell?’’
    ‘‘Yes, of course. He was a famous case around here, around the bank. He was murdered—this must’ve been a few months or maybe a year or so before I came here. Must’ve been back in ’85.’’
    ‘‘How was it famous? The name doesn’t ring a bell with me . . .’’
    ‘‘It was over on the St. Paul side of the river. Somebody started shooting white guys who were walking in the black areas—there were like three or four of them in a few weeks, shot in the back of the head.’’
    ‘‘Ah, jeez, I remember that,’’ Lucas said. ‘‘Never solved. And Arris was one of them?’’
    ‘‘Yup.’’
    ‘‘What’d he do here?’’ ‘‘Worked with the trust department, setting up portfolios for rich folk.’’
    ‘‘Would he have worked with McDonald?’’
    Bone said, ‘‘Probably. I’d have to look up the exact dates, but they probably overlapped. They certainly both went through that department. I don’t really know the details. I wasn’t here yet. I just heard about the killing later.’’
    ‘‘Okay. How about Andrew Ingall?’’
    ‘‘Andy? He was a vice president, also in the trust department, but he died a few years ago in a boating accident up on Superior. You think Wilson had something to do with it?’’
    ‘‘Why would he?’’ Lucas asked.
    Bone leaned back, then spun his chair in a circle, stopped it with one foot, reached into a desk drawer where he apparently had a stereo tuner hidden. A Schumann piano piece, simple, easy, elegant, and sweet, sprang into the office, and Bone said, ‘‘Schumann,’’ and Lucas said, ‘‘I know— Scenes