Secret Prey

.’’
    ROUX WAS AMUSING, AND HE LAUGHED WITH HER, and convinced her to sign off on the thirty hours. But the laughter was like a water bug on a pond, skating across the surface of his mind. He was amused and he laughed, but nothing was deeply funny; life was simply stupid most of the time. Going downhill, again, he thought. He walked back to his office, tired, a little unnerved by the overnight rattling in his brain, and found Sherrill waiting for him.
    Sherrill was lanky and dark-eyed, with short black hair and—Sloan’s words—the good headlights. Her estranged husband had been killed by a crazy outlaw, who was himself killed by Lucas in a close-quarters firefight in the middle of a freak blizzard. It all happened just minutes before the cold-eyed Iowa boy had blown up both Dick LaChaise and Lucas’s marriage prospects. Last winter had been a bad one.
    ‘‘There you are,’’ Sherrill said. ‘‘Want to come detect?’’
    ‘‘Detect what?’’
    ‘‘An anonymous caller phoned the Garfield sheriff’s office and said that a US West lineman saw the killer, or might have seen him. The lineman was working on an exchange box near Kresge’s place. Said that he was talking about it in a bar, thought about calling the cops but didn’t because he didn’t want to get involved. So the sheriff tracked him down, and guess what?’’
    ‘‘He confessed and threw himself on the mercy of the court.’’
    ‘‘Nope. He’s down here. They sent him to an NSP warehouse to pick up a bunch of splicer things . . . The sheriff talked to him and called me. He’s the only eyewitness we have so far. I’m going over.’’
    ‘‘How far?’’
    ‘‘Ten minutes?’’
    ‘‘Let’s go,’’ Lucas said.
    SHERRILL HAD A CITY CAR PARKED AT THE CURB. THEY took I-394 west, falling into routine cop chitchat that covered a vaguely uncomfortable tension between them. Sherrill was at least somewhat available, and, rumor had it, would not be averse to exploring possibilities with Lucas. At the same time, word was around that Lucas hadn’t quite recovered from the loss of Weather, and nobody wanted to be the first woman afterwards.
    Lucas, on the other hand, with a small reputation as a womanizer, had been expected to make a run at Sherrill ever since her marriage began going bad. He’d never done that. There lingered about them the sense that somebody ought to make a move, almost as a matter of common politeness.
    ‘‘Did you get anything good out of Kresge’s office?’’ Lucas asked after a while.
    ‘‘Naw. But there are some newly humble secretaries and assistants around the place, I’ll tell you,’’ Sherrill said cheerfully. ‘‘Especially around Bone and O’Dell and McDonald. Everybody thinks one of them will get the job.’’
    ‘‘What about the merger?’’
    ‘‘That’s apparently on hold.’’
    ‘‘Hmph. So if somebody shot Kresge to stop the merger, it worked.’’
    ‘‘Yup. For the time being, anyway.’’
    ‘‘And this telephone guy . . .’’
    ‘‘Harold Hanks.’’
    ‘‘. . . saw the killer.’’
    ‘‘Maybe. But there’s something odd about the whole thing. Whoever called the sheriff’s office said she heard him talking in a bar. Harold Hanks is a hard-shell Baptist. He told the sheriff he hadn’t been in a bar for fifteen years, since he was born again. But he did see somebody, just like the caller said. But he never connected whoever he saw with the killing.’’
    ‘‘The caller was a woman?’’
    ‘‘Yeah.’’
    ‘‘They knew where the call came from?’’
    ‘‘A pay phone off I-35. I wrote it down, it’s up north somewhere.’’
    ‘‘Nothing there, then.’’
    ‘‘Nope.’’
    ‘‘Both letters to Rose Marie were probably written by women—one of them for sure, and the one pointing at McDonald has a female feeling to it . . .’’
    ‘‘Yeah, it does,’’ Sherrill agreed. ‘‘So we’ve got somebody out there who knows a lot more than we do, and she’s leading us in.’’
    ‘‘Which makes you wonder . . .’’ He looked out the window.
    ‘‘What?’’
    ‘‘McDonald’s wife,’’ Lucas suggested.
    ‘‘Hmm.’’
    ‘‘He beats her up,’’ Lucas said.
    ‘‘Yeah?’’ Old story.
    ‘‘Something to look into,’’ he said.
    They rode in the slightly tense silence for another few minutes, then Sherrill blurted, ‘‘Seeing Weather at all?’’
    ‘‘No. The shrink thinks we ought to spend some time apart.’’