Secret Prey

a little break from the Ericson thing, and I thought I might as well clean it up.’’
    ‘‘That’s good,’’ Lucas said. ‘‘It’s a burden off my mind.’’
    Sloan’s tone of voice changed: ‘‘Terrance Robles just walked in and said he may know who did it.’’
    Lucas, uncertain, and not wanting to bite too hard, said, ‘‘You’re kidding.’’
    ‘‘I’m not kidding. He’s out sitting at my desk. Where are you?’’
    ‘‘About two minutes away.’’
    ‘‘See you in two minutes,’’ Sloan said.

EIGHT

    ROBLES WAS SITTING AT SLOAN’S DESK WHEN LUCAS and Sherrill arrived at Homicide. He was talking to Sloan, and Lucas watched for a minute. Robles was crossing and recrossing his ankles under his chair, twisting his hands together, rubbing the back of his neck, squirming in the chair. Serious stress, Lucas thought. Lucas walked up behind him, trailed by Sherrill, and when Sloan looked up, Robles turned, then got to his feet.
    ‘‘D-D-Detective Davenport,’’ he stuttered. ‘‘I’ve bbbeen talking to Detective Sloan, he thinks you should know about this.’’
    Lucas took a chair and Sherrill pulled one out of a nearby desk.
    ‘‘So . . . you think you know who did it?’’ Lucas asked.
    ‘‘No. I know somebody who says she did it, but I don’t think she really did. But if I didn’t tell you, I thought . . . I don’t know what I thought.’’
    ‘‘So?’’ Lucas grinned at him and made a What? gesture with his hands.
    Robles had a friend, he said, a woman, a computer freak he’d met in an Internet chat room, and then in person, when it turned out that she lived in Minneapolis. When the news hit the papers that Polaris was considering a merger, and a large number of administrative and clerical personnel in Minneapolis could lose their jobs, she called him to ask him if the merger could be stopped.
    ‘‘Her mother works at Polaris, routine clerical stuff, exactly the kind of job that would probably be wiped out,’’ Robles said.
    ‘‘And you told her that the merger couldn’t be stopped.’’
    ‘‘Not exactly. I told her that nobody much wanted it except Kresge and a small majority of board members, and the only reason the board was going for it was the stock premium . . .’’
    ‘‘Explain that,’’ Sherrill said. ‘‘I don’t understand stocks.’’
    ‘‘Well, see, Midland has offered to buy all the outstanding Polaris shares by trading with their shares, one to one. When they made the offer, they were trading in the sixties—sixty-plus dollars per share—and we were trading in the upper thirties. Their stock dropped on the offer, down to about fifty-three right now. But ours went to forty-six right now, and the closer we get to the merger, and the more certain it looks, the more ours will go up. If we finally merge, and nothing else happens, it’ll probably be around fifty dollars a share. Polaris needs ten board members to okay the deal. If you look at how many board members own how much stock, the tenth biggest holder . . .’’ Robles looked at Sherrill, who seemed to be having trouble following the explanation. ‘‘What I’m saying is, of those ten members needed to approve the merger, the one with the smallest holding is Shelley Oakes. He has ninety thousand shares, plus options for fifty thousand more at an average price in the thirties. If the sale goes through at fifty bucks, he’ll make a couple of million bucks over what the stock was worth before the merger talk started.’’
    ‘‘Ah,’’ Sherrill said, as though she understood.
    ‘‘The biggest holder, Dave Brandt, has better than four hundred thousand shares, plus God only knows what he has in stock options, which he could exercise before the deal goes down. He’ll make tens of millions. Literally tens of millions.’’
    ‘‘So the board and Kresge make millions, and everybody else gets fired,’’ Lucas said.
    ‘‘No, not exactly. Some people would make it. There’re rumors that the investment division will be kept intact, that Midland wants the division. Then there are other executives who could make a stink, but most of them have stock options.’’
    ‘‘Do you have options?’’ Lucas asked.
    ‘‘Yeah, yeah. I’ve got options on five thousand shares at a bunch of different prices that average out to about thirty-five, so if it goes to fifty, I’d make seventy-five thousand. But I’ll tell you what, that’s about six weeks’ pay for me. And the