Secret Prey

‘‘Everybody else has one.’’
    ‘‘ ’Cause then people would call me up,’’ Lucas said. ‘‘And I couldn’t say I must’ve been out.’’
    Sloan nodded and he and Del left. Sherrill lingered. ‘‘You’re going up north?’’
    ‘‘Yeah. I want to talk to—’’ His phone rang and he grabbed it, lifting a finger to Sherrill so she’d wait: ‘‘ Davenport.’’
    ‘‘Lucas this is Sergeant Ogram over in St. Paul. We talked—’’
    ‘‘Yeah, yeah. What’d you get?’’
    ‘‘I talked to my pal in the FBI and he called down to the fingerprint people and then he called me back: he says it’s maybe a hundred to one against having the wrong guy.’’
    ‘‘So we got him.’’
    ‘‘You got him. And listen, that slug fragment’s on the way over in a squad. Oughta be there about now.’’
    ‘‘Thanks. See ya.’’
    Lucas hung up: ‘‘We got him . . . Anyway, I want to go up north and talk to the caretaker and walk the place a little.’’
    ‘‘Okay.’’ She turned to go, but she was going slowly.
    ‘‘You got a problem?’’ Lucas asked.
    She stopped again, looked at him and said, ‘‘No,’’ and turned back toward the door. Lucas thought, Uh-oh. He’d never in his life gone through a little sequence like that when the woman didn’t have something to say, and one way or another, he almost always wound up getting his ass kicked.
    ‘‘Okay, if you’re sure.’’
    ‘‘I may give you a call tonight,’’ she said. She was nibbling the inside of her lip, as if distracted by something. ‘‘I do have something I sort of want to talk about.’’
    LUCAS CALLED KRAUSE AT THE GARFIELD COUNTY courthouse before he left and arranged to meet Kresge’s part-time caretaker at the cabin. The trip north was a good one: quick up the interstate, dry and fast on the back highways. The small towns were buckling down for winter: a man on a small green and yellow John Deere was mowing what must have been a glorious summer garden, now all brown stalks and dead leaves; a man in a camouflage jacket was shooting arrows across his backyard at two archery butts made of bundled wood shavings; an Arctic Cat dealership was running a special on snowmobile tune-ups and a closeout on Yamaha ATVs.
    Krause was waiting at the cabin, stepped into the yard and frowned when he saw the Porsche slipping down the driveway. Lucas punched it into an open space next to a Ford truck, climbed out. Below the cabin, the small lake showed a collar of ice, now out six feet from the shoreline.
    ‘‘Didn’t recognize the vehicle,’’ Krause said. ‘‘Boy, that’s something; don’t see many of those around here.’’
    ‘‘Had it for years,’’ Lucas said, looking back at the 911. ‘‘I’m thinking about trading it in for something a little larger.’’
    ‘‘Wouldn’t imagine it’d do you too much good out here in the winter.’’
    ‘‘Not too much,’’ Lucas agreed. A weathered, whitehaired man in his late sixties or early seventies had come around a corner of the cabin, carrying a gas-powered brush cutter. He put it down by the cabin steps and Krause said, ‘‘Marlon, this here’s Chief Davenport from Minneapolis, and Chief, this is Marlon Wiener.’’
    They shook hands, and Lucas said, ‘‘I just sorta need to walk around the place and chat for a while . . .’’
    ‘‘I’ll leave you to it,’’ Krause said. ‘‘I got some paperwork with me, I’m gonna sit inside with Mrs. Wiener and drink some coffee. Holler if you need me.’’
    LUCAS WANTED TO LOOK AT ALL THE TREE STAND LOCATIONS. The transcripts of Sloan’s interrogations had given the order in which the hunters had dispersed to the stands, but said nothing about the terrain itself.
    ‘‘We got a six-wheeler here, we could ride up, unless you rather walk,’’ Wiener said.
    ‘‘Let’s walk,’’ Lucas said. ‘‘They all walked the morning of the shoot, right?’’
    ‘‘That’s right,’’ Wiener said.
    ‘‘So tell me about Kresge,’’ Lucas said, as they started through the fallen leaves toward the track around the lake. ‘‘Good guy, bad guy, what do you think?’’
    ‘‘Wouldn’t have wanted to work for him on a daily basis—you know, right next to him,’’ Wiener said. ‘‘He was all right with me. Told me what he wanted done and sometimes I’d suggest stuff, and he usually told me to do that too. My wife’d keep the place clean, come down a couple of times a week to dust and