Secret Prey

the bedroom, carrying Granddad’s favorite twelve-gauge. She looked like a nightmare from a horror film, blood matting her hair, running down her cheek into her blouse, bubbling from her nose over her lips and chin down her neckline, and running from her legs down to her feet; she’d left a row of bloody footprints into and out of the bedroom.
    ‘‘You loser,’’ she said, through the dripping blood. A sad look came over McDonald’s bully face as he looked into the muzzle of the gun: ‘‘I was afraid you’d killed all those people; but I didn’t want to know,’’ he said.
    ‘‘Well, now you do,’’ she said.
    ‘‘You don’t have to kill me.’’
    ‘‘Wilson, that goddamned Davenport is snuffling around after you, and he’s going to get you. He already knows about some of the other killings, and once he has those figured out—you’d cave in like a house of cards. My problem is, you might still be able to prove you were out of town for a couple of the killings. And I’ll tell you what, Wilson, after all the shit I put up with married to a goddamn loser . . .’’ The booze was beginning to have an effect, and she blinked once, twice, almost lost her line of thought. ‘‘After all that shit, I couldn’t stand going to jail for it.’’
    ‘‘You don’t have to,’’ he said, hastily. He took a step back. ‘‘You gotta think about this.’’
    ‘‘I have thought about it,’’ she said. ‘‘I would have had to do it sooner or later anyway.’’
    ‘‘You goddamn hillbilly,’’ he said, taking another step back.
    ‘‘You . . .’’ She couldn’t think of an answer to that, so she fired the shotgun, the load of buckshot blowing straight through the broken golf trophy McDonald had moved up over his chest, through an inch of yellow fat, and into McDonald’s heart. He wasn’t blown backward, the way people hit with shotguns were in the movies; he simply took another step back, tried to say something else, and then toppled.
    Audrey checked to make sure he was dead, and then called 911.
    ‘‘I killed my husband,’’ she choked; and she really choked, because she had loved him, more or less. ‘‘I shot my husband,’’ she moaned. ‘‘Send somebody . . .’’
    And when they said they would, she dropped the phone, tossed the gun at McDonald’s sightless body, and staggered into the kitchen for another drink.

NINETEEN

    LUCAS WOKE IN FULL LIGHT, WITH THE PHONE RINGING again. He hopped out of bed, nearly stumbled on cramped legs, lurched through the bedroom door to the study, picked up the extension on the sixth or seventh ring and said, ‘‘Yeah?’’
    ‘‘Lucas, this is Dan Johnson.’’ Johnson ran the overnight Homicide. ‘‘Listen, you know this McDonald guy you’ve been tracking?’’
    ‘‘Yeah?’’
    ‘‘We caught a call from his old lady last night. Audrey McDonald. She killed him with a shotgun.’’
    ‘‘What?’’ He heard the words, but they didn’t make sense.
    ‘‘Killed him,’’ Johnson said. ‘‘Hit him in the chest with a goose load, range of about six feet. He’d beaten the shit out of her. There was blood all over the goddamn place.’’
    ‘‘Aw, man.’’ Lucas thought for a moment. ‘‘Where is she right now? Audrey?’’
    ‘‘Over at the hospital. We got a preliminary statement from her, on the way downtown. She admitted shooting him, then asked for an attorney. Her sister, Helen, is here, making a statement. She says Audrey called her, looking for help, while her old man was chasing her around the house.’’
    ‘‘That sounds a little strange. What’d they do, call a time-out so she could use the phone?’’
    ‘‘Well, you gotta hear the whole story, but it holds together.’’
    ‘‘Okay.’’
    ‘‘So Helen called 911 and asked us to send out a car, that her sister was being beaten to death. The next thing, we get a 911 from Audrey, saying she shot her old man. They were both pretty drunk, Audrey and Wilson. We got blood alcohols on both of them, the old man was twopointone, she was one-point-four, and big as he was, he had to drink a shitload of booze to get up to two-point-one. We got an empty fifth of scotch and another bottle with about an inch left. He had been drinking part of the afternoon and all evening.’’
    ‘‘You think Audrey and Helen could’ve set it up?’’ Lucas asked.
    ‘‘I don’t think so. You gotta see Audrey. I mean, McDonald beat the shit out of her. She’s gonna