Secret Prey

holders, upgraded six years earlier from the Gold. The most interesting statement involved charges on McDonald’s card in the days before Andy Ingall sailed off on Lake Superior and vanished.
    ‘‘The day before Ingall disappears, McDonald spends four hundred bucks at Marshall Field in Chicago. That night, and the night before, he’s at the Palmer House,’’ Lucas said to Franklin. ‘‘That means if he rigged the boat, he had to have done it at least a couple of days beforehand, or, if he came home that day, he had to go right up to Superior and rig the boat the night before. That seems tricky.’’
    Franklin, enormous in a plaid shirt and jeans, had been going through the check stubs and investment papers. ‘‘I ain’t finding anything here. It’s all too general. They were pretty well off, though. He’s got a trust account at Polaris with about three-point-four million divided between stocks and bonds, heavy on the bonds. Plus an account at Vanguard worth another three million, all in the stock market. And if I’m reading it right, he’s got another nine hundred thousand in stock at Merrill Lynch. Cash in bank accounts, about twenty-four thousand, plus a money market account with a hundred and seventy thousand . . . that’s apparently a tax account.’’ He put the papers down, and looked at Lucas. ‘‘I don’t know. With that much—that’s gotta be more’n seven million—you think he’d be killing to get even richer?’’
    ‘‘I asked the same thing,’’ Lucas said. ‘‘The answer is, he was chasing power, not money. He was a bully in high school, he beat his wife, he killed people to eliminate competition for the promotions. He got off on power trips. He’d be running the lives of a couple thousand people if he took over the bank.’’
    Franklin sighed: ‘‘I’d like to get a nice killer sometime.’’
    A uniformed cop stuck his head in the door: ‘‘You know how you told us to find that Jag?’’
    Lucas nodded without looking up. According to a file they found in the house, and confirmed by the Department of Motor Vehicles, Wilson McDonald owned a 1969 XKE, which was not in their three-car garage.
    ‘‘We talked to McDonald’s old man,’’ the uniformed cop said. His name was Lane, and he wanted to be a detective. ‘‘The car was in a downtown parking garage, already covered up for the winter. And guess what?’’
    Lucas looked up now. ‘‘What?’’
    Lane stepped fully into the room, held up a transparent plastic baggie. Inside, a small automatic pistol. ‘‘Ta-da.’’
    ‘‘I don’t believe it,’’ Lucas said. He took the bag, held it up, and peered at the gun. The caliber, .380, was stamped on the slide. ‘‘That’s the one . . . You touch it?’’
    ‘‘No, of course not. The safety’s on, and we just bagged it. Figured, who knows—if he didn’t shoot it much, maybe it’s got some of the same shells from the Arris or O’Dell deals.’’
    ‘‘Get it downtown,’’ Lucas said, handing it back.
    ‘‘Do I get a medal?’’ Lane asked.
    ‘‘Yeah. You’ll get a size eleven medal right in the ass if you don’t get it downtown.’’
    Lane left, and a few minutes later, Franklin, who’d fallen into an odd reverie sitting in an overstuffed chair with the bank statements in his hands, staring at an English hunting print on the wall above McDonald’s desk, suddenly said, ‘‘I know what it is.’’
    ‘‘I’m glad somebody does,’’ Lucas said.
    ‘‘You know what’s wrong with this place?’’
    Lucas looked around. ‘‘Looks pretty nice.’’ ‘‘There are no fuckin’ books,’’ Franklin said. He got up, walked around the study, checking the shelves full of ceramic figurines. ‘‘They even got a couple of bookends, with no books between them—they got these fuckin’ Keebler elves, or whatever they are.’’
    ‘‘Hummels,’’ Lucas said. ‘‘But they do have a computer.’’ He nodded at the Hewlett Packard crouched on the desk.
    ‘‘Ain’t a book,’’ Franklin said. ‘‘I’m going to look around.’’
    Lucas finished the American Express statements, extracted the statement that showed McDonald in Chicago, and stacked the rest on the desk. Slow going. He’d just gotten up when Franklin came back: ‘‘I could find five books in this whole fuckin’ house. A dictionary, a cookbook, a bartender’s guide, and travel books on California and Florida.’’
    ‘‘Maybe they took turns reading the