Secret Prey

dictionary,’’ Lucas said.
    ‘‘You don’t think it’s weird?’’
    ‘‘The pinking shears thing with Del—that was weird,’’ Lucas said. ‘‘No books? That’s not weird, that’s just a little unusual.’’
    ‘‘I think it’s weird,’’ Franklin insisted. ‘‘People with seven million, they oughta have books.’’ He frowned, and said, ‘‘Hey, you know what else?’’
    He left the room, and Lucas trailed after him. ‘‘There’s no CD player. I don’t think they’ve got any CDs. They got no goddamn record player, Lucas.’’
    ‘‘Yeah, well . . .’’
    Franklin turned and said, ‘‘These people are very strange.’’ He looked around the room again, spotted a studio portrait of Wilson and Audrey McDonald smiling down from another knickknack shelf. The photo was so heavily retouched that the two of them looked like puppets. ‘‘Look at her eyes,’’ Franklin said. Lucas looked. ‘‘They follow you. Man, they are very strange.’’
    AUDREY MCDONALD LAY IN HER HOSPITAL BED AND thought about Davenport. He seemed to know something. To know her . The others had shaken their heads when they saw her, had essentially apologized for their maleness in view of what another male had done to her. The hospital had provided female attendants to care for her, as if a male doctor or male nurse might somehow further the damage done.
    Not Davenport. He was ready to crucify her. She would have to move on this.
    She dozed for a while, in a little pain, and woke up, calculating.
    The lawyer said she’d be here overnight, and then would be wheeled into court for a preliminary hearing on an open charge of murder. She would be allowed to enter a plea— not guilty—and bail would be set. If she was willing, he’d said, she could use her house as security. The assistant county attorney handling the case had already indicated that the state would have no objection, so the deal was as good as done, and she could go straight home from the courthouse.
    ‘‘Murder?’’ She’d croaked. ‘‘They’re charging . . . ?’’
    ‘‘Don’t worry: they’re already backing off,’’ Glass had said. ‘‘When the police finish investigating, they’ll almost certainly find that it was self-defense. Right now, it’s ninety-ten for no charges at all.’’
    So Audrey had agreed to use the house as security, and had given him a limited power of attorney so that he could get all the paperwork. She’d be out tomorrow afternoon.
    And that would be the time to handle the Davenport problem.
    She’d thought she was doing that when she pitched the Molotov cocktail through Weather Karkinnen’s window. From what she could tell by questioning Wilson, and careful questions to others at the bank, Davenport had been the only reason that Wilson had been looked at so closely. Audrey had attacked Karkinnen in an effort to turn Lucas around—the same tactic had worked in the past, with the McKinney situation and the Bairds. And from what she could tell of the investigation’s pace, and from stories in the newspapers, the attack had diverted him for a time. Investigators had vanished from the bank, there’d been two days of silence from the police . . . and then suddenly, they were back, and all over Wilson.
    Wilson.
    She sighed, and let a little tear start at the corner of her eye. She already missed Wilson. She’d known, in her heart of hearts, that someday she’d have to kill him, the love of her life. He would inevitably get in her way, or even become a danger to her. And he finally had. If the police had put pressure on him, he would’ve pointed them at her, because he was basically a coward. He had no grit. Wilson . . .
    She wrenched her mind back to Davenport. The problem with the Karkinnen diversion was that the police investigation hadn’t led anywhere. The newspapers said the police were simply mystified. They’d run down every single clue and they’d found nothing at all. After a while, there was nothing left to do, so they went back to Wilson and had apparently stumbled over something that pointed at the Arris killing. If they’d been preoccupied with Karkinnen a little bit longer, they might never have found whatever it was.
    Now they were looking at her. Or at least, Davenport was. She didn’t quite understand why. She’d given him an answer to his question—her own dead husband.
    She’d actually given him an earlier answer, the answer to who killed Kresge, but he either hadn’t