better.
Maybe if I could just try a couple. If I dont sleep tonight…
Sure. Well talk tomorrow.
When Helen was gone, Audrey prowled through the house, already planning: shed bundle up his suits, dump them at Goodwill and get a tax deduction. She got a notepad and wrote: ACCOUNTANT/Taxes and Deductions, and under that, Suits. Wilson had all kinds of crap shed want to get rid of, starting with that XK-E. She wrote Jag under Suits. And he had a whole wall full of bullshit awards and plaqueschairman of this charity in 1994, director of that community effort in 1997. All worthless: straight into the garbage can, she thought.
So much to do.
Audrey really did hurt from Wilsons beating, and from her own enhancements to the damage. The scalp wound, in particular, felt tight, like a banjo head, its edges seeming to pull against the stitches. After half an hour of cruising through the house, she went up to the bedroom, set the alarm clock for nineP. M., and tried to sleep.
But sleep, she found, wouldnt come easily. Too many images in her head, a mix of plans and memories. If Wilson had only landed the chairmanship, none of this would have happened. Shed believed in him from the start, and the belief had only begun to falter after Kresge got the top job six years earlier. Kresge was a technocrat, and brought in other technocrats like Bone and Robles. They had no respect for family name, for fortune, for breeding or society. All they knew was how to make money. Wilson, running the mortgage division, which had always been one of the pillars of the bank, was suddenly out on a limb.
She didnt know that sleep had come, but it must have. The clock went off: she sat up, a bit groggy, realized that the room was dark. She groped around the bedstand, found the clock, and silenced the alarm. Then she touched the light and swung out of bed.
A little tension now. She went straight to the shower and stood under it, breathing deeply, flexing the muscles in her back and shoulders. Stiff. When she got out of the shower, she downed four ibuprofen tablets, then dressed: black slacks, a deep red sweater, and a dark blue jacket over the sweater. She found a pair of brown cotton gardening gloves, and pulled them on. The best she could do for nighttime camouflage. Now for a weapon.
The police had been all through the house, but she remembered that when the closet rod broke in the front closet a year or so earlier, Wilson had tossed the broken dowel rod up in the rafters of the yard shed, where it lay with other scrap wood. She found a flashlight in the kitchen, let herself out the back, and walked in the dark to the shed. Inside, she turned the flash on. She could see the scrap wood overhead, but couldnt reach it. The lawn tractor wasthere, and she stood on the seat, stretched to push the wood around, and saw the two pieces of the dowel rolling to one side. She got both of them down. One was a little more than six feet long, including the split; the other a little more than two feet long, including the sharp split end.
She carried them both back to the house in the dark, and inside the porch gave the shorter of the two pieces a test swing. A little lighter than a baseball bat, but it swung just as well. Wearing the gloves, she rubbed both of them down with WD-40, eliminating any fingerprints.
In the garage, she put both pieces in Wilsons Buick, then climbed on top of the car hood, pulled the cover off the light on the garage door opener, and unscrewed the lightbulb. She climbed down from the car and put the bulb on the passenger seat.
Ready. She took a deep breath, started the car, pushed the garage door opener. The door came up, but no light came on. She backed out of the garage, lights out, then rolled down the long driveway to the street. The houses were far enough apart, and the street dark enough, that she should be able to get out without being seen… a calculated risk. If anyone saw her driving without lights, theyd remember it. A risk shed take. She rolled into the street, drove a hundred feet, and turned on the lights. Shed gotten away with it, she thought.
On the south side of Minneapolis, she stopped in a beatup industrial area and threw the longer of the two pieces of dowel rod into a pile of trash; the other waited beside the passenger seat.
ST. ANNES COLLEGEST. ANNES COLLEGE FOR BLOND Catholic Girls, as Audrey thought of it, was a leafy, redbrick girls college in St. Paul, a short walk from the Mississippi. Davenport lived somewhere in the neighborhood, Audrey knew. The newspaper article didnt say exactly where: just the Highland Park neighborhood.
Maybe to be close to the nun, she thought.
Audrey had spent four unhappy years at St. Annes, gettingfinished. Shed needed the finish, with her Red River farm background. And the unhappiness hadnt counted for much, since she couldnt ever remember being happy. Shed plowed through her courses, a smart, reasonably pretty brunette, and had carefully weeded out the likely husband prospects from St. JamessSt. Jamess College for Blond Catholic Boys.
Wilson McDonald had been the result of her four years of winnowing.
ON THE SOUTHWEST SIDE OF THE CAMPUS, THE RESIDENCE squatted in sooty obscurity. A near-cube built of red brick like most of the other buildings on campus, it housed the declining numbers of the sisterhood of nuns who ran St. Annes. The newspaper article, The Pals of Lucas Davenport, had mentioned that Sister Mary Joseph lived on campus, and continued to wear the traditional black habit on public occasions, including the classroom, though she sometimes went out in civilian clothing when working in area hospitals.
Audrey had never seen her in anything but traditional dress, and wasnt sure shed recognize her in civilian clothing. Still, she thought, she could pick her out.
Audrey parked on the street, and after sittingfor a moment in the dark, looking up and down, she got out, leaving her purse but carrying her cell phone, the dowel rod held by her side. She walked to the Residence along the sidewalk, and, in the dark space between streetlights, turned into the parking lot and moved quickly to the far corner of the building. She stood there, between two tall junipers, an arms length from the ivy-twined walls the bare ivy like a net of ropes and strings climbing the bricksand listened. She could hear voices, but far away; and a snatch of classical music from somewhere. More thefeelof the conversation than the actual words and notes. The parking lot itself held only a dozen cars, most of them nunlikeblack and simple; along with a few civilian cars.
She remembered this moment from the other times. The moment before commitment, when she could still back away, when, if discovered, she hadnt done anything. The moment where she could wave and say, Oh, hello, I was a bit confused here, Im just trying to find my way.
And the thrill came from piercing that moment, going through it, getting into the zone of absolute commitment.
She took the phone from her jacket pocket, and punched the numbers in the eerie green glow of the phones information screen.
St. Annes Residence. A young womans voice. Audrey had done this very job, answering the phone as a student volunteer, two nights a week for a semester, six oclock to midnight.
Yes, this is Janice Brady at Midway Hospital. We have a family-emergency call for a Sister Mary Joseph…
I think Sister is in chapel…
The chapel was in the Residence basement. Could you get her please? We have an injured gentleman asking for her.
Uh, just a moment. Actually, itll be two or three minutes.
Ill hold…
Then she heard more voices, close by. A man came around the corner, said something, laughed, walked into the parking lot.
Shit. This could ruin everything…
The man waved, walked to a car, fumbled with his keys, got in. Sat for a moment. Then started the engine, turned on the lights, and drove to the street.
And Sister Mary Joseph was there: Hello? Curiosity in her voice.
Is this Sister Mary Joseph, a psychologist at St. Annes College?
Yes, it is…
Theres been a shooting incident, and one of the victims asked that you be notified. An Officer Lucas Davenport.
Oh no! How bad is he?
Hes in surgery. I really dont have any more information; a priest on the staff has been notifiedwe assumed he was Catholic.
