Mind Prey by John Sandford Read Free Book Online

Lucas asked.
    Dunn shook his head. “It’s gotta be one of the nuts she handles,” he said. “She gets the worst. Sex criminals, pyromaniacs, killers. Nobody’s too crazy for her.”
    Lucas gazed at him for a moment. The gooseneck lamp made a pool of light around his hands, but his pug’s face was half in shadow; in an old black-and-white movie, he might have been the devil. “How much do you dislike her?” Lucas asked. “Your wife?”
    “I don’t dislike her,” Dunn said, bouncing once in the chair. “I love her.”
    “That’s not the word around town.”
    “Yeah, yeah, yeah.” He put his fingers to his forehead, scrubbed at it. “I screwed a woman from the office. Once.” Lucas let the silence grow, and Dunn finally launched himself from his chair, walked to a box, opened it, took out a bottle of scotch. “Whiskey?”
    “No, thanks.” And he let the silence go.
    “We’re talking about a major-league cookie, this chick, in my face five days a week,” Dunn said. He made a Coke-bottle tits-and-ass figure with his hands. “Andi and I had a few disagreements—not big ones, but we’ve got a lot going on. Careers, busy all the time, we don’t see each other enough…like that. So this chick is there, in the office—she was my traffic manager—and finally I jump her. Right there on her desk, pencils and pens all over the place, Post-it notes stuck to her butt. The next thing I know, she gets her little handbag and her business suit and shows up at Andi’s office to announce that she loves me and I love her.” He ran his hands through his hair, then laughed, a short, half-humorous bark. “Christ, what a nightmare that must’ve been.”
    “Doesn’t sound like one of your better days,” Lucas admitted. He remembered days like that.
    “Man, I wish I hadn’t done it,” Dunn said. He lipped the bottle of whiskey in his hand, caught it. “I lost my wife and a pretty goddamn good traffic manager on the same day.”
    Lucas watched him for a long beat. He wasn’t acting.
    “Is there any reason you might’ve killed your wife for her money?”
    Dunn looked up, vaguely surprised: “Christ, you don’t fuck around, do you?”
    Lucas shook his head. “Could you have done that? Does it make sense?”
    “No. Just between you and me—there isn’t that much money.”
    “Um…”
    “I know, Tower Manette and his millions, the Manette Trust, the Manette Foundation, all that shit,” Dunn said. He flicked a hand as if batting away a cobweb, then walked across the room, stepped through a doorway and flicked on a light. He opened a refrigerator door, dropped a couple of ice cubes in his glass, and came back. “Andi gets a hundred thousand a year, more or less, from her share of the Manette Trust. When the kids turn eighteen, they’ll get a piece of it. And they’ll get bigger pieces when they turn twenty-five and forty. If they were…to die…I wouldn’t see any of that. What I’d get is the house, and the stuff in it. Frankly, I don’t need it.”
    “So what about Manette? You said…”
    “Tower had maybe ten million back in the fifties, plus the income from the trust, and a board seat at the Foundation. But he was running all over the world, buying yachts, buying a house in Palm Beach, screwing everything in a skirt. And he was putting the good stuff up his nose—he was heavy into cocaine back in the seventies. Anyway, after a few years, the interest on the ten mil wasn’t cutting it. He started dipping into the principal. Then he got into politics—bought his way in, really—and he dipped a little deeper. It must’ve seemed like taking water out of the ocean with a teacup. But it added up. Then, in the late seventies and eighties, he did everything wrong—he was stuck in bonds during the big inflation, finally unloaded them at a terrific loss. Then sometime in there, he met Helen…”
    “Helen’s his second wife, right?” Lucas said. “She’s quite a bit younger than he