Easy Prey

thought so.” Bad as it was, it was something new. They’d both been to multiple murders, but never to one where the cops had already gotten the coffee hot, sent somebody out for donuts, started the routine, then opened a closet door and had another body drop out like a dislodged sock monkey.
    “Why’d it take so long to find her?” Lucas asked.
    “She was in a closet, the door was locked. Nobody unlocked it right away.”
    “Jesus, I hope the papers don’t get that,” Lucas said. “Or maybe we ought to give it to them. You know, our way.”
    “This woman who lives here, Hanson—she was there when we found the second one, and she’s gonna talk about it. She lives for the media. You know what she told me when I was talking to her about it?”
    Lucas shook his head.
    “She said her only good black dresses were too short for this. For the murders. She sees this as a photo op and she’s already figuring out her wardrobe for the cameras.”
    “All right.” That happens.
    “There’s one other thing.” Swanson glanced down at the uniformed cops. Lucas got the idea, and they both turned sideways, and Swanson dropped his breath. “Hanson says there was a strange guy wandering through the place. About the time Maison disappeared out of the crowd. Hanson thinks he did it. She didn’t know him, but he was talking to everybody. She said he was like a street guy. Too thin, yellow teeth, and he was wearing this T-shirt that read, ‘I’m with Stupid,’ and had this arrow that pointed down at his dick. And he had this weird dog-shit-brown sport coat.”
    Lucas stared at Swanson for a moment, then said, “Huh.”
    “That’s what I thought,” Swanson said. “You want to call him?”
    “Yeah, I’ll call him. Let me look at the scene first.”
     
 
HANSON’S HOME WAS elegant but sterile. Lucas recalled another case, a couple of months before, when he’d entered an apartment and found the same high-style sterility. Like a picture on the cover of Architectural Digest : Pretty, but not lived-in. Eggshell walls with contemporary graphics—wrenches and hammers and gestures and angst—and then, around the corner, the interjected English country scene, in oil colors, with cows, spotted perfectly to connect with the graphics. Somebody else’s sense of humor; a humor spoiled by the underlying scent of alcohol and smoke, the smell of a well-kept motel.
    The house seemed divided into two parts—an open plan public area, and a conventional series of bedroom suites at the back. Swanson led the way into the back. Two plainclothes cops were standing in a long central hallway, looking down at the thick gray hair of an assistant medical examiner, who was crouched over a body on the floor. The dead woman was facedown; she wore a reddish-brown party dress. The AME was dabbing at her mouth with an absorbent tissue.
    “Name is Sandy Lansing,” Swanson said as they walked back. “She’s a hostess of some kind, at Brown’s Hotel.” Brown’s was expensive, a hotel where poised young blond women in pearl-gray suits took the guests to their suites, while bellhops in red-and-black monkey suits toted the luggage and kept their mouths shut.
    Lucas squatted beside the body; one knee cracked. “Know what did it?” Lucas asked the AME.
    The AME was older, like Swanson, with the same tired hound-dog eyes. He had a pack of Marlboros in his shirt pocket, and a black medical bag, which was open on the rug behind him. “I think her skull is cracked,” he said. “That’s the only trauma I can find, but that was probably enough. There’s a cleft, looks like a V-shaped cleft. She could have been hit by something with a narrow edge on it, a board, maybe the end of a cane—a walking stick. Not a pipe, nothing round.”
    “A cane? Did somebody have a cane?” Lucas asked, looking up at Swanson. Swanson shrugged.
    “But could have been a doorjamb, or something like that,” the AME continued. “Here . . .” He picked up the woman’s head, gently, as though he might have had a daughter of his own, and turned it. A small indentation marked the back of the woman’s head, near the top; there was a smear of blood, enough to show the line of the injury.
    “We think she might have walked in on the murder, by accident, and the killer went after her. Hit her with anything he had,” Swanson said. “Maybe banged her head against the wall.”
    “Why would he stuff her in the closet?” Lucas objected, but the AME interrupted: