Easy Prey

it’s over.’
    “And that was it.”
    “We need that number, and times and transcripts,” Lucas said. He jotted down the number, and when he got off, he looked at Rose Marie and said, “It’s piling up.”
    WHEN ROSE MARIE was gone, he called Mallard and gave him the Miami number, and called Del and gave him the local number. Del called back fifteen minutes later and said, “That number is out to another blind phone, but Narcotics knows it. They picked it up on a pen register a couple of months ago, a guy named Herb Scott. That’s all they know, a number and a name in the computer. Want them to look a little closer?”
    “Absolutely. Put him on the list. If nothing happens by tomorrow night, we’re gonna sweep them all, and see if we can shake anything loose.”
    Mallard called back a few minutes after Del. “That number goes with a guy who lists his address in a place called Gables-By-The-Sea. I guess it’s a ritzy neighborhood. I’ve got a guy checking with the locals.”
    “Thanks.”
    Piling it up.
    For a moment, he thought about running down the new real estate dealer, but decided against it: That might make the phone tap obvious, and the phone might still be valuable.
     
 
SLOAN CALLED. “COME on down to Homicide. There’s something you got to see.”
    Lucas walked down, and found a half-dozen cops laughing around a small-screen TV. “What?”
    “That’s Rodriguez’s apartment,” Sloan said.
    “Penthouse,” somebody said.
    A wavering picture was focused on a window surrounded by reddish concrete. Then, moving in slow motion, Rodriguez appeared in the window and pulled the curtain across it. When he was out of sight, the loop started again: the window, Rodriguez, the curtain.
    “Guilty, guilty, guilty,” a cop said.
    And somebody else, with a little edge of sarcasm: “If he wasn’t guilty, why would he pull the curtain?”
    And a third guy: “If it was me, I’d be pointing a rifle out the window.”
    “They’d love that.”
    “Yeah, until a little bullet hole appeared on the forehead of one of them blonde c--”
    A woman with a gun said, “Watch it.”
    “--cameramen.”
     
 
OLSON CAMEBY, trailing the Bentons, the Packards, and Lester Moore, the newspaper editor. “Who is this Rodriguez?” Olson demanded. “Everybody’s saying he did it.”
    Rose Marie said, “He’s a suspect. Lucas . . .”
    Lucas said, “We think he’s a drug dealer—actually, we’re sure he is. And we have at least two sources who say that he was running Sandy Lansing. That is, Sandy Lansing was the street dealer for drugs brought in by Rodriguez.”
    “Rodriguez was the wholesaler?”
    “More like the local franchise owner, and Lansing was one of his employees.”
    “Amazing,” Olson said. “Franchises and employees. Did he pay her Social Security?”
    Moore broke in: “Can you get him?”
    “Not yet,” Lucas said. “Maybe on drugs. We have no direct connection to the murder, but we can put him at the party, we can connect him with Lansing, we have him denying that he knew her, we can probably show that they dealt drugs together. We can project it as a drug argument that went bad. He killed Lansing, maybe even accidentally, by cracking her head against a doorjamb. Alie’e comes out of the bedroom just at that point, and he kills her, to get rid of a witness.”
    Olson stood up slowly, peered at the Bentons and then at Moore. “You mean . . . she was killed as a bystander? That all this happened because she was at the wrong place?”
    “That’s a possibility,” Lucas said.
    Olson said, “I don’t believe it. This is not a casual killing. All these people dead. It can’t just be chance. It can’t be.”
    “We don’t really know that it is,” Rose Marie interjected. “Lucas is just outlining one possible theory.”
    “My good God,” Olson said. He put his hands on the side of his head, as he had the day he found his parents, and pulled the hair straight out, as he had that day, just before his collapse.
    Lucas stood up, stepped toward him, took his arm. “Easy.”
    “I can’t, I can’t . . .”
    “Sit down.”
    Olson stumbled, and Lucas guided him around to the chair. Olson looked around the room, at the faces all pointed toward him, and said, “This cannot stand. This cannot.”
    WHEN HE WAS gone, Frank Lester said, “If that doesn’t get him cranked, I don’t know what will.”
     
 
LANE CAME BACK. “Took all goddamn day, but the bank examiner comes in on