Easy Prey

“Look at this.”
    “What?”
    He was peering closely at the woman’s scalp, then reached back, felt in his bag, and took out a hand lens. “I think, uh, it looks like a little flake of paint in her hair. . . .” He looked up at Swanson. “Don’t let anybody touch the doorjambs or any of the wooden trim. Anywhere she could whack her head. You might find an impact mark and maybe a hair or two.” That could make the difference between murder and manslaughter, or even an accident.
    “All right,” Swanson said. He looked up and down the hall at all the doorjambs; there seemed to be dozens.
    Lucas went back to his first thought. “Why couldn’t this one have been killed first, and then--”
    “’Cause Maison was strangled and she wasn’t wearing any underpants, and the condition of her vulva and her pubic hair would suggest that she’d very recently been engaged in sex,” Swanson said. “If somebody had killed Lansing first, we thought it was pretty unlikely that he’d stop off to bang Maison and then strangle her.”
    “Okay.” Made sense.
    “She’s got something written on her wrist in ballpoint, but it’s kinda smeared, so it probably didn’t happen right at the time she was killed,” the AME said. He turned a wrist, and Lucas looked at the smear of blue ink.
    “Looks like . . . Ella? Fella? Della?”
    “Probably not fella,” Swanson said. “Why would anybody write ‘fella’ on their wrist?”
    “Could be a name,” the AME suggested.
    “Strange name,” Swanson said.
    “See what you can do to bring it up,” Lucas said. “Get some photos over to homicide.”
    “Okay.”
    Lucas stood. “Let’s see the other one.”
    The door to the guest bedroom was another six feet down the hall, and Lucas stepped over Lansing’s body, Swanson following along behind. Two crime-scene guys stepped out of the room just as Lucas came up. “Video,” one of them said. “Crying goddamned shame,” said the other.
    Inside, a photographer lit up, and began taping the crime scene, while a second guy maneuvered a light. All Lucas could see of Alie’e Maison was one bare foot, sticking out from behind the bed; the body was lodged in the space between the bed and the wall.
    He waited until the video guy was finished, then looked over the edge of the bed. Maison was lying faceup, one hand over her head, one trapped beneath her back. Her filmy green dress had been pulled up under her arms, exposing her body from the navel down. Her hips were canted toward the wall, and her ankles were crossed, but the wrong way: The one that should have been on the bottom was on the top.
    “Looks like she was thrown in there,” Lucas said.
    One of the cops nodded. “That’s what we think. Tried to hide her.”
    “But not too hard. You can see her feet.”
    “But if you just poked your head in, from the door, you probably wouldn’t.”
    “Who found her?” Lucas asked.
    “One of the people at the party.” He looked at a notebook. “A woman named Rowena Cooper. Cooper knew Maison was back here, supposedly sleeping, and hadn’t come out. She went back to see if she was awake. She says she opened the door but couldn’t see anything, so she turned on the lights. She was just turning around to go back out when she saw the underpants. She went over to pick them up, and she saw the feet. Started screaming.”
    “Where’s Cooper now?”
    The cop tipped his head toward the other end of the house. “The library. We called Sloan, he’s coming in to talk to her.”
    “Good.” Sloan was the best interrogator in the department. Lucas took a last look around the room. The bedspreads coordinated with the window treatments and the carpet. He asked, “The windows were locked?”
    “In this room, yeah. But we got an open window down the hall,” one of the cops said.
    “Let me see.”
    “Check this first,” the cop said. He leaned forward, hovering an index finger over the inside of Alie’e’s left elbow.
    Lucas would have known what that meant even if he couldn’t see the BB-sized bruise. A needle user. He sighed, nodded at the cop, said, “Swanson,” and stepped back into the hallway. Swanson was a step behind.
    “Look, you know what’s gonna happen, so we’ve got to nail everything down,” Lucas said. “Everything. I want everything sampled, swept, vacuumed. I want every test there is, on both women. I want interviews with everyone at the party—ask everybody for a list of names, and make sure you get