Easy Prey

could call her? What the fuck did she mean? And why was he screwing around with Jael? And Jesus, he didn’t even want to think about Catrin.
    So he went home, thought about the game for a few minutes, then took a shower and crawled onto his bed. Ran it all around his head, and drifted off to sleep.
    He woke twice during the night, lay awake for an hour each time, running it through. In the morning, he shaved, showered, and, still tired, headed into downtown St. Paul. On the way, he took out his cell phone and called the department photo guy.
    “I got a picture I want you to take,” he said.

25
    FRIDAY. THE SEVENTH day of Alie’e.
    Rodriguez’s building had been cleaned up and was open for business; except for the cops working on his computer, nobody would have known. Lucas stopped at Rodriguez’s office and was introduced to Rodriguez’s secretary, a young woman who was dealing with her loss with equanimity. “I’ll be working tomorrow night,” she told Lucas. “In this economy, a dead guy could get a job. Whoops—maybe I oughta rephrase that.”
    “Do you think that Richard would have committed suicide?” Lucas asked.
    “He wasn’t the moody type,” she said. But she pressed a finger to her lips, thinking. “On the other hand, when he decided to do something, he’d do it, impulsive-like. Real quick. So, I mean, with all this publicity . . . But I don’t know. Maybe you really don’t know a person until he does something like this. And then, of course, you don’t know him at all, because he’s dead. So, like you never really get a chance to know anybody, you know? When you think about it.”
    In the hall, Lucas told the St. Paul cop, “She seems to be dealing with it.”
    “Yeah. A little too well, if you ask me. I wouldn’t be surprised if she was holding a little cash for the boss, or a little product.”
    “Cash, maybe. Not dope. She’s too ditzy to be trusted with dope,” Lucas said.
    “We’ll probably find out that she’s the brains behind the operation.” They both looked at her through the window slit beside the office door. She was talking to another cop, unconsciously twirling a ringlet of hair with an index finger. Lucas and the St. Paul cop looked back at each other and simultaneously said, “Maybe not.”
    “You know what I really need,” Lucas said. “I need to find the maintenance guy.”
     
 
THE MAINTENANCE MAN looked worried. “I’ll do anything I can to help.”
    “What I need to know is, how would you get out of this building if you couldn’t go out the ramp and you couldn’t go out the front door and you couldn’t go out the Skyway?”
    “You mean, like, if there was a mystery man here last night?”
    “Exactly.”
    The maintenance man thought about it. “Couldn’t do it,” he said finally. “He’d need a key. But all the keys are on two rings, and you have to know what you’re looking for before you can use one. Otherwise, it’s just a bunch of numbers on the keys. So if you wanted to get just one, you’d have to steal the whole ring—which nobody did. Even then, you still wouldn’t know which key opened what until you tried them all. That’d take a couple of days if that’s all you did.”
    “So let’s say the guy didn’t have a key.”
    “Well, there are some windows on the second floor that open, so he could lower himself down—but that’d be pretty obvious. I mean, there are cars on the street at that time of night.”
    “And it’s a long way down,” Lucas said. “He’d need a big rope.”
    “Yeah.” The maintenance man thought for another minute, puzzled. “You say he can’t go out through the garage.”
    “Nope.”
    “Well, if it were me, I’d hide in the building until the cops were gone, and then I’d just jump out and walk away with the crowd. Lots of places to hide.”
    “St. Paul went through here pretty thoroughly, last night and this morning.”
    “No kidding—had me running around like a mad-man.”
    “How about access to the alley?”
    “Nope. Them overhead doors lock with padlocks and . . . Ohh. Wait a minute.”
    “What?”
    “The regular door there. There’s a great big dead bolt on it, but . . .”
    “It opens from the inside,” Lucas said.
    “Yeah. I never use it. If we got a big delivery, they ring and we open the overheads. . . .”
    “Let’s go look,” Lucas suggested.
    The maintenance man started toward the far end of the building. “It locks with a key from the