Easy Prey

it’s too sophisticated, where did he figure out how to do it? How about a banker?
    • “What does the banker get out of it? How about dope, money, and women?
    • “What does Rodriguez get? How about financing, a way to wash his dope money, and legitimacy. He was a smart guy, even if he didn’t have much education.
    • “What happens at the party? Who knows? But Spooner winds up killing Sandy Lansing, maybe accidentally. Alie’e witnesses the killing, so he has to kill her. He then evaporates—maybe goes out the window, I don’t know. In any case, he doesn’t come up on our party list. He’s not part of that crowd, he’s just Lansing’s boyfriend, and a lot of people don’t even know her .”
     
“Wait a minute,” Rose Marie said. “There’s a fairly big jump in there. All the other stuff is linked, but that’s a pure jump--”
    “Let me finish,” Lucas said.
    • “We identify Rodriguez as being at that party, because, unlike Spooner, he’s known to be rich and single, and so he gets some attention from the other partygoers.
    • “When Al-Balah links Rodriguez and Lansing, we assume that since they were dealer-employee, that there’d been a falling-out. We then assume that Derrick Deal knew about them, because we knew Rodriguez was Lansing’s boss. We assume that Deal went to Rodriguez, tried to blackmail him, and got killed for his trouble. But when I took a photo of Rodriguez over to Brown’s, nobody recognized him. And I remembered that, back when I first talked to Deal, he wasn’t absolutely sure that Sandy Lansing was a dealer. He thought she might be, but he didn’t know . And that suggests to me that he didn’t know who her boss was. He definitely knew who her boyfriend was—we confirmed that today, with the photo of Spooner. He went to Spooner , not Rodriguez, and he got killed.
    • “Of all the people who were at the party, the ones most likely to finger Spooner as being there were Lansing, who was dead, and Rodriguez, who couldn’t, because that would drag the whole drug-apartment deal out into the open.
    • “So then I talk to Spooner. I try to intimidate him by suggesting that we’re about to bust Rodriguez, and let him know that we’re watching Rodriguez, that we’re all over him.
    • “Spooner realizes that if we really come down on Rodriguez, his goose is cooked—Rodriguez will try to stay clean as long as he can, but he’s not gonna suck it up for first-degree murder. He’ll talk to us, and one thing that will come out is that Spooner was at the party. And Spooner had some kind of relationship with Lansing. Sex, dope, something. He’d be as good a suspect as Rodriguez. But if Rodriguez commits suicide . . .
    • “Spooner knows we’re watching Rodriguez, and probably suspects that includes tapping the phone. So he goes to Rodriguez’s apartment and slips a note under the door. Probably something unsigned, maybe even typed. It says something like, ‘They’re coming for you—you gotta get anything incriminating off your computer. Burn this note.’”
     
“And we find ashes in the sink at Rodriguez’s apartment,” Del said. “Though he could of flushed it.”
    “Nothing gets rid of paper like burning,” Lucas said. He continued:
    • “So Spooner watches Rodriguez until he sees him leave for home, then hides out in the building where he can watch the entrance from the ramp. Rodriguez goes home, gets the note, thinks, ‘Oh, man, if they get the computer, my goose is cooked.’ He stops at CompUSA to get a Zip disk, because he plans to dump his files to the Zip disk, then either write over the hard drive or just take it out and throw it in the river. They’re cheap enough.
    • “Spooner knows we’re watching, so he can’t just whack Rodriguez and walk out the Skyway or the ramp or the front door, which would be the logical way to get out, especially if you’re in a little bit of a hurry. He has to sneak out. The basement door.”
     
“How’d he know about that?” Del asked.
    “Who knows? Maybe from hanging around with Rodriguez. Maybe he actually scouted the building the day before. Whatever the reason, if Rodriguez was murdered, the killer snuck out, as though he knew the place were being watched.”
    “How’d he kill him?” Rose Marie asked.
    “Hit him with something flat and hard. Not a baseball bat, because the wound would be wrong. Maybe a two-by-four.”
    “Oooh. Sting the hands,” Del said.
    “He then hauls Rodriguez