Easy Prey

every goddamn last one.”
    “Sure.”
    “Who takes over when you get off?”
    “I think . . . Thompson.”
    “Brief him. Do everything. We’ll pay for every bit of science anybody can think of.” He looked back at the room. “Did you look at her fingernails?”
    “Yeah. They’re clean. We’ll get her vagina swabbed and get a rush on the semen.”
    “And blood, we need blood right away. I want to know what kind of shit she was shooting.”
    “Heroin.”
    “Yeah, I know, but I wanna know. ”
    “You gonna call Del?”
    “In a minute.”
    “There’s a phone in the office. I was keeping it clear for incomings,” Swanson said.
    “Show me the unlocked window. . . . This place doesn’t look like the windows should be unlocked.”
    “Hanson says they never are,” Swanson said. “But she got them washed a couple of weeks ago, and they were all opened then—they’re some kind of tilt thing, so you can wash both sides from the inside.”
    “I dunno.”
    “Yeah, well, the window could have been unlocked then. Hanson says she never went around and checked them. She assumed they were all locked.”
    The unlocked window was in another guest room, one door down the hall; this room had a different set of coordinated bedspreads, window treatments, and carpet. Lucas looked out through the window glass. Nothing but lawn and shrubs. “Any muddy footprints outside the window, with a unique brand-logo impressed in the mud?”
    “No fuckin’ mud. It ain’t rained in two weeks.”
    “I was joking,” Lucas said.
    “I wasn’t. I went out and looked,” Swanson said. “The grass ain’t even crinkled.”
    “All right. Where’s that phone?”
    Hanson’s home office was a small, purpose-built cubicle with cherry-wood shelves at one end for phone books, references, and a compact stereo. The cherry desk had four drawers, filing drawers to the left, envelope drawers to the right. A wooden Rolodex sat on the right side of the desk, a telephone on the left. A Dell laptop computer sat on a pull-out typing shelf, the wiring dropping out of sight, to appear behind a laser printer that sat on a two-drawer wooden filing cabinet beside the desk.
    “Hanson still in the living room?” Lucas asked Swanson.
    “Yeah.”
    “Go talk to her. Keep her entertained. . . . Ask her questions, start the witness list.”
    “You got it.” Swanson glanced at the laptop, nodded, and headed toward the living room.
     
 
WHEN HE WAS gone, Lucas shut the office door and turned on the computer. Windows 98 came up, and he clicked Programs—Accessories—Address Book. The address book was empty. He jumped back to the opening page and clicked on Microsoft Outlook. When it came up, he checked the Inbox and Sent folders and found that Hanson had a small e-mail correspondence.
    He picked up the phone and dialed Del’s number from memory, and as the phone began ringing, clicked on the Inbox folder again, clicked on Find, and typed in “Alie’e.”
    He was still typing when Del’s wife answered the phone. The answer was more like a groan than a word: “Hello?”
    “Cheryl, this is Lucas. Is Del there?”
    “He’s asleep, Lucas. He was trying to get you all night, but he couldn’t find you.” She was crabby. “What time is it, anyway?”
    “Sorry. Wake him up, we gotta talk.”
    “Just a minute. . . .”
    After a few seconds of background mumbling, Del came on the line. “You heard?”
    “Yeah, just now. What were you doing here?”
    After a moment’s silence, Del said, “What?” He sounded only semiconscious. Then, “Where’s here ?”
    “Sallance Hanson’s. You were at the party last night, right?” Lucas asked.
    “Yeah, but what’re you doing there?”
    “The Maison thing,” Lucas said.
    “What?”
    Lucas looked at the phone and then said, “You don’t know?”
    “Yeah, I called in,” Del said. “I called all over, looking for you. I even had your neighbor up north go look in your cabin, but you’d gone.”
    “You called in that somebody strangled Alie’e Maison?”
    Longer silence. Then, “What the fuck are you talking about?”
    “Somebody strangled Alie’e Maison and threw her body behind a bed in a guest bedroom,” Lucas said. “Another woman was killed and stuffed in a closet. Hanson thinks a street guy did it—said he was wearing an ‘I’m with Stupid’ shirt.”
    After a moment of silence, Del said, “You’re not joking. ’”
    “I’m not joking.”
    “Jesus Christ.” Del was