Easy Prey

you are, you’re committing a crime.”
    He turned to Swanson and asked, “Have you read her her rights?”
    “Not yet.”
    “Do it,” he said. He turned back to Hanson, “You don’t have to talk to us at all, or you can have an attorney, but if you do talk to us, it better be the truth. We can get pretty goddamn cranky about obstruction of justice in a double-murder case.”
    From the front hall, a man called, “Hello?”
    Lucas recognized the voice. “Sloan. In here.”
    A moment later, Sloan appeared, cleaned up and ready for the day in a fresh brown suit, white shirt, and blue-and-gold-striped necktie. “Lucas . . .”
    “This is Miz Hanson, owner of the house,” Lucas said. “We need an interview with her, and with the lady who found Miz Maison’s body.”
    “I can take Miz Hanson’s statement now,” Sloan said. He held up a tape recorder and looked down at Hanson. “If we can find some place quiet and comfortable?”
    She flipped a hand, to say, whatever , and turned back to Lucas. “Before you go, let me get something straight. You’re not telling me that I can’t speak to the media, you’re just saying . . .”
    “That you should edit what you say. Carefully. I’m perfectly happy to see you on TV, I expect to see you on TV. There’s almost no way you could avoid it—but there are aspects of the investigation that we really don’t want made public.”
    “Like this undercover man.”
    “Who?” Sloan asked, looking at Lucas.
    “Del was here last night,” Lucas said.
    “Ah. Chasing dope?”
    Hanson looked from Sloan to Lucas and back to Sloan, and shook her head. “There was no dope.”
     
 
SWANSON AND LUCAS quickly briefed Sloan on what they knew. While they were talking, Hanson stood up and said, “I’ll be back in a sec. I gotta pee.”
    “Meet you in the kitchen,” Sloan said.
    “Who’s got the list of the people at the party?” Lucas asked Swanson.
    Swanson took a notebook out of his pocket. “I’ve got most of it.”
    “You got anyone on there named Amnon? Or Jael?”
    Swanson said, “Yeah, somewhere. I remember the names. They’re brother and sister.” He flipped through his notebook, found the names. “Amnon Plain and a Jael Corbeau. Why?”
    “There’s a rumor that Alie’e jilted Amnon and went off with Jael, and this Amnon guy was pretty pissed about it. So let’s get them downtown.” He looked at Sloan. “Why don’t you fix it? Call me when you get them: I want to sit in.”
    “Okay.”
    “Those are both Bible names,” Swanson said. “Amnon and Jael.”
    “Yeah? What’d they do in the Bible?”
    “Fuck if I know,” Swanson said. “I just remember them from Sunday school.”
    “Let’s get them downtown. We can ask them about it,” Lucas said.
     
 
LUCAS LOOKED IN on Rowena Cooper, the woman who’d found Alie’e’s body. Cooper was a thin, morose woman with dark hair and red-rimmed eyes; she was sitting with a chubby baby-sitter cop named Dorothy Shaw. “I just wanted to say hello,” Cooper said. “The last time Alie’e came to town, we went to a movie together. I just wanted to see how she was doing.”
    “You didn’t have a chance to talk to her earlier?” Lucas asked.
    “No, no, I didn’t get here until midnight. She’d already gone back to take her nap by then.”
    She really knew nothing else: She’d hung around the party for better than two hours, mostly because she wanted to talk to Alie’e, if only for a moment. “We shared some concerns about current fashion, and where it’s going. . . .”
    She seemed genuinely upset about the murder, without Hanson’s undertone of excitement. Lucas tried to reassure her, without much luck, and left her with Shaw.
    “Del’s on the porch,” Swanson said when Lucas wandered back into the living room.
     
 
DEL HAD TAKEN the time to dress up; he was wearing clean jeans, sneakers without holes, and a gray sweatshirt with the sleeves pulled up over the elbows. He smelled vaguely of musk-scented deodorant, and his long hair was still damp.
    “We’re gonna have to talk to Internal Affairs. You’re gonna have to meet with them,” Lucas said. “Just to keep the record straight.”
    Del nodded. “No problem. I picked up on this party yesterday afternoon, and told Lane where I was going. So I’m covered.”
    “Good.” Lane was the other man in Lucas’s two-man Strategic Studies and Planning Group.
    Del said, “But I never told you why I was calling you . . . why I was