Easy Prey

looking for you. Did anybody tell you about Trick? Anybody call you from downtown?”
    “What trick?”
    “Trick Bentoin. He was at the party last night. He just got back from Panama,” Del said.
    Lucas took a long look at him and finally showed a small smile. “You gotta be bullshitting me.”
    “I’m not, man,” Del said, his eyes round. “I talked to him. He thought it was funnier than hell. He hardly ever laughs; he goddamn near fell down in the hallway.”
    “Ah, fuck.” Then Lucas started to laugh, and a minute later Del joined in. A uniformed cop with a solemn murder-scene face poked his head around the corner, saw who it was, and pulled back.
    “That’s gonna be a little hard to explain,” Lucas said finally.
    Narcotics and Homicide had worked together, with the county attorney’s investigators, for more than four months to build a murder case against Rashid Al-Balah. Al-Balah had killed Trick Bentoin, and had thrown his body in a bog at the Carlos Avery Wildlife Area, the traditional murdered-body-disposal area for the Twin Cities, the state claimed. The case had been a jigsaw puzzle of evidence: weed seeds in the backseat of the Cadillac, identified by a University of Minnesota botanist and unique to the bog; traces of blood in the trunk of the car, confirmed as the same blood type as Bentoin’s; a history of death threats by Al-Balah against Bentoin; a lack of any alibi. . . .
    Al-Balah had been in prison for a little more than a month, looking at a life sentence for first-degree murder.
    “What about the blood in the car?” Lucas asked.
    “Trick didn’t know about any blood,” Del said. “He said he had a deal going in Panama, this rich guy who thought he could play gin rummy, so he took off. He never heard anything about the trial. Wasn’t that big a deal in Panama.”
    Lucas scratched his head. “Well, shit. I’ll call the county attorney. He ain’t gonna be happy. He got a lot of good ink out of that trial.”
    “You know what’s worse? That asshole Al-Balah is gonna be back on the street.”
    “What’d Trick think about that?”
    “He said, ‘Leave him in there. You know he’s killed somebody.’”
    “Got that right,” Lucas said.
    DOWN THE STREET, TV lights came up, and Lucas peeked: Silly Hanson was being interviewed, posed in her black dress against her expansive lawn. After a second, the lights went down again, and a couple of different cameramen began scrambling around with portable lights. They’d have a roadside studio set up in a moment.
    “Goddamnit,” Lucas said.
    “Gonna be a circus,” Del said.
    “I know it. . . . Hanson told me she didn’t know about any drugs.”
    “What’d you expect?” Del said. “But the only guy who wasn’t putting something up his nose or into his arm was too drunk to do it.”
    “You know any of the people at the party?”
    “Only by sight. None of them knew me, of course.” Swanson stuck his head out on the porch, looking for Lucas. “Rose Marie called,” he said. “You got a meeting at six-thirty, her office.”
    “Okay.” Lucas turned back to Del.
    “You gotta talk to Internal Affairs right away,” he said.
    “When you get clear, talk to the dope guys and nail down every dealer who might have been selling to Maison or her friends. Find out where she got the shit she put in her arm last night. Did she buy it here, or did she bring it with her?”
    Del nodded. “Okay.”
    “The real problem for us is, if the media finds out you were at the party, they’re gonna want to break you out,” he said. “You get your face on the nightly news, you’ll have to find a new job. Giving out tickets for illegal lane changes.”
    “No, no, no. I ain’t going on TV,” Del said. “I gotta stay out of this.”
    “I’ll do what I can, but if the word leaks, we might need a major plane crash. And you know how the goddamn department leaks.”
    “Plane crash wouldn’t do it,” Del said gloomily, looking at the lights down the street. “Not with Alie’e Maison dead. Beautiful, rich, famous, and strangled. It’s a CNN wet dream. They’re gonna run down everybody who had anything to do with her. Once my cat gets outa the bag . . . shit. We got to find this guy.” He nodded toward the house, meaning the killer. “We got to find him quick.”

4
    ROSE MARIE ROUX had lost thirty pounds on a new all-protein diet and now was thinking about a face-lift. “Just a couple of snips, to pull me up around the sides,” she