Easy Prey

told Lucas. Rose Marie was the chief of police. She put her fingertips on her face just below her cheekbones and pushed the skin back until it began pulling on her lips. The mayor stepped into her office, looked at her and said, “What?”
    She let go of the skin, and her face slid back to its usual shape. “Face-lift,” Lucas said. He yawned; he liked late nights, but not early mornings.
    “I been thinking about getting some hair,” the mayor said. He was balding, but still had the remnants of a hairline. “Think anyone would notice?”
    “They look like little bushes planted into the side of a grassy hill, the hair plugs do,” Rose Marie said. “You don’t ever want anybody on a staircase above you, looking down.”
    “Ah, that’s the old-style plugs,” the mayor said. “I’m thinking about micro-implants—they’re supposed to be really natural.” They chatted about plastic surgery and micro-implants for a few minutes, aging politicians doing what they did best—schmoozing—until Lucas yawned again. The mayor stopped the chitchat in the middle of a sentence and asked, “How dead is she?”
    “Pretty dead,” Lucas said, sitting up. “Strangled. Maybe raped. Did Rose Marie tell you about the second woman?”
    The mayor’s head went back, and he gave Lucas a startled-deer look, as much as a short, barrel-chested, balding, former personal-injury attorney can have a startled-deer look. “A second woman?”
    He turned to Rose Marie, who shrugged and said, “Not my fault. A second body turned up, stuffed in a closet. I just found out.”
    “Another model?” Swiveling to Lucas.
    “No,” Lucas said. He gave the mayor a short rundown on the double murder. “Your friend Sallance Hanson says if we give her any trouble, she’s gonna call you.”
    “Fuck her,” the mayor said. “Chain-whip her if you want.”
    “Really?” Rose Marie’s eyebrows went up.
    “She gave me two hundred bucks,” the mayor said.
    “For that much, she gets a signed photograph. I sure as shit don’t run interference on a murder.” He looked back at Lucas. “Do we have any leads?”
    “Probably, but not that I know of,” Lucas said. “We’re still processing the scene. Maison had been putting some dope in her arm, heroin probably. The other woman was red around the nose, like she’d seen a lot of coke.”
    “Chamber of Commerce is gonna love that, coke and heroin,” the mayor said. “What do we tell the movie people?” The movie people were television reporters.
    “We tell them it’s probably a dope-related murder,” Lucas said.
    The mayor frowned. “Dope-related sounds bad.”
    “ Everything sounds bad,” Lucas said. “But saying that it’s dope makes it simple to understand. And that’s what we need. Simple. Boring. Understandable. Nothing exotic. No orgies, no weird sex, no big money or jealous lovers, no scandal. Just a bad guy somewhere. And the movie people’ll believe heroin. There’s so much heroin in the fashion business that it was a look not very long ago. All the models had this fagged-out doper look. It won’t surprise anybody.”
    “We don’t want it to drag out: We don’t want it to become some culture thing for the movie intellectuals to get onto.”
    “That’s what I’m saying,” Lucas said. “We don’t want anything mysterious or exotic. A dope-related killing fits.”
    “Tell him about the window,” Rose Marie said.
    “Window?”
    “A bedroom down from the murder room—the room where Maison’s body was, if that was the murder room, and it probably was—had an unlocked window. Somebody could have gone out that way. Or, more to the point, might have come in. A cat burglar.”
    “With all the people in there? There must’ve been lights.”
    “Lights seem to pull cat burglars in,” Lucas said. “They get a buzz from going into a house where people are-- ’cause they’re nuts. Generally, you get a cat burglar, you get a guy who’s gonna start raping the victims. Or killing them. They’re thrill freaks.”
    “Ah, man.” The mayor shook his head.
    “It’s better to stay with the dope story,” Lucas said. “If a dealer killed her, or she was killed because of dope, everybody understands. It’s a one-time thing and she’s partially at fault. If she hadn’t been using dope, she’d still be alive. But if it’s a cat burglar, then we’ve got a serial killer on the loose, and the worst kind of serial killer—the kind who’ll come creeping into