Easy Prey

your bedroom and strangle you, even with other people in the house.”
    “Like one of those horror movies. Halloween , or the one with the guy with the fingers that are knives,” Rose Marie said.
    “No, no, no, we don’t want that,” the mayor said, waving off the idea.
    “That’s what we thought,” Rose Marie said wryly.
    “So it’s dope,” the mayor said. “Who’s running the show?”
    “Frank Lester,” said Rose Marie. “Lucas and his group will fit in sideways, like we did before. Everybody’s comfortable with that.”
    “Good. It’s Strategic Planning--”
    “Strategic Studies and Planning,” Lucas said. “And I need a woman in the group. Marcy Sherrill wants to come over from Homicide.”
    Rose Marie shook her head. “Then I got to give Homicide somebody else. Everything is too tight.”
    “We’re paying for ourselves about twenty times over,” Lucas said patiently. “And I need a woman if I’m going to operate.”
    “There’s politics. . . .”
    “Murder is down fourteen percent, and a lot of it’s because of my guys—three guys, including me—spotting the assholes,” Lucas said. “That’s politics.”
    The mayor held up his hands to stop the argument. To Rose Marie he said, “Half the people in Homicide are going to be working on this anyway, so why don’t you give him Marcy for the duration of the Maison case? When that’s done, we’ll figure something out.”
    Rose Marie sighed and said, “All right. But I want some more money.”
    The mayor rolled his eyes, then said, “Yeah, who doesn’t?” Then: “You’ll do the media?”
    Rose Marie nodded. “But you’ll have to be there, too, the first time. This is gonna be large, media-wise.”
    “Who do you think’ll come in?”
    “Everybody,” she said. “Four locals and a freelancer for CNN are already outside the house. All the other networks are on the way. And most of the picture-and-gossip magazines. People. The Star. ”
    “Then we’re gonna need something more than just saying it’s a ‘dope-related killing.’” He looked at Lucas. “Do we have somebody we can throw to them? Some doper asshole they can chase for a couple of days?”
    “I can ask,” Lucas said.
    “Do that. The more they’ve got to occupy them, the less time they’re gonna spend asking why nothing’s been done yet.” The mayor touched his forehead. “Wish I’d gotten the new hair, though, you know? Like last year.”
    Rose Marie stretched the skin back from her nose. “Never too late,” she said.
     
 
THE MEETING LASTED fifteen minutes. As Lucas was leaving, Rose Marie said, “Hey—turn on your cell phone, okay? For the duration.”
    Lucas shrugged noncommittally. On the way back to his office, he poked Del’s number on his phone’s speed-dial. Del was in the middle of the Internal Affairs interview, and when Lucas passed on the mayor’s request, he said, “I’ll see what we got, as soon as I get out of here.”
    “How’s it going?”
    “Fine. They’re a lovely bunch of people.”
    Lucas punched off, dropped the phone back in his coat pocket. Del could take care of himself. At his office, he yawned, peeled off his jacket, and locked himself in, leaving the lights off. He pulled open a desk drawer, dropped into his chair, and put his feet on the drawer. Not quite seven o’clock: He’d gone to bed a little after two, and normally wouldn’t have gotten up until ten.
    Years before—before he’d inadvertently gotten rich—he’d invented board games as a way of supplementing his police salary. The games were created in all-night sessions that now, in memory, seemed to merge with his time of running the streets. The games eventually became computer-based, with Lucas writing the story and a hired programmer from the University of Minnesota writing the computer code.
    That work led to Davenport Simulations, a small software company that specialized in computer-based simulations of law-enforcement crises, intended to train police communications personnel in fast-moving crisis management. By the time the company’s management bought him out, Davenport Simulations were running on most of the nation’s 911 equipment.
    The simulations hadn’t much interested him. They’d simply been an obvious and logical way to make money, more of it than he’d ever expected to make. And while games still interested him, he’d lost his place in the gaming world. The new three-dimensional computer-based action/strategy games