Easy Prey

were far beyond anything he’d been able to do as recently as five years before.
    When he’d gotten rich, when he’d gotten political, he’d stepped off the streets. But in the past six months, his life had begun to shift again. He was wandering the Cities at night. Looking into places he hadn’t seen in years: taverns, a couple of bowling alleys, barbershops, a candy store that fronted for a sports book. Strip joints, now masquerading as gentlemen clubs. Putting together rusty connections.
    And he was talking to old gaming friends. He began to consider a new kind of game, a game set in the real world, with real victories to win, and a real treasure at the end, maybe using palm computers and cell phones. He’d been staying up late again, working on it. He was still in the pencil-twiddling stage, but now had a block of scratchy flow charts pinned to his drafting table. One idea a night, that’s all he wanted. Something he could use. But an idea a night was a lot of ideas.
    He leaned back in the chair, yawned, closed his eyes. In his mind’s eye, he saw Maison on the floor, her foot sticking out from behind the bed, and the woman crumpled on the floor below the closet. Maison and her friends were dopers, and dopers got killed; it happened forty or fifty times a year in Minneapolis, thousands of times a year across the country.
    As far as he was concerned, dopers were crap, and if they died, well, that’s what dopers did. That Alie’e was famous cut no ice with Lucas. Her fame was entirely ephemeral, not the result of hard work, or intellectual or moral superiority, but simply a by-product of her appearance.
    He felt no impulse to revenge; he did feel the first tingles of the hunt. That was something else altogether. That had nothing to do with Alie’e, but was purely between his guys and the other guys.
     
 
THEN HE SAW, in his mind’s eye, the image of Catrin as a young woman. Man, the last time he saw her . . .
    Lucas’s eyes were closed, and the corners of his mouth turned up. A small smile, and not a particularly attractive one. Feeling a little wasted; feeling some pressure from the politicals; feeling a killer out there, somewhere, maybe running, maybe not. And a woman on the mind, somebody to wonder about.
    This was how life was supposed to be. Propped up in a chair, wishing you still smoked, worried about twenty-four things at the same time. Not that laid-back, going-nowhere-slowly feeling . . . that prosperous, rich-guy, hand-shaking shit.
    Like this.
    He was sleeping like a baby when the phone rang.

5
    DARK. BAD TASTE. Lucas pushed himself up in the chair, the phone still ringing. Confused for a moment, he realized he was in his office, that he’d dozed off. He sighed and fumbled for the phone. “Yeah?”
    Sloan: “I got this Amnon kid coming down here. And his sister, uh, Jail, however you pronounce it. Ya-el, whatever.”
    “Yeah. Jael.” Lucas rubbed his eyes, held on to the phone and stumbled to the light switch, and then looked at his watch. Seven-fifteen. “When are they due in?”
    “Amnon’s in St. Paul. He said he was in the middle of something, but he could leave there in ten minutes or so. He ought to be here in a half an hour. The sister said she’d be here about nine. She sounded pretty freaked out. I could hear somebody crying in the background. Anyway, you said you might want to sit in.”
    “Yeah, I would. Are they bringing lawyers?”
    “I don’t know. I do know that they moved Maison to the ME’s, and he was coming in to take a look. I’m going over.”
    “Wait for me—I’ll walk along.”
     
 
THE ME WAS a middle-sized man with long graying hair tied in a neat ponytail, gold-rimmed glasses, and a distracted air. They talked in his office, a routine government cubicle with no bodies in sight. “I’ve taken a preliminary look, is all I’ve done—we’ll get right on the full autopsy. I’ll do it myself. We’ll start getting some chemistry back by late afternoon. But I can tell you three things,” he said. “Your guys told me that she was strangled, and I can confirm that that’s almost certainly the case. This wasn’t accidental sexual asphyxiation or anything like that. Her hyoid bone’s broken, and that takes direct pressure, probably with the thumbs, from a pair of strong hands.”
    “A man, then,” Sloan said.
    Lucas frowned. “Why wouldn’t it be?”
    “There are some rumors that she swung the other way,” Sloan said. “Really, that