Easy Prey

she swung both ways, but recently, mostly with women.”
    The ME shook his head. “I can’t tell you that it was a man, for sure. Just that it was somebody with strong hands. The second thing is this: The crime-scene people say that her condition suggested sexual activity before her death. And I can tell you that she did engage in sexual activity, not long before her death, but at least some time before. An hour, maybe as many as two hours. There are two or three small scratches and some light bruising next to her vulva. Fingernails, I think, just enough to draw a little blood—but the bruises had time to develop before she was killed. And it appears—I’ll tell you for sure after the autopsy—that while there is light bruising suggestive of rough sexual play, she was not fully penetrated. Not by a penis, anyway. It appears that the sexual play was primarily manual and oral. There’s no semen.”
    Lucas looked at Sloan, who asked, “Is that two things or three things?”
    “Two things,” the ME said.
    “What’s the third thing?” Lucas said.
    “There are no defensive wounds. No other bruises, no indications of a struggle, no sign that the killer had to fight to hold his grip. She didn’t scratch him—her fingernails are clean. I couldn’t even find any signs that she thrashed around. She just . . . let herself go. For whoever did it, she was an easy kill.”
    “Dope,” Sloan said. “She might not even have known she was dying.”
    “Oh, yeah, that’s a fourth thing,” the ME said. “That is a needle stick on her arm, and there are more between her toes. She was taking a lot of sticks.”
    “An addict?”
    “Tell you later. None of this is final. I’ll have some definitive stuff this afternoon.”
     
 
LUCAS STOPPED AT the chief’s office, gave her a quick capsule of what the ME had said. She made a few notes and said, “So it really could be drug-related.”
    “Yeah. Maybe even probably. ”
    “We got half an hour before the press conference,” she said. “I’ve promised everybody that you’ll drag the killer in and hurl him to the floor in front of the microphones.”
    “Or her,” Lucas said.
    “Yeah?”
    “Maybe.”
    The chief turned to her window, squinted out at the empty sidewalk, then shook her head. “Nope. It’s a man. A woman didn’t kill Alie’e Maison.”
    “You’re sure?”
    “Yup. And seriously, Lucas . . .”
    “Mmmm?”
    “We’d look really good if we caught this guy quick.”
    The chief’s secretary stuck her head in. “Lucas, Sloan says a Mr. Plain is here.”
    “Gotta go,” Lucas said. “Good luck with the movie people.”
     
 
SLOAN WAS WAITING in the back of the Homicide office, talking with a tall dark-haired man with black eyes, who might have been called slender except that he had a square-shouldered heft that made him too tough for the word; he could have played a dissolute biker in a rock ’n’ roll movie. He was wearing a black leather jacket, black slacks, and a plain black T-shirt. Another man, fleshy, brown-haired, freckled, wearing a Star Wars Crew baseball hat and a single silver earring, sat sideways in a hard-back chair a few feet away.
    Sloan saw Lucas coming and said, “Chief Davenport, this is Amnon Plain. He was at the party last night and agreed to come to talk with us.”
    The dark-haired man nodded at Lucas and the brown-haired man said, “Get a lawyer, dude.”
    Plain asked Lucas, “Do I need one? A lawyer?”
    Lucas shrugged. “I don’t know. Did you kill Alie’e?”
    “No.” Nothing more; no explanation of why he wouldn’t have, or couldn’t have, or a protest at the question.
    Lucas said, “If you’ve got a simple and convincing story, then there shouldn’t be a problem. If there are ambiguities to your statement . . . then maybe you ought to get a lawyer.”
    Plain looked at the brown-haired man, who said, “Do what the dude says. Get a lawyer.”
    Plain looked back at Lucas, then at Sloan, then back to Lucas, and said, “Fuck a lawyer. But I want to make my own tape of the statement. I brought a recorder.”
    “No problem,” Lucas said.
    Plain asked if the brown-haired man could come along, and Lucas, looked at Sloan, who shrugged. “I’d rather not . . .”
    “Get a lawyer,” said the brown-haired man.
    “. . . but if he doesn’t get involved . . .” Sloan continued.
    “Come on along,” Lucas said.
     
 
THEY TOOK THE statement in an interview room, with three tape recorders on the