Easy Prey

had an hour of tape.
    Lucas rubbed his forehead. “I was feeling almost sympathetic there, toward the end. Two arty parents, rich dipshits, get divorced. Each one takes a kid. The kids don’t see or speak to each other for fifteen years, then they run into each other, virtual strangers, good-looking, one is a model and the other one is working in photography, both running with the same crowd. If they hadn’t been brother and sister, you’d expect them to fall in bed.”
    “Yeah, but . . .”
    Lucas nodded. “Then there’s the other thing.”
    “What’s that?”
    “He says his sister quit modeling and now is a professional potter, big in the art world. I’ve met a couple of potters.”
    “I wouldn’t doubt it,” Sloan said. He had an exaggerated idea of Lucas’s love life.
    “I’ll tell you one thing about potters,” Lucas continued. “They pick up this clay, and they throw it around, and they beat it and twist it and turn it. . . . a few years of that, and they’ve got arms and hands like wrestlers.”
    “Alie’e was strangled,” Sloan said. “Be interesting to talk to the sister.”
     
 
ALIE’E’S BOYFRIEND, A guy who insisted his only name was Jax, came through Homicide’s front door a few steps before Jael Corbeau came in with her lawyer. Lucas had to decide which interview to watch, and he went with Corbeau.
    Sloan took the statement, with Lucas and Swanson sitting in; Lucas tried not to stare, but Jael Corbeau was somebody to stare at. Not immediately—not a flash thing—but after a minute or so, he found it hard to stop looking at her. She had the same angular face as her brother, but was blond. And she had tracks on her face, scars; they did something unnatural: made it hard to breathe.
    After the preliminaries—Sloan read her the Miranda warning, and the lawyer said that he might ask his client not to reply to certain questions, and that was not to be taken as an indication of guilt—Sloan said, “Tell us about your relationship with Alie’e Maison.”
    Jael looked at her lawyer, who nodded, and she said, “Well, I didn’t kill her. Or the other woman.”
    “I’m happy to hear that,” Sloan said, smiling at her. “Do you have any idea who might have?”
    “No. Really. I’ve been going over and over it in my head, and I can’t figure out who would.” Her eyes drifted away from Sloan and stopped at Lucas. “Nobody disliked her enough. I mean, I don’t know about the other woman, but Alie’e—some people probably disliked her, but not enough to hurt her.”
    “How about in New York? Anybody there?” Sloan asked.
    “No.” She was talking to Lucas now. “Of the top ten or fifteen models that you hear about, you know, the supermodels, she’s like number seven or eight. She was very close to the top—maybe she would have become number one, she had the look for it—but there are other people who really are bigger. Who would be more likely to attract a crazy person, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
    “We don’t know quite what to think yet,” Sloan said. “So you don’t--”
    Jael leaned forward, interrupting: “But you know, she had a big following on the Internet. A lot of the . . . you know, engineer-type people were interested in her. They put up Internet pages, or whatever you call them, Websites, with her pictures. Some of them grafted porno pictures on her, so you’d see a woman fucking somebody, and the face would be Alie’e’s. . . . There are quite a few of those.”
    “Hmm. Interesting,” Sloan said. He looked at Lucas, then back at Jael, and asked, “Did she ever do any porn?”
    “No. Of course not. Aside from everything else, she couldn’t afford to. If she’d done any porn, the big courtiers would have dropped her like a hot rock.”
    “Okay. . . . How about Lansing? Was she a friend of yours?” Sloan asked.
    “No. I knew her—she came to parties—but she really wasn’t part of the . . . I don’t know what you’d call it. The art scene? That sounds pretentious and stupid at the same time.”
    “So she wasn’t a friend, but you sort of knew her,” Lucas said.
    “Yes. She was some kind of hotel executive.”
    Sloan nodded. “Okay. Let me ask you about your personal relationship with Miz Maison. You were . . . what?”
    He let the question hang there, unfinished. Corbeau hesitated for a moment, then said, “We had both a friendship and a sexual relationship. I originally met her in New York. We were both working as