Easy Prey

can be a little rough, and she had long nails. I keep mine very short because of my job.”
    “You’re a potter.”
    “Yes.”
    “And you had nothing to do with the death of Alie’e Maison?”
    “No, I did not.” She bit her lip as the words came out, and her chin trembled. To Lucas, she seemed shaken.
    “Do you think your brother might have?” Lucas interjected.
    She looked at him, a frown flickering across her face, and then said, “No. If Amnon was going to go after somebody, it’d be me.”
    “Why you?”
    “We have a personal problem.”
    “He told us about your relationship,” Lucas said. “You think that could turn to violence? The breakup?”
    She turned away, looking at the floor, twisting her fingers together. “Amnon has violence in him. He wouldn’t have killed Alie’e, because he had no . . . regard for her. He didn’t care about her. You’d have to have some feeling for a person before you killed her, wouldn’t you?”
    “No,” Lucas said. “Not if you’re psychologically disturbed. People who are disturbed may kill to change the way they feel about something. The person killed may be a complete stranger, if the killing somehow . . . medicates . . . the disturbed person.”
    “God, that’s awful.”
    “Yes. Your brother?”
    “No. He’s not disturbed that way. I know him well enough to say that.”
    “How did you get your names?” Swanson asked.
    “Our parents were hippies, they went from one thing to another, and they eventually tried out Judaism. Amnon and I were born during that period. They’re Bible names.”
    “I’m a Catholic,” Lucas said. “We weren’t big on Bibles when I was a kid. Do the names mean something?”
    “Jael was maybe a sorceress. Deborah fought Sisera, the Canaanite, and defeated him, and Sisera fled the battlefield and hid in Jael’s tent. When he was asleep, she killed him by driving a tent peg through his head.”
    “Ouch,” Lucas said. A tiny flicker of a smile on her sad face? “How about Amnon?”
    “Amnon was one of Solomon’s sons,” Corbeau said.
    “What, he was wise?”
    “No, no,” she said. “He slept with his sister.” She scanned the four men, Lucas, Sloan, Swanson, and her own attorney, showed a flicker of a sad smile again, and said, “Were my parents prophets, or what?”
     
 
WHEN THEY WERE done, they milled in the hallway outside the interview room, and Lucas asked Jael, “Why’d you quit modeling?”
    “You think I shouldn’t have?”
    “I think you could have . . . continued,” he said. She made him feel like a provincial clown, and he kind of liked it.
    “It’s boring,” she said. “It’s like making movies, except they don’t pay you enough.”
    “Movies are boring?”
    “Movies are fuckin’ nightmares,” she said. She laughed, and grasped his arm, just for a second; she was the kind of woman who liked to touch people, Lucas thought. “Shooting a movie is like watching grass grow.”
    When Jael and her lawyer left, Lucas and Sloan walked back to Homicide. Frank Lester was talking to Rose Marie, and waved Lucas over.
    “How’d you guys do?” he asked.
    Lucas shrugged. “There’s a lot of motive floating around, but not that points at Alie’e or Lansing.”
    “Who, then?” Rose Marie asked.
    “Everybody,” Lucas said. “We’ve got incest, jealousy, drugs, love triangles. You name it, we got it. But nothing that points at anyone.”
    “That’s what I was telling Rose Marie,” Lester said. “We’ve got so many suspects that it’s turning into a technical problem. We’ve got fifty-four people for the party now, and there’ll be more. How in the hell do you really interview more than fifty people, and do a good job of it? Who do you push, and how hard? The thing is, if the killer was at the party, and he’s our forty-fifth interview . . . there’s no feel to it anymore.”
    “You’re asking everybody to point at somebody else?” Lucas asked.
    “Yeah, but they’re all lying through their teeth. Nobody knew that everybody was using drugs. . . . Anyway, we’ve only been able to probably eliminate a half-dozen people who left the party when Alie’e was still circulating. With that open window, we can’t eliminate anyone who left after Alie’e went back to the bedroom. Somebody might have unlocked the window for the purpose of leaving, and coming back later.”
    “If the window was used at all,” Sloan said.
    “Yeah. If.”
    “How about the husband of the woman