Easy Prey

comment, sorry. Excuse me.” Lucas pushed through the group, walking down toward the cars. The interview-on-the-scene was over, and the cameras went down, but the reporters tagged along behind.
    “There’s gotta be more than that, Lucas,” one of the reporters said. She was an intense young woman with short dark hair and small, pretty features.
    “I wish I could tell you more, but I can’t,” Lucas said. “I just can’t. But I’ll tell you what—if you hang around here, I’ll talk to Jim Jones, Lieutenant Jones from Narcotics, and I’ll get you inside the house. Marijuana might not be that big a deal, but it is when you’ve got a mountain of it, and there’s a mountain of it in there. And I’ll get them to show you the cocaine and heroin.”
    “Alie’e was using heroin, at least in New York she was,” another reporter asserted. This one was a honey blonde, with a nose so tidy that it could only be explained as the product of surgery.
    “Listen,” Lucas said, dropping his voice. “This has honest-to-God gotta be off the record, okay? I’m serious.”
    The three reporters glanced at each other and nodded. “Alie’e had what’s called a short pop of heroin about the time she was murdered. I don’t know what they’re planning to say downtown, but that’s the truth. If you push them on it, they’ll confirm it.” He looked back at Shaw’s house—significantly, he hoped. “That’s all I can tell you.”
    “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” the blonde said. “You said, ‘short pop,’ is that the phrase?”
    “Yeah, short pop.”
    “That’s good. That sounds really, you know, ghetto,” she said. “And one more question, this can’t hurt anyone. When you saw Alie’e this morning . . . was she wearing a green dress?”
    “A green dress?”
    “Yes, a green dress with a narrow, dropped neck and--”
    “This has gotta be off the record.” He couldn’t see how it could hurt.
    “Sure. Of course. We just want to know ,” she said.
    “It was green. Kind of semitranslucent.”
    “Excellent.” The cameramen had been drifting over to listen in, their cameras pointed away—this was off the record, and they knew the rules. The blonde picked out her cameraman and lifted a hand, palm up, and said, “The dress was green.”
    They high-fived, and Lucas asked, “What?” The other reporters looked as puzzled as he was.
    “Death dress,” the reporter said. “We got it on tape yesterday. It’s by Gurleon. A twenty-five-thousand-fucking-dollar shroud, and we got it on tape, with Alie’e in it. Are we fuckin’ good , or what?”

7
    “. . . AND BECAME A beautiful filmy-green twenty-five-thousand-dollar shroud for the mysterious women with the jade-green eyes. Back to you, Henry.”
    The first man hadn’t gotten any sleep; he paced his office, watching the TV. The blond reporter was smiling at him. Filmy-green shroud. She was proud of that. Filmy-green.
    At the tips of his fingers, the man could still feel the soft skin of Alie’e’s throat. He hadn’t had any choice with her. She’d come along at the precisely wrong time in everybody’s life. . . .
    Sandy Lansing was panicking, she was going to run. He’d had to talk with her, to discipline her: You did not run when there was business to be done. He’d reached out, intending to push her against the wall. Somehow the pit of his palm had landed under her chin, and when he pushed, her head snapped back, into a molding around a door. He’d actually felt her skull crack, the vibration through the heel of his hand—like feeling a raw egg crack on the edge of a china cup.
    Her eyes had gone up, and she’d slipped down the wall, and he’d glanced back up the hallway toward the party. If the door opened . . . “Get up,” he said. “Come on, get the fuck up.”
    He’d taken her arm and pulled, but her arm was deathly slack. And after a minute, he’d believed. He’d looked for a pulse, tried to find a heartbeat, but could find neither. He’d been seized by fear: Christ, she was dead. He crouched over the body, like a jackal over a baked ham, looking from her face to the still-closed door. He hadn’t meant to kill her.
    But nobody knew. . . .
    The body was next to a door. He pulled the door open: a closet, with a rack of cold-weather jackets and coats. He lifted her, her heels dragging, and shoved her into the closet. She wouldn’t fit; she kept slumping, and she had to be upright to fit. He was holding her by the throat with