Easy Prey

one hand, trying to get the door shut, when a voice said from a few inches behind his ear, “What are you doing ?”
    He’d almost had a heart attack. He turned and saw the green eyes; and the closet door finally clicked shut. Alie’e asked again, “Why did you put her in the closet?”
     
 
THE SECOND MAN heard about Alie’e’s death from his dashboard radio. At first, he thought he’d misheard; and then it occurred to him that he was crazy—that he wasn’t hearing this at all. But the radio kept talking, talking, talking . . . and when he changed stations they were talking, talking . . .
    Alie’e this, Alie’e that.
    Alie’e with lesbians.
    Alie’e nude in a photo shoot.
    Alie’e dead.
    The second man swerved to the side of the road, pulled on the park brake, put his head on the steering wheel, and wept. Couldn’t stop: his shoulders shaking, his mouth open, breathing in stuttering gasps.
    After a long five minutes, he wiped his eyes on his shirtsleeve, turned, found a clipboard in the back, clipped in a piece of notepaper.
    He wrote: Who did this? And drew a line under it.
    And under that, he wrote the first name.
    There would, he thought, be quite a few names before he finished the list.

8
    ON THE WAY back to police headquarters, Lucas took out his cell phone, thumbed it on, and called Rose Marie Roux on her command line. She picked up and Lucas said, “We got the media fixed. The raid turned up a ton of grass, and a bunch of coke and heroin. I think they all bought it.”
    “Good. Now we need a second act.”
    “It’s like managing the media has gotten more important than finding the killer.”
    Roux said, “You know the truth about that, Lucas. We’ll either get the killer or we won’t, no matter what the media does. But the media can kill us. And I don’t have anything else I’d rather be doing right now.”
     
 
FOR THE REST of the day, Lucas hung around the interrogation rooms, listening in. One item came up early—Alie’e didn’t have any dope in her possession, or any cooking equipment for the heroin, or a syringe or needles. Somebody else put the dope on her, but nobody at the party was admitting to the use of dope, and nobody knew anybody else who was using.
    A question they asked everyone involved the scribble on Sandy Lansing’s wrist. They got the answer to that in the early afternoon.
    “A woman named Pella,” Swanson told Lucas. “She’s going to England in December, for three weeks, and Lansing was going to get her a rate at a hotel. She said Lansing wrote her name on her wrist to remember to set it up.”
    “This holds water?”
    Swanson shrugged. “Does with me, I guess. Pella said a decent hotel in London is gonna cost her two hundred a night, but with Lansing’s connection, she can get the same room for one and a quarter. That’s something like fifteen hundred bucks in savings.”
    “And this Pella doesn’t know anything about the dope?”
    “She said she met Alie’e for the first time last night, and said three words to her. But she looks kinda wired. . . . I wouldn’t be surprised if she carried a little toot in her purse.”
    “All we have to do is crack one of them,” Lucas said. “Get somebody to rat out her friend.”
    Lester stopped by: “We grabbed Hanson’s computer, but most of what we’re getting is bullshit.”
    “They talked about dope,” Lucas said.
    “She said it was just rumors.”
    “She’s bullshitting us.”
    “Of course she is.”
    TWO UNIFORMED COPS from St. Paul brought in a huge man named Clark Buchanan, who, improbably, told them that he was a model and, incidentally, a welder.
    “Model what?” one of the interrogating cops asked skeptically. “Lunch buckets?”
    “You know, clothes and shit,” Clark said. “I was the other guy in the Alie’e shoot. She was doing the clothes up front, I was making some sparks in the back.”
    Clark didn’t know anything about drugs at the party. “I had some drinks, that’s all I saw.”
    “Lotta drinks?”
    He shrugged. “Maybe a half-dozen. Maybe ten. Vodka martinis. Goddamn. I’ll tell you something, guys—rich people make good fuckin’ vodka martinis.” He stayed at the party until one o’clock, then caught a cab and went home. He remembered the name of the cab company and that the driver’s name was Art. They asked a few more questions and cut him loose.
     
 
EARLY IN THE afternoon, Alie’e’s parents arrived with a group of friends and talked first to