Easy Prey

the wall, and Lynn Olson got back on his feet and said, “Tom, Tommy. Tommy . . .”
    “. . . people living in this nightmare, people encouraging this nightmare, willingly doing the business of the devil . . .”
    He’d turned to Rose Marie, who was watching him openmouthed, and for a moment he looked as if he was going over the desk at her. Lucas moved quickly, from behind the desk, saying, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, slow down, man, slow down . . .”
    Olson stopped talking, but continued to vibrate, then turned away and stepped to the back of the office and leaned on the door. After a moment, in the silence, he turned, with tears running down his cheeks. “Can I see her?” he asked.
    DEL WAS WORKING down a line of junkies and dealers, trying to find the source of the drugs going through Silly Hanson’s apartment the night before. Lucas’s other guy, Lane, was working on Alie’e’s genealogy.
    “I want all of her family, and I want a chart that shows how they’re related,” he told Lane. “I want all of her exhusbands--”
    “Aren’t any.”
    “--all of her ex-fiancés, ex-boyfriends, anyone else who might want to do her. Same with this other chick . . .”
    “Lansing.”
    “Yeah. I want the whole chart.”
    “Listen, I think if we sorted through the people who were at the party last night, ran them--”
    Lucas shook his head. “Homicide’s halfway through the list. I’ll get it tonight or tomorrow, if they don’t have a case by then.”
    “Or working on the cat-burglar angle. I got some sources down there from when I was on patrol.”
    “Lane—go with the genealogies. Homicide and Property are working the cat-burglar thing. We want stuff that Homicide won’t get around to right away. ’Cause if Alie’e getting killed isn’t a random thing, if it’s not a cat burglar, then it’s somebody who knows her well enough to have a motive, and it’s gotta be somebody reasonably close.”
    “But--”
    Lucas pointed a finger at him. “The fuckin’ genealogies.”
    HE SPENT AN hour in Homicide, listening to returning cops talk about what they’d found, what looked good. Not much looked good. Lester came back from his talk with Tom Olson. “He says his parents trained her like a dog. That’s his word. Like a show dog. Used to drag her all over the country for beauty competitions and youth talent contests and modeling gigs.”
    “But abuse? ”
    “He didn’t mean sexual abuse, that wasn’t part of the deal,” Lester said. “And he doesn’t think his parents could have had anything to do with her death. He said they were living through her. That they took her life as a kid away from her, and that they were still taking.”
    “Did Alie’e fight it?” Lucas asked.
    Lester shook his head. “He says no. He said she never knew anything else.”
    “Huh. He seemed a little nuts.”
    “He’s a preacher of some kind,” Lester said. “He says he actually loves his parents, but he just doesn’t like them very much.”
     
 
THEN DEL WAS on the phone, and said, “Hold on to your shorts.”
    “What happened?”
    “Boo McDonald called me. I’m over at his place.” McDonald was a paraplegic who monitored police scanners for a half-dozen TV and radio stations, and sometimes back-fed information to the cops. “He’s been cruising the Internet, searching under ‘Alie’e.’ There’s a story out, from here in the Cities, called ‘Muff-Divers’ Ball Goes Homicidal.’ Guess what it’s about.”
    “Muff-Divers’ Ball?” Lucas repeated.
    Lester’s eyebrows went up. “That doesn’t sound good.”
    Del was still talking. “Yeah. This is an online rock ’n’ roll rag called Spittle. And they got some detail. It’s gotta come out of the department.”
    “How bad?”
    “Well, see, the rag says it’s semidocumentary, which means they make up a lot of stuff. You know, to enhance the reality of the moment.”
    “Enhance?”
    “Let me read a part. Move over, Boo.” Lucas could hear them clunking around for a moment, then Del read, “Alie’e stretched back toward the brass bars at the head of the bed and grasped them in her hands, holding on tight as the waves of pleasure rippled through her lean, taut body. Jael’s head bobbed between her thighs, her long pink tongue parting Alie’e’s glistening labia, finding at last that little man in the canoe, the center of Alie’e’s heat and being. . . .”
    “Ah, fuck me,” Lucas said. Then he laughed. “You’d sound like a porno