Easy Prey

flick if you had somebody playing a saxophone behind you.”
    “Probably will be, sooner or later—a movie, not a saxophone. I called the kid at Spittle and asked where he got this shit. He told me he wouldn’t talk because of First Amendment considerations. But he said that he had interviews lined up with Channels Three and Four and Eleven.”
    “An asshole,” Lucas suggested.
    “Actually, I kinda liked him. Reminded me of myself when I was his age. I tried a little threat, but he told me he was a minor and I could go fuck myself.”
    “So what’d you say?”
    “What could I say? I said, ‘The bed wasn’t brass, you little prick.’”
    “How old is he?”
    “Sixteen,” Del said.
    “So we go fuck ourselves. Anyway, the lesbian thing is out.”
    “It’s out. Another ring in the circus.”
     
 
LUCAS CALLED ROSE Marie to warn her, and when he got off the phone, walked down to his office and a silent space, kicked back in his chair, and stared at the ceiling.
    His ceiling was dirtier than it should be.
    That’s all he got. The case had a bad feel to it: too many suspects, and not enough serious possibilities. Clean murders were the hardest to solve: somebody’s killed, everybody denies everything. There were a half-dozen killers walking around the Twin Cities who’d never been touched; the cops knew everything about the murders, without any proof. Husbands killing wives, mostly. Whack the old lady on the head, throw the pipe in the river, go back home and find the body.
    What can you do?
    He was mulling it over when the phone rang again. More bad news?
     
 
NO. CATRIN.
    “Lucas. I’ve been thinking about you all morning,” she said. “God, it was good to see you. I’ve been thinking about the U—Do you remember Lanny Morton? Do you know what happened to him?”
    “Yeah, as a matter of fact,” Lucas said, getting comfortable. “He moved to L.A. to get involved in film, and got into real estate instead. He was pretty rich the last time I saw him; he was on his fourth wife.”
    “Fourth? What happened to Virginia?”
    Lucas hunched forward in his chair. “Virginia died. Didn’t you know that? Jeez, it was only maybe five years after we graduated. She had a heart attack one day on the Venice Beach. She was, like, twenty-eight.”
    “Oh, my God. Do you remember that football game with all the mums, everybody had to buy his girlfriend a mum--”
    “The Iowa game.”
    “Yeah. Virginia was like . . . she was going to live forever.”
    They talked for twenty minutes, catching up on old times. Catrin remembered all the names from their few months together, and the faces came swimming up from Lucas’s memory, along with the sights and the sounds and even the smells of all those old glory days: the field houses all over the Big Ten, smelling of popcorn and dirt; the ice arenas and the odors of cold and blood, wet wool and sweat; diesel fumes from the buses; cheerleaders.
    “God, I wish we’d had time to talk,” Lucas said. “What do you do now? Do you still paint?”
    “No, no, I do some photography, but the painting, I don’t know. I just stopped. My husband’s a family practice guy. I helped out at the office when we were first getting started. . . .”
    “I heard about you marrying a doctor. I remembered on the way over here, after you told me this morning. I think Bill Washington said something about you going out with an older guy.”
    “Washington. God, I haven’t thought about him in years. The last time I saw him, we were all sitting around on a floor in Dinkytown getting high.”
    “You’re a photographer? Say, you don’t know a guy named Amnon Plain, do you? He’s hooked up with the Alie’e case.”
    “Really? Did he do it?”
    “He says not, and he probably didn’t . . . but he says he’s some kind of fashion photographer, and I thought--”
    “Jeez, he’s more than that. He does fashion photography, got started that way. But he does these most amazing pictures of the prairie. He’s like Avedon, he does fashion but he’s got this whole other thing.”
    “Avedon?”
    “You were never an intellectual, were you?” She laughed.
    “I was majoring in hockey, for Christ’s sakes. Criminal justice.”
    “Yeah, well . . . Plain’s a photographer. Big time. Pretty big time. I’m nothing like that—I mostly take care of the kids. Or try to—they’re getting to the point where they don’t want to hear from me. Oh, my God. . . .”
    “What?”
    “I just had