Easy Prey

support a game mistress for long. So there’d have to be a time limit on the game. Say, one year. He pulled out a fresh sheet of paper, sat on his high stool, doodled a bit. Couldn’t get going . . .
    CATRIN. HE DIDN’T know what he thought about her, but she was on his mind. . . .
     
 
RESTLESS, HE WALKED down the hall, picked up the phone, hesitated, then dialed. Calling the nunnery. A nun answered. “This is Chief Davenport with the Minneapolis Police Department,” Lucas said. “I need to speak to Sister Mary Joseph.”
    “I’ll find her,” the nun said; a young voice with a depressive note.
    Sister Mary Joseph was his oldest friend, going back to elementary school. Born Elle Kruger, she was a professor of psychology at St. Anne’s College, a few blocks from Lucas’s home. Lucas waited two minutes, then heard a phone being fumbled on the other end.
    “Lucas.”
    He smiled when he heard her voice; he almost always did. “Hey, Elle. How’s everything?”
    “So much for the small talk, Lucas. What’s going on with this Alie’e Maison murder?”
    “Funny you should ask.”
    “Is there a lesbian involvement?”
    “Ah, man . . .”
    “And what’s a muff ?”
    Lucas was absolutely befuddled for a moment, though he knew from the first instant that he’d never be able to find an answer to the question. But then Elle laughed merrily and said, “You can restart your heart now.”
    “Listen, don’t do that,” he said. “The Alie’e thing . . . it’s a mess. There was a lesbian scene, an act, involving three women, some time before she was killed. I don’t know what it has to do with the killing. Maybe nothing. That’s sorta what I wanted to ask you about.”
    “What?”
    “When gay guys kill each other, it can be pretty rough: a lot of mutilation, a lot of anger. A lot of knives, for some reason. You see guys stabbed twenty or thirty times.”
    “Passion turns to anger when things go wrong: Passion and anger are linked. What were these women like? Was it all very sexual, or was it less sexual and more something else?”
    “That’s what I was worrying about. One of the women suggested that while it was sexual, it wasn’t aggressively sexual. She said it was more like cuddling. But there was a sexual act—stroking, oral sex. But it didn’t seem . . . crazy.”
    “It might not have been. The cultural prohibition against lesbian sex is not nearly as strong as it is against male homosexuality. If a man becomes involved in gay sex . . . there’s a tremendous amount of stress, at least initially,” Elle said. “Women sometimes can go from friendship with another woman to occasional touching, to sex, and back to friendship, in a seamless way, without much guilt or stress. That’s why you don’t see so many violent lesbian murders. The stress isn’t so high.”
    “All of the women involved were also involved with men. The relationships sometimes were simultaneous.”
    “That’s not unusual. There are some women who are . . . How’ll I put this? Reflexively lesbian, that’s what they are. They are as interested in women as . . . well, as you are. But many women, especially young women . . . they may just drift along, having relationships with women as well as with men. There’s even a kind of fashionable element to it.”
    “All right.”
    “Have you looked at Alie’e’s family?”
    “Somebody has. I met her folks. I don’t think they’d get the Good Housekeeping seal for parenting. . . . They dragged her all over the country since she was a baby, pushing her into showbiz. Living through her.”
    “Mmm.”
    “And she’s got a goofy brother.”
    “That’s interesting—it suggests there must’ve been some serious stresses in the family.”
    “Yeah. He’s a peasant preacher out around Fargo somewhere. Gives away his clothes.”
    Elle said, “Not . . . Tom Olson?”
    Lucas looked at the phone, then put it back to his ear. “Yeah. You know him?”
    “He’s a saint. Oh, boy.”
    “Oh boy” was rough language from Elle. “What?”
    “He really is a saint. He’s an evangelical Christian, he believes the rapture is coming next month or next year or whatever, because he can see it coming. Rolling in, like a wave. He might be schizophrenic; he is definitely an ecstatic. We had a novice here, from out that way, the Red River. She went home to visit her folks. He was preaching at a bowling alley. She went to see him with some of her girlfriends—sort of a lark. She