Easy Prey

murders.”
    “Really?”
    “What do you want to do, Catrin?” Lucas asked.
    “Not be a cop,” she said.
    “So what?”
    “I don’t know. I’m just so comfortable, everything is so perfect, that I want to scream.”
     
 
HE WALKED HER back to the car. She stood on her tiptoes and kissed him on the cheek, and swiveled into the front seat of the Lincoln. “By the way, the chances of us running into each other up here are just about nil, but if we do—we do get up here every couple of weeks—I didn’t tell Jack about meeting you for lunch. There just would have been too many questions. So if we see you . . .”
    “Yeah. Don’t worry.”
     
 
HE WAS WHISTLING on the way back to the office, caught himself, and caught himself again. Man, she was married. And it didn’t sound like a bad marriage, either. But there was something between the two of them, between himself and a woman he hardly knew anymore, and it had a lot to do with sex. The thought might have brought him down, but it didn’t. When he got back to his office, he found another Post-it note on the door: Find me. Marcy.
    Sherrill was at her desk in Homicide. She didn’t ask about the lunch. She said, “No Trick.”
    “What?”
    “The motel manager said he checked out this morning. He’s driving a ten-year-old lime-green Caddy with a trunk full of golf clubs and one suitcase. We got a license number.”
    “A real license number?”
    “Yeah. Illinois tag. I ran it, and it comes up under a different name, a guy named Robert Petty, but it’s a ten-year-old lime-green Caddy. I called Petty, and he said he sold it two weeks ago, and the guy was supposed to change plates. I guess Trick never got around to it.”
    “Goddamnit,” Lucas said. “You put the tag out?”
    “Yeah. Pretty much all over the five-state. And I called Del, and he’s looking around. The hotel manager said Trick didn’t seem to be in a hurry—he checked out about ten minutes before the checkout deadline, and they talked about the Vikings for a while. So . . .”
    “He may still be around.”
     
 
SLOAN CAME IN, asked, “Have you seen it?”
    He held up a copy of The Star, with Alie’e on the front. She was standing in a dark, cavernous space, with fire or sparks flying behind her; she was wearing what looked like men’s underpants and a short, torn T-shirt that left her midriff bare. In yellow, inch-high block letters, a headline read, “ALIE’E: THE LAST SHOOT.”
    “Holy shit,” Sherrill breathed. She took it from Sloan, and flipped it open to the portfolio in the middle of the issue. Alie’e in a dress the color of froth on the Caribbean Sea, walking down what looked like a line of fire. Another shot of her in the shorts-and-T-shirt ensemble, but this time with one exposed and apparently rouged nipple, and behind her, a giant man in a welder’s helmet.
    And on the page opposite, a close-up facial shot of a woman Lucas wouldn’t have recognized, except for the film he’d seen on television the night before, and the scars. “Is that . . .” Sloan asked.
    “Jael Corbeau,” Lucas said.
    “Looks different,” Sloan said.
    “Lots better,” Lucas said.
    She’d been caught full-face, at night. Although the photo had the flash ambience of a news shot, it was obviously done in a studio: Everything was perfect, poised, balanced, designed. Corbeau was looking back over a bare shoulder; a single strand of dark pearls looped around her neck and dropped out of the bottom of the photo. Her hair was cropped and she was not quite snarling at the camera; her lipstick looked dark, maybe purple.
    “Hot,” Sherrill said. “If I was inclined to do a little muff diving, I’d take either one of them.”
    “What kind of talk is that?” Sloan asked.
    “The kind that turns me on,” Lucas said, bumping Sherrill in the arm with his elbow.
    “You’re not the only one,” Sherrill said. She tapped the lap of the giant welder in the photo of Alie’e, the photo with the rouged nipple.
    Lucas looked closer. “Is that . . .”
    “Unless it’s a bigger-than-usual jackknife,” Sherrill said. “Like, way bigger than usual.”
     
 
NOTHING WAS HAPPENING. Cops came back shaking their heads, looking for something else to do. Every person that they could find who’d been at the party had been interviewed. Nobody used any dope, nobody knew where it was coming from. Nobody had seen Alie’e after midnight, only a few people could remember Lansing at all.
    After an