Easy Prey

back for something,” Graf said.
    “How often did he send you out?”
    “Most nights when we’re working. I’d go get some food somewhere and we’d eat it upstairs, in the kitchen. We don’t like to have food in here, ’cause you get grease around, and crumbs, and then you get bugs and mice. There’s just too much stuff in here.”
    “So he might have thought it was you, coming back.”
    “Yes.”
    “Did he have his shirt on when you last saw him?”
    “Yes. And his shoes. He was going to take a shower.”
    “So whoever attacked him, it probably had to happen within a few minutes of your leaving.”
    “Probably. I don’t think he’d taken his shower yet. His hair didn’t look wet. . . . He always washed his hair, because if we were working a long time, it’d get greasy. That’s what he always said.”
    “Do you think--”
    Allport shouted down from the apartment level. “We’re gonna roll him.”
     
 
LUCAS WENT BACK upstairs. The medical examiner was pulling on yellow rubber gloves; a cop and an ME’s assistant were already wearing them. A photographer squatted in the corner, sorting equipment out of a camera bag. An eight-foot-long sheet of plastic had been spread across the floor, just outside the blood puddle.
    “Gonna turn him,” Allport said.
    “Gotta pick him up, straight up, keep him in the air, don’t let him dip back into the puddle. Then we’re gonna roll onto the plastic,” the ME told the other two guys with gloves.
    “Did you talk to somebody named Joyce?” Lucas asked Allport.
    “Joyce Woo,” Allport said, nodding.
    The ME interrupted. “You’re gonna have to move, we’re gonna swing him right past you,” he said. Lucas and Allport stepped back. The ME said, “Bill, you gotta hang on to the shoulder at the same time you pick up the hand or we’ll lose him. With the blood on there, he could be slippery. . . .”
    “She’s an Oriental chick,” Allport said to Lucas. “She was out in the hallway. She might’ve seen somebody, she might even have heard the shot, but she was so drunk at the time that she’s not sure. I mean, she’s sure, but we’re not sure. Go talk to her.”
    “The phone call? The wrong number?”
    “Still looking for it.”
    “Ready?” The medical examiner asked. “Lift . . .”
    When they moved the body, Lucas turned away. But he heard it. As it broke free of the partially coagulated blood, it sounded like a boot coming out of a mudhole.
    They picked Plain straight up, carried him facedown to the plastic sheet, and then flipped him in midair and dropped him to the plastic. His eyes were open; Lucas winced and turned away for a moment.
    “Nothing here,” Allport said. “Boom, he falls down.”
    Lucas squatted, looked Plain in the face. “So strange,” he said.
    “What?”
    “The killings at the party were improvised,” Lucas said. “Who’d be crazy enough to go to a big party, planning to kill somebody in a hallway, and then strangle a famous model in a bedroom, with a hundred people around? Had to be improvised. It seemed almost accidental.”
    “This ain’t,” Allport said. “Maybe this Plain guy knew something and the killer had to shut him up.”
    Lucas stood up. “That’s . . . pretty complicated.”
     
 
WHEN JOYCE WOO answered her door, she was holding a beer mug half full of white wine, and her apartment reeked of the stuff. She was short, stocky, moon-faced, and wore thick-lensed glasses. She invited him in, and slumped on a couch with paisley cushions. Lucas pulled up a kitchen chair.
    “I told the other cops I saw somebody,” she said, nipping at the wine, looking at Lucas over the rim of the glass. “Down the hall. But I didn’t see him very well, ’cause I was playing catch-me-fuck-me with a friend.”
    “You were, uh . . .”
    “A guy I know from across the street, a computer-art guy. Not what you’d call real good-looking, but, what the hell, I’m not exactly the Queen of the May. And he’s big where it counts, if you know what I mean?”
    “Yeah, well . . .” Big-where-it-counts was getting a workout, between the computer guy and Clark the welder. But she wasn’t finished with the idea.
    “It’s like that with all the computer guys, you know?” She rolled her head back, staring at the ceiling, as if she were trying to unlock a conundrum. “I don’t know why. You’d think the jocks would be the guys with big wieners, but it’s never like that. It’s always these thin skinny