Easy Prey
his white socks and the cuff of the green pants. “I’m the ground rules problem,” he said affably.
“The problem,” Rose Marie said, “is that Mr. Moore is also one of the Olsons’ good friends.” The Olsons both nodded at once, as did the Bentons and the Packards. “They want him here. But if we give him the confidential family briefing that is not available to all the press . . .”
“So will you use what we tell you in confidence?” Lucas asked.
Moore shook his head. “Of course not. I’m here as a friend, not as a reporter. We have our reporter down here right now, and she’ll do our coverage.”
Milton piped up. “Suppose you think your reporter is reading something wrong, because of privileged information you happen to have.”
“We’ll go with her story,” Moore said. “The people of Burnt River have the right to the information—but not necessarily at this exact minute.”
Rose Marie looked at Lucas, who shrugged. “So, you trust him or not. I’d say, go ahead and trust him now, and stop if something comes out.”
After thinking about it for a second, Rose Marie nodded. “All right. Mr. Moore stays . . . with the understanding that what is said in this room, stays in this room.”
AS ROSE MARIE briefed the group on what had been done in the past twenty-four hours, and filled them in on the murder of Amnon Plain, Lucas watched Tom Olson. Olson sat squarely and solidly in his chair, his chin down almost to his chest, staring fixedly at Rose Marie as she spoke. He really wasn’t porky, Lucas thought, although an observer at a distance might think so—especially since pork was almost the default body shape for men in the upper Midwest. But Olson looked hard; he was barrel-shaped and square-faced, but you could see the bones in his cheeks and at his wrists. He looked like a farm mechanic: somebody used to pushing around machines, and maybe throwing bales.
The Bentons and Packards, on the other hand, had the pale, round blandness of prosperous Minnesota small-town people. They were not quite blond, but not quite brunette, either. They all spoke softly in rounded Scandinavian vowels, with perfect grammar, and finished each other’s sentences. They were, Lucas thought, like two pairs of sugar cookies out of the same unisex male-female cookie cutter.
Tom Olson was the one to speak when Rose Marie finished. “So what you just said is, you didn’t find out anything. There’s no new information.”
“That’s not at all what I said,” Rose Marie snapped. “There was a lot of negative information—we eliminated a lot of possibilities. I will tell you, Mr. Olson, and Chief Davenport will tell you the same thing, that if you don’t find the killer standing over the victim and arrest him on the spot, then the elimination of possibilities is one of the most important things we do. We will find the killer. We know it’s going to take time--”
“Oh, horseshit,” Olson said.
His mother looked at him and said, “Thomas.”
The older Olson cleared his throat and said, “The funeral is the day after tomorrow, if you can release Alie’e to us. The ME said he thought that was likely.”
“It’s done, or will be in the next few minutes,” Rose Marie said.
Olson continued, “When the funeral’s over, Lil and I are coming back, with Tom, and the Bentons, and the Packards, when Charlie doesn’t have to work, and we’d like to stay for a week or two and hope you catch this guy, but we’d like to stay and see what you do.”
“That’s no problem at all. We can meet every day to keep you up to date.”
“Is Amnon Plain’s murder related directly to Alie’e?” Lester Moore asked.
“We don’t know,” Rose Marie said. “We have to treat it as though it is.”
Lucas jumped in. “I was at Plain’s apartment. Whoever killed him, planned it. There was nothing impulsive about it. The other murder had an ad hoc quality . . . they feel different.”
“Two separate killers?” Tom Olson said.
“Possibly. They may be related—they may even have been done by the same person—but I personally think Plain was killed by another person.”
“When you say ‘person,’ are you being politically correct or are you not sure whether the killer was a male or female?” Lester Moore asked.
“I’m being politically correct,” Lucas said. “We had a series of very cold, execution-style murders done by a woman, just this past summer. But that’s very rare. I think
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