Easy Prey

out was narrow and dark, and he was in no hurry. He took Highway 77 into Hayward, dropped down to 70 in Spooner, headed west, across the border into Minnesota, out to I-35. By ten o’clock he was on the far northern rim of the Cities, pulling the boat. The owner of the Lund was a guy named Herb Clay who owned the remnants of a farm south of Forest Lake, not far off the interstate.
    Lucas pulled into Clay’s driveway, bounced past the house to the barnyard, and turned a tight circle. He left the engine running and climbed out of the truck as a porch light came on. A moment later, Clay stepped out on the porch, supporting himself on crutches. “That you?”
    “It’s me,” Lucas said. He started unhitching the trailer. “How’re the legs?”
    “Itch like hell,” Clay said.
    “Got a coat hanger to scratch with?”
    “Yeah, but there’s always a spot that you can’t reach.” Clay’s wife came out on the porch, pulling on a quilted jacket. She hurried across the yard.
    “Let me get the door,” she said. She pulled open a lower-level door on the barn, which led into what at the turn of the century would have been a milking chamber, but was now a garage. She turned on lights and Lucas got in the truck and backed the boat into the barn.
    “Stop,” she yelled when the boat was far enough back. He stopped, and they unhitched the trailer and dropped it. The interior of the barn, years past the last bovine occupant, still smelled slightly of hay and what might have been manure; a thoroughly pleasant smell. Clay’s wife closed the door and came out to stand by Lucas, and they both looked up at the sky.
    “Pretty night,” she said. She was a small, slender woman with dark hair and a square face. She and Lucas had always liked each other, and if things had been different, if the Clays hadn’t been quite so happy with each other . . . She smelled good, like some kind of faintly perfumed soap.
    “Pretty night,” he repeated.
    “Thanks for helping out with the boat,” she said quietly.
    “Thanks for bringing it,” Clay called from the porch.
    “Yup.” Lucas got back in the truck. “Talk to ya.”
    At ten minutes after eleven o’clock, he rolled up his driveway, punched the garage-door opener, and eased the Tahoe in next to the Porsche. A new car, the Porsche; about time.
    Clean, mellow, starting to fade, the memory of Verna Clay’s scent still on his mind, he dropped into bed. He was asleep in five minutes, a small easy smile on his face.
     
 
HE GOT THREE hours and forty-five minutes of sleep. The phone rang, the unlisted line. Groggy, he pushed himself up in bed, picked it up.
    “Yeah?”
    Swanson, one of the old-time guys: “Goddamnit, you’re home. You know who Alie’e Maison is, the famous model?”
    “Yeah?”
    “Somebody strangled her in a rich lady’s house. We need some political shit over here: This is gonna be a screamer.”

3
    SATURDAY. THE FIRST day of the Alie’e Maison case.
    The morning was cold, even for mid-November. The lake, a hundred miles north, would have frozen over for sure, Lucas thought. He stood at a gas pump, trickling fifteen gallons of premium into the tank of the Porsche. Two blocks out of his driveway, running for the Alie’e Maison scene, he remembered about the gas—he didn’t have any. Now, at the least convenient moment, he’d had to stop.
    He yawned, and peered around. The gas station attendant sat in an armored-glass booth, punching with his thumbs at a Game Boy, like a figure in an Edward Hopper tableau. Lucas didn’t register Hopper; instead, he wondered idly why gas pumps no longer dinged. They used to ding with every gallon or so, he thought, and now they just rattled off yellow electronic digits, gallons and dollars, silent as the night.
    Another car, a small Lincoln, the one that shared its frame with a Jaguar—Lucas knew about the Jaguar, but could never remember the Lincoln’s name—pulled into the second set of gas pumps. Lucas yawned again and watched as a woman got out.
    And stopped yawning. Something familiar about her, from a long time ago. He couldn’t see her face, and it wasn’t her face that sparked the memory—it was the way she moved, something about the movement and the stature and the hair.
    Her face was turned away from him as she opened the gas flap on the car, unscrewed the cap, and maneuvered the nozzle into the mouth of the tank. She was wearing a suit and dark low heels and a dark blouse. She turned toward him to