Easy Prey

They just put all their chips on Olson.”
    “And we put all of ours on Rodriguez,” Del said.
    “Yeah, but there’s a major difference,” Lucas said.
    “What’s that?”
    “We’re right. They might not be.”

19
    DEL WENT OFF to coordinate with the county attorney’s office on the wiretaps and the subpoena for Rodriguez’s bank records. Lucas went down to the Homicide office and spent an hour looking over the typescript of the Rodriguez interview, and talked to Frank Lester and Sloan about the multiple-personality idea.
    “Everything I know about it I learned from TV,” Sloan said. “But you gotta admit, the guy looks good. He’s got motive, he had access to the shooting car, he could get close enough to take his parents out . . .”
    “When he came running after us, after he found the bodies . . . he looked like his head was trying to explode,” Lucas said. “He was trying to pull the hair out of the sides of his head; I’ve never seen anything like it. Then he dropped in his tracks.”
    “Could be psychological pressure from the other personality,” Lester said. “Or maybe he’s just goofy.”
    “What we saw was real. He wasn’t faking anything. If his other personality killed his parents, the personality we saw didn’t know it,” Lucas said.
     
 
LUCAS LEFT THE City Hall as the streetlights were coming on. Fifteen minutes later, he slid to the curb at Jael Corbeau’s house and headed up the walk. Every room inside the house was lit; everything outside was dark, including the front porch. When Lucas reached for the doorbell, a voice from the corner of the porch said, “Go on in, Chief.”
    “Who is that?” he asked. He didn’t turn his head.
    “Jimmy Smith. From dope.”
    “You cold?” Lucas asked, still speaking at the door panel.
    “Nah. I’m wearing my deer-hunting camies.”
    “Excellent.” Lucas pushed through the door into the living room, where he met another dope cop, Alex Hutton, who stood to one side with a hammerless .357 in his right hand. He slipped it away when he saw Lucas’s face, and said, “Franklin and Jael are upstairs. Cooking.”
    “Franklin cooks?” It seemed unlikely.
    “He’s teaching her how to make one-minute meals, you know, for during football commercials.”
    “The guy has talent,” Lucas said.
    Hutton took a step closer, dropped his voice, and said, “I don’t know where this chick has been for the first part of my life, but she is hot. ”
    “I thought you were married with about nine kids,” Lucas said, dropping his voice. He added, “Besides, she sorta likes other girls.”
    “I only got three kids . . . and I think Jael likes a little of everything,” Hutton said, glancing at the door that led into the back of the house and the kitchen. “If she wanted to bring another chick along, I could handle that—conceptually, anyway.”
    “Except that your wife would stab you to death.”
    “Fuck my wife. She’s history. I’m abandoning her. I figure if I abandon a wife and three kids, the papers will pass on the story. You only get in trouble for five or more.”
    “I forgot all about stakeouts,” Lucas said. “The sexual fantasies, and all that, when you’ve got nothing to do.”
     
 
AS HE WALKED up the stairs, Lucas could hear Franklin’s gravelly voice. He was saying, “All right, hands clear of the counter. Hands clear . . .”
    Jael: “I’m arranging the cheese sacks.”
    “Nope. No good. Gotta be like you just threw them in the fridge. . . .”
    Lucas leaned in the kitchen door, and a second later, Hutton came to stand behind him. Franklin and Jael had their backs to them, and Jael was closing the refrigerator door. Franklin looked at his watch and asked, “Ready?”
    “Ready.”
    “Five seconds . . . four, three, two, one, GO!”
    Jael jerked the refrigerator open, pulled out two sacks of grated cheese, threw them at the kitchen counter, snatched a plate out of the cupboard, opened a bag of blue-corn nacho chips, and spilled them onto the plate.
    “Too many chips, too many chips,” Franklin warned. She grabbed a handful of them off the plate, threw them back in the bag, quickly arranged the others on the plate, and Franklin said, “Fifteen seconds.” Jael opened the two bags of cheese, working frantically, spread a small handful from one bag over the plate of chips, opened the other, spread another small handful, and asked, “Is that good?”
    “You’re looking good, but you’re a few seconds