[Prey 11] - Easy Prey

by John Sandford

  "Jesus."

  "It was not good. Lung cancer," she said. "She never quit smoking. I'm just so, just so…"

  He patted her on the back. "Yeah."

  "And where are you going? I don't remember you as an early riser."

  "Got a murder," he said. He felt that he was staring at her, and that she knew it and was amused. Back when, she'd know exactly what she did to him. The effect, he thought, must have been wired in, because it hadn't changed in twenty-five years.

  "Ah."

  "You know the model, Alie'e Maison?"

  Her hand went to her mouth in astonishment. "She was murdered?"

  "Strangled."

  "Oh, my God. Here?"

  "Minneapolis."

  Catrin looked around the empty gas station pad. "You're not exactly rushing to the scene of the crime."

  "Five minutes ain't gonna make any difference," Lucas said. "She's dead."

  She seemed to step back, though she hadn't moved. She looked up and said, "You always had a harsh line in you. The cold breath of reality."

  And she'd just seen a friend die, Lucas thought. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean…"

  "No, that's okay. That's just… Lucas." She smiled again, took one of his hands in hers, and patted it. "You better go. Take care of her."

  "Yeah." He stepped away, stopped. "You're absolutely gorgeous," he said. "You're one of those women who'll be gorgeous when she's ninety."

  "Nice to think so, when you feel the age coming," she said. She crossed her arms, hugged herself. "When your friends are dying, and you feel the age coming on."

  He left, reluctantly, turning his head to watch her walk to her car. The Lincoln. Conservative, upper crust. Well-tended.

  Jesus. The last time he'd seen her…

  His body ran the Porsche through the gears, out to the interstate ramp, down onto I-94 toward the lights of Minneapolis, his eyes intent on the road and the traffic, his mind stuck with Catrin.

  The last time he'd seen her she'd been both angry and buck naked, just out of a hot shower, rubbing her hair with a ratty brown bath towel that he'd had stolen from his mothers linen closet. The trouble had started two weeks earlier, at a pickup hockey game on an outdoor rink. Lucas had caught a deliberate elbow in the face, and with blood pouring out of his nose, had gone after the other guy—and hadn't stopped quite soon enough. The other guys friends had taken him to a local hospital for some emergency dental work.

  Then he'd caught a stick in a regular game, against Duluth. Nothing serious, just a cut and a few stitches. After the match, at an off-campus party, a hassle erupted between a couple of the players and a defensive end from the football team. The hassle had cooled quickly enough—no fight—but Lucas had been ready to jump in, Catrin clutching at him, pulling him off.

  She started getting on him: He liked to fight, he enjoyed fighting, he had to look at himself, at what he was doing. Did he think fighting was right? Why'd he hang around with all those silly fuckin' jocks who'd be working down at the car wash as soon as their eligibility ran out? He was smarter than they were, why couldn't he…

  They'd gone around a few times, and she started again as she got out of the shower. He'd finally had enough and shouted at her: Shut the fuck up. She'd flinched away—she'd thought he might hit her. That was a shock: He never would have hit her. He said so. Then she got on him again.

  He walked out of the apartment. Stayed out. Went down and got some ice time. When he came back, a sheet of notebook paper lay on his kitchen counter. She'd scribbled on it, "Fuck you."

  When he'd tried to call, her roommate said she didn't want to hear from him. He didn't push it: He was practicing all the time, playing, trying to keep his head above water in school. Never went after her. But always remembered her. They'd dated from October through February of his sophomore year. He'd slept with a half-dozen women in his life, but she'd been the first one who seemed to match his interest in sex. They studied it together.

  Still remembered…

  He smiled at the thought—and noticed that the concrete walls of the interstate were a little too blurred. He looked down at the speedometer: one-oh-four. He backed off a bit.

  Catrin…

  Silly Hanson lived in a white-stuccoed house with an orange-tiled roof, across the street from Lake of the Isles, a rich neighborhood of professionally tended landscapes and architect-designed houses from the first half of the twentieth century. A half-dozen police vehicles were piled up at the curb outside Hanson's house. An early-morning blader, who looked too old and bald and fat and way too rich for his skater gear, went by on the lakeside skateway his face turned toward the cluster of cops. The word about the murder would be getting out very soon now. Lucas found a spot by a fire hydrant, parked, nodded at a cop standing by the stoop.

  "Beautiful morning," he said.

  "Fuckin' A," said the cop.

  "If I get a ticket…"

  "You won't get a ticket."

  Lucas went up the steps. A sloppy, overweight homicide cop, wearing an insulated nylon baseball jacket over a white shirt and necktie, was waiting on the porch. His face was tired, but he smiled in relief when he saw Lucas. "Man, I'm glad you're here."

  "So what happened?" Lucas asked. Two more uniformed cops were standing just inside the door, looking out at them.

  "You ain't gonna believe it." The fat cop's name was Swanson.

  "Alie'e Maison got killed," Lucas said. "I believe it. Where's the body?"

  "It's worse than that," Swanson said. "We tried to call you again, but you were out of touch."

  Lucas stopped. "What happened?"

  "When're you gonna start turning on your cell phone?" Swanson was reluctant.

  "If I turn on my cell phone, people call on it," Lucas said. "So what happened?"

  "We were just doing the routine, checking the house, opening doors. You know." They both knew. Lucas had been on more murder scenes than he could remember, and Swanson had been to more than Lucas had; he'd been a homicide cop when Lucas was still in uniform.

  "Yeah?"

  "We found another body," Swanson said. "Stuffed in a closet. Another woman."

  Lucas looked at him for a long moment, then shook his head. "That's a lot worse."

  "Yeah. I thought so." Bad as it was, it was something new. They'd both been to multiple murders, but never to one where the cops had already gotten the coffee hot, sent somebody out for donuts, started the routine, then opened a closet door and had another body drop out like a dislodged sock monkey.

  "Why'd it take so long to find her?" Lucas asked.

  "She was in a closet, the door was locked. Nobody unlocked it right away."

  "Jesus, I hope the papers don't get that," Lucas said. "Or maybe we ought to give it to them. You know, our way."

  "This woman who lives here, Hanson—she was there when we found the second one, and she's gonna talk about it. She lives for the media. You know what she told me when I was talking to her about it?"

  Lucas shook his head.

  "She said her only good black dresses were too short for this. For the murders. She sees this as a photo op and she's already figuring out her wardrobe for the cameras."

  "All right." That happens.

  "There's one other thing." Swanson glanced down at the uniformed cops. Lucas got the idea, and they both turned sideways, and Swanson dropped his breath. "Hanson says there was a strange guy wandering through the place. About the time Maison disappeared out of the crowd. Hanson thinks he did it. She didn't know him, but he was talking to everybody. She said he was like a street guy. Too thin, yellow teeth, and he was wearing this T-shirt that said, 'I'm with Stupid,' and had this arrow that pointed down at his dick. And he had this weird dog-shit-brown sport coat."

  Lucas stared at Swanson for a moment, then said, "Huh."

  "That's what I thought," Swanson said. "You want to call him?"

  "Yeah, I'll call him. Let me look at the scene first."

  Hanson's home was elegant but sterile. Luc
as recalled another case, a couple of months before, when he'd entered an apartment and found the same high-style sterility. Like a picture on the cover of Architectural Digest: Pretty, but not lived-in. Eggshell walls with contemporary graphics—wrenches and hammers and gestures and angst—and then, around the corner, the interjected English country scene, in oil colors, with cows, spotted perfectly to connect with the graphics. Somebody else's sense of humor; a humor spoiled by the underlying scent of alcohol and smoke, the smell of a well-kept motel.

  The house seemed divided into two parts—an open plan public area, and a conventional series of bedroom suites at the back. Swanson led the way into the back. Two plainclothes cops were standing in a long central hallway, looking down at the thick gray hair of an assistant medical examiner, who was crouched over a body on the floor. The dead woman was facedown; she wore a reddish-brown party dress. The AME was dabbing at her mouth with an absorbent tissue.

  "Name is Sandy Lansing," Swanson said as they walked back.

  "She's a hostess of some kind, at Browns Hotel." Brown's was expensive, a hotel where poised young blond women in pearl-gray suits took the guests to their suites, while bellhops in red-and-black monkey suits toted the luggage and kept their mouths shut.

  Lucas squatted beside the body; one knee cracked. "Know what did it?" Lucas asked the AME.

  The AME was older, like Swanson, with the same tired hound-dog eyes. He had a pack of Marlboros in his shirt pocket, and a black medical bag, which was open on the rug behind him. "I think her skull is cracked," he said. "That's the only trauma I can find, but that was probably enough. There's a cleft, looks like a V-shaped cleft. She could have been hit by something with a narrow edge on it, a board, maybe the end of a cane—a walking stick. Not a pipe, nothing round."

  "A cane? Did somebody have a cane?" Lucas asked, looking up at Swanson. Swanson shrugged.

  "But could have been a doorjamb, or something like that," the AME continued. "Here…" He picked up the woman's head, gently, as though he might have had a daughter of his own, and turned it. A small indentation marked the back of the woman's head, near the top; there was a smear of blood, enough to show the line of the injury.

  "We think she might have walked in on the murder, by accident, and the killer went after her. Hit her with anything he had," Swanson said. "Maybe banged her head against the wall."

  "Why would he stuff her in the closet?" Lucas objected, but the AME interrupted: "Look at this."

  "What?"

  He was peering closely at the woman's scalp, then reached back, felt in his bag, and took out a hand lens. "I think, uh, it looks like a little flake of paint in her hair…" He looked up at Swanson. "Don't let anybody touch the doorjambs or any of the wooden trim. Anywhere she could whack her head. You might find an impact mark and maybe a hair or two." That could make the difference between murder and manslaughter, or even an accident.

  "All right," Swanson said. He looked up and down the hall at all the doorjambs; there seemed to be dozens.

  Lucas went back to his first thought. "Why couldn't this one have been killed first, and then—"

  " 'Cause Maison was strangled and she wasn't wearing any underpants, and the condition of her vulva and her pubic hair would suggest that she'd very recently been engaged in sex," Swanson said. "If somebody had killed Lansing first, we thought it was pretty unlikely that he'd stop off to bang Maison and then strangle her."

  "Okay." Made sense.

  "She's got something written on her wrist in ballpoint, but its kinda smeared, so it probably didn't happen right at the time she was killed," the AME said. He turned a wrist, and Lucas looked at the smear of blue ink.

  "Looks like… Ella? Fella? Delia?"

  "Probably not fella," Swanson said. "Why would anybody write 'fella' on their wrist?"

  "Could be a name," the AME suggested.

  "Strange name," Swanson said.

  "See what you can do to bring it up," Lucas said. "Get some photos over to homicide."

  "Okay."

  Lucas stood. "Let's see the other one."

  The door to the guest bedroom was another six feet down the hall, and Lucas stepped over Lansing's body, Swanson following along behind. Two crime-scene guys stepped out of the room just as Lucas came up. "Video," one of them said. "Crying goddamned shame," said the other.

  Inside, a photographer lit up, and began taping the crime scene, while a second guy maneuvered a light. All Lucas could see of Alie'e Maison was one bare foot, sticking out from behind the bed; the body was lodged in the space between the bed and the wall.

  He waited until the video guy was finished, then looked over the edge of the bed. Maison was lying faceup, one hand over her head, one trapped beneath her back. Her filmy green dress had been pulled up under her arms, exposing her body from the navel down. Her hips were canted toward the wall, and her ankles were crossed, but the wrong way: The one that should have been on the bottom was on the top.

  "Looks like she was thrown in there," Lucas said.

  One of the cops nodded. "That's what we think. Tried to hide her."

  "But not too hard. You can see her feet."

  "But if you just poked your head in, from the door, you probably wouldn't."

  "Who found her?" Lucas asked.

  "One of the people at the party." He looked at a notebook. "A woman named Rowena Cooper. Cooper knew Maison was back here, supposedly sleeping, and hadn't come out. She went back to see if she was awake. She says she opened the door but couldn't see anything, so she turned on the lights. She was just turning around to go back out when she saw the underpants. She went over to pick them up, and she saw the feet. Started screaming."

  "Where's Cooper now?"

  The cop tipped his head toward the other end of the house. "The library. We called Sloan, he's coming in to talk to her."

  "Good." Sloan was the best interrogator in the department. Lucas took a last look around the room. The bedspreads coordinated with the window treatments and the carpet. He asked, "The windows were locked?"

  "In this room, yeah. But we got an open window down the hall," one of the cops said.

  "Let me see."

  "Check this first," the cop said. He leaned forward, hovering an index finger over the inside of Alie'e's left elbow.

  Lucas would have known what that meant even if he couldn't see the BB-sized bruise. A needle user. He sighed, nodded at the cop, said, "Swanson," and stepped back into the hallway. Swanson was a step behind.

  "Look, you know what's gonna happen, so we've got to nail everything down," Lucas said. "Everything. I want everything sampled, swept, vacuumed. I want every test there is, on both women. I want interviews with everyone at the party—ask everybody for a list of names, and make sure you get every goddamn last one."

  "Sure."

  "Who takes over when you get off?"

  "I think… Thompson."

  "Brief him. Do everything. We'll pay for every bit of science anybody can think of." He looked back at the room. "Did you look at her fingernails?"

  "Yeah. They're clean. We'll get her vagina swabbed and get a rush on the semen."

  "And blood, we need blood right away. I want to know what kind of shit she was shooting."

  "Heroin."

  "Yeah, I know, but I wanna know."

  "You gonna call Del?"

  "In a minute."

  "There's a phone in the office. I was keeping it clear for incomings," Swanson said.

  "Show me the unlocked window… This place doesn't look like the windows should be unlocked."

  "Hanson says they never are," Swanson said. "But she got them washed a couple of weeks ago, and they were all opened then—they're some kind of tilt thing, so you can wash both sides from the inside."

  "I dunno."

  "Yeah, well, the window could have been unlocked then. Hanson says she never went around and checked them. She assumed they were all locked."

  The unlocked window was in another guest room, one door down the
hall; this room had a different set of coordinated bedspreads, window treatments, and carpet. Lucas looked out through the window glass. Nothing but lawn and shrubs. "Any muddy footprints outside the window, with a unique brand-logo impressed in the mud?"

  "No fuckin' mud. It ain't rained in two weeks."

  "I was joking," Lucas said.

  "I wasn't. I went out and looked," Swanson said. "The grass ain't even crinkled."

  "All right. Where's that phone?"

  Hansons home office was a small, purpose-built cubicle with cherry-wood shelves at one end for phone books, references, and a compact stereo. The cherry desk had four drawers, filing drawers to the left, envelope drawers to the right. A wooden Rolodex sat on the right side of the desk, a telephone on the left. A Dell laptop computer sat on a pull-out typing shelf, the wiring dropping out of sight, to appear behind a laser printer that sat on a two-drawer wooden filing cabinet beside the desk.

  "Hanson still in the living room?" Lucas asked Swanson.

  "Yeah."

  "Go talk to her. Keep her entertained… Ask her questions, start the witness list."

  "You got it." Swanson glanced at the laptop, nodded, and headed toward the living room.

  When he was gone, Lucas shut the office door and turned on the computer. Windows 98 came up, and he clicked Programs—Accessories—Address Book. The address book was empty. He jumped back to the opening page and clicked on Microsoft Outlook. When it came up, he checked the Inbox and Sent folders and found that Hanson had a small e-mail correspondence.

  He picked up the phone and dialed Del's number from memory, and as the phone began ringing, clicked on the Inbox folder again, clicked again on Find, and typed in "Alie'e."

  He was still typing when Del's wife answered the phone. The answer was more like a groan than a word: "Hello?"

  "Cheryl, this is Lucas. Is Del there?"

  "He's asleep, Lucas. He was trying to get you all night, but he couldn't find you." She was crabby. "What time is it, anyway?"

  "Sorry. Wake him up, we gotta talk."

  "Just a minute…"

  After a few seconds of background mumbling, Del came on the line. "You heard?"