[Prey 11] - Easy Prey

by John Sandford

  "Yeah. Pretty much all over the five-state. And I called Del, and he's looking around. The hotel manager said Trick didn't seem to be in a hurry—he checked out about ten minutes before the checkout deadline, and they talked about the Vikings for a while. So…"

  "He may still be around."

  Sloan came in, asked, "Have you seen it?"

  He held up a copy of The Star, with Alie'e on the front. She was standing in a dark, cavernous space, with fire or sparks flying behind her; she was wearing what looked like men's underpants and a short, torn T-shirt that left her midriff bare. In yellow, inch-high block letters, a headline read, "Alie'e: The Last Shoot."

  "Holy shit," Sherrill breathed. She took it from Sloan, and flipped it open to the portfolio in the middle of the issue. Alie'e in a dress the color of froth on the Caribbean Sea, walking down what looked like a line of fire. Another shot of her in the shorts-and-T-shirt ensemble, but this time with one exposed and apparently rouged nipple, and behind her, a giant man in a welder's helmet.

  And on the page opposite, a close-up facial shot of a woman Lucas wouldn't have recognized, except for the film he'd seen on television the night before, and the scars. "Is that…" Sloan asked.

  "Jael Corbeau," Lucas said.

  "Looks different," Sloan said.

  "Lots better," Lucas said.

  She'd been caught full-face, at night. Although the photo had the flash ambience of a news shot, it was obviously done in a studio: Everything was perfect, poised, balanced, designed. Corbeau was looking back over a bare shoulder; a single strand of dark pearls looped around her neck and dropped out of the bottom of the photo. Her hair was cropped and she was not quite snarling at the camera; her lipstick looked dark, maybe purple.

  "Hot," Sherrill said. "If I was inclined to do a little muff diving, I'd take either one of them."

  "What kind of talk is that?" Sloan asked.

  "The kind that turns me on," Lucas said, bumping Sherrill in the arm with his elbow.

  "You're not the only one," Sherrill said. She tapped the lap of the giant welder in the photo of Alie'e, the photo with the rouged nipple.

  Lucas looked closer. "Is that…"

  "Unless it's a bigger-than-usual jackknife," Sherrill said. "Like, way bigger than usual."

  Nothing was happening. Cops came back shaking their heads, looking for something else to do. Every person that they could find who'd been at the party had been interviewed. Nobody used any dope, nobody knew where it was coming from. Nobody had seen Alie'e after midnight, only a few people could remember Lansing at all.

  After an end-of-the-day meeting in Rose Marie Roux's office, Lucas headed home. He changed into a sweatshirt and shorts, ran for forty-five minutes through the quiet Highland Park area of St. Paul. Feeling virtuous. And back home, he picked up the phone to find a message from dispatch: Call Carl Knox.

  "Carl," he said. "Lucas Davenport."

  "I got two names for you. And I've squeezed as hard as I'm going to—I'm already nervous enough."

  "What're the names?"

  "Curtis Logan, spelled just like it sounds. He says he's an artist and he used to work in one of the art museums. He started by selling coke and ecstasy and speed to a few of the patrons, and his name got around. In certain groups."

  "Okay. Curtis Logan." Lucas noted it on a legal pad.

  "And James Bee. That's B-E-E, like in bumble."

  "What's he do?"

  "Certified financial adviser. Hooks up with rich people through a company called RIO Accounting. Same thing as Logan, mostly handles fashion drugs. Ecstasy, speed."

  "What are we talking about in sales? Every once in a while? Or big time?"

  "I don't know exactly—I wasn't doing an investigation, I was looking for a connection. But I got the feeling they're semi-big-time. And very careful."

  "I owe you," Lucas said.

  "Yeah. You do. And for Christ's sakes, don't do anything that'll make them think of me, when you ask about them."

  Neither of the two names was on the party list; that would have been too much to expect, anyway. But if they could get the two of them, they might be able to develop a daisy chain of peddlers-to-the-rich, and a name might still be found…

  Del was still working. Lucas dialed his cellular number and pulled him out of a bar. "Got two names for you, but you've gotta go gentle."

  "Like walking on cotton."

  Lucas gave him the names—Del hadn't heard of either of them—and said, "Call me if you get anything."

  "Probably won't nothing happen until tomorrow," Del said. "I'll get on some banks, start doing some financials."

  "We can't really afford a long-term look," Lucas said.

  "I'll do it fast as I can, but I can't just go knock on their doors."

  "Hear any more about Trick?"

  "No, but people are talking about a big game. Maybe tomorrow night, or the next night. I haven't tracked it down yet, but that'd be a possibility."

  "Call me when you get it."

  That night he worked on his game, but there were no calls. A call came in the morning, though.

  "You awake, sleepyhead?" Rose Marie Roux—and the words, on other days, might have brought up a smile; they didn't this morning, because of her tone of voice.

  "What happened?" Lucas asked.

  "Amnon Plain's dead."

  "Dead?" he said stupidly.

  "In St. Paul. Somebody shot him."

  Chapter 12

  « ^ »

  Monday. The third day of the hunt.

  There had been no premonition. Lucas was given to premonitions—mostly wrong, and usually involving a variety of plane crash scenarios, beginning as soon as he made a reservation for an airline flight. He also had premonitions involving criminal cases. Some were right. He'd been told by a shrink that his unconscious was probably pushing him to a logical connection that his conscious mind hadn't yet made. He didn't necessarily buy the mumbo-jumbo, but he didn't yet deny it, either. So he paid attention to premonitions, but in this instance, he hadn't had one. And even after he heard about Plain, he felt no foreboding about the rest of the day…

  Plain had been murdered in his apartment/studio at the Matrix Building in St. Paul's Lowertown, an out-of-the-loop business district of old converted warehouses occupied by artists and start-up businesses. The Matrix was one of the oldest and least updated: All the elevators were designed for freight, and stank of decades of crushed fruit and rotten onions, paint, beer, and card-board boxes. The hallways were littered with trash cans, most of them stuffed to overflowing. The Matrix had sold everything at one time or another: produce, hardware, dope, even wholesale leisure suits, sewn in St. Paul's only double-knit sweatshop.

  Lately, the big product was art, mostly painting, with some light sculpture. And Plains photography studio.

  A half-dozen St. Paul cop cars were gathered in the street when Lucas rolled up. He dumped the Porsche in a furniture-store parking lot, flashed his badge at a clerk who stood in the window. The clerk nodded, and he headed across the street. A St. Paul cop at the door recognized him, and said, "Nice to see you, chief," when Lucas said "Good morning."

  Another cop pointed him at the elevator: "Up to seven, take a right."

  A St. Paul police lieutenant named Allport was standing over Amnon Plain's body, making notes on a steno pad with a yellow pencil. Plain, shirtless and shoeless, was facedown in a puddle of drying blood that had spread across a pale hardwood floor. A brown paper grocery bag lay a few feet from his head, its contents spilled out across the floor: bakery, a cereal box, a six-pack of mineral water. Just beyond the grocery bag, a stainless-steel spiral staircase led down to the floor below.

  Lucas took it in for a minute, then the St. Paul cop looked up. "Ah, thank God. The Minneapolis cops. We were just about to call for help."

  "We heard you had a murder, and thought you probably needed some advice on how to handle it," Lucas said.

  "We certainly would. What would you advise?"
/>   "Get your PR guy out of bed and get his ass over here," Lucas said. "In about one hour, you're gonna be up to your knees in CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC, and every goddamn channel that's got initials."

  "Yeah." Allport scratched behind his ear with the pencil point Then he turned and looked at a cop. "Get the chief on the line."

  "So what happened?" Lucas asked.

  Allport spread his hands over the body. "They just had this big Alie'e spread in The Star—have you seen it?"

  "Yeah. Sexy."

  "You see the boner on that guy?"

  "Yeah. So what happened here?"

  "I'll tell you what, if I had a dick like that, I sure as shit wouldn't be a welder… Anyway, everybodywas screaming for pictures. That's what Plain's assistant says. They were sending them out by phone—I don't know how, exactly."

  "So…"

  "So the assistant was here until four-thirty, and then they decided to break. He said Plain wanted to take a shower, and they needed some food. It was too early for any regular store to be open and they didn't like any of the all-night restaurants, so the assistant drove over to White Bear Avenue. There's an all-night supermarket…"

  "Where all the cops hang out."

  "Used to, when they had the all-night restaurant. Anyway, he bought some rolls and fruit and shredded wheat and a carton of milk and some bottled water." His pencil dipped toward the bag on the floor. "When he came back, he let himself in downstairs, because he thought Plain might still be in the shower, and then he came up the stairs and he found… this."

  "He dropped the bag?"

  "Yup."

  "Got a cash-register receipt?" Lucas asked.

  "Yup. And the time of the receipt says four-fifty-four. Already worked it out, and it fits."

  "You believe him?"

  "Yup."

  "Why?"

  "Because he was freaked out in a way that's hard to fake. Because we had an off-duty cop working at the supermarket who saw the assistant checking the food through, and she said he was mellow enough to bullshit both the cashier and the cop."

  "Shit."

  "I sorta thought the same thing, until it occurred to me that I'll probably get a lot of airtime outa this."

  The cop that Allport had sent to the make the phone call came back with a cell phone and handed it to him. "Chief," he said.

  Allport took the phone and said, "I got Lucas Davenport here. He says we're gonna need some heavy PR bullshit here, and right away. Yeah. Yeah… here he is." He handed the phone to Lucas.

  "You working up a new handload?" Lucas asked, when he took the phone.

  "Well, uh, not at the moment. Why?"

  "All the stray dogs have been disappearing from the neighborhood," Lucas said.

  "Yeah, bullshit, Davenport. Listen, how bad's this gonna be?"

  "Can't tell. All depends on how you handle it—the movie people are like flies over in Minneapolis right now, and you can bet your ass they'll be over here as soon as the word leaks. I'd be surprised if you got more than an hour. If I were you, I'd get the mayor in and get him briefed, so he doesn't say anything stupid. And I'd talk to Rose Marie. Get her to ship our PR guy here, to brief you on our case… If you sound half bright and on top of all the questions, you'll be okay. For now."

  "Until we catch the killer. You guys getting anything over there?"

  "No."

  "Then spend some time with Allport. If you aren't doing any good over there, maybe something'll catch your eye over here."

  When he got off the phone, Lucas went back to the body, squatting as close as he could get without disturbing the puddle of blood. All he could see was the red stain in the middle of Plain's back. An exit wound, he thought; but the cloth was too soaked to show a hole. Lucas looked around the room. "You find a bullet hole anywhere?"

  "Yeah. The problem is, the whole place is poured concrete. There's a big goddamn dent in the wall over there." He pointed, and Lucas saw the gray pit. "The slug went somewhere else. I wouldn't be surprised if it more or less evaporated. Hit the wall straight-on."

  "When are you gonna roll him over?" he asked.

  "We're ready." Allport nodded to an assistant medical examiner, who was sitting on a chair in the kitchen, reading a comic book. "But our photo guy is checking what he got on film—we don't want any mistakes on this."

  "So how lone?"

  "He's been out of here for half an hour, so it should be anytime."

  "Where's Plain's assistant?" Lucas asked.

  "Down in the studio."

  "Mind if I chat with him?"

  "Go ahead. I'll call you when we roll him."

  The studio consisted of five rooms—one big open space with pull-down paper rolls mounted on the walls; a smaller room full of strange-looking tables with curved milky-white plastic tops; a small room with a group of hooded lights and a half-dozen chairs of different kinds, apparently a portrait studio; an office and storage space; and an entry.

  Lucas found James Graf in the office. He was dressed in a black turtleneck and black slacks, and had a thin black beard. He looked, Lucas thought, like a picture of one of the old-time beatniks. Graf was lying on a couch, an arm thrown over his eyes. Lucas dragged a director's chair across the floor and sat down next to the couch. Graf lifted his head and looked wordlessly at Lucas. He'd been crying, Lucas thought.

  "Did you see or hear anybody outside the studio or the apartment when you left for the grocery store?"

  "I already talked."

  "I'm from Minneapolis. I'm working on the Alie'e murder," Lucas said. "I just have a couple of questions. Did you see or hear anybody?"

  "I didn't see anyone, but we heard people from time to time, when we were working. There's always somebody around," Graf said. "People here work all night sometimes. They're always out wandering around in the hallways."

  "But you didn't see anybody."

  "No, but I did recognize one voice. Joyce, I don't know her last name, she's an artist, down the hall. I heard her yelling, and running in the hall. Laughing. This was a few minutes before I went out. I told the St. Paul police."

  "How about cars in the parking lot?"

  Graf dropped his head back, refocused on the ceiling, thinking, then shook his head. "I'm sorry. I didn't notice anything unusual. We did have a wrong-number phone call about two o'clock, which was pretty unusual, but I told St. Paul and they're checking."

  "This artist, Joyce, was wandering around. For what?"

  "I don't know." Graf pushed himself up on the couch. "But you know, she was down here. He was killed upstairs, and to get upstairs, you have to go all the way to the middle of the building and take the elevator or the public stairs. Unless you take a fire escape. So if he was waiting up there, she probably wouldn't have seen him."

  "You don't think he came in through here." Lucas nodded at the studio door.

  "No. Ammy was on his way upstairs when I left, and the bolts on all the doors lock automatically. And those doors, they're steel. We've got maybe a hundred thousand dollars' worth of photo equipment and computer stuff in here, and the place is full of thieves—stuff gets stolen all the time—so our doors are good. The locks are good. So I think whoever it was, went up and knocked on the door upstairs, and killed Ammy when he answered it."

  "Would Plain just open the door if somebody knocked?"

  "Well… maybe. I mean, everybody in the building knows everybody else, so if somebody knocks…" He gestured at the door. "The doors upstairs are just like these: solid, no windows. If somebody knocks, you have to open it to see who it is. And maybe…"

  "What?"

  "Maybe he thought it was me, coming 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.