Easy Prey

Chapter 11

Sunday. The second day of the Maison case.

Lucas retrieved thePioneer Press from his front porch, looked at the large dark headline: "Alie'e Maison Murdered." And beneath that, the subhead "Strangled in Minneapolis."

The headline, he thought, was smaller than the moonwalk, and possibly even smaller than reproductions he'd seen of the Pearl Harbor news flash.

But not much.

And he thought: Trick.

County Attorney Randall Towson was not exactly a friend, but he was a decent guy. He took the phone call at his breakfast table and said, "Tell me we got everything we need."

"What?"

"On the Alie'e Maison killerwho you're calling to tell me you caught."

"I have something much better. Honest to God." Lucas tried to inject sincerity into his voice. "I've found a chance to serve justice."

The attorney betrayed a cautious curiosity. "You're bullshitting me. Sorry, darlin'."

"No, no, I've found an innocent guy in the prison system. You can get him out. And then you can take the credit, and the grateful taxpayers will undoubtedly return you to office for thewhat, fifth time?"

"Sixth," Towson said. "What the fuck sorry darlin'I'm eating breakfast with my granddaughter. What are you talking about?"

"Del Capslock was at the Alie'e party the other night. He wasn't there at the time of the murder, but he did meet an old friend of ours."

"Who?" Suspicious now.

"Trick Bentoin." Silence. Silence for so long that Lucas added, "Trick had gone to Panama to play gin rummy."

Then, his voice soft and unshaken, Towson said, "This is a problem."

"Yeah." Lucas nodded, though there was nobody to see it.

"I've clearly identified it as a problem. Tomorrow, when I get to work, I'll get my best people working on a solution."

"That would be good," Lucas said.

Another long silence. Then: "Great Jesus fuckin' Christ, Davenport," Towson screamed. And meekly added, "Sorry, darlin'."

Catrin.

What to wear to a Sunday lunch? She was married to a doctor, so she probably had some bucks. She'd be more comfortable with something neat, rather than something out on the edge: Boots and black-leather jackets were out. Lucas dug through his closet, through a stack of dry cleaning, and finally came up with what he hoped would be righttwill pants in a deep khaki, a crisp blue shirt, and a brown suede sport coat. He added dark brown loafers and his dress gun, a P7 in 9mm.

Checked himself in the mirror; smiled a couple of times. Nah.

Better to can the little smile, he thought. Go for sincerity and pleasure at seeing her

On Sundays, City Hall was dead quiet. Not today. Lucas went straight for Roux's office; the secretary's desk was empty, but Rose Marie, dressed in slacks and a sweater with fuzzy white sheep on it, was in her office with two visitors. Dick Milton, the department's media specialist, was a former newspaper reporter who'd once written an eight-part investigative seriesSunday through Sundayon oak wilt. Angela Harris, a departmental contract shrink, was perched on the windowsill.

"What do you think?" Lucas asked as he stuck his head in the door.

"Media-wise?" Roux looked up. "Just about what we expected."

"Been a little rough on George Shaw," Milton said.

"That's not rough," Lucas said. He'd never liked Milton, even when he was reporting. "Rough is sitting in the county jail, waiting to go to Stillwater for ten years, which is what George is gonna do."

"Its not gonna hold, the connection between Shaw and Alie'e," Milton said. He looked at Roux. "This whole lesbian business they stayed pretty delicate about it last night, on the news shows, but I was on the Net and I saw a scan of the first copies ofThe Star, and they got a big sexy picture of this Jael Corbeau. She's hotter than Alie'e, so it ain't gonna stay delicate very long."

"When'sThe Star gonna get here?" Lucas asked.

"This afternoon, I guess. They got stories on the Net about how theStar editors tore the ass off a whole issue as it was going out the door, and turned it around to do an Alie'e issue. The Journal says all them other rags are suckin' wind."

"So it's gonna pump everything up," Lucas said. He looked at Roux. "You're still working the press pretty hard?"

"We're doing another press conference at ten o'clock, and then the Olson family and friends are supposed to be back around noon. They want the body as soon as they can get it. The funeral's gonna be later in the week, up in Burnt River. Then we'll probably have another press briefing around three o'clock, and if we need another, around seven."

"Nothing came up overnight?"

"Nothing. Except this morning, Randall Towson called about Trick Bentoin."

"I forgot to tell you about it," Lucas said. "The murder washed it away. Del says Tricks in a Days Inn down on 694, so we'll pick him up tomorrow and get a statement. Towson is gonna call Rashid Al-Balah's attorney, I guess, as soon as we get a statement from Trick."

"Maybe nobody will notice?"

"We should announce it the day of the funeral," Milton said. "If we can hold off until then."

"I dunno," Lucas said. "We really ought to get Al-Balah out of Stillwater as soon as we can."

"Al-Balah?" Roux said. "Fuck him. But why don't you get Bentoin today? Just in case."

"Okay." Lucas looked at the shrink. "What do you think about Alie'e? We got a crazy?"

She shook her head. "Too soon to tell. It looks more efficient than crazy, though. Of course, the man is disturbed in some sense."

"He'd be more disturbed if I could get my goddamned hands on him," Rose Marie said.

"Twelve of the people at the party have arrest records, and I'm looking at them for any sign of psychiatric involvement, but I don't see any so far," the shrink continued.

"Twelve?" Lucas asked, looking at Rose Marie.

"Talk to Lesterbut it's all small stuff. Shoplifting, petty theft, two misdemeanor domestic assaults, one street fight, a couple of ticket scofflaw cases like that."

Nothing.

A Post-it note was stuck to Lucas's door: Come get me. It was signed, Marcy. He walked down to Homicide, and found the place full of copsmore homicide cops than he'd ever seen in one spot, at one time, on a Sunday. Lester was perched on a desk at the end of the room, talking to a cop with a notebook. He spotted Lucas and shook his head. Nothing happening.

Lucas stepped back to Marcy Sherrill's desk. She saw him coming, said something into the phone she was holding, and hung up. "I'm really coming over?" She was a pretty woman in her early thirties; she liked to fight. She and Lucas had had a brief, intense affair, which everyone in the office had considered inevitable and overdue. After a couple of months, they'd called the thing off by mutual consent, to their mutual relief.

"Yeah, at least for a while," Lucas said.

"Good. I'm trying to track down more people from the partyI bet we're missing forty peoplebut I'm not getting anywhere. I'm ready to bag it."

"So you're up? Right now?"

"I could be, if you whispered in Frank's shell-like ear," Marcy said.

"You remember Trick Bentoin?"

Sherrill didn't want to go after Bentoin, but if she could bring him into the state attorneys office, he could keep Del free all day.

"Soif I do this, I can work Alie'efor you?"

"We're all working Alie'e after this," Lucas said. "Maybe forever."

Sherrill leaned back in her chair, locked her hands behind her head, and studied him.

"What?" he asked.

"You've got something going on, the way you look. You look sort of snazzy."

"Meeting an old friend for lunch," Lucas said. No point in denying it. During the affair, Sherrill had learned to read his mind.

"Nice-looking, I'd guess." She smiled.

"I don't know. I really haven't talked to her in twenty years."

"Whoa. So what happened? She just came back to town?"

"No, she's been living down south, on the Mississippi, somewhere down there."

And shecould read his mind. She rocked forward, her face serious. "Lucas, is she married?"

He shrugged. "She's not entirely unmarried, as I understand it. Look, we're just having lunch."

"Oh, God. Don't fuck her up, Lucas."

He was offended, stiffened up. "I won't. And you go get Bentoin, okay? Call me when you've got him."

"Lucas" Even more serious now. "Lucas, man, she's your age, she's married, she's in the danger zone. You could seriously mess her up. I can tell by the way you're acting."

"Find Bentoin." He turned and left. In the hall, under his breath, he said, "Fuck you," and looked at his watch. Plenty of time for an errand.

Carl Knox had taken a fine Sunday morning to look at a stolen Kubota 2900 tractor with a front loader and rear-mounted backhoe; an accessory mower was piled on the front of the trailer that held the tractor. While Carl looked, a freckle-faced, straw-haired, outraged thief was talking about the turf tires, practically unusedthe goddamn machine had only 145 hours on it, came straight off the best golf course in southern Minnesota. What was this two-thousand-dollar shit?

Carl couldn't hear him, because he was thinking about a Cree Indian guy named Louis Arnot up in Canada, who'd been calling around looking for just such a machine. Arnot would pay twelve thousand American if Carl could deliver the tractor to Kenora, Ontario, which he could, but his guys would have to change the numbers and he'd have to come up with some Kubota papers, and he hadn't done Kubota in a couple of years.

His daughter had come out to the shop with him. She'd been inside, fooling with the books, but now suddenly broke through the Service Department door and said, "The cops are here."

"Uh-oh," he said. He waved her back inside, and then looked at the tractor. "How hotis this thing?"

"Nobody even knows it's stolen yet," Roy said nervously.

Davenport came around the corner of the building, fifty yards away. Knox said, quietly, "Here he comes. Don't look. I know this guy, and he's not here about the tractor."

"I'll take the two thousand," Roy said, his Adam's apple bobbing. Knox stepped away from the trailer to greet Davenport.

"Nice-looking machine," Lucas said as he strolled up. "I use a B20 up north."

"No offense, but that's practically a fucking lawn mower," Knox said. Enough small talk. "What's going on?"

Lucas was offended, but tried not to show it. Instead, he looked at the freckle-faced thief: "Why don't you go get a Coke?"

"Sounds good," Roy said. He hopped off the trailer and hotfooted it across the parking lot, toward the Service Department door. Through the glass panel of the door, Lucas could see the pale face of Knox's daughter peering out at them.

"Why's everybody so nervous?" he asked. "What's everybody doing at work on a Sunday?"

"You work every day if you have a small business, and you're not sucking out of the state trough," Knox said.

"That can't be it," Lucas said. He looked at the Kubota. "What, that hick steal this tractor?"

"Jesus, Davenport, he's a goddamn basement excavator who's going broke and has to sell his job. What do you want?"

"A list," Lucas said. "We chase all over town, going after the big dope wholesalers, the gangs, the people pushing shit on the street, and we pretty much know every one of them. The ones we don't know, the ones we can't get at, are the really smart ones who only move a kilo or so a week, to rich people. Nobody ever complains, nobody ever gets caught. Nobody's standing on a street corner. We need some of those names."

"You know I don't mess with dope. Too dangerous."

"But you do loan-sharking, Carl. And you got that layoff business with the sports-book guys. You know a lot of rich people who get their money in strange ways, and put a lot of it up their nose, and who don't buy their shit down in the ghetto."

"You're gonna get my nuts cut off," Knox said.

Lucas shrugged. "So who's ever gonna know that you're talking to me? And it gives us just that much less incentive to figure out what you reallydo for a living. You know, the ugly details."

"Is this part of the Alie'e Maison thing?"

"Yeah, part of it."

"Nobody ought to be killing young girls," Knox said. "I saw the story in theStar-Tribune this morning, the interview with her parents." He looked toward the service door, where his daughters face still floated in the rectangle of black glass in the service door. "I can ask around," he said. "But like the last time, I might come up empty."

"That helped, when you came up empty," Lucas said. "It eliminated some possibilities."

"So I can ask," Knox said. "Now, you wanna take a hike before my kid breaks out in hives?"

Lucas left. Halfway back to the corner of the building, he turned and said, "I'll anxiously await your call."

Knox shook his head and watched until Lucas had turned the corner. The freckle-faced thief eased out of the building and asked, "What'd he want?"

"Just bullshit," Knox said. He turned to the thief. "You said nobody knows the tractor is gone yet?"

"Won't nobody know until tomorrow, when the owner gets back from Vegas."

"Can you get it back there?"

"Get it back? I just stole it," Roy said.

"Yeah, but this guy is gonna look it up, just sure as shit. If it's on a list, he's gonna be back here, and he's gonna want to know where it went. I'd have to tell him I turned you down, and then he'd come looking for you."

"You wouldn't tell him"

Knox shrugged. "You're not a real big part of my business."

"Well, goddamn, Carl"

"So you take it back," Knox said. "When does your guy go to Vegas again?"

"He goes every couple of months."

"So steal it again, then. I'll give you three thousand," Knox said.

"Three?"

"Take it or leave it."

The thief looked up at the big orange tractor and said, "I'm gonna be out fifty bucks for gas."

"Hey, Roy?"

"Yeah?"

"Tell somebody who gives a shit."

Lucas stopped back at headquarters, left a note for a guy in Property Crimes, asking him to check on stolen Kubota 2900 tractors. He looked at his watch every thirty seconds for ten minutes, then headed for a restaurant called The Bell Jar. No sign of Catrin. He was a few minutes early, but he started to worry. Maybe she'd bailed

The maоtre d' put him in a corner, where he could see the room. A waitress came by and dropped off the drinks menu; a couple of minutes later she came back and he ordered a martini. "Will you be dining by yourself today?" she asked.

"No, I" And Catrin came in the door. "I'm meeting that lady right there."

Catrin, he thought, had dressed as carefully as he had, in a light gray-wool skirt, a black cashmere sweater, and low heels. She was wearing small diamond earrings. She looked, he thought, absolutely wonderful. She read his face and might have colored, just a bit, as he stood up to meet her.

"Lucas."

"How are you?" He was fumbling already. "I mean, with your friend"

"Funeral's on Tuesday," she said. "It's over. With what she'd been through, it was time. I don't feel the least bit bad about it."

"Okay"

She smiled and said, "Did you order?"

"A martini."

"A martini? What happened to the Grain Belt?"

"Only on special occasions," he said. He looked around the restaurant, "if you ordered bratwurst in this place, the chef'd probably faint."

"So I'll have a martini," she said. "An old-time drink with an old-time friend."

And she was fumbling, he thought.

"Last time I saw younot this morning, but back whenyou were really upset."

"I remember," she said. "You were such a punk. You were unbelievable. You were also pretty sure you were God's gift to women, if I remember correctly."

"C'mon. I wasn't Gods gift to anyone."

"Easy to say now."

"You weren't exactly a ride in the park yourself."

"Are we gonna fight?" But she said it smiling, almost delightedlike something was still the same.

"The last time I saw you," he said, dropping his voice, "you were absolutely buck naked. The last thing I saw was you standing there with your fists on your hips, looking for your underpants."

"That was something you weren't supposed to bring up," she said, and now shewas pink. "Though I do remember that we spent quite a bit of time running around naked."

"Yeah. Jesus. Are we old now?"

"No, but we were definitely young then." A waiter came, gave them menus and left water, and promised to come back. Catrin opened the menu and looked over it to say, "You really made me angry, back then. I almost couldn't stand it. I never told Jack about you, and he was a hockey fan, and he used to take me to hockey games the next year, before he graduated. He was one of your fans. I remember how pissed off I'd get when you'd be skating around. Cruising around, backward or something, all arrogant macho tough asshole, smiling at the girls"

"Jesus." He was impressed.

"Still pisses me off, thinking about it." Her eyes dropped to the menu.

That was the end of the sex talk. After they ordered, the conversation drifted to their current lives.

"When you said your husband took you to hockey games before he graduated When did he graduate?"

"The next year. We got married June of my sophomore year, and he did his internship with a military hospital in Koreahe was a captain. Then, when we came back, he joined his fathers practice in Lake City and that's where we've been."

"What about you? You didn't finish school?"

"No you know. I got pregnant while we were in the army. I mean, I took classes over the years, but I never got back to school full-time. I thought about going this fall, to Macalester, but I just I don't know. I didn't go. Now I'm supposed to go this winter, and I still don't know I'm kind of fucked up." She heard herself say it, and stopped. "The last time I said thatused those words, 'fucked up'was when we were dating."

"Yeah, well, the good stuff always comes back," Lucas said wryly.

When they were eating, she said, "Things have really been good. I loved Jack right away, I wouldn't give up any of that for anything. But this is like feminist hell: I keep coming back toHow about me? When do they make my movie? I always thought I was gonna be the movie star, and the rest of you were gonna be the extras. Instead, I wind up as the one in the background who's changing diapers and doing the books and working for free for United Way.

"I thought you and I were alike, because you always did what you were going to do; you were always the star in your movie. I thought I was like that: I was always going to do whatI wanted to do, and then the kids came, and Ihad to take care of them. I didn't have any choice, because they weremine, and nobody else was going to do it, and it just made sense."

"Now they're moving out," Lucas said. "So do what you want to do."

"But what am I going to do? I have a feeling that if you want to be a movie star, in any movie, you've got to start young and work hard, and the best way to do that is be hungry all the time. But Jack started investing while we were still in the Army, and he always made good money, and you know how much we're worth now? Something like ten million dollars. That's a ridiculous amount Jack wants to buy a house in Florida, and he's talking about an apartment in Londonwe both like London, and you can get there in seven hours on Northwest So what's the point in trying to be a movie star now? To do what?"

"Not to make money, maybe. You were a painter, and you want to do photography. So do photography. Or paint."

"Ahhh" she said. "That all seems too sterile now. Everything is too comfortable."

"So go back to college in criminal justice," Lucas said. "You can be a cop. I can fix it so Minneapolis'll hire you, and you can go around and do murders."

"Really?"

"What do you want to do, Catrin?" Lucas asked.

"Not be a cop," she said.

"So what?"

"I don't know. I'm just so comfortable, everything is so perfect, that I want to scream."

He walked her back to the car. She stood on her tiptoes and kissed him on the cheek, and swiveled into the front seat of the Lincoln. "By the way, the chances of us running into each other up here are just about nil, but if we dowe do get up here every couple of weeksI didn't tell Jack about meeting you for lunch. There just would have been too many questions. So if we see you"

"Yeah. Don't worry."

He was whistling on the way back to the office, caught himself, and caught himself again. Man, she was married. And it didn't sound like a bad marriage, either. But there was something between the two of them, between himself and a woman he hardly knew anymore, and it had a lot to do with sex. The thought might have brought him down, but it didn't. When he got back to his office, he found another Post-it note on the door: Find me. Marcy.

Sherrill was at her desk in Homicide. She didn't ask about the lunch. She said, "No Trick."

"What?"

"The motel manager said he checked out this morning. He's driving a ten-year old lime-green Caddy with a trunk full of golf clubs and one suitcase. We got a license number."

"A real license number?"

"Yeah. Illinois tag. I ran it, and it comes up under a different name, a guy named Robert Petty, but it's a ten-year-old lime-green Caddy. I called Petty, and he said he sold it two weeks ago, and the guy was supposed to change plates. I guess Trick never got around to it."

"Goddamnit," Lucas said. "You put the tag out?"

"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 hurryhe 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 ofThe 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 toI'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 exactlyI 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 namesDel hadn't heard of either of themand 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 Rouxand 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."