Easy Prey

Chapter 4

Rose Marie Roux had lost thirty pounds on a new all-protein diet and now was thinking about a face-lift. "Just a couple of snips, to pull me up around the sides," she told Lucas. Rose Marie was the chief of police. She put her fingertips on her face just below her cheekbones and pushed the skin back until it began pulling on her lips. The mayor stepped into her office, looked at her and said, "What?"

She let go of the skin, and her face slid back to its usual shape. "Face-lift," Lucas said. He yawned; he liked late nights, but not early mornings.

"I been thinking about getting some hair," the mayor said. He was balding, but still had the remnants of a hairline. "Think anyone would notice?"

"They look like little bushes planted into the side of a grassy hill, the hair plugs do," Rose Marie said. "You don't ever want anybody on a staircase above you, looking down."

"Ah, that's the old-style plugs," the mayor said. "I'm thinking about micro-implantsthey're supposed to be really natural." They chatted about plastic surgery and micro-implants for a few minutes, aging politicians doing what they did bestschmoozinguntil Lucas yawned again. The mayor stopped the chitchat in the middle of a sentence and asked, "How dead is she?"

"Pretty dead," Lucas said, sitting up. "Strangled. Maybe raped. Did Rose Marie tell you about the second woman?"

The mayor's head went back, and he gave Lucas a startled-deer look, as much as a short, barrel-chested, balding, former personal-injury attorney can have a startled-deer look. "A second woman?"

He turned to Rose Marie, who shrugged and said, "Not my fault. A second body turned up, stuffed in a closet. I just found out."

"Another model?" Swiveling to Lucas.

"No," Lucas said. He gave the mayor a short rundown on the double murder. "Your friend Sallance Hanson says if we give her any trouble, she's gonna call you."

"Fuck her," the mayor said. "Chain-whip her if you want."

"Really?" Rose Marie's eyebrows went up.

"She gave me two hundred bucks," the mayor said. "For that much, she gets a signed photograph. I sure as shit don't run interference on a murder." He looked back at Lucas. "Do we have any leads?"

"Probably, but not that I know of," Lucas said. "We're still processing the scene. Maison had been putting some dope in her arm, heroin probably. The other woman was red around the nose, like she'd seen a lot of coke."

"Chamber of Commerce is gonna love that, coke and heroin," the mayor said. "What do we tell the movie people?" The movie people were television reporters.

"We tell them it's probably a dope-related murder," Lucas said.

The mayor frowned. "Dope-related sounds bad."

"Everythingsounds bad," Lucas said. "But saying that it's dope makes it simple to understand. And that's what we need. Simple. Boring. Understandable. Nothing exotic. No orgies, no weird sex, no big money or jealous lovers, no scandal. Just a bad guy somewhere. And the movie people'll believe heroin. There's so much heroin in the fashion business that it was alook not very long ago. All the models had this fagged-out doper look. It won't surprise anybody."

"We don't want it to drag out: We don't want it to become some culture thing for the movie intellectuals to get onto."

"That's what I'm saying," Lucas said. "We don't want anything mysterious or exotic. A dope-related killing fits."

"Tell him about the window," Rose Marie said.

"Window?"

"A bedroom down from the murder roomthe room where Maison's body was, if that was the murder room, and it probably washad an unlocked window. Somebody could have gone out that way. Or, more to the point, might have come in. A cat burglar."

"With all the people in there? There must've been lights."

"Lights seem to pull cat burglars in," Lucas said. "They get a buzz from going into a house where people are'cause they're nuts. Generally, you get a cat burglar, you get a guy who's gonna start raping the victims. Or killing them. They're thrill freaks."

"Ah, man." The mayor shook his head.

"It's better to stay with the dope story," Lucas said. "If a dealer killed her, or she was killed because of dope, everybody understands. It's a one-time thing and she's partially at fault. If she hadn't been using dope, she'd still be alive. But if it's a cat burglar, then we've got a serial killer on the loose, and the worst kind of serial killerthe kind who'll come creeping into your bedroom and strangle you, even with other people in the house."

"Like one of those horror movies. Halloween, or the one with the guy with the fingers that are knives," Rose Marie said.

"No, no, no, we don't want that," the mayor said, waving off the idea.

"That's what we thought," Rose Marie said wryly.

"So it's dope," the mayor said. "Who's running the show?"

"Frank Lester," said Rose Marie. "Lucas and his group will fit in sideways, like we did before. Everybody's comfortable with that."

"Good. It's Strategic Planning"

"Strategic Studies and Planning," Lucas said. "And I need a woman in the group. Marcy Sherrill wants to come over from Homicide."

Rose Marie shook her head. "Then I got to give Homicide somebody else. Everything is too tight."

"We're paying for ourselves about twenty times over," Lucas said patiently. "And I need a woman if I'm going to operate."

"There's politics"

"Murder is down fourteen percent, and a lot of it's because of my guysthree guys, including mespotting the assholes," Lucas said. "That's politics."

The mayor held up his hands to stop the argument. To Rose Marie he said, "Half the people in Homicide are going to be working on this anyway, so why don't you give him Marcy for the duration of the Maison case? When that's done, well figure something out."

Rose Marie sighed and said, "All right. But I want some more money."

The mayor rolled his eyes, then said, "Yeah, who doesn't?" Then: "You'll do the media?"

Rose Marie nodded. "But you'll have to be there, too, the first time. This is gonna be large, media-wise."

"Who do you think'll come in?"

"Everybody," she said. "Four locals and a freelancer for CNN are already outside the house. All the other networks are on the way. And most of the picture-and-gossip magazines. People. The Star."

"Then we're gonna need something more than just saying it's a 'dope-related killing.' " He looked at Lucas. "Do we have somebody we can throw to them? Some doper asshole they can chase for a couple of days?"

"I can ask," Lucas said.

"Do that. The more they've got to occupy them, the less time they're gonna spend asking why nothing's been done yet." The mayor touched his forehead. "Wish I'd gotten the new hair, though, you know? Like last year."

Rose Marie stretched the skin back from her nose. "Never too late," she said.

The meeting lasted fifteen minutes. As Lucas was leaving, Rose Marie said, "Heyturn on your cell phone, okay? For the duration."

Lucas shrugged noncommittally. On the way back to his office, he poked Del's number on his phones speed-dial. Del was in the middle of the Internal Affairs interview, and when Lucas passed on the mayor's request, he said, "I'll see what we got, as soon as I get out of here."

"Hows it going?"

"Fine. They're a lovely bunch of people."

Lucas punched off, dropped the phone back in his coat pocket. Del could take care of himself. At his office, he yawned, peeled off his jacket, and locked himself in, leaving the lights off. He pulled open a desk drawer, dropped into his chair, and put his feet on the drawer. Not quite seven o'clock; He'd gone to bed a little after two, and normally wouldn't have gotten up until ten.

Years beforebefore he'd inadvertently gotten richhe'd invented board games as a way of supplementing his police salary. The games were created in all-night sessions that now, in memory, seemed to merge with his time of running the streets. The games eventually became computer-based, with Lucas writing the story and a hired programmer from the University of Minnesota writing the computer code.

That work led to Davenport Simulations, a small software company that specialized in computer-based simulations of law-enforcement crises, intended to train police communications personnel in fast-moving crisis management. By the time the company's management bought him out, Davenport Simulations were running on most of the nation's 911 equipment.

The simulations hadn't much interested him. They'd simply been an obvious and logical way to make money, more of it than he'd ever expected to make. And while games still interested him, he'd lost his place in the gaming world. The new three-dimensional computer-based action/strategy games were far beyond anything he'd been able to do as recently as five years before.

When he'd gotten rich, when he'd gotten political, he'd stepped off the streets. But in the past six months, his life had begun to shift again. He was wandering the Cities at night. Looking into places he hadn't seen in years: taverns, a couple of bowling alleys, barbershops, a candy store that fronted for a sports book. Strip joints, now masquerading as gentlemen clubs. Putting together rusty connections.

And he was talking to old gaming friends. He began to consider a new kind of game, a game set in the real world, with real victories to win, and a real treasure at the end, maybe using palm computers and cell phones. He'd been staying up late again, working on it. He was still in the pencil-twiddling stage, but now had a block of scratchy flow charts pinned to his drafting table. One idea a night, that's all he wanted. Something he could use. But an idea a night was a lot of ideas.

He leaned back in the chair, yawned, closed his eyes. In his mind's eye, he saw Maison on the floor, her foot sticking out from behind the bed, and the woman crumpled on the floor below the closet. Maison and her friends were dopers, and dopers got killed; it happened forty or fifty times a year in Minneapolis, thousands of times a year across the country.

As far as he was concerned, dopers were crap, and if they died, well, that's what dopers did. That Alie'e was famous cut no ice with Lucas. Her fame was entirely ephemeral, not the result of hard work, or intellectual or moral superiority, but simply a by-product of her appearance.

He felt no impulse to revenge; he did feel the first tingles of the hunt. That was something else altogether. That had nothing to do with Alie'e, but was purely between his guys and the other guys.

Then he saw, in his mind's eye, the image of Catrin as a young woman. Man, the last time he saw her

Lucas's eyes were closed, and the corners of his mouth turned up. A small smile, and not a particularly attractive one. Feeling a little wasted; feeling some pressure from the politicals; feeling a killer out there, somewhere, maybe running, maybe not. And a woman on the mind, somebody to wonder about.

Thiswas how life was supposed to be. Propped up in a chair, wishing you still smoked, worried about twenty-four things at the same time. Not that laid-back, going nowhere slowly feeling that prosperous, rich-guy, hand-shaking shit.

Likethis.

He was sleeping like a baby when the phone rang.