Easy Prey

Chapter 7

" and became a beautiful filmy-green twenty-five-thousand-dollar shroud for the mysterious women with the jade-green eyes. Back to you, Henry."

The first man hadn't gotten any sleep; he paced his office, watching the TV. The blond reporter was smiling at him. Filmy green shroud. She was proud of that. Filmy green.

At the tips of his fingers, the man could still feel the soft skin of Alie'e's throat. He hadn't had any choice with her. She'd come along at the precisely wrong time in everybody's life

Sandy Lansing was panicking, she was going to run. He'd had totalk with her, todiscipline her: You did not run when there was business to be done. He'd reached out, intending to push her against the wail. Somehow the pit of his palm had landed under her chin, and when he pushed, her head snapped back, into a molding around a door. He'd actually felt her skull crack, the vibration through the heel of his handlike feeling a raw egg crack on the edge of a china cup.

Her eyes had gone up, and she'd slipped down the wall, and he'd glanced back up the hallway toward the party. If the door opened "Get up," he said. "Come on, get the fuck up."

He'd taken her arm and pulled, but her arm was deathly slack. And after a minute, he'd believed. He'd looked for a pulse, tried to find a heartbeat, but could find neither. He'd been seized by fear: Christ, she was dead. He crouched over the body, like a jackal over a baked ham, looking from her face to the still-closed door. He hadn't meant to kill her.

But nobody knew

The body was next to a door. He pulled the door open: a closet, with a rack of cold-weather jackets and coats. He lifted her, her heels dragging, and shoved her into the closet. She wouldn't fit; she kept slumping, and she had to be upright to fit. He was holding her by the throat with one hand, trying to get the door shut, when a voice said from a few inches behind his ear, "What are youdoing?"

He'd almost had a heart attack. He turned and saw the green eyes; and the closet door finally clicked shut. Alie'e asked again, "Why did you put her in the closet?"

The second man heard about Alie'e's death from his dashboard radio. At first, he thought he'd misheard; and then it occurred. to him that he was crazythat he wasn't hearing this at all. But the radio kept talking, talking, talking and when he changed stations they were talking, talking

Alie'e this, Alie'e that.

Alie'e with lesbians.

Alie'e nude in a photo shoot.

Alie'e dead.

The second man swerved to the side of the road, pulled on the park brake, put his head on the steering wheel, and wept. Couldn't stop: his shoulders shaking, his mouth open, breathing in stuttering gasps.

After a long five minutes, he wiped his eyes on his shirtsleeve, turned, found a clipboard in the back, clipped in a piece of notepaper.

He wrote: Who did this? And drew a line under it.

And under that, he wrote the first name.

There would, he thought, be quite a few names before he finished the list.