Easy Prey (12 page)

“The Iowa game.”

“Yeah. Virginia was like . . . she was going to live forever.”

They talked for twenty minutes, catching up on old times. Catrin remembered all the names from their few months together, and the faces came swimming up from Lucas's memory, along with the sights and the sounds and even the smells of all those old glory days: the field houses all over the Big Ten, smelling of popcorn and dirt; the ice arenas and the odors of cold and blood, wet wool and sweat; diesel fumes from the buses; cheerleaders.

“God, I wish we'd had time to talk,” Lucas said. “What do you do now? Do you still paint?”

“No, no, I do some photography, but the painting, I don't know. I just stopped. My husband's a family practice guy. I helped out at the office when we were first getting started. . . .”

“I heard about you marrying a doctor. I remembered on the way over here, after you told me this morning. I think Bill Washington said something about you going out with an older guy.”

“Washington. God, I haven't thought about him in years. The last time I saw him, we were all sitting around on a floor in Dinkytown getting high.”

“You're a photographer? Say, you don't know a guy named Amnon Plain, do you? He's hooked up with the Alie'e case.”

“Really? Did he do it?”

“He says not, and he probably didn't . . . but he says he's some kind of fashion photographer, and I thought--”

“Jeez, he's more than that. He does fashion photography, got started that way. But he does these most amazing pictures of the prairie. He's like Avedon, he does fashion but he's got this whole other thing.”

“Avedon?”

“You were never an intellectual, were you?” She laughed.

“I was majoring in hockey, for Christ's sakes. Criminal justice.”

“Yeah, well . . . Plain's a photographer. Big time. Pretty big time. I'm nothing like that—I mostly take care of the kids. Or try to—they're getting to the point where they don't want to hear from me. Oh, my God. . . .”

“What?”

“I just had a terrible thought,” she said.

“What?”

“One of them's about to go off to the U. She could run into a Lucas Davenport.”

“Hey, how bad could it get?”

But she was laughing. “I read about you in the newspaper. Sometimes I can't believe that, you know, I
knew
you once. You're kinda famous.”

“Yeah. Like they say, world famous in Minneapolis.” Pause. “So let me buy you lunch,” Lucas said.

A pause on the other end. “Will you tell me all the inside-cop stuff about Alie'e?”

“If you won't tell anybody else.”

She laughed again, and said, “When?”

 
 
CATRIN. A SSOON as she was off the phone, he wanted to call her again.

And what was he gonna wear tomorrow? Something really cool and expensive, or something tough, coplike? He'd been a hockey jock when they first got together, but she'd confessed then that she wasn't much interested in sports—or jocks, either. He'd talk about taking somebody out on the ice, or he'd come back after the match with a little ding on a cheekbone, a little rub, and she'd be perplexed and disturbed and sometimes even a little amused by his pleasure in the violence. . . .

The adrenaline of Catrin's call got to him. He pushed himself out of the chair, took another turn around the office, and finally launched himself out into the hallway. Frank Lester was sitting in his office, leaning back in his leather chair, the door open, cops coming and going. “Anything new?” Lucas asked.

“Nope. Rose Marie's doing another press conference about the lesbo thing.”

“Jesus—don't call them lesbos if you go on TV.”

“Hey, am I an idiot?”

Lucas looked at the ceiling, as if thinking about it, and Lester grinned and said, “We're indexing everything we're getting from the interviews, running down every single person at the party, but I'll tell you what: The guys are starting to think it's a cat burglar.”

“That'd be tough,” Lucas said. “If we haven't got anything yet.”

“It'd be damn near impossible, unless somebody turns him in. What's the evidence gonna be? He didn't even get any blood on him, because there wasn't any. We're thinking about putting up a reward.”

“You know about George Shaw?” Lucas asked.

Lester nodded. “Nothing there.”

“Probably not, but the media seems to have gotten the idea that there is. If you decide to organize a reward, why don't you wait until after the George Shaw angle burns out? A reward would be something new. Keep the goddamn TV off our backs as long as we can.”

“All right.”

“Besides, I'll tell you what,” Lucas said. “The answer is in the party. There wasn't any cat burglar.”

“Sez who?”

“Sez me. Rose Marie told me this morning that a man killed Alie'e, that it wasn't a lesbo thing, and by God, she was right. It wasn't a cat burglar, either. God just wouldn't like it, if it was all just a coincidence, a one time thing, and the victim just happened to be Alie'e Maison.”

Lester puffed up his cheeks, and then exhaled. Then nodded.

“A cat burglar does
not
crawl though a window and accidentally find a passed-out Alie'e Maison lying there without her underpants,” Lucas said. “Not in a million fuckin' years.”

Lester grinned again, thinking about it. “Have to be a profoundly lucky cat burglar.”

Lucas asked, “Where's Sloan?”

“Still down doing interviews.”

 
 
LUCAS HEADED FOR the stairs. Maybe Sloan was pulling a thread.

He wondered what Catrin would be like. What if she'd turned into this small-town mommy housewife? She hadn't looked like that. At the gas station, she'd looked . . . interesting. He tried to gather back the memory of the morning. She was older, obviously, but then, so was he. She had some lines. A couple of extra pounds? Maybe. Maybe ten? Maybe. But still with the good hair, the good moves. The laugh . . .

He flashed back to his college apartment. He'd lived over a dingy auto-parts shop down University Avenue. He had one room with a fold-out couch and fake Oriental carpet from Goodwill, a bathroom permanently frosted over with either mildew or fungus—he was never interested enough to find out which—and a kitchen with a cheap gas stove and a refrigerator that was missing a leg and so listed to the left, and made sloped ice cubes. He also had a tiny bedroom, and in the bedroom was the best piece of furniture in the apartment, a bed he'd brought from home. And a good thing it was that he had the bed, because if he hadn't, Catrin would have broken his back. She liked sex. A lot. She was not promiscuous, just enthusiastic. The two of them had learned a lot together, trying out their chops. There was one cold winter day, but sunny, they'd been in bed late in the morning, the sun coming through the dirty window, splashing across the bed, and Catrin . . .

Flashing back on it, he felt himself . . . stir.

 
 
AT THE BOTTOM of the stairs he stopped and looked around. What was he doing?

Ah. Sloan.

 
 
SLOAN WAS JUST coming out of the interview room. He carried a piece of paper, and walked a half-step behind a middle-aged man who seemed broken. The man had a hump at the back of his neck, his head pressed forward, his thinning gray hair combed over the top of his balding head. His face was dry, but tear tracks showed down his cheeks.

“Lucas . . . this is Mr. Arthur Lansing. Sandy Lansing was his daughter.”

“I'm sorry, Mr. Lansing,” Lucas said.

“I can't believe she's gone,” he said. “She was so happy. Her career . . .” He trailed off, then said it again: “Her career . . .” He looked at Lucas. “When she was a little girl, her mama and I used to drive over to Como Park and push her through the zoo in a walker. She loved the bears. And the monkeys, she loved the monkeys.”

“I'm sure--” Lucas was about to unreel a cliché, but Lansing broke in.

“Do you think you'll catch them?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“I'll betcha it was niggers,” he said.

“There weren't any black people at the party last night.”

Lansing shook a trembling finger at Lucas. “Maybe. But you watch. I betcha it was niggers. You go upstairs, in the courthouse? I go up there all the time. To watch. All you see in them courtrooms is niggers. I mean, some white trash goes through there, but ninety-nine percent of them is niggers. And most of the white trash got nigger blood.”

Sloan, standing behind Lansing, rolled his eyes. Lucas said, “Whoever did it, we'll catch him, Mr. Lansing. I'm really sorry about your daughter.”

Lansing turned away and spoke to no one. “My daughter. She was an executive.” And he wandered away, talking to the air.

“He loved his daughter,” Sloan said after him.

“Yeah. That's what all that segregation shit used to be about. All the white people loved their daughters.”

“Hate to lose a daughter, though,” Sloan said. He had a daughter in college. “Worst thing I could think of. It's not right, dying out of order.”

Lucas sighed. “You get anything from anybody?”

“No, but we're working the right people. Whoever killed them was at the party. There was too much going on that sparks off trouble—drugs, former boyfriends and girlfriends, the celebrity thing and the macho shit that goes with it, and just the general craziness of the crowd.”

“I just said the same thing to Lester,” Lucas said. “So how many people were at the party?”

“We've got sixty-odd, so far, outa maybe a hundred.” Sloan held up the piece of paper. “This is the list. Most people don't remember seeing Alie'e after about midnight. I talked to one guy and his girlfriend, who can pin down their arrival at about twelve-fifteen, who say they never saw her. And they heard she was there, so they were looking. Jael and Catherine Kinsley left her in the bedroom sometime before one o'clock. She was alive and drowsy when they left.”

“You talked to Kinsley?”

“On the phone. She's on her way back, with her husband. Their cabin is all the way up in Ely—five hours. She didn't hear about it until noon, on public radio.”

“And you believe them, that Alie'e was alive?”

“Yes. There's just too much . . . Other people saw Lansing still alive after Jael and Kinsley had left; at least, that's what we're getting now.”

“So how many people are eligible to do the killing?”

“Hanson says the party peaked between one and two, which means maybe most of the people were around when Alie'e got it. We've got a few who'd left earlier, that we've been able to confirm. And quite a few more that said they left earlier, but we haven't been able to confirm or are lying,” Sloan said.

“What if the killer unlocked that window, left the house, so people could see him leaving—made a deal out of it, kissed a few people, shook a couple of hands, giving himself an alibi—then came back through the window, killed her, and went back out the window?”

“Sounds like too much coming and going,” Sloan said.

“But it explains the open window,” Lucas said. “And it might even explain why Sandy Lansing was killed. Suppose he came back in the window, does Alie'e, and boom, Lansing is right there in the hall. He's gotta kill her. She knows that he left, and made a big deal out of it, and then came back.”

Sloan looked at the paper in his hand. “So we put everybody back on the list.”

9

LANE GOT BACK. “I got a chart on Alie'e—her folks, her brother.”

“I saw her brother,” Lucas said.

“Yeah, the preacher. He goes around and ministers to farm people out in the Red River Valley. He fixes farm equipment, sometimes he works part-time at a grain elevator. Won't take any contributions. Gives away everything he earns except what he needs to eat and buy clothes.”

“Tell you this: He doesn't spend any money on clothes,” Lucas said.

“So the people out there think he's either crazy or a saint, or both. That's what they said in the Fargo newspaper. There was an article.”

“On the brother, not Alie'e.”

Lane nodded. “Mostly on the brother. The angle was, you know, ‘crazy saint related to Alie'e Maison.'”

“Where was he last night?”

Lane had asked that question. “In Fargo. He runs a free kitchen there. He was around the kitchen until eight o'clock or so. He was back in the morning. He could have made a round trip in between.”

“And he's got a temper,” Lucas said. “What else you got?”

“I got all the shit on Alie'e. That was just a matter of going out on the Net—I got a file of printouts two inches thick. And you know what? There's a cult of Alie'e worshipers out there. And Alie'e haters. They fight on the Net.”

“I heard.”

“Anyway, I wouldn't be surprised if one of those guys did her.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. You know, some computer nerd rapist killer nutso builds a fantasy around her, crashes a party where she's supposed to be, she laughs him off, says she'd rather be fuckin' her girlfriends than a pimply little freak--”

Lucas grinned at the runaway description. “Nerd rapist killer nutso?”

“It coulda happened that way,” Lane said seriously.

“What else you got?”

“I
got
something else,” Lane said, “and it's interesting, but nothing like my previous conjecture about the nerd rapist killer. Nutso.”