Easy Prey (4 page)

“You go to St. Thomas?” Lucas asked.

“Yeah.”

“Bad hours.”

“Life sucks and then you die,” the kid said. He didn't smile; he seemed to mean it. His eyes flicked past Lucas's shoulder and a light soprano voice asked, “Lucas? Is that you?”

He turned, but he didn't have to to know who it was. Everything came back with the voice. “Catrin,” he said, and turned.

She was smiling, and the smile nearly knocked him off his feet. She was forty-four, ten pounds heavier than in college, a little rounder in the face, but with that fine Welsh skin and wild reddish-blond hair. The last time he'd seen her . . .

“Must be twenty-five years,” she said. She reached out and took his hand, then looked at the attendant and said, “I paid outside.”

They stepped toward the door, then outside, and Catrin said, “I've seen you on television.”

Lucas was trying to recover, but recovery was difficult. The last time he'd seen her . . . “What, uh, what're you doing? Now?”

“I live down in Lake City,” she said. “You know, on Lake Pepin . . .”

“Married with kids?”

She grinned at him. “Of course. To a doctor, a family practitioner. Two kids, one of each. James is a sophomore at St. Olaf; Maria's a senior in high school.”

“I've got one, a daughter,” Lucas said. “Still in elementary school. Her mother and I . . . aren't together anymore.” Never married; no need to make a point of it. A thought occurred to him, and he looked at his watch. “It's not four o'clock yet. What are you doing out here?”

“A friend died this morning,” she said. Her smile had gone wistful; he thought, for a moment, that she might break down. “I knew she was going. Tonight. I sort of dressed up for it.”

“Jesus.”

“It was not good. Lung cancer,” she said. “She never quit smoking. I'm just so, just so . . .”

He patted her on the back. “Yeah.”

“And where are you going? I don't remember you as an early riser.”

“Got a murder,” he said. He felt that he was staring at her, and that she knew it and was amused. Back when, she'd know exactly what she did to him. The effect, he thought, must have been wired in, because it hadn't changed in twenty-five years.

“Ah.”

“You know the model, Alie'e Maison?”

Her hand went to her mouth in astonishment. “She was murdered?”

“Strangled.”

“Oh, my God. Here?”

“Minneapolis.”

Catrin looked around the empty gas station pad. “You're not exactly rushing to the scene of the crime.”

“Five minutes ain't gonna make any difference,” Lucas said. “She's dead.”

She seemed to step back, though she hadn't moved. She looked up and said, “You always had a harsh line in you. The cold breath of reality.”

And she'd just seen a friend die, Lucas thought. “I'm sorry, I didn't mean . . .”

“No, that's okay. That's just . . . Lucas.” She smiled again, took one of his hands in hers, and patted it. “You better go. Take care of her.”

“Yeah.” He stepped away, stopped. “You're absolutely gorgeous,” he said. “You're one of those women who'll be gorgeous when she's ninety.”

“Nice to think so, when you feel the age coming,” she said. She crossed her arms, hugged herself. “When your friends are dying, and you feel the age coming on.”

 
 
HE LEFT, RELUCTANTLY, turning his head to watch her walk to her car. The Lincoln. Conservative, upper crust. Well-tended.

Jesus. The last time he'd seen her . . .

His body ran the Porsche through the gears, out to the interstate ramp, down onto I-94 toward the lights of Minneapolis, his eyes intent on the road and the traffic, his mind stuck with Catrin.

The last time he'd seen her she'd been both angry and buck naked, just out of a hot shower, rubbing her hair with a ratty brown bath towel that he'd stolen from his mother's linen closet. The trouble had started two weeks earlier, at a pickup hockey game on an outdoor rink. Lucas had caught a deliberate elbow in the face, and with blood pouring out of his nose, had gone after the other guy—and hadn't stopped quite soon enough. The other guy's friends had taken him to a local hospital for some emergency dental work.

Then he'd caught a stick in a regular game, against Duluth. Nothing serious, just a cut and a few stitches. After the match, at an off-campus party, a hassle erupted between a couple of the players and a defensive end from the football team. The hassle had cooled quickly enough—no fight—but Lucas had been ready to jump in, Catrin clutching at him, pulling him off.

She started getting on him: He liked to fight, he enjoyed fighting, he had to look at himself, at what he was doing. Did he think fighting was right? Why'd he hang around with all those silly fuckin' jocks who'd be working down at the car wash as soon as their eligibility ran out? He was smarter than they were, why couldn't he . . .

They'd gone around a few times, and she started again as she got out of the shower. He'd finally had enough and shouted at her:
Shut the fuck up.
She'd flinched away—she'd thought he might hit her. That was a shock: He
never
would have hit her. He said so. Then she got on him again.

He walked out of the apartment. Stayed out. Went down and got some ice time. When he came back, a sheet of notebook paper lay on his kitchen counter. She'd scribbled on it, “Fuck you.”

When he'd tried to call, her roommate said she didn't want to hear from him. He didn't push it: He was practicing all the time, playing, trying to keep his head above water in school. Never went after her. But always remembered her. They'd dated from October through February of his sophomore year. He'd slept with a half-dozen women in his life, but she'd been the first one who seemed to match his interest in sex. They
studied
it together.

Still remembered . . .

He smiled at the thought—and noticed that the concrete walls of the interstate were a little too blurred. He looked down at the speedometer: one-oh-four. He backed off a bit.

Catrin . . .

 
 
SILLY HANSON LIVED in a white-stuccoed house with an orange-tiled roof, across the street from Lake of the Isles, a rich neighborhood of professionally tended landscapes and architect-designed houses from the first half of the twentieth century. A half-dozen police vehicles were piled up at the curb outside Hanson's house. An early-morning blader, who looked too old and bald and fat and way too rich for his skater gear, went by on the lakeside skateway, his face turned toward the cluster of cops. The word about the murder would be getting out very soon now. Lucas found a spot by a fire hydrant, parked, nodded at a cop standing by the stoop.

“Beautiful morning,” he said.

“Fuckin' A,” said the cop.

“If I get a ticket . . .”

“You won't get a ticket.”

Lucas went up the steps. A sloppy, overweight homicide cop, wearing an insulated nylon baseball jacket over a white shirt and necktie, was waiting on the porch. His face was tired, but he smiled in relief when he saw Lucas. “Man, I'm glad you're here.”

“So what happened?” Lucas asked. Two more uniformed cops were standing just inside the door, looking out at them.

“You ain't gonna believe it.” The fat cop's name was Swanson.

“Alie'e Maison got killed,” Lucas said. “I believe it. Where's the body?”

“It's worse than that,” Swanson said. “We tried to call you again, but you were out of touch.”

Lucas stopped. “What happened?”

“When're you gonna start turning on your cell phone?” Swanson was reluctant.

“If I turn on my cell phone, people call on it,” Lucas said. “So what happened?”

“We were just doing the routine, checking the house, opening doors. You know.” They both knew. Lucas had been on more murder scenes than he could remember, and Swanson had been to more than Lucas had; he'd been a homicide cop when Lucas was still in uniform.

“Yeah?”

“We found another body,” Swanson said. “Stuffed in a closet. Another woman.”

Lucas looked at him for a long moment, then shook his head. “That's a
lot
worse.”

“Yeah. I thought so.” Bad as it was, it
was
something new. They'd both been to multiple murders, but never to one where the cops had already gotten the coffee hot, sent somebody out for donuts, started the routine, then opened a closet door and had another body drop out like a dislodged sock monkey.

“Why'd it take so long to find her?” Lucas asked.

“She was in a closet, the door was locked. Nobody unlocked it right away.”

“Jesus, I hope the papers don't get that,” Lucas said. “Or maybe we ought to give it to them. You know, our way.”

“This woman who lives here, Hanson—she was there when we found the second one, and she's gonna talk about it. She lives for the media. You know what she told me when I was talking to her about it?”

Lucas shook his head.

“She said her only good black dresses were too short for this. For the murders. She sees this as a photo op and she's already figuring out her wardrobe for the cameras.”

“All right.” That happens.

“There's one other thing.” Swanson glanced down at the uniformed cops. Lucas got the idea, and they both turned sideways, and Swanson dropped his breath. “Hanson says there was a strange guy wandering through the place. About the time Maison disappeared out of the crowd. Hanson thinks he did it. She didn't know him, but he was talking to everybody. She said he was like a street guy. Too thin, yellow teeth, and he was wearing this T-shirt that read, ‘I'm with Stupid,' and had this arrow that pointed down at his dick. And he had this weird dog-shit-brown sport coat.”

Lucas stared at Swanson for a moment, then said, “Huh.”

“That's what I thought,” Swanson said. “You want to call him?”

“Yeah, I'll call him. Let me look at the scene first.”

 
 
HANSON'S HOME WAS elegant but sterile. Lucas recalled another case, a couple of months before, when he'd entered an apartment and found the same high-style sterility. Like a picture on the cover of
Architectural Digest
: Pretty, but not lived-in. Eggshell walls with contemporary graphics—wrenches and hammers and gestures and angst—and then, around the corner, the interjected English country scene, in oil colors, with cows, spotted perfectly to connect with the graphics. Somebody else's sense of humor; a humor spoiled by the underlying scent of alcohol and smoke, the smell of a well-kept motel.

The house seemed divided into two parts—an open plan public area, and a conventional series of bedroom suites at the back. Swanson led the way into the back. Two plainclothes cops were standing in a long central hallway, looking down at the thick gray hair of an assistant medical examiner, who was crouched over a body on the floor. The dead woman was facedown; she wore a reddish-brown party dress. The AME was dabbing at her mouth with an absorbent tissue.

“Name is Sandy Lansing,” Swanson said as they walked back. “She's a hostess of some kind, at Brown's Hotel.” Brown's was expensive, a hotel where poised young blond women in pearl-gray suits took the guests to their suites, while bellhops in red-and-black monkey suits toted the luggage and kept their mouths shut.

Lucas squatted beside the body; one knee cracked. “Know what did it?” Lucas asked the AME.

The AME was older, like Swanson, with the same tired hound-dog eyes. He had a pack of Marlboros in his shirt pocket, and a black medical bag, which was open on the rug behind him. “I think her skull is cracked,” he said. “That's the only trauma I can find, but that was probably enough. There's a cleft, looks like a V-shaped cleft. She could have been hit by something with a narrow edge on it, a board, maybe the end of a cane—a walking stick. Not a pipe, nothing round.”

“A cane? Did somebody have a cane?” Lucas asked, looking up at Swanson. Swanson shrugged.

“But could have been a doorjamb, or something like that,” the AME continued. “Here . . .” He picked up the woman's head, gently, as though he might have had a daughter of his own, and turned it. A small indentation marked the back of the woman's head, near the top; there was a smear of blood, enough to show the line of the injury.

“We think she might have walked in on the murder, by accident, and the killer went after her. Hit her with anything he had,” Swanson said. “Maybe banged her head against the wall.”

“Why would he stuff her in the closet?” Lucas objected, but the AME interrupted: “Look at this.”

“What?”

He was peering closely at the woman's scalp, then reached back, felt in his bag, and took out a hand lens. “I think, uh, it looks like a little flake of paint in her hair. . . .” He looked up at Swanson. “Don't let anybody touch the doorjambs or any of the wooden trim. Anywhere she could whack her head. You might find an impact mark and maybe a hair or two.” That could make the difference between murder and manslaughter, or even an accident.

“All right,” Swanson said. He looked up and down the hall at all the doorjambs; there seemed to be dozens.

Lucas went back to his first thought. “Why couldn't this one have been killed first, and then--”

“'Cause Maison was strangled and she wasn't wearing any underpants, and the condition of her vulva and her pubic hair would suggest that she'd very recently been engaged in sex,” Swanson said. “If somebody had killed Lansing first, we thought it was pretty unlikely that he'd stop off to bang Maison and then strangle her.”