Easy Prey (5 page)

“Okay.” Made sense.

“She's got something written on her wrist in ballpoint, but it's kinda smeared, so it probably didn't happen right at the time she was killed,” the AME said. He turned a wrist, and Lucas looked at the smear of blue ink.

“Looks like . . . Ella? Fella? Della?”

“Probably not fella,” Swanson said. “Why would anybody write ‘fella' on their wrist?”

“Could be a name,” the AME suggested.

“Strange name,” Swanson said.

“See what you can do to bring it up,” Lucas said. “Get some photos over to homicide.”

“Okay.”

Lucas stood. “Let's see the other one.”

The door to the guest bedroom was another six feet down the hall, and Lucas stepped over Lansing's body, Swanson following along behind. Two crime-scene guys stepped out of the room just as Lucas came up. “Video,” one of them said. “Crying goddamned shame,” said the other.

Inside, a photographer lit up, and began taping the crime scene, while a second guy maneuvered a light. All Lucas could see of Alie'e Maison was one bare foot, sticking out from behind the bed; the body was lodged in the space between the bed and the wall.

He waited until the video guy was finished, then looked over the edge of the bed. Maison was lying faceup, one hand over her head, one trapped beneath her back. Her filmy green dress had been pulled up under her arms, exposing her body from the navel down. Her hips were canted toward the wall, and her ankles were crossed, but the wrong way: The one that should have been on the bottom was on the top.

“Looks like she was thrown in there,” Lucas said.

One of the cops nodded. “That's what we think. Tried to hide her.”

“But not too hard. You can see her feet.”

“But if you just poked your head in, from the door, you probably wouldn't.”

“Who found her?” Lucas asked.

“One of the people at the party.” He looked at a notebook. “A woman named Rowena Cooper. Cooper knew Maison was back here, supposedly sleeping, and hadn't come out. She went back to see if she was awake. She says she opened the door but couldn't see anything, so she turned on the lights. She was just turning around to go back out when she saw the underpants. She went over to pick them up, and she saw the feet. Started screaming.”

“Where's Cooper now?”

The cop tipped his head toward the other end of the house. “The library. We called Sloan, he's coming in to talk to her.”

“Good.” Sloan was the best interrogator in the department. Lucas took a last look around the room. The bedspreads coordinated with the window treatments and the carpet. He asked, “The windows were locked?”

“In this room, yeah. But we got an open window down the hall,” one of the cops said.

“Let me see.”

“Check this first,” the cop said. He leaned forward, hovering an index finger over the inside of Alie'e's left elbow.

Lucas would have known what that meant even if he couldn't see the BB-sized bruise. A needle user. He sighed, nodded at the cop, said, “Swanson,” and stepped back into the hallway. Swanson was a step behind.

“Look, you know what's gonna happen, so we've got to nail everything down,” Lucas said. “Everything. I want everything sampled, swept, vacuumed. I want every test there is, on both women. I want interviews with everyone at the party—ask everybody for a list of names, and make sure you get every goddamn last one.”

“Sure.”

“Who takes over when you get off?”

“I think . . . Thompson.”

“Brief him. Do everything. We'll pay for every bit of science anybody can think of.” He looked back at the room. “Did you look at her fingernails?”

“Yeah. They're clean. We'll get her vagina swabbed and get a rush on the semen.”

“And blood, we need blood right away. I want to know what kind of shit she was shooting.”

“Heroin.”

“Yeah, I know, but I wanna
know.
”

“You gonna call Del?”

“In a minute.”

“There's a phone in the office. I was keeping it clear for incomings,” Swanson said.

“Show me the unlocked window. . . . This place doesn't look like the windows should be unlocked.”

“Hanson says they never are,” Swanson said. “But she got them washed a couple of weeks ago, and they were all opened then—they're some kind of tilt thing, so you can wash both sides from the inside.”

“I dunno.”

“Yeah, well, the window could have been unlocked then. Hanson says she never went around and checked them. She assumed they were all locked.”

The unlocked window was in another guest room, one door down the hall; this room had a different set of coordinated bedspreads, window treatments, and carpet. Lucas looked out through the window glass. Nothing but lawn and shrubs. “Any muddy footprints outside the window, with a unique brand-logo impressed in the mud?”

“No fuckin' mud. It ain't rained in two weeks.”

“I was joking,” Lucas said.

“I wasn't. I went out and looked,” Swanson said. “The grass ain't even crinkled.”

“All right. Where's that phone?”

Hanson's home office was a small, purpose-built cubicle with cherry-wood shelves at one end for phone books, references, and a compact stereo. The cherry desk had four drawers, filing drawers to the left, envelope drawers to the right. A wooden Rolodex sat on the right side of the desk, a telephone on the left. A Dell laptop computer sat on a pull-out typing shelf, the wiring dropping out of sight, to appear behind a laser printer that sat on a two-drawer wooden filing cabinet beside the desk.

“Hanson still in the living room?” Lucas asked Swanson.

“Yeah.”

“Go talk to her. Keep her entertained. . . . Ask her questions, start the witness list.”

“You got it.” Swanson glanced at the laptop, nodded, and headed toward the living room.

 
 
WHEN HE WAS gone, Lucas shut the office door and turned on the computer. Windows 98 came up, and he clicked Programs—Accessories—Address Book. The address book was empty. He jumped back to the opening page and clicked on Microsoft Outlook. When it came up, he checked the Inbox and Sent folders and found that Hanson had a small e-mail correspondence.

He picked up the phone and dialed Del's number from memory, and as the phone began ringing, clicked on the Inbox folder again, clicked on Find, and typed in “Alie'e.”

He was still typing when Del's wife answered the phone. The answer was more like a groan than a word: “Hello?”

“Cheryl, this is Lucas. Is Del there?”

“He's asleep, Lucas. He was trying to get you all night, but he couldn't find you.” She was crabby. “What time is it, anyway?”

“Sorry. Wake him up, we gotta talk.”

“Just a minute. . . .”

After a few seconds of background mumbling, Del came on the line. “You heard?”

“Yeah, just now. What were you doing here?”

After a moment's silence, Del said, “What?” He sounded only semiconscious. Then, “Where's
here
?”

“Sallance Hanson's. You were at the party last night, right?” Lucas asked.

“Yeah, but what're you doing there?”

“The Maison thing,” Lucas said.

“What?”

Lucas looked at the phone and then said, “You don't know?”

“Yeah, I called in,” Del said. “I called all over, looking for you. I even had your neighbor up north go look in your cabin, but you'd gone.”

“You called in that somebody strangled Alie'e Maison?”

Longer silence. Then, “What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Somebody strangled Alie'e Maison and threw her body behind a bed in a guest bedroom,” Lucas said. “Another woman was killed and stuffed in a closet. Hanson thinks a street guy did it—said he was wearing an ‘I'm with Stupid' shirt.”

After a moment of silence, Del said, “You're not joking. '”

“I'm not joking.”

“Jesus Christ.” Del was awake now. And again, “Jesus Christ.”

Behind him, Cheryl asked, “What happened?”

“That was me, all right,” Del said. “I was there until one o'clock. I didn't see Maison there after midnight or so.”

“What were you doing?”

“Runnin' drugs, man. That goddamn place was an ocean of shit.”

“Maison's got fresh tracks on her arm.”

“Yeah, they were all doing a little something,” Del said. “I was trying to figure out where it was coming from.”

“Figure it out?”

“No.”

“You better get over here. I'm gonna have to talk to Hanson pretty quick.”

“On my way.”

 
 
WHEN DEL HAD hung up, Lucas clicked on the Find Now button. The computer thought about it for a moment, then kicked out fifteen or twenty messages. He went through them as quickly as he could: Most of them were “Did you see” or “Did you hear about” Alie'e in a magazine spread. Two of them seemed relevant: Three months earlier, according to the date stamp, Hanson's correspondent, a woman named Martha Carter, had seen Alie'e at a party and she'd been flying on c—cocaine.

Lucas switched to the Sent folder, scanned it until he found Carter's name and the right date. Hanson had replied to the cocaine comment, with the observation that friends told her that Alie'e had started using heroin.

Lucas sent both letters to the printer, then went back to the Inbox, and the Find function, and typed in “Maison.” He got two letters he'd already seen. He tried “Aliee,” without the apostrophe between the
e
's, and found only one new letter, about a dress.

He quickly typed in “Sandy Lansing” and found only one letter, in which Lansing was mentioned only in passing. He tried “Sandy” alone, and “Lansing” alone, and found only the one letter. He switched back to the Sent folder, and repeated himself. He found nine references to Alie'e and none to Lansing; one letter from Hanson confided to a woman named Ardis—there was no last name—that Alie'e was definitely having an affair with somebody named Jael, and that somebody else, an Amnon, was wildly jealous.

Lucas sent the letter to the printer, and noted the e-mail address on it.

 
 
SALLANCE HANSON WAS sitting on her couch, wrapped in a black dress, a black hat beside her, when Lucas wandered into the room. Swanson, who'd been sitting in an easy chair, facing her, stood up and said, “Miz Hanson, this is Deputy Chief Davenport.”

Hanson turned on the couch and extended her hand without getting up. She was a pretty blond woman in her forties, with a tight, willful mouth and tough blue eyes. She'd used black eyeliner under her eyes, and just touched her eyelids with a gray tone; the combination gave her a played-out, dying-puppy look. “When do we go downtown?”

“I beg your pardon?” Lucas asked.

“To make my statement?”

“Oh, yeah. Detective Swanson will make the arrangements. Actually, we can probably take it right here. . . . But I want to talk to you about another matter.”

“Have you found that street person? I identified him,” Hanson said.

“That's what I want to talk to you about.”

Her eyebrows rose. “You
found
him? Nobody notified
me.
Why didn't anybody tell me?”

Swanson said, “Um, you're more of a . . . witness or bystander . . . than anything else, Miz Hanson. You're not really part of the investigation.”

“That's not the way I see it,” she snapped.

“That's the way it is,” Lucas said.

“I could talk to the mayor, and he might inform you differently,” she said. “The mayor's a friend of mine.”

“He's a friend of mine, too,” Lucas said. “He appointed me to my job. He'd tell you the same thing we're telling you. You're not part of the investigation. You're being investigated.”

“Two murders were committed in your house, Miz Hanson. You were on the scene when the killings took place. We know nothing about you or your relationship with the dead women.” He smiled at her, softening it up. “No politician, the mayor included, would go on the record defending somebody who might later be charged with murdering Alie'e Maison. I'm sure you can see that.”

She said, “Oh,” tipped her head from side to side, thinking about it, bounced once on the couch, brightened, and said, “That's not bad—being a suspect. But I didn't do it. Either one. That street person . . . is he in jail, or are you bringing him here, or what?”

Lucas felt awkward looking down at her; he took a step away and settled into a leather easy chair, steepling his fingers in front of his face. “The street person's name is Del Capslock,” he said. “He's an undercover police officer. One of our
best
undercover people.”

“Uh-oh,” she said, looking from Lucas to Swanson. “This could cause you problems.” Then she frowned. “What was he doing at my party, anyway?”

“That's the other thing,” Lucas said. “Del was . . . researching drugs. Miz Maison showed signs of heroin use. She had needle marks on her arm.”

“No.” Hanson registered shock—something she was good at, Lucas thought. One hand went artfully to her face. “She was using
drugs
?”

A cop stepped into the room, said, “TV's here. They all got here in a bunch.”