Easy Prey

by John Sandford

  "Nothing here," Allport said. "Boom, he falls down."

  Lucas squatted, looked Plain in the face. "So strange," he said.

  "What?"

  "The killings at the party were improvised," Lucas said. "Who'd be crazy enough to go to a big party, planning to kill somebody in a hallway, and then strangle a famous model in a bedroom, with a hundred people around? Had to be improvised. It seemed almost accidental."

  "This ain't," Allport said. "Maybe this Plain guy knew something and the killer had to shut him up."

  Lucas stood up. "That's… pretty complicated."

  When Joyce Woo answered her door, she was holding a beer mug half full of white wine, and her apartment reeked of the stuff. She was short, stocky, moon-faced, and wore thick-lensed glasses. She invited him in, and slumped on a couch with paisley cushions. Lucas pulled up a kitchen chair.

  "I told the other cops I saw somebody," she said, nipping at the wine, looking at Lucas over the rim of the glass. "Down the hall. But I didn't see him very well, 'cause I was playing catch-me-fuck-me with a friend."

  "You were, uh…"

  "A guy I know from across the street, a computer-art guy. Not what you'd call real good-looking, but, what the hell, I'm not exactly the Queen of the May. And he's big where it counts, if you know what I mean?"

  "Yeah, well…" Big-where-it-counts was getting a workout, between the computer guy and Clark the welder. But she wasn't finished with the idea.

  "It's like that with all the computer guys, you know?" She rolled her head back, staring at the ceiling, as if she were trying to unlock a conundrum. "I don't know why. You'd think the jocks would be the guys with big wieners, but it's never like that. It's always these thin skinny computer guys who got the package."

  "You were playing…" Lucas said, trying to wrench her back on track.

  She rolled her head forward, focused on him, and said, "Yeah. He gives me a two-minute head start, and then if he can catch me in the building in five minutes, he gets to fuck me."

  "Well, that sounds like—"

  "Sometimes I cheat and let him catch me," she said. She burped. "Anyway, we run all over the building. I was running down the hall, and I saw this guy in the stairwell. I yelled at him, just, 'Hello,' and kept going."

  "Was he going up or down?"

  "Don't know. He was just there, in the stairwell," she said.

  "He didn't answer?"

  "No."

  "What time was it?" Lucas asked.

  "I don't know, but early. Or late. Whatever. I talked to Jimmy for a minute this morning, after they found the body."

  "This is Jimmy, Plains assistant?"

  "Yeah. Anyway, he heard me yelling in the hallway, and the only time I was yelling that they would have heard was about the time I saw the guy. So when I saw him, Plain was still alive."

  "You didn't think it was weird that somebody was wandering around the building in the middle of the night?" Lucas asked.

  "This building? I'd think it was weird if people weren't wandering around in the middle of the night."

  "The St. Paul police said you might have heard a shot."

  "Maybe. I heard a loud noise, but it might have been a door banging shut. We've got all these metal doors in here, and they echo off the concrete when you let them bang shut," she said. "I didn't think about it at the time, except that I heard it."

  "This guy in the hallway looked like… what?"

  "Porky. That's all I can say. Porky. He was sort of turned around from me…" A puzzled look crossed her face. "You know something that crossed my mind? This is stupid. I thought the guy might be the vending machine guy. We got a vending machine guy who looks like this guy."

  "Did you tell the other cops that?" Lucas asked.

  "No, I just thought of it," she said.

  "The vending machine guy wouldn't be here at that time in the morning."

  "No."

  "But you play catch-me-fuck-me at that time."

  "Sure. The way it works is, I drink myself into a stupor in the morning, which I'm doing now. Then I sleep until about three o'clock or maybe four o'clock. Then I get up, and I feel like shit and I eat something, and then I work. I work until midnight, and then… you know, whatever. I eat again, and sometimes Neil comes over and we play. And then, when I start getting sleepy, I start drinking."

  "Did this Neil guy, your friend, did he see the man in the stairwell?"

  "The other cops went and got him up, and he said he didn't see anybody," she said.

  "All right." Lucas looked around the apartment, which seemed spartan if not absolutely bare. The only thing hung on the walls was a Kliban cat calendar. "What kind of art do you do?" he asked.

  "Conceptual," she said.

  Lucas had just turned the corner at the top of the stairs when he heard the woman scream. The scream came from Plain's apartment, and the cop at the door turned to look inside. A second later, a woman ran out, directly into the green concrete-block wall on the opposite side of the hall. She ran into it full-face, staggered from the blow, ran another step, and then Lucas caught her as she sagged toward the floor. The woman held on and turned her face sideways, and Lucas first registered the scars.

  Jael Corbeau. She wrapped her arms around him, blindly, using him for support. Lucas half turned, and Allport came through the door, spotted them.

  "Ah, Jesus," he said. "I'm sorry, you shouldn't have…" He looked at Lucas. "We told her she'd have to wait until we got him to the medical examiners to see him. We had the sheet over him and she just stooped down and ripped it off before we could stop her. Jesus, Miz Corbeau, I'm sorry…"

  "I gotta go home," she said. "I gotta go home."

  "Where's your car?" Lucas asked. He let her go, but she held on to his jacket with one hand. She hadn't looked at his face yet; he was a handy post.

  "I don't have a car. A friend brought me."

  "Is he still here?"

  "No, the police wouldn't let him come up, so I told him I'd catch a cab. I thought, I thought, I thought… I thought I'd be here for a long time. But I gotta go home. If I can't have him…" She looked back at Plain's door.

  "Where do you live?" Lucas asked.

  Now she looked up at him. "South Minneapolis."

  "I'll give you a lift," Lucas said. He looked at Allport. "Do you need to talk to her?"

  Allport shrugged. "Sooner or later, but it doesn't have to be this minute. We can talk to her this afternoon or tomorrow… unless you think you might have some information we need, Miz Corbeau."

  "I don't know, I don't know, I don't know…"

  "You better go on home. We'll have somebody call you this afternoon… Get some rest."

  Lucas said, "The Woo woman. She said that the guy she saw in the hall looked like the vending machine guy."

  Allport's forehead wrinkled. "She didn't say anything about that to us."

  "She's a little drunk," Lucas said.

  "The vending machine guy?"

  Lucas said, "This way," and took Jael toward the door Halfway down, she stopped suddenly and said, "I have to make the arrangements."

  "Not now," Lucas said. "There's nothing you can do here."

  "A funeral."

  "Call somebody from your house. If you don't have a funeral director, I can get you the name of a guy who'll take care of you," Lucas said.

  "Oh, God." They started down the hall again.

  "Did you call your folks?" Lucas asked.

  "My mother's dead. My father… I'll have to find him. He's in Australia or someplace right now."

  At the first floor, there was a short wide flight of steps down to the door and they could see a cop standing with his back to the glass. Lucas pushed through and the cop half turned, and Lucas heard somebody say, "That's her and that's Davenport."

  Jael stopped, and a knot of people in dark coats hurried toward them; down the street were two TV trucks. A still photographer started ratcheting shots with an F5, and a TV cameraman was already shooting, while anothe
r ran down the street, towing a reporter on the end of a microphone cord. Lucas recognized the towed reporter as an old friend who'd done a turn as a studio talking-head, and now was back on the street.

  Jael squared off against the cameras, looked up at Davenport, waited for the second camera to come up, smiled, and said, "I just want to say, go fuck yourselves." To Lucas: "Where's your car?"

  "Across the street." He took her arm and they went left, and the late-arriving reporter followed.

  "Lucas, is he dead?"

  Lucas turned his head and said, "This is St. Paul. Ask St. Paul."

  "Yeah, but…"

  They hurried across the street into the furniture store parking lot, the reporter trailing behind, the camera on the end of her tether. Lucas stuffed Jael in the driver's side and the reporter, an old friend, followed him around the back of the car and said, in a low tone, "Answer one question."

  He leaned toward her and said, "Stick your microphone under your coat." She did, and he whispered, "Plains dead. He was shot to death. A very bad scene. You didn't get it from me."

  In the car, Jael sat silently, hunched, staring straight ahead, as they crossed the interstate, hit a couple of red lights, and then dropped down a ramp onto the roadway heading west toward Minneapolis. After a while, she said, "Honest to God."

  "What'd you say? I'm sorry—"

  "Nothing. Honest to God, I can't believe he's dead." She looked at him. "You were one of the men who interviewed me. I remember you."

  "Yeah."

  "You look mean. I kept thinking you were going to say something mean," she said.

  "Thanks, I appreciate that. I'll write it in my book of memories."

  She said, "I'm sorry if I offended you."

  "No…"

  "Its the scars," she said. She reached out and touched his neck, a white scar that had resolved itself into a question mark. "How'd that happen?"

  "Oh… you know."

  "No. You'll have to tell me."

  "A little girl shot me," Lucas said. "A surgeon had to do a tracheotomy so I could breathe."

  "Not a very good surgeon, from the looks of the scar."

  "She did it with a jackknife," Lucas said. "She's a pretty good surgeon."

  "Why did a little girl shoot you? Like, really a little girl?" Jael asked.

  "Yeah. Really. Because she was in love with the guy who was abusing her, and I was chasing him. She was trying to buy him time to get away."

  "Did he get away?"

  "No."

  "What about the girl?"

  "Another cop shot her. She was killed."

  "Really." She looked at him for another minute, and then asked, "What about the one on your face? The scar?"

  "A fishing leader. Snapped it out of a log and it buried itself in my face."

  "Bet that hurt."

  "No, not really. It stung a little. The real problem was, I didn't do anything about it. Washed it with a can of Coke, pressed it with a shirtsleeve, and kept fishing. It didn't look that bad when I went to bed, but when I woke up the next morning, it was infected."

  "I made a lot of money with my scars," Jael said. Her voice had a distant quality, as though she might be sliding into shock. Lucas glanced at her, took in the scars again: three distinct white lines that slashed across her face from the hairline on the left temple. Two of them crossed her nose and ended on her right cheek. The other ran at a steeper angle, missed the left wing of her nose, crossed her lips, and ended on the right side of her chin. They gave her face an odd look of discontinuity, as though she were a piece of paper that had been torn, then Scotch-taped together a little less than perfectly.

  "That's because, uh…"

  "I look terrific. Lots of little boys go home and jerk off when they think about them."

  "Yeah? You got them in a car accident?" Lucas asked.

  Looking at him again. "How'd you know?"

  "I spent a few years in uniform, I've done my share of car accidents. Looks like you hit the glass…"

  "Yeah."

  "Was that when your mother—?"

  "No, no. She took pills. She thought she had Alzheimer's, and sleeping pills were a way out."

  "She didn't?" Lucas asked.

  "No. She just saw a program about it on TV and did a self-diagnosis. When she told people what she was going to do, nobody believed her. Then she did it. The joke was on them."

  Lucas said, "Jesus."

  A little later: "How can a cop afford a car like this? Are you on the take?"

  "No, no, I'm rich."

  "Really? So am I, I guess. That's what they tell me. The bank. I'll be even richer when I inherit from Amny."

  "You'll inherit?"

  "Yup. Unless he changed his will when he got pissed at me. About Alie'e. I don't think he did."

  "A lot?"

  "A few million."

  "Jeez. If you don't mind me asking… where'd you get it?"

  "From my mom and dad. When my dad was in college, a long time ago, he invented a new kind of ball for roll-on deodorant." Lucas thought she was joking, but she was solemn as ever. "No, really. The ball has to have some kind of surface thing that I don't know about, to pick up an even coat of deodorant. I mean, they had roll-ons, but they weren't very good. Everybody was looking for a better ball. The problem defeated the best minds of a generation, until Dad came along. Then he got rich, and gave everybody trust funds, and started smoking a lot of dope. When Mom died, Amny and I got her part of the divorce settlement, on top of our trusts."

  And later: "How'd you get rich?"

  "Computers," Lucas said.

  "Ah," she said. "Like everybody."

  She was not in a condition to talk much about her brother. Halfway back, she put her head down, the heels of her hands in her eye sockets, and began to sob. Lucas let her go, and drove; she stopped after a while, and wiped her eyes. "God. I can't believe it."

  Lucas dropped her at her house. A man was sitting on the steps, fiddling with the wheel on a bicycle. "Don," she said. "A friend. He keeps hoping I'm going to sleep with him, but I'm not going to."

  "It's a country song," Lucas said.

  She looked at him quickly, and almost smiled. "You'll call me if anything happens. If they catch anybody."

  "Yeah."

  "Do you think this person… I mean, if it's about Alie'e, do you think…" Her voice trailed away, then her hand went to her mouth and she said, "Oh." She looked up and down the street.

  "What?"

  "There used to be a lot of crack around here," she said. "That's why all the houses have bars on the windows, and big doors."

  "It's going away now," Lucas said. "Burned itself out."

  "I know. But when there was a lot of crack, the crack kids would try to break in all the time. I'd hear them, and I'd go yell at them from a window, and they'd run away. But somebody tried to break in the night before last. I thought it might be crack, but I thought it was weird, too. The guy didn't look like a crack kid. He was too big, he was…" She made a gesture.

  "Porky?" Lucas asked.

  "Well, I don't know if he was porky. I was gonna say he looked sort of rednecky… sort of. Why?"

  "White?"

  "I think so, but I couldn't really see him. But his clothes looked… white."

  Lucas peered through the windshield at Don, the friend, who was now standing up, looking at them as they idled by the curb. "Can you trust this guy?"

  "Don? He wouldn't hurt a fly."

  "Do you have anybody you can trust, who would hurt a fly?" Lucas asked.

  "Why? Tell me."

  "A woman in your brothers building saw a man last night. She said he was porky. She saw him probably within a few minutes of the time your brother was killed."

  "You think?"

  "I think we shouldn't take any chances. The guy who killed your brother is a nut. Stick with Don. I'm gonna have a cop drop by and hang out with you."

  "How'll I know it's really him? The cop."

  "Not a him,
it's a her. Ask for her ID. Her name's Marcy Sherrill." He looked at her. "I think you'll probably like each other."

  Chapter 13

  « ^ »

  Lucas went to Rose Maries office. The secretary waved him through, and he found her talking to a slender man with a red beard and an expensive black suit. "This is Howard Bennett. He's a curator over at the Walker Art Center," Rose Marie said.

  "I've been there a few times," Lucas said.

  "Inside?" Rose Marie asked suspiciously, one eyebrow going up.

  "Not actually inside," Lucas said. "When I was in uniform, the guards would get us over there to chase people who were trying to, you know…"

  "Fuck in the spoon," Bennett said.

  "The exact words I was looking for," Lucas said. The Walker Center had a Claes Oldenberg sculpture of a spoon with a cherry. Fucking in the spoon was the Twin Cities equivalent of flying a Cessna 185 through the arch in St. Louis.

  "Yeah, well, Howard is an expert in photography. He says Amnon Plain's murder is gonna be a bigger deal than Alie'e's."

  "I didn't quite say that," Bennett said. "But it'll be bigger with a different crowd." He smiled a thin, marmotlike smile. "You'll get press synergy. A whole new, even more weasel-like element of the press will get on your case, demanding action."

  "That's good," Rose Marie said. "We weren't getting enough attention." She looked at Lucas: "How bad was it?"

  "Bad. I don't know what you're getting from St. Paul, but I think it's a different killer. Maybe somebody just taking the opportunity, hoping we'll think that whoever did Alie'e and Lansing also did Plain—but I don't think it was the same guy."

  "So it might not be directly related."

  "Maybe not. On the other hand, it could be. It's possible that a couple of people have seen the killer. They said he was 'porky' and 'big' and 'rednecky.' "

  Rose Marie looked at Lucas for a second, then at Bennett. "Howard, I really appreciate your telling me about Plain. Can I call you… ?"

  Bennett knew when he was being shuffled out. He smiled his marmot smile again and said, "Say hello to your friends in the legislature."