[Prey 11] - Easy Prey

by John Sandford

  Plain watched her go, watched until she was out of sight, turned back to Alie'e, took a breath, saw Clark hovering in the background like a sumo wrestler. He turned to the couture rep and said, "I've got your key shot."

  The couture rep was a thin-faced German named Dieter Kopp. He had a stubble-cut skull, two-day beard, and gaunt, pale face; his cheeks were lightly pitted, as though he might once have suffered from smallpox. He was the only one not wearing jeans. Instead, he wore a pale gray Italian suit with an open-necked black dress shirt, and a gold tennis bracelet.

  Kopp didn't want to be in St. Paul, didn't want to be in America. He wanted to be in Vienna, or Berlin, but he was condemned to this: to sell seventy-dollar male-look underpants, complete with front vent, to American women.

  Like a good German, he would do what was necessary to carry out his orders; but at the moment, he was still vibrating with the possibility of violence against the striking blonde who'd just walked off the barge. He knew her face. She'd been a model, he knew that, but she'd been out of it for a few years. She looked better now; she was stunning, he thought…

  "What?" he asked. He'd missed what Plain said to him.

  "I've got your key shot. We move Clark around back and we put Alie'e dead center—Alie'e, come over here." Alie'e walked toward them, along the plank, as Plain continued: "We light them separately and then jam them together with the long lens. Clark will look like the fuckin' moon coming over the horizon, and Alie'e will be there in the foreground."

  "We still need the nipple for the punch," said the German. "We could lose it with a long lens."

  "Gotta lose it anyway for the Americans," said the creative director, a man with a red beard and a bald, freckled head.

  "We can do it both ways," Plain said. "For the Europeans, we'll hold it. We'll stick a snoot over on the left and light it. Alie'e…" Alie'e stepped closer, and Plain slipped his fingers into the torn slit in the T-shirt and pulled it wider, to expose her nipple. "We'll have to tape this back, we'll have to bring it out a little more. Maybe touch it with a little more makeup."

  "Not too much. She's really pale, and too much would look artificial," the art director said nervously.

  "Artificial would be all right," Plain said. "What could be sexier than rouged nipples?"

  "In Germany, yes, I think," Kopp said. "In America…"

  "Sexy in America, too, but it'd be too much for the mainline magazines," Plain said. "For the American shot, we'll ice her nipple to bring it up, so you can see it through the T-shirt, put a little shading on the side to emphasize it, but we re-layer the rip so there's more coverage, and drop the snoot. But you'll still be able to feel it there—there'll be like a mental tit behind the T-shirt."

  "You're gonna ice me?" Alie'e asked. "You're gonna fucking ice me? It's twelve degrees in here."

  The German had closed his eyes. After a moment, he nodded. Plain had worked for eight years in Miami, where he'd developed a reputation for a decadent, sexually charged fashion art, juxtaposing outlandishly disparate characters in variations of the Beauty and the Beast theme. Anyone could do that, and many tried, but Plain had something different, something that nobody else could quite get. Something straight out of Grimm's Fairy Tales. Like this shot.

  The German could see it in his mind's eye, now that all the characters were assembled in this ridiculous hulk, with the lights, the smell of the welder, the roaring propane heater… but never could have thought of it. This was why he traveled to Minneapolis and paid Plain as much as he did.

  Plain had vision.

  They worked the rest of the morning: hard work, done over and over. Plain had a color card in his brain, and a drama chip. He knew what he was getting, and he pushed it. Shredded the T-shirt, exposed one breast completely. Clark watched from the background, a burning torch in his hand, his cement-block sausage lovers face fixed by the vision of the woman's body. Lynn and Lil watched from behind the lights: "You don't think that's getting toward the porno… ?" When they were done, and while Jax was collecting her dressing bags, one of Plains assistants walked Alie'e back to a rented Lincoln Towncar. She recovered her purse and the stash of cocaine, caught a little dust under a fingernail, and inhaled.

  "What do you think of that Clark guy?" the assistant asked.

  Alie'e, whose eyes had been closed, the better to experience the rush, now opened one eye, cocked her head, and thought about it: "He's not bad, for a pickup."

  "What I meant was, he looked like he had a zucchini stuffed in his pants during that last sequence."

  Alie'e smiled her wan, coked-up smile and said, "Then it must have been a good sequence."

  Dieter Kopp had seen it; so had Plain.

  "I was afraid I'd lose it." Plain laughed, brushing the hair back from his eyes. "I was over there waggling that snoot around, trying to get some light on him, hoping it wouldn't go away, hoping he wouldn't figure out what I was doing."

  "Not for the American magazines, I don't think?" Kopp said. But it was a question.

  "Oh, I think so," Plain said. "You couldn't say anything about it. You couldn't make it too obvious. But a little work on the computer, taking it up or down. We'll get it in. And people will notice…"

  Kopp bobbed his head, flashed his thin, hard grin. At another time, he might've been driving a tank into Russia instead of selling underwear. But that was then, and this was now. He was in underwear.

  They all went to the party that night, at Silly Hanson's home: Alie'e, Jax, Plain, Kopp, Corbeau, the photo assistants, Alie'e's parents, even Clark the welder. Alie'e looked spectacular. She wore the green dress from the photo shoot, and hung with Jael Corbeau and Catherine Kinsley, the heiress, the three women like the three fates in the Renaissance paintings, all tangled together.

  Techno-pop rolled from small black speakers spotted around Silly Hanson's public rooms and Alie'e images flashed across movie-aspect flat-screen monitors. The crowd danced and sweated and drank martinis and Rob Roys and came and went.

  Silly herself got drunk and physical with Dieter Kopp, who left thumb bruises on her breasts and ass. A gambler drifted through the crowd, and met a cop who was astonished to see him.

  And the killer was there. In the corner, watching.

  Chapter 2

  « ^ »

  Lucas Davenport got up that morning at five o'clock, long before the sun had come over the treetops. He ate a bowl of oatmeal, drank a cup of coffee, filled a Thermos with the rest of the coffee, and drove into Hayward. His friend had the boat loaded. Lucas left his Tahoe on the street, and they'd drove together out to Round Lake on the years last muskie-fishing trip.

  Cold weather; no wind, but cold. They had to break through a fifteen-foot line of quarter-inch ice at the landing. In another day, the ice would be an inch thick, and out fifty or eighty feet. All along the country roads, guys were pulling ice-fishing houses out of their backyards, getting ready for winter.

  On this day, though, most of the water was still soft. They found a spot off a sunken bar and dropped their baited sucker hooks off the side and waited. Lucas's friend didn't talk much, just stood like a moron and bounced a lure called a Fuzzy Duzzit off the bottom, and kept one eye on the sucker rods. Lucas dozed—a quiet, peaceful, unstressed sleep that always left him oddly refreshed.

  They didn't catch anything—they rarely did, although Lucas's friend was an authority on muskie fishing—and by noon, stiff with the cold, they headed back to town. Lucas pulled the battery out of the boat, for winter storage in his friends basement, while his friend carried nets, oars, a cooler, a pissjug, and other gear into the garage. When it was all done, Lucas said, "See you in the spring, fat boy," and headed back to his cabin.

  He could have taken a nap. He'd had only four hours of sleep the night before. But he'd been drinking coffee to keep warm, and the caffeine had him jangled; and the nap in the boat had helped. Instead of sleeping, he got tools out of the truck and started working on his new steel boat shed.

  The previous she
d had been wired for electricity, and the contractor who built the new shed had left the underground cable coiled next to the foundation. The day before, Lucas had bought four fluorescent shop lights, four outlets, and a wall-mounted junction box, and now started putting them up and wiring them in.

  The job went slowly. He had to run into town for more wire, and he stopped for a late lunch and more coffee. By the time he was finished, the sun was dropping over the lake. He flipped on the lights, spent a few seconds admiring their pink glow—he'd gotten the natural fluorescents—and started filling the place up.

  He backed in two small aluminum boats on their trailers, put a utility trailer in the far corner, a John Deere Gator sideways in front of the trailer, and finally, a Kubota tractor. The Kubota belonged to a neighbor who found he couldn't fit it in his garage. It wouldn't start right away, so Lucas had to bleed the fuel line before it would kick over.

  A little after six o'clock, he walked in the dark back to the cabin. Just beyond, down at the lake, a merganser squawked. The edge of ice around the lake had disappeared during the day, but the temperature dropped quickly after sundown. Unless a wind came up to roil the water, the lake should ice over during the night.

  He spent two hours picking up the cabin, vacuuming, collecting garage and old summer magazines, washing and drying sheets, cleaning out the refrigerator, wiping down the kitchen. Then a shower,' with a beer sitting on the toilet stool. Dressed again, he turned off the water heater and water pump, and pushed the thermostat down to fifty. After a last check, he dragged the trash out to the Tahoe and threw it in the back.

  At eight o'clock, he locked the cabin and walked out to the truck, A red and silver Lund fishing boat was parked just beyond the new shed, dropped by another guy the week before. He'd be dragging it back to the Cities. He hooked it up, double-checked the safety chains, checked the trailer lights. Good: They worked, even the turn signals.

  All right. Ready for winter, he thought. A merganser squawked again, and then another: some kind of duck fistfight down at the lake. Or somebody rolling over in bed. And a million stars looking down at him on a moonless night; he looked up through the treetops at the Milky Way, a billion stars like bubbles…

  Davenport was a tall man; he drove a Porsche day-to-day, but fit better in the big Tahoe. He had black hair shot through with vagrant strands of gray; he was as dark as a Sicilian, with a permanent outdoor tan. The tan made his eyes seem bluer and brighter, and his smile whiter. Women had told him that his eyes seemed kindly, even priestly, but his smile made them nervous. He had the smile, one of them told him, of a predator about to eat something nasty.

  His face was touched with scars. A long thin line crossed his eyebrow into his cheek, like a knife cut, but it wasn't. Another that looked like an exclamation mark—a thin line from a knife, a round O from a bullet wound—marked the front of his neck, along his windpipe. He'd been shot, and had almost died, but a surgeon had opened his throat with a jackknife and kept him breathing long enough to get him to an operating table. A plastic surgeon had offered to revise the scars, but he kept them, absently traced them with his fingers when he was thinking; personal history, not to be forgotten.

  The road out was narrow and dark, and he was in no hurry. He took Highway 77 into Hayward, dropped down to 70 in Spooner, headed west, across the border into Minnesota, out to I-35. By ten o'clock he was on the far northern rim of the Cities, pulling the boat. The owner of the Lund was a guy named Herb Clay who owned the remnants of a farm south of Forest Lake, not far off the interstate.

  Lucas pulled into Clay's driveway, bounced past the house to the barnyard, and turned a tight circle. He left the engine running and climbed out of the truck as a porch light came on. A moment later, Clay stepped out on the porch, supporting himself on crutches. "That you?"

  "It's me," Lucas said. He started unhitching the trailer. "How're the legs?"

  "Itch like hell," Clay said.

  "Got a coat hanger to scratch with?"

  "Yeah, but there's always a spot that you can't reach." Clays wife came out on the porch, pulling on a quilted jacket. She hurried across the yard.

  "Let me get the door," she said. She pulled open a lower-level door on the barn, which led into what at the turn of the century would have been a milking chamber, but was now a garage. She turned on lights and Lucas got in the truck and backed the boat into the barn.

  "Stop," she yelled when the boat was far enough back. He stopped, and they unhitched the trailer and dropped it. The interior of the barn, years past the last bovine occupant, still smelled slightly of hay and what might have been manure; a thoroughly pleasant smell. Clay's wife closed the door and came out to stand by Lucas, and they both looked up at the sky.

  "Pretty night," she said. She was a small, slender woman with dark hair and a square face. She and Lucas had always liked each other, and if things had been different, if the Clays hadn't been quite so happy with each other… She smelled good, like some kind of faintly perfumed soap.

  "Pretty night," he repeated.

  "Thanks for helping out with the boat," she said quietly.

  "Thanks for bringing it," Clay called from the porch.

  "Yup." Lucas got back in the truck. "Talk to ya."

  At ten minutes after eleven o'clock, he rolled up his driveway, punched the garage-door opener, and eased the Tahoe in next to the Porsche. A new car, the Porsche; about time.

  Clean, mellow, starting to fade, the memory of Verna Clay's scent still on his mind, he dropped into bed. He was asleep in five minutes, a small easy smile on his face.

  He got three hours and forty-five minutes of sleep. The phone rang, the unlisted line. Groggy, he pushed himself up in bed, picked it up.

  "Yeah?"

  Swanson, one of the old-time guys: "Goddamnit, you're home. You know who Alie'e Maison is, the famous model?"

  "Yeah?"

  "Somebody strangled her in a rich lady's house. We need some political shit over here: This is gonna be a screamer."

  Chapter 3

  « ^ »

  Saturday. The first day of the Alie'e Maison case.

  The morning was cold, even for mid-November. The lake, a hundred miles north, would have frozen over for sure, Lucas thought. He stood at a gas pump, trickling fifteen gallons of premium into the tank of the Porsche. Two blocks out of his driveway, running for the Alie'e Maison scene, he remembered about the gas—he didn't have any. Now, at the least convenient moment, he'd had to stop.

  He yawned, and peered around. The gas station attendant sat in an armored-glass booth, punching with his thumbs at a Game Boy, like a figure in an Edward Hopper tableau. Lucas didn't register Hopper; instead, he wondered idly why gas pumps no longer dinged. They used to ding with every gallon or so, he thought, and now they just rattled off yellow electronic digits, gallons and dollars, silent as the night.

  Another car, a small Lincoln, the one that shared its frame with a Jaguar—Lucas knew about the Jaguar, but could never remember the Lincoln's name—pulled into the second set of gas pumps. Lucas yawned again and watched as a woman got out.

  And stopped yawning. Something familiar about her, from a long time ago. He couldn't see her face, and it wasn't her face that sparked the memory—it was the way she moved, something about the movement and the stature and the hair.

  Her face was turned away from him as she opened the gas flap on the car, unscrewed the cap, and maneuvered the nozzle into the mouth of the tank. She was wearing a suit and dark low heels and a dark blouse. She turned toward him to drag her credit card through the pump's card reader, but he caught only a flash of her face. A square chin, tennis-blond hair. He thought of Weather, the woman he'd almost married—should have married, a woman he still thought about—but this wasn't Weather. Weather was smaller, and he'd know her a mile away, whether her back was turned or not.

  The pump handle jumped under his hand, and clanked. Filled up. He turned off the pump and walked over to the station, got a bottle of Diet Coke out
of a cooler, and pushed a twenty and a ten through the cash window. The attendant, barely able to tear himself away from the game, sullenly made change one-handed. A college algebra book sat on the counter next to him.

  "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."