Easy Prey ld-11

by John Sandford

  "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 Elyfive 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 peoplesaw 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 leavingmade a deal out of it, kissed a few people, shook a couple of hands, giving himself an alibithen 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."

  Chapter 9

  Lane got back. "I got a chart on Alie'eher 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 hack 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?"

  "Igot something else," Lane said, "and it's interesting, but nothing like my previous conjecture about the nerd rapist killer. Nutso."

  "And?"

  "It's this other chick, Sandy Lansing. I talked to the manager at Browns Hotel, and it turns out Lansing wasn't exactly a big deal. She was more like a female bellhop. She'd take rich people up to theirrooms and show them around."

  "Not an executive?" Lucas said.

  "No. She was making maybe twenty-five thousand a year. Enough to starve on. But, man, I talked to the guys from Homicide who were down at her apartment. She's got the cool clothes, she's got a decent carPorsche Boxter? and she hung out with all these rich people. And held her end up financially. She's gotta have money coming in from somewhere, butI can't findit."

  "It ain't coming from her old man," Lucas said. "I just saw him. He looked like he doesn't have two dimes to rub together."

  "That's the impression I got," Lane said. "So I was thinking She works at this hotel, greeting people. Maybe she's on the corner?"

  "Any busts?"

  "Not a thing. But at that level, it's more by introduction," Lane said. "Some big sports guy comes through town, or big TV guy, and you go hang out. Then you go back to his hotel room and later you geta gift. Maybe the hotel knows, maybe not."

  "So let's get her friends, and push a little. Find out where the money came from."

  "I thought maybe you could do the hotel end," Lane said.

  "Me? I'm a deputy chief of police."

  "Yeah, but the hotel's assistant manager in charge of keeping things right is an old pal of yours."

  "Who's that?" Lucas asked.

  "Derrick Deal."

  "You gotta be shitting me."

  "I shit you not, Deputy Chief of Police."

  On the way out of the building, Lucas passed Rose Marie Roux puffing down the hall. " 'Muff-Divers' Ball?' " she asked, hooking his arm.

  "That's what the headline said," he answered, mildly flustered.

  "How many euphemisms do men have for the female sexual organ?" she asked.

  "That's not a place you wanna go," Lucas said.

  "How long before we catch the guy?"

  "Another place"

  She nodded. "that I don't want to go."

  Derrick Deal had once been an assistant county assessor, more or less. His actual position was bagman for a city council cabal that was selling cut-rate property assessments. The cabal ran into trouble when Deal tried to hit up a machine-shop owner, who happened to be the uncle of a vice cop. The cop did some cop shit and got a tape of Deal soliciting a payoff.

  Then the cop made a mistake. He believed that if he simply nailed Deal, that Deal's brother assessors would, in turn, punish his uncle by running up his assessments, even as Deal went off to six weeks in jail. So instead of arresting him, the cop let Deal listen to the tape, and told him to lay off. Deal misinterpreted the threat and ran to his city council protectors. They went to the chiefthis was three chiefs agowho squashed the vice cop like a bug. The vice cop found himself working traffic management on construction sites.

  Thenhe rang in his brother copsnotably Lucas. Lucas set up a sting operation and Deal went to jail for nine months. His city council employers managed to slide, and Deal's brother assessors did the expected numberon the machine-shop owner, whose taxes went up fifty percent.

  When Deal got out of jail, he tried selling cars and then houses, but wasn't good at it. His skills lay in bureaucracy and blackmail, not sales. Lucas heard that he'd gone to California, and until Lane mentioned his name, assumed he was still there.

  "Derrick Deal?" he asked himself as he walked across town.

  Brown's Hotel was a brick building a block from the IDS tower. From the outside, it barely looked like a hotel; you had toknow it was there. Lucas nodded at the white-gloved doorman, who held the door for him, and turned right across the plush red carpet, around a circular seat with a spray of out-of-season gladiolas in the center, to the reception desk. A neat young woman stood behind the desk. She was black, with delicate bones in her face; she wore a conservative suit and a silver-and-turquoise necklace with small oval stones. "Yes, sir?"

  "I need to see Mr. Deal? Derrick Deal?" Lucas said
.

  "Can I tell him who's calling?"

  "No." Lucas smiled to soften the answer, slipped his ID from his pocket, and showed it to her. "This is sort of a surprise. If you could just show me where he is?'"

  She reached for a phone. "I'll call the manager on duty."

  Lucas stretched across the desk and put his hand on the phone. "Please don't do that. Just show me where Mr. Deal works."

  "I'll get in trouble." Her lip trembled.

  "No, you won't," Lucas said. "Believe me."

  She looked both ways, saw no help, touched her lip with her tongue, and said, "He's in his office down the hall." She looked to her right, a long narrow hallway off the lobby.

  "Show me the door."

  She looked both ways again, as if the manager might spring out of the red carpet, and finally said, "This way." She came out from behind the desk and started down the hall, walking swiftly. When they were out of sight of the lobby, she slowed. "Is he in trouble?"

  "I have a question for him."

  "If he's not in trouble, he should be," she said.

  "Really?" Lucas asked.

  "He's a jerk."

  "Wait a minute," Lucas said quietly. They stopped in the hallway. "What's a jerk?"

  "He hassles people," she said.

  "For money? Sex? Dope?"

  "Not dope," she said.

  "You've had to fight him off?" Lucas asked.

  "Not exactly. I'm a little too dark for him. And I told him that if he hassled me, my brother would cut off his testicles."

  "He believed you?"

  "Yes. My brother came over and showed him the knife," she said.

  "Ah."

  "But we have all these little maids, a lot of them are Mexican, and maybe they don't have papers. It's this tight economy is the reason they hire them."

  "He puts the bite on them?"

  "Yes. Sometimes sexthere are usually a few empty rooms around. Mostly it's money. The guests leave tips for the maids, ten dollars or twenty dollars. He might take out fifty dollars a day, all told. The maids are afraid to turn him down. All he has to do is make an anonymous phone call. He lets them know it."

  "Maybe they should bring their brothers up from Mexico," Lucas said.

  She shook her head. "Easy to say."

  "I know," Lucas said. "All right. I'll go ask him my question, and then maybe later we'll figure out somethingto slow him down a little."

  "The hotel won't fire him," she said. "He's very good at what he does."

  "Which is?"

  "He fixes things. He gets tickets for shows and basketball games. If somebody gets sick, he gets a doctor."

  "Anybody could do that," Lucas said.

  "I mean, if a rock star gets sick"

  "Because he put something up his nose?"

  "Or whatever. Or if there's a little lovers quarrel, and somebody gets beat up or cut up"

  "Okay," Lucas said. "We could still have a talk with him about the maids."

  Lucas waited until the receptionist was well back toward her desk before he quietly opened Deal's office door. The office was a collection of six shoulder-high fabric cubicles; the clacking sound of a computer keyboard came horn the far corner.

  Deal was a balding man with a long nose and heavy, petulant lips that he thrust in and out as he peered at his computer screen. He was wearing a dark sport coat, and sprinkles of dandruff decorated the shoulders and lapels. He was intent. He never saw Lucas coming.

  Lucas picked up a visitors chair from a neighboring cubicle and sat it in the aisle just outside Deal's. He sat down heavily, and now Deal, for the first time, realized he wasn't alone. He jerked around, pulled back, startled.

  " 'Lo, Derrick," Lucas said, smiling. "Thought you were in California."

  Deal pulled himself together. "Goddamnit, Davenport, you scared the shit outa me. What do you want?"

  "You heard about the murder? Sandy Lansing?"

  "Nothing to do with us," Deal muttered. He picked a piece of paper up from the desktop, squinted atit, and slipped it into a desk drawer, out of sight.

  Lucas shrugged. "You know how it is, Derrick. We gotta nail everything down. And this Lansing chick, she sorta puzzles us. She's got no moneyshe's pulling down twenty-five from this place. But she's driving a Porsche, she's dressing outa those Edina boutiques"

  "We give her five grand a year for clothes," Deal said.

  "Party dresses?"

  "No. Not party dresses," Deal said. He turned casually to his computer screen, which showed a spreadsheet, pushed a couple of keys, and the screen blanked out. "The kind of dresses you see on the other women here. Upper-middle-class conservative matron clothes."

  "We thought maybe she was getting the extra money from taking the clothes off. You know, the matron dresses."

  Deal shook his head. "No."

  "Come on, man," Lucas said. He waved his hand, meaning, Look at this place. "You got all kinds of jocks and movie stars and singers and theater people and rich guys I mean, what does a fixer guy like you do when one of them wants a blow job?"

  "I tell him to go blow himself," Deal said.

  "Derrick"

  Deal put up his hands. "Listen, man. She was not fucking anybody for money. Not here, anyway. I knew about the car, I even asked her about it. She said something like, 'I got my own money.' I figured it came from Daddy and she was working until she got married."

  "She was not a rich kid," Lucas said.

  Deal shook his head. "So maybe you should do some real investigation, so you can stop hassling innocent people."

  "Derrick, goddamnit, I'm trying tolike you, but you make it so hard," Lucas said. He put his hands on the arms of the visitor's chair, ready to stand up. "We know she's getting some extra cash, and sex is the only thing we can think of. I'd hate to think that Brown's is some kind of high-class bordello, but we're gonna have to send some people around to look at the records. Can we use your name as a recommendation?"

  "Wait a minute, wait a minute," Deal said. He picked up a telephone, punched in four numbers, listened to it ring once, then again, and then said, "Jean, could you come down here for a second?"

  He hung up and said, "You oughta look into dope."

  "Why?"

  "Because half the time, when Sandy came in, which was usually late in the afternoon, she was hungover. From partying. She was a party girl, and she had a real bad coke habit."

  "You think she was selling?" Lucas asked.

  Deal opened his mouth, as if with a reflexive response, but his eyes flickered and he changed direction. "I don't know about selling. But she was using. And she wasn't getting any extra cash here, above the boardor below it."

  He was lying about something, Lucas thought. He'd seen it in Deal's eyes, the momentary flicker. The office door opened, and they both turned toward it. A moment later, a young woman looked down the aisle to Deal's cubicle and saw Lucas. "Mr. Deal?"

  Deal stood up and stepped past Lucas. "Yeah, Jean, down here."

  The woman walked toward them, and Lucas suddenly realized that she was extraordinarily good-looking. She was a little heavy, round, and had soft brown hair spiked with blond strands, a lush face with placid, pale blue eyes, and a slightly rolled underlip. She wore just a dab of lipstick. Her business suit was as conservative as the receptionist's, but with a differencehers was cut deeply enough in front to show a soft slice of cleavage. She was, Lucas thought, maternal and sexy at the same time.

  "Yes?" she asked.

  "Would you take this pencil outto India at the front desk?" He handed her a yellow pencil.

  Shewas puzzled, but compliant. "Yes, sir."

  When she was gone, Deal sat down again and said, with just a touch of sarcasm, "That'swhy Sandy Lansing wasn't dating our customers."

  Looking after the woman, Lucas thought about it for a moment and then nodded. "She wasn't enough."

  "Not nearly enough, for this place," Deal said, comfortably. "And there are a couple more like Jean. Even better than Jean.
Not that I'd know anything about private arrangements between staff members and our guests." He folded his hands across his stomach and leaned hack in his office chair. "Anything else, Officer Davenport?"

  Lucas leaned into him, smiled, reached out, and tapped him on the kneecap. "Yeah. Lansing and drugs. Where was she getting them?"

  "I don't know." He squealed it; he sounded like a startled pig. "I don't know anything about any drugs, I don't do drugs. You know that."

  "Yeah, right." Deal was lying about something. "You do assessments."

  "Well. I would be, if you hadn't fucked me," he said. "Now I do hotels."

  "Like it better?"

  "No," Deal said. "I don't. I used tobe somebody. Now" He looked up between the rows of cubicles. "I'm in a goddamn rat cage."

  Chapter 10

  Not much more to do: There were cops out everywhere, working on everybody. Writing biographies on the party people; matching their stories, one against the next. Outside, TV trucks were beginning to pile up at the curb. He called Rose Marie, checked out, and went home.

  Had a sandwich, got a beer out of the refrigeratorthe last one; he'd have to run down to the store. He clicked on the TV: The movie people were going crazy, as expected. The local TV news shows crushed sports and weather into a five-minute segment, everything else into two minutes, and spent the rest of the half hour on Alie'e. Then the networks jumped in, with their talking heads. They'd had all day to explore the topic of fashion and dope, and long lines of solemn middle-aged men deplored the relationship.

  Fox and NBC had a stunning Amnon Plain photograph of Alie'e Maison in what looked like men's underwear. The photo was as sexual as could be broadcast on TV without a fuzzy spot over the good parts, Lucas thoughtand while Plain was credited as the photographer, all of the commentators gave credit toThe Star for the use of the photo.

  ABC's news reader said the issue ofThe Star would hit the news-stands by two o'clock the next day, only thirty-six hours after Alie'e was murdered. He seemed to think it was a technological miracle. Lucas got a few seconds of airtime, the interview cut in over movies of a stunned George Shaw, now in jeans and a sweatshirt, being dragged out to a cop car. They'd bitten on George, but not too hard.