Easy Prey (14 page)

Had a sandwich, got a beer out of the refrigerator—the 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 thought—and while Plain was credited as the photographer, all of the commentators gave credit to
The Star
for the use of the photo.

ABC's news reader said the issue of
The Star
would hit the newsstands 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.

“While drugs are acknowledged to be a central point of investigation, rumors have surfaced about a number of sexual escapades involving a former model named Jael Corbeau . . .” And the broadcast cut to a shot of Corbeau in a Chinese-collared black dress that emphasized the planes of her face, the jagged jigsaw quality of the scarring.

After a while, Lucas got tired of it, punched off the TV, and wandered back to the drawing board.

One idea a night, that was all. His idea tonight was that he might need a full-time game master—or better, he thought, a game mistress, somebody cute and blond with gold-rimmed glasses. But game sales wouldn't support a game mistress for long. So there'd have to be a time limit on the game. Say, one year. He pulled out a fresh sheet of paper, sat on his high stool, doodled a bit. Couldn't get going . . .

CATRIN. HE DIDN'T know what he thought about her, but she was on his mind. . . .

 
 
RESTLESS, HE WALKED down the hall, picked up the phone, hesitated, then dialed. Calling the nunnery. A nun answered. “This is Chief Davenport with the Minneapolis Police Department,” Lucas said. “I need to speak to Sister Mary Joseph.”

“I'll find her,” the nun said; a young voice with a depressive note.

Sister Mary Joseph was his oldest friend, going back to elementary school. Born Elle Kruger, she was a professor of psychology at St. Anne's College, a few blocks from Lucas's home. Lucas waited two minutes, then heard a phone being fumbled on the other end.

“Lucas.”

He smiled when he heard her voice; he almost always did. “Hey, Elle. How's everything?”

“So much for the small talk, Lucas. What's going on with this Alie'e Maison murder?”

“Funny you should ask.”

“Is there a lesbian involvement?”

“Ah, man . . .”

“And what's a
muff
?”

Lucas was absolutely befuddled for a moment, though he knew from the first instant that he'd never be able to find an answer to the question. But then Elle laughed merrily and said, “You can restart your heart now.”

“Listen, don't do that,” he said. “The Alie'e thing . . . it's a mess. There was a lesbian scene, an act, involving three women, some time before she was killed. I don't know what it has to do with the killing. Maybe nothing. That's sorta what I wanted to ask you about.”

“What?”

“When gay guys kill each other, it can be pretty rough: a lot of mutilation, a lot of anger. A lot of knives, for some reason. You see guys stabbed twenty or thirty times.”

“Passion turns to anger when things go wrong: Passion and anger are linked. What were these women like? Was it all very sexual, or was it less sexual and more something else?”

“That's what I was worrying about. One of the women suggested that while it was sexual, it wasn't aggressively sexual. She said it was more like cuddling. But there was a sexual act—stroking, oral sex. But it didn't seem . . . crazy.”

“It might not have been. The cultural prohibition against lesbian sex is not nearly as strong as it is against male homosexuality. If a man becomes involved in gay sex . . . there's a tremendous amount of stress, at least initially,” Elle said. “Women sometimes can go from friendship with another woman to occasional touching, to sex, and back to friendship, in a seamless way, without much guilt or stress. That's why you don't see so many violent lesbian murders. The stress isn't so high.”

“All of the women involved were also involved with men. The relationships sometimes were simultaneous.”

“That's not unusual. There are some women who are . . . How'll I put this? Reflexively lesbian, that's what they
are.
They are as interested in women as . . . well, as you are. But many women, especially young women . . . they may just drift along, having relationships with women as well as with men. There's even a kind of fashionable element to it.”

“All right.”

“Have you looked at Alie'e's family?”

“Somebody has. I met her folks. I don't think they'd get the
Good Housekeeping
seal for parenting. . . . They dragged her all over the country since she was a baby, pushing her into showbiz. Living through her.”

“Mmm.”

“And she's got a goofy brother.”

“That's interesting—it suggests there must've been some serious stresses in the family.”

“Yeah. He's a peasant preacher out around Fargo somewhere. Gives away his clothes.”

Elle said, “Not . . . Tom Olson?”

Lucas looked at the phone, then put it back to his ear. “Yeah. You know him?”

“He's a saint. Oh, boy.”

“Oh boy” was rough language from Elle. “What?”

“He really
is
a saint. He's an evangelical Christian, he believes the rapture is coming next month or next year or whatever, because he can see it coming. Rolling in, like a wave. He might be schizophrenic; he is definitely an ecstatic. We had a novice here, from out that way, the Red River. She went home to visit her folks. He was preaching at a bowling alley. She went to see him with some of her girlfriends—sort of a lark. She came back and quit the convent and quit the church and began wandering around the Red River preaching Christ's gospel. I try to stay in touch with her: She told me that Olson sometimes gets the stigmata.” Her voice hushed with the word “stigmata.”

“You gotta be sh . . . kidding me.”

“No. I'm not.”

As a Catholic, Lucas was severely lapsed, but he nevertheless felt a chill crawl down his spine at the idea of the stigmata. Bleeding from Christ's wounds in the hands, the feet, the side, even from the crown of thorns. “So he thinks he's God?”

“Oh, no. Absolutely not,” Elle said. “He sees himself as a messenger, preparing the way.”

“John the Baptist, then,” Lucas said.

“I don't think he'd put it that way. You're being cop-sarcastic, and he's a very serious man.”

“He was in the office today. He was . . . intense.”

“Where was he when the murder was committed?” Elle asked.

“In Fargo. Out there somewhere. That's his story. But you think he could have done it?”

“I don't know. Sainthood is generally a mystery, but it involves very deep emotional streams, and often something very dark. He may have very deep feelings about his sister. And because of his emotional condition, he might be very . . . demonstrative.”

“He was, with the chief.”

They talked for a few more minutes, Lucas filling in the details of the crime. Elle would think about them, and call if anything occurred to her. They said goodbye, and Lucas started back to the study. Halfway there, he turned, went back to the phone, and called the nunnery again. The same young depressive nun answered, and he waited the same two minutes for Elle to pick up.

“Something else?”

“You know what you said to me when you first came to the phone?”

“I don't know. I was teasing you.”

“You asked something like, ‘What's going on with the Alie'e Maison murder?'”

“Yes?” She was puzzled.

“Nobody ever asks about the other woman. Lansing. She's like a piece of Kleenex that got used.”

“Mmm. To be honest, I
haven't
thought of her,” Elle confessed.

“You know, when you were hurt . . . you were hurt because somebody was trying to distract
me.
And it worked for a while. With everybody saying Alie'e, Alie'e . . . I hope we're not looking in the wrong direction.”

“As long as we keep that in mind,” Elle said. After a second of silence, she added, “I'll think about her. Pray for her.”

 
 
LATE THAT NIGHT, as he sat on the bed taking off his socks, Lucas remembered Trick Bentoin—Trick the gambler, the man who wasn't dead, who hadn't been killed by a brand-new lifer out at Stillwater. Lucas had forgotten to call the county attorney, and so, apparently, had Del; they'd talked to each other a dozen times during the day, and neither had mentioned it again.

Lucas muttered a short obscenity to himself. Folks were gonna be pissed about the delay. Even though it
was
kinda funny.

But he wasn't thinking about Trick when he drifted off to sleep. He was thinking about what he should wear to lunch tomorrow.

Lunch with Catrin.

EVEN LATER THAT night, not far from Lucas, but across the Mississippi in Minneapolis, Jael Corbeau heard a scratching 'round her door. Her eyes popped open, and she sat up. She was exhausted, but she hadn't been able to sleep. She'd taken a pill, but her body fought it. Alie'e: Amnon said she was infatuated, that Alie'e was nothing more than a willing reflection of Jael's own need for a special kind of pleasure—for a languid, wicked, fashionable lover. A beautiful lover. And Jael feared it was true, that she was shallow, dissolute.
Trendy.

The scratching on the door popped her out of the depressive cycle. She recognized the sound as soon as she heard it. Somebody was trying to get in.

Jael lived in a small house on the south side of the loop, not far from the Metrodome. Her bedroom was on the second floor; the first was occupied by her workshop—a throwing room, a glazing room, a kiln room with two big electric Skutts, and a wedging room where she stored clay and did the preliminary workups. The workups that'd built her arms and shoulders: The cops had asked her about that. One had taken her hand, told her to squeeze. She had, and he'd pretended to wince. Fucking with her. Trying to intimidate her. It hadn't worked.

She wasn't intimidated by the cops, and she wasn't intimidated by the scratching at the door. During the worst of the crack years, the scratching would come every week or two. But crack was fading, burning out: She hadn't had an attempt in a year or more.

Still.

She rolled out, knelt as if in prayer, and felt under the edge of the bed. Her fingers picked it up immediately: the cold steel of the barrel. She pulled it out, an old pump Winchester 12-gauge. Moving swiftly through the dark, she went into the bathroom to the barred, frosted-glass window over the tub. The window was double-hung, and the slides were waxed. She unlocked it, slipped it up.

Down below, a heavyset man in black crouched on the stoop, prying amateurishly at the lock. Bushes flanked the stoop, so he would be invisible from the street, unless somebody looked straight up the walk.

She spoke softly but clearly: “Hey, you, down there.”

The figure froze, then half-turned. She could see a crescent of his face in the ambient light from the street, like a sliver of the moon seen through a thin cloud, pale, obscure.

“I have a shotgun.” She pumped it, the old steel action cycling with the precise
chick-chick
sound effect heard in a thousand movies. “It's a twelve-gauge. I'm pointing it at your head.”

The crescent of face disappeared. The man turned, quick as a thought, and bolted from the porch, down through the bushes, around the corner, and down the street, hands and heavy legs pumping frantically.

Watching him go, Jael allowed herself the first smile she'd enjoyed in twenty-four hours. But as she slid the window back down and locked it, a vagrant thought crossed her mind.

He hadn't looked like a crackhead. Not at all.

He looked like some kind of redneck.

11

SUNDAY. THE SECOND day of the Maison case.

Lucas retrieved the
Pioneer Press
from his front porch, looked at the large dark headline: “Alie'e Maison Murdered.” And beneath that, the subhead “Strangled in Minneapolis.”

The headline, he thought, was smaller than the moon-walk, and possibly even smaller than reproductions he'd seen of the Pearl Harbor news flash.

But not much.

And he thought:
Trick.

 
 
COUNTY ATTORNEY RANDALL Towson was not exactly a friend, but he was a decent guy. He took the phone call at his breakfast table and said, “Tell me we got everything we need.”

“What?”

“On the Alie'e Maison killer—who you're calling to tell me you caught.”

“I have something much better. Honest to God.” Lucas tried to inject sincerity into his voice. “I've found a chance to serve justice.”

The attorney betrayed a cautious curiosity. “You're bullshitting me. Sorry, darlin'.”