Easy Prey (9 page)

“But there was a physical component.”

“Yes.”

“What happened . . . afterwards? How was she when you left?”

“Sleepy. We were all sleepy, but she'd gotten up very early for her photo shoot, and had to get up the next day, and Silly—Silly Hanson—said she could sleep there, and so we left her. She was okay.”

“And neither you nor Miz Kinsley saw her again.”

“No. Well, I don't know if Catherine saw her, because, like I said, I haven't been able to reach her this morning. I couldn't find her number, and I don't know exactly where the cabin is. Anyway, I don't think she saw her. We walked out to our cars together, said good-bye, and I went home. Your police people woke me up.”

“Miz Maison injected heroin around the time of your encounter. Were you present for that?”

“No.” Quick and definite, Lucas thought. She'd known the question was coming.

Sloan continued. “You didn't know that she was using heroin?”

A slight hesitation, another glance at the attorney, and, “I thought she might be tripping when we met in the bedroom. She was . . . languid. She was the way you get when you're using. But I wasn't there when she injected, and I don't think she had much, because she didn't fall asleep or anything, not while we were there. It was more like a . . . a . . . party favor.”

“A party favor,” Lucas said.

“Yeah. That's what people call them. Some people call them short pops—you know, if you want the effect but don't want to get addicted.”

“You get addicted anyway,” Sloan said.

Corbeau flipped her head. “You know that's not true. That's just a political position.”

Sloan looked at Lucas, who raised his eyebrows, and Sloan said, “I'm not here to argue with you, but just for the record, Miz Corbeau: Short pops will addict you as fast as anything. Believe me or don't believe me. But that's the way it is.”

She shook her head, and Sloan said, “I don't want to embarrass you, but I've got to ask this question. The medical examiner tells us that Miz Maison has small light scratches around her vulva, and light bruising, as if she'd been involved in a fairly active sexual encounter involving manual stimulation and perhaps oral stimulation. . . . Would that have characterized your encounter?”

She flushed again, looked at them quickly, one at a time, taking them in. Lucas, still feeling the effect she had on his breathing, squirmed; he felt like a pervert. She didn't help; she asked, “Do you guys get off on this sort of thing?”

Sloan, his face a monk's stolid mask, shook his head. “Sitting in a room like this, full of metal tables and tile floors, this is not very sexual, Miz Corbeau. We need to know, because we need to know if she had another sexual contact after yours, or if yours was most likely the cause of the scratching and bruising. Miz Maison was strangled, which frequently is associated with sexual activity.”

“Okay,” she said. “Yes, it's possible that she was scratched. Especially by Catherine. Catherine can be a little rough, and she had long nails. I keep mine very short because of my job.”

“You're a potter.”

“Yes.”

“And you had nothing to do with the death of Alie'e Maison?”

“No, I did not.” She bit her lip as the words came out, and her chin trembled. To Lucas, she seemed shaken.

“Do you think your brother might have?” Lucas interjected.

She looked at him, a frown flickering across her face, and then said, “No. If Amnon was going to go after somebody, it'd be me.”

“Why you?”

“We have a personal problem.”

“He told us about your relationship,” Lucas said. “You think that could turn to violence? The breakup?”

She turned away, looking at the floor, twisting her fingers together. “Amnon has violence in him. He wouldn't have killed Alie'e, because he had no . . . regard for her. He didn't care about her. You'd have to have some feeling for a person before you killed her, wouldn't you?”

“No,” Lucas said. “Not if you're psychologically disturbed. People who are disturbed may kill to change the way they feel about something. The person killed may be a complete stranger, if the killing somehow . . . medicates . . . the disturbed person.”

“God, that's awful.”

“Yes. Your brother?”

“No. He's not disturbed that way. I know him well enough to say that.”

“How did you get your names?” Swanson asked.

“Our parents were hippies, they went from one thing to another, and they eventually tried out Judaism. Amnon and I were born during that period. They're Bible names.”

“I'm a Catholic,” Lucas said. “We weren't big on Bibles when I was a kid. Do the names mean something?”

“Jael was maybe a sorceress. Deborah fought Sisera, the Canaanite, and defeated him, and Sisera fled the battlefield and hid in Jael's tent. When he was asleep, she killed him by driving a tent peg through his head.”

“Ouch,” Lucas said. A tiny flicker of a smile on her sad face? “How about Amnon?”

“Amnon was one of Solomon's sons,” Corbeau said.

“What, he was wise?”

“No, no,” she said. “He slept with his sister.” She scanned the four men, Lucas, Sloan, Swanson, and her own attorney, showed a flicker of a sad smile again, and said, “Were my parents prophets, or what?”

 
 
WHEN THEY WERE done, they milled in the hallway outside the interview room, and Lucas asked Jael, “Why'd you quit modeling?”

“You think I shouldn't have?”

“I think you could have . . . continued,” he said. She made him feel like a provincial clown, and he kind of liked it.

“It's boring,” she said. “It's like making movies, except they don't pay you enough.”

“Movies are boring?”

“Movies are fuckin' nightmares,” she said. She laughed, and grasped his arm, just for a second; she was the kind of woman who liked to touch people, Lucas thought. “Shooting a movie is like watching grass grow.”

When Jael and her lawyer left, Lucas and Sloan walked back to Homicide. Frank Lester was talking to Rose Marie, and waved Lucas over.

“How'd you guys do?” he asked.

Lucas shrugged. “There's a lot of motive floating around, but not that points at Alie'e or Lansing.”

“Who, then?” Rose Marie asked.

“Everybody,” Lucas said. “We've got incest, jealousy, drugs, love triangles. You name it, we got it. But nothing that points at anyone.”

“That's what I was telling Rose Marie,” Lester said. “We've got so many suspects that it's turning into a technical problem. We've got fifty-four people for the party now, and there'll be more. How in the hell do you really interview more than fifty people, and do a good job of it? Who do you push, and how hard? The thing is, if the killer was at the party, and he's our forty-fifth interview . . . there's no
feel
to it anymore.”

“You're asking everybody to point at somebody else?” Lucas asked.

“Yeah, but they're all lying through their teeth. Nobody knew that everybody was using drugs. . . . Anyway, we've only been able to
probably
eliminate a half-dozen people who left the party when Alie'e was still circulating. With that open window, we can't eliminate anyone who left after Alie'e went back to the bedroom. Somebody might have unlocked the window for the purpose of leaving, and coming back later.”

“If the window was used at all,” Sloan said.

“Yeah. If.”

“How about the husband of the woman who was with Alie'e and Corbeau on the bed, this Catherine Kinsley. Did he know about the relationship?” Lucas asked.

“They're not in yet,” Rose Marie said.

Lester said, “I did just sit in on an interview with Alie'e's boyfriend--”

“I saw him,” Lucas said.

“Noxious little penis,” Lester said. “His real name used to be Jim Shue. He didn't think he looked like a shoe, so he tried to change it to JX. J for James, X for nothing. The court told him he had to have a vowel, so he winds up Jax. Anyway, he knew all about the relationship with Corbeau. He says it didn't bother him. He called it Alie'e's ‘alternate modality.' He said that they were both multisexual. He said pretty soon everybody will be.”

“Too late for me,” Rose Marie said.

“Yeah. I'm barely unisexual,” Lester said. “Anyway, he's a dipshit. He said he had nothing to do with her death, but we're putting him on the shortlist.”

“What about the media thing?” Rose Marie asked Lucas. “The human sacrifice?”

“I'll ask Del,” Lucas said. “He's setting it up.”

6

DEL WAS WAITING outside Lucas's office, leaning patiently against the wall. When he saw Lucas coming, he walked down the hall to meet him and said, “I'm clear with IA.”

“What about finding somebody we can throw to the media?”

“I can't find a connection. These aren't street people. But the dope guys are set up to raid George Shaw's operation--”

“Shaw is street. He's not Alie'e's dealer,” Lucas said.

“I know, but it's what we got,” Del said. “We got confirmation last night that he's got a lot of cocaine on hand and maybe some heroin. So they're gonna hit him, and I thought we could ride along. We don't say anything, but we get your picture taken.”

“Where?”

“A place down on Thirty-fifth. Shaw has been sleeping there, usually until three o'clock or so. He's there now. We're gonna hit him a little after noon. If we work it right, the TV people are gonna jump to a conclusion. We can deny our ass off and they won't believe us for a minute.”

“That's not exactly what we wanted.”

“No, but that's as good as we're gonna get it,” Del said.

 
 
LUCAS THOUGHT ABOUT it for a second. The movie people weren't stupid; if they thought they were being manipulated, there'd be trouble. But if they weren't thrown some kind of meat, they'd be running around like a pack of wolves, and pretty soon the politicians would start to panic, and then the attorney general—you never wanted to stand between the attorney general and a TV camera—would get into it, on some theme like police negligence. In a fairly short time, a world-class pissing match would be going on and . . .

“All right. If that's what we got.”

“I've already tipped TV3 to be ready to roll between noon and one o'clock,” Del said. “Rose Marie and the mayor already said at the press conference that you'd be monitoring the investigation. So if you're monitoring the raid, and if they want to put two and two together . . . that's their problem.”

“But the raid isn't a put-up job, is it? I mean, it's legit?”

“It's fine. Shaw got a ton of shit a week ago, but he's been moving, wholesaling it to all the little assholes. Couldn't find him. Now he's holed up at his sister-in-law's and he's still got some left.”

Lucas nodded. “Because if it was a put-up job, and somebody gets hurt, the word would get out and we'd all be in shit city.”

Del nodded. “We're okay. The drug guys were talking about it last night, before Alie'e, as soon as they spotted Shaw walking home.”

 
 
THE TWELVE-MAN EMERGENCY response team met at a south side precinct house and was briefed by a guy named Lapstrake from Intelligence. Lapstrake was a bland, twenty-something guy with a home haircut who wore blue Sears work pants and a blue shirt that read, “Cairn's Glass” on the back. He used a flip pad to illustrate the approaches to George Shaw's house. Lucas and Del sat on folding chairs in the back of the room, listening in.

“We're gonna have to move fast,” Lapstrake said, pointing with a laser. “George's got relatives all over the neighborhood, and every one of them's got him on speed-dial. Four guys go in the back, coming in from Thirty-fourth. You'll split up and go around this house . . .” He put a red laser-dot on the house behind Shaw's. “. . . And go right over the fence and cover the back door and side windows. It's a hurricane fence, no problem.”

“A dog?” somebody asked.

“Used to be, but it died,” the Intelligence cop said.

“Aw, shit,” somebody said. “They got pit bulls down there.”

“He's gone, really,” Lapstrake said, grinning. “I promise.”

He put another red dot on the front of the house. “We got Group Two coming in from the front, blocking, watching down the sides. Group Three hits the front door. We think George sleeps in what used to be the dining room. When you go in, you'll be in the living room. There'll be a hall straight ahead, and an arch over to the right. The dining room is behind the arch, and that's where George should be, but there's also a connection between the dining room and the kitchen.”

Lapstrake sketched it quickly, and made sure the entry group had it. “From the time we hit the sidewalk, we need to be on top of him in one minute, no more. There's a possibility that he'll be upstairs. There's no bathroom upstairs and no way out, and we don't think it's likely he'll be up there. The stairs come down into the front room—you'll see them on your left when you go through the door.”

“Who else is in the house?” somebody asked. “And what're we looking for, specifically?”

“We think he's probably got anything from a quarter kilo to a kilo of cocaine on him, and some amount of heroin, but we don't know how much. He usually carries it in plastic squeeze bottles, like the kind you get at camping stores, REI, like that. We heard last week that he'd gotten a delivery the week before, and was putting it on the street, but we couldn't find him, so who knows what he's got left? Maybe he's got a ton, maybe he's sold it all. The coke is definite, one of our guys saw it last night,” Lapstrake said. “As for who else in the house, the house is owned by his sister-in-law, Mary Lou Carter. The thing is, you gotta watch Mary Lou. Get her on the floor. She tends to go off.”