John Sandford - Easy Prey

"You ain't gonna believe it." The fat cop's name was Swanson.

"Alie'e Maison got killed," Lucas said. "I believe it. Where's the body?"

"It's worse than that," Swanson said. "We tried to call you again, but you were out of touch."

Lucas stopped. "What happened?"

"When're you gonna start turning on your cell phone?" Swanson was reluctant.

"If I turn on my cell phone, people call on it," Lucas said. "So what happened?"

"We were just doing the routine, checking the house, opening doors. You know." They both knew. Lucas had been on more murder scenes than he could remember, and Swanson had been to more than Lucas had; he'd been a homicide cop when Lucas was still in uniform.

"Yeah?"

"We found another body," Swanson said. "Stuffed in a closet. Another woman."

Lucas looked at him for a long moment, then shook his head. "That's alot worse."

"Yeah. I thought so." Bad as it was, itwas something new. They'd both been to multiple murders, but never to one where the cops had already gotten the coffee hot, sent somebody out for donuts, started the routine, then opened a closet door and had another body drop out like a dislodged sock monkey.

"Why'd it take so long to find her?" Lucas asked.

"She was in a closet, the door was locked. Nobody unlocked it right away."

"Jesus, I hope the papers don't get that," Lucas said. "Or maybe we ought to give it to them. You know, our way."

"This woman who lives here, Hansonshe was there when we found the second one, and she's gonna talk about it. She lives for the media. You know what she told me when I was talking to her about it?"

Lucas shook his head.

"She said her only good black dresses were too short for this. For the murders. She sees this as a photo op and she's already figuring out her wardrobe for the cameras."

"All right." That happens.

"There's one other thing." Swanson glanced down at the uniformed cops. Lucas got the idea, and they both turned sideways, and Swanson dropped his breath. "Hanson says there was a strange guy wandering through the place. About the time Maison disappeared out of the crowd. Hanson thinks he did it. She didn't know him, but he was talking to everybody. She said he was like a street guy. Too thin, yellow teeth, and he was wearing this T-shirt that said, 'I'm with Stupid,' and had this arrow that pointed down at his dick. And he had this weird dog-shit-brown sport coat."

Lucas stared at Swanson for a moment, then said, "Huh."

"That's what I thought," Swanson said. "You want to call him?"

"Yeah, I'll call him. Let me look at the scene first."

Hanson's home was elegant but sterile. Lucas recalled another case, a couple of months before, when he'd entered an apartment and found the same high-style sterility. Like a picture on the cover ofArchitectural Digest: Pretty, but not lived-in. Eggshell walls with contemporary graphicswrenches and hammers and gestures and angstand then, around the corner, the interjected English country scene, in oil colors, with cows, spotted perfectly to connect with the graphics. Somebody else's sense of humor; a humor spoiled by the underlying scent of alcohol and smoke, the smell of a well-kept motel.

The house seemed divided into two partsan open plan public area, and a conventional series of bedroom suites at the back. Swanson led the way into the back. Two plainclothes cops were standing in a long central hallway, looking down at the thick gray hair of an assistant medical examiner, who was crouched over a body on the floor. The dead woman was facedown; she wore a reddish-brown party dress. The AME was dabbing at her mouth with an absorbent tissue.

"Name is Sandy Lansing," Swanson said as they walked back.

"She's a hostess of some kind, at Browns Hotel." Brown's was expensive, a hotel where poised young blond women in pearl-gray suits took the guests to their suites, while bellhops in red-and-black monkey suits toted the luggage and kept their mouths shut.

Lucas squatted beside the body; one knee cracked. "Know what did it?" Lucas asked the AME.

The AME was older, like Swanson, with the same tired hound-dog eyes. He had a pack of Marlboros in his shirt pocket, and a black medical bag, which was open on the rug behind him. "I think her skull is cracked," he said. "That's the only trauma I can find, but that was probably enough. There's a cleft, looks like a V-shaped cleft. She could have been hit by something with a narrow edge on it, a board, maybe the end of a canea walking stick. Not a pipe, nothing round."

"A cane? Did somebody have a cane?" Lucas asked, looking up at Swanson. Swanson shrugged.

"But could have been a doorjamb, or something like that," the AME continued. "Here" He picked up the woman's head, gently, as though he might have had a daughter of his own, and turned it. A small indentation marked the back of the woman's head, near the top; there was a smear of blood, enough to show the line of the injury.

"We think she might have walked in on the murder, by accident, and the killer went after her. Hit her with anything he had," Swanson said. "Maybe banged her head against the wall."

"Why would he stuff her in the closet?" Lucas objected, but the AME interrupted: "Look at this."

"What?"

He was peering closely at the woman's scalp, then reached back, felt in his bag, and took out a hand lens. "I think, uh, it looks like a little flake of paint in her hair" He looked up at Swanson. "Don't let anybody touch the doorjambs or any of the wooden trim. Anywhere she could whack her head. You might find an impact mark and maybe a hair or two." That could make the difference between murder and manslaughter, or even an accident.

"All right," Swanson said. He looked up and down the hall at all the doorjambs; there seemed to be dozens.

Lucas went back to his first thought. "Why couldn't this one have been killed first, and then"

" 'Cause Maison was strangled and she wasn't wearing any underpants, and the condition of her vulva and her pubic hair would suggest that she'd very recently been engaged in sex," Swanson said. "If somebody had killed Lansing first, we thought it was pretty unlikely that he'd stop off to bang Maison and then strangle her."

"Okay." Made sense.

"She's got something written on her wrist in ballpoint, but its kinda smeared, so it probably didn't happen right at the time she was killed," the AME said. He turned a wrist, and Lucas looked at the smear of blue ink.

"Looks like Ella? Fella? Delia?"

"Probably not fella," Swanson said. "Why would anybody write 'fella' on their wrist?"

"Could be a name," the AME suggested.

"Strange name," Swanson said.

"See what you can do to bring it up," Lucas said. "Get some photos over to homicide."

"Okay."

Lucas stood. "Let's see the other one."

The door to the guest bedroom was another six feet down the hall, and Lucas stepped over Lansing's body, Swanson following along behind. Two crime-scene guys stepped out of the room just as Lucas came up. "Video," one of them said. "Crying goddamned shame," said the other.

Inside, a photographer lit up, and began taping the crime scene, while a second guy maneuvered a light. All Lucas could see of Alie'e Maison was one bare foot, sticking out from behind the bed; the body was lodged in the space between the bed and the wall.

He waited until the video guy was finished, then looked over the edge of the bed. Maison was lying faceup, one hand over her head, one trapped beneath her back. Her filmy green dress had been pulled up under her arms, exposing her body from the navel down. Her hips were canted toward the wall, and her ankles were crossed, but the wrong way: The one that should have been on the bottom was on the top.

"Looks like she was thrown in there," Lucas said.

One of the cops nodded. "That's what we think. Tried to hide her."