Easy Prey (11 page)

A question they asked everyone involved the scribble on Sandy Lansing's wrist. They got the answer to that in the early afternoon.

“A woman named Pella,” Swanson told Lucas. “She's going to England in December, for three weeks, and Lansing was going to get her a rate at a hotel. She said Lansing wrote her name on her wrist to remember to set it up.”

“This holds water?”

Swanson shrugged. “Does with me, I guess. Pella said a decent hotel in London is gonna cost her two hundred a night, but with Lansing's connection, she can get the same room for one and a quarter. That's something like fifteen hundred bucks in savings.”

“And this Pella doesn't know anything about the dope?”

“She said she met Alie'e for the first time last night, and said three words to her. But she looks kinda wired. . . . I wouldn't be surprised if she carried a little toot in her purse.”

“All we have to do is crack one of them,” Lucas said. “Get somebody to rat out her friend.”

Lester stopped by: “We grabbed Hanson's computer, but most of what we're getting is bullshit.”

“They talked about dope,” Lucas said.

“She said it was just rumors.”

“She's bullshitting us.”

“Of course she is.”

TWO UNIFORMED COPS from St. Paul brought in a huge man named Clark Buchanan, who, improbably, told them that he was a model and, incidentally, a welder.

“Model what?” one of the interrogating cops asked skeptically. “Lunch buckets?”

“You know, clothes and shit,” Clark said. “I was the other guy in the Alie'e shoot. She was doing the clothes up front, I was making some sparks in the back.”

Clark didn't know anything about drugs at the party. “I had some drinks, that's all I saw.”

“Lotta drinks?”

He shrugged. “Maybe a half-dozen. Maybe ten. Vodka martinis. Goddamn. I'll tell you something, guys—rich people make good fuckin' vodka martinis.” He stayed at the party until one o'clock, then caught a cab and went home. He remembered the name of the cab company and that the driver's name was Art. They asked a few more questions and cut him loose.

 
 
EARLY IN THE afternoon, Alie'e's parents arrived with a group of friends and talked first to the mayor, and then the mayor walked them over to Roux's office. Roux called Lucas, who went down to her office and stood in the back, with Lester, as the chief explained what was happening with the case.

Both Lynn and Lil Olson were dressed from head to toe in black, Lynn in a black-on-black suit that may have come from Manhattan, and Lil in a black lace dress that dropped over a black silken sheath; she also wore a black hat with a net that fell off the front rim over her eyes; her eyebrows matched the hat, severe dark lines, but her hair was a careful, layered honey-over-white blond, like her daughter's. Her eyes, when Lucas could see them, were rimmed with red. Alie'e got her looks from her father, Lucas thought—the cheekbones, the complexion, the green eyes. Lynn Olson was a natural blonde, but his hair was going white. In the black suit, he looked like a famous artist.

The friends were dressed in flannel and jeans and corduroy; they were purely Minnesota.

“She was going to be in the
movies
,” Alie'e's mother said, her voice cracking. “We had a project just about set. We were interviewing costars. That was the big step, and now . . .”

Rose Marie was good at dealing with parents: patient, sympathetic. She introduced Lucas and Lester, and outlined how the case would be handled.

Lucas felt a strange disjuncture here: Alie'e's parents, who were probably in their late forties, looked New York, their black-on-black elegant against their blond hair and fair complexions. The words they used were New York, and even their attitude toward Alie'e was New York: all business. Not only was their daughter dead, so was the Alie'e enterprise.

But the sound of the language was small-town Minnesota: round Scandinavian vowels, “oo” instead of “oh,” “boot” instead of “boat.” And every few sentences, a Minnesota construction would creep out.

Rose Marie was straightforward. She mentioned the relationship with Jael—Lil said, “But that was just a lark, girls . . .”—and the possibility of drugs. The Olsons' eyes drifted away from Rose Marie's . . . and as Rose Marie was finishing, the door opened, and a heavyset man stepped in, looked around.

He wore jeans, black boots, and a heavy tan Carhartt jacket, with oil stains on one sleeve. His hair was cut like a farmer's, shaggy on top but down to the skin over the ears. Lynn Olson stood up and said, “Tom,” and Lil stopped sniffling, her head jerking up. The big man scowled at them, nodded at the people from Burnt River, looked at Lucas, Lester, and then at Rose Marie. “I'm Tom Olson,” he said, “Alie'e's brother.”

“We were just telling your parents what we're doing,” Rose Marie said.

“Do you
know
what you're doing?” he asked Rose Marie.

“We handle this kind of--”

“You're dealing with a nest of rattlesnakes,” Olson said. “The best thing you could do is beat all of them with a stick. They are sinners, each and every one. They are involved in drugs, illicit sex, theft, and now murder. They're all criminals.”

“Tom,” Lil said. “Tom, please.”

“We're questioning everyone who was with Alie'e in the past day,” Rose Marie said. “We're very confident--”

Tom Olson shook his head once and looked away from her, at his parents. “So. After twenty-five years of abuse, she comes to this. Dead in Minneapolis. Full of drugs, the radio says, heroin—a short pop, the radio says—whatever that is. Some kind of evil they have a special name for, huh? We didn't hear about that in Burnt River.”

Lester's eyes flicked at Lucas, as Lynn Olson stood up and said, “Tom, take it easy, huh?”

Olson squared off to his father and said, “I'm not going to take it easy. I can still remember when we called her Sharon.”

“We need to talk to you,” Lester said to Tom Olson.

“To question me? That's fine. But I know almost nothing about what she was doing. I had one letter a month.”

“Still . . . we'd like to talk.”

Olson ignored him, turned to his parents, shook a finger at them. “How many times did I tell you this?> How many times did I tell you that you were buying death? You even dress like the devil, in Satan's clothes. Look at you, you spend more money on one shirt than good people spend on a wardrobe. It's a sickness, and it has eaten into you . . .”

He was starting to foam, shaking not just his finger but his entire body. Lucas pushed away from the wall, and Lynn Olson got back on his feet and said, “Tom, Tommy. Tommy . . .”

He'd turned to Rose Marie, who was watching him openmouthed, and for a moment he looked as if he was going over the desk at her. Lucas moved quickly, from behind the desk, saying, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, slow down, man, slow down . . .”

Olson stopped talking, but continued to vibrate, then turned away and stepped to the back of the office and leaned on the door. After a moment, in the silence, he turned, with tears running down his cheeks. “Can I see her?” he asked.

DEL WAS WORKING down a line of junkies and dealers, trying to find the source of the drugs going through Silly Hanson's apartment the night before. Lucas's other guy, Lane, was working on Alie'e's genealogy.

“I want all of her family, and I want a chart that shows how they're related,” he told Lane. “I want all of her exhusbands--”

“Aren't any.”

“--all of her ex-fiancés, ex-boyfriends, anyone else who might want to do her. Same with this other chick . . .”

“Lansing.”

“Yeah. I want the whole chart.”

“Listen, I think if we sorted through the people who were at the party last night, ran them--”

Lucas shook his head. “Homicide's halfway through the list. I'll get it tonight or tomorrow, if they don't have a case by then.”

“Or working on the cat-burglar angle. I got some sources down there from when I was on patrol.”

“Lane—go with the genealogies. Homicide and Property are working the cat-burglar thing. We want stuff that Homicide won't get around to right away. 'Cause if Alie'e getting killed isn't a random thing, if it's not a cat burglar, then it's somebody who knows her well enough to have a motive, and it's gotta be somebody reasonably close.”

“But--”

Lucas pointed a finger at him. “The fuckin' genealogies.”

HE SPENT AN hour in Homicide, listening to returning cops talk about what they'd found, what looked good. Not much looked good. Lester came back from his talk with Tom Olson. “He says his parents trained her like a dog. That's his word. Like a show dog. Used to drag her all over the country for beauty competitions and youth talent contests and modeling gigs.”

“But
abuse?
”

“He didn't mean sexual abuse, that wasn't part of the deal,” Lester said. “And he doesn't think his parents could have had anything to do with her death. He said they were
living
through her. That they took her life as a kid away from her, and that they were still taking.”

“Did Alie'e fight it?” Lucas asked.

Lester shook his head. “He says no. He said she never knew anything else.”

“Huh. He seemed a little nuts.”

“He's a preacher of some kind,” Lester said. “He says he actually loves his parents, but he just doesn't like them very much.”

 
 
THEN DEL WAS on the phone, and said, “Hold on to your shorts.”

“What happened?”

“Boo McDonald called me. I'm over at his place.” McDonald was a paraplegic who monitored police scanners for a half-dozen TV and radio stations, and sometimes back-fed information to the cops. “He's been cruising the Internet, searching under ‘Alie'e.' There's a story out, from here in the Cities, called ‘Muff-Divers' Ball Goes Homicidal.' Guess what it's about.”

“Muff-Divers' Ball?” Lucas repeated.

Lester's eyebrows went up. “That doesn't sound good.”

Del was still talking. “Yeah. This is an online rock 'n' roll rag called
Spittle.
And they got some detail. It's gotta come out of the department.”

“How bad?”

“Well, see, the rag says it's semidocumentary, which means they make up a lot of stuff. You know, to enhance the reality of the moment.”

“Enhance?”

“Let me read a part. Move over, Boo.” Lucas could hear them clunking around for a moment, then Del read, “Alie'e stretched back toward the brass bars at the head of the bed and grasped them in her hands, holding on tight as the waves of pleasure rippled through her lean, taut body. Jael's head bobbed between her thighs, her long pink tongue parting Alie'e's glistening labia, finding at last that little man in the canoe, the center of Alie'e's heat and being. . . .”

“Ah, fuck me,” Lucas said. Then he laughed. “You'd sound like a porno flick if you had somebody playing a saxophone behind you.”

“Probably will be, sooner or later—a movie, not a saxophone. I called the kid at
Spittle
and asked where he got this shit. He told me he wouldn't talk because of First Amendment considerations. But he said that he had interviews lined up with Channels Three and Four and Eleven.”

“An asshole,” Lucas suggested.

“Actually, I kinda liked him. Reminded me of myself when I was his age. I tried a little threat, but he told me he was a minor and I could go fuck myself.”

“So what'd you say?”

“What could I say? I said, ‘The bed wasn't brass, you little prick.'”

“How old is he?”

“Sixteen,” Del said.

“So we go fuck ourselves. Anyway, the lesbian thing is out.”

“It's out. Another ring in the circus.”

 
 
LUCAS CALLED ROSE Marie to warn her, and when he got off the phone, walked down to his office and a silent space, kicked back in his chair, and stared at the ceiling.

His ceiling was dirtier than it should be.

That's all he got. The case had a bad feel to it: too many suspects, and not enough serious possibilities. Clean murders were the hardest to solve: somebody's killed, everybody denies everything. There were a half-dozen killers walking around the Twin Cities who'd never been touched; the cops knew everything about the murders, without any proof. Husbands killing wives, mostly. Whack the old lady on the head, throw the pipe in the river, go back home and find the body.

What can you do?

He was mulling it over when the phone rang again. More bad news?

 
 
NO. CATRIN.

“Lucas. I've been thinking about you all morning,” she said. “God, it was good to see you. I've been thinking about the U—Do you remember Lanny Morton? Do you know what happened to him?”

“Yeah, as a matter of fact,” Lucas said, getting comfortable. “He moved to L.A. to get involved in film, and got into real estate instead. He was pretty rich the last time I saw him; he was on his fourth wife.”

“Fourth? What happened to Virginia?”

Lucas hunched forward in his chair. “Virginia died. Didn't you know that? Jeez, it was only maybe five years after we graduated. She had a heart attack one day on the Venice Beach. She was, like, twenty-eight.”

“Oh, my God. Do you remember that football game with all the mums, everybody had to buy his girlfriend a mum--”