As far as he was concerned, dopers were crap, and if they died, well, that's what dopers did. That Alie'e was famous cut no ice with Lucas. Her fame was entirely ephemeral, not the result of hard work, or intellectual or moral superiority, but simply a by-product of her appearance.
He felt no impulse to revenge; he did feel the first tingles of the hunt. That was something else altogether. That had nothing to do with Alie'e, but was purely between his guys and the other guys.
Then he saw, in his mind's eye, the image of Catrin as a young woman. Man, the last time he saw her
Lucas's eyes were closed, and the corners of his mouth turned up. A small smile, and not a particularly attractive one. Feeling a little wasted; feeling some pressure from the politicals; feeling a killer out there, somewhere, maybe running, maybe not. And a woman on the mind, somebody to wonder about.
Thiswas how life was supposed to be. Propped up in a chair, wishing you still smoked, worried about twenty-four things at the same time. Not that laid-back, going nowhere slowly feeling that prosperous, rich-guy, hand-shaking shit.
Likethis.
He was sleeping like a baby when the phone rang.
Chapter 5
Dark. Bad taste. Lucas pushed himself up in the chair, the phone still ringing. Confused for a moment, he realized he was in his office, that he'd dozed off. He sighed and fumbled for the phone. "Yeah?"
Sloan: "I got this Amnon kid coming down here. And his sister, uh, Jail, however you pronounce it. Ya-el, whatever."
"Yeah. Jael." Lucas rubbed his eyes, held on to the phone and stumbled to the light switch, and then looked at his watch. Seven-fifteen. "When are they due in?"
"Amnon's in St. Paul. He said he was in the middle of something, but he could leave there in ten minutes or so. He ought to be here in a half an hour. The sister said she'd be here about nine. She sounded pretty freaked out. I could hear somebody crying in the background. Anyway, you said you might want to sit in."
"Yeah, I would. Are they bringing lawyers?"
"I don't know. I do know that they moved Maison to the ME's, and he was coming in to take a look. I'm going over."
"Wait for meI'll walk along."
The ME was a middle-sized man with long graying hair tied in a neat ponytail, gold-rimmed glasses, and a distracted air. They talked in his office, a routine government cubicle with no bodies in sight. "I've taken a preliminary look, is all I've donewe'll get right on the full autopsy. I'll do it myself. We'll start getting some chemistry back by late afternoon. But I can tell you three things," he said. "Your guys told me that she was strangled, and I can confirm that that's almost certainly the case. This wasn't accidental sexual asphyxiation or anything like that. Her hyoid bone's broken, and that takes direct pressure, probably with the thumbs, from a pair of strong hands."
"A man, then," Sloan said.
Lucas frowned. "Why wouldn't it be?"
"There are some rumors that she swung the other way," Sloan said. "Really, that she swung both ways, but recently, mostly with women."
The ME shook his head. "I can't tell you that it was a man, for sure. Just that it was somebody with strong hands. The second thing is this: The crime-scene people say that her condition suggested sexual activity before her death. And I can tell you that shedid engage in sexual activity, not long before her death, but at leastsome time before. An hour, maybe as many as two hours. There are two or three small scratches and some light bruising next to her vulva. Fingernails, I think, just enough to draw a little bloodbut the bruises had time to develop before she was killed. And it appearsI'll tell you for sure after the autopsythat while there is light bruising suggestive of rough sexual play, she was not fully penetrated. Not by a penis, anyway. It appears that the sexual play was primarily manual and oral. There's no semen."
Lucas looked at Sloan, who asked, "Is that two things or three things?"
"Two things," the ME said.
"What's the third thing?" Lucas said.
"There are no defensive wounds. No other bruises, no indications of a struggle, no sign that the killer had to fight to hold his grip. She didn't scratch himher fingernails are clean. I couldn't even find any signs that she thrashed around. She just let herself go. For whoever did it, she was an easy kill."
"Dope," Sloan said. "She might not even have known she was dying."
"Oh, yeah, that's a fourth thing," the ME said. "Thatis a needle stick on her arm, and there are more between her toes. She was taking a lot of sticks."
"An addict?"
"Tell you later. None of this is final. I'll have some definitive stuff this afternoon."
Lucas stopped at the chief's office, gave her a quick capsule of what the ME had said, She made a few notes and said, "So it reallycould be drug-related."
"Yeah. Maybe evenprobably."
"We got half an hour before the press conference," she said. "I've promised everybody that you'll drag the killer in and hurl him to the floor in front of the microphones."
"Or her," Lucas said.
"Yeah?"
"Maybe."
The chief turned to her window, squinted out at the empty sidewalk, then shook her head. "Nope. It's a man. A woman didn't kill Alie'e Maison."
"You're sure?"
"Yup. And seriously, Lucas"
"Mmmm?"
"We'd look really good if we caught this guy quick."
The chief's secretary stuck her head in. "Lucas, Sloan says a Mr. Plain is here."
"Gotta go," Lucas said. "Good luck with the movie people."
Sloan was waiting in the back of the Homicide office, talking with a tall dark-haired man with black eyes, who might have been called slender except that he had a square-shouldered heft that made him too tough for the word; he could have played a dissolute biker in a rock 'n' roll movie. He was wearing a black leather jacket, black slacks, and a plain black T-shirt. Another man, fleshy, brown-haired, freckled, wearing a Star Wars Crew baseball hat and a single silver earring, sat sideways in a hard-back chair a few feet away.
Sloan saw Lucas coming and said, "Chief Davenport, this is Amnon Plain. He was at the party last night and agreed to come to talk with us."
The dark-haired man nodded at Lucas and the brown-haired man said, "Get a lawyer, dude."
Plain asked Lucas, "Do I need one? A lawyer?"
Lucas shrugged. "I don't know. Did you kill Alie'e?"
"No." Nothing more; no explanation of why he wouldn't have, or couldn't have, or a protest at the question.
Lucas said, "If you've got a simple and convincing story, then there shouldn't be a problem. If there are ambiguities to your statement then maybe you ought to get a lawyer."
Plain looked at the brown-haired man, who said, "Do what the dude says. Get a lawyer."
Plain looked back at Lucas, then at Sloan, then back to Lucas, and said, "Fuck a lawyer. But I want to make my own tape of the statement. I brought a recorder."
"No problem," Lucas said.
Plain asked if the brown-haired man could come along, and Lucas, looked at Sloan, who shrugged. "I'd rather not"
"Get a lawyer," said the brown-haired man.
" but if he doesn't get involved" Sloan continued. "Come on along," Lucas said.
They took the statement in an interview room, with three tape recorders on the table: two police recorders, backing each other up, and Plains hand-sized Sony.
Sloan had gone into good-cop mode, and said, pleasantly, "If you'll just tell us where you were and what you did, and who you saw last night."
Plain dipped into a jacket pocket and took out an orange-cove red notebook and flipped it open. "I got to the party a little after ten o'clockas close as I can put it, about ten minutes after ten. Before that, starting at about eight o'clock, I'd been at the New French Cafe with friends. The friends were"
He listed the friends. In the next five minutes, he gave a nearly minute-by-minute account of his evening, with each friend he encountered along the way.