"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 toprobably 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."
Chapter 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 generalyou never wanted to stand between the attorney general and a TV camerawould 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, andsomebody 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 said "Cairns 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 roomyou'll see them on your left when you go through the door."