Read Easy Prey for Free Online

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.”
    “But not too hard. You can see her feet.”
    “But if you just poked your head in, from the door, you probably wouldn’t.”
    “Who found her?” Lucas asked.
    “One of the people at the party.” He looked at a notebook. “A woman named Rowena Cooper. Cooper knew Maison was back here, supposedly sleeping, and hadn’t come out. She went back to see if she was awake. She says she opened the door but couldn’t see anything, so she turned on the lights. She was just turning around to go back out when she saw the underpants. She went over to pick them up, and she saw the feet. Started screaming.”
    “Where’s Cooper now?”
    The cop tipped his head toward the other end of the house. “The library. We called Sloan, he’s coming in to talk to her.”
    “Good.” Sloan was the best interrogator in the department. Lucas took a last look around the room. The bedspreads coordinated with the window treatments and the carpet. He asked, “The windows were locked?”
    “In this room, yeah. But we got an open window down the hall,” one of the cops said.
    “Let me see.”
    “Check this first,” the cop said. He leaned forward, hovering an index finger over the inside of Alie’e’s left elbow.
    Lucas would have known what that meant even if he couldn’t see the BB-sized bruise. A needle user. He sighed, nodded at the cop, said, “Swanson,” and stepped back into the hallway. Swanson was a step behind.
    “Look, you know what’s gonna happen, so we’ve got to nail everything down,” Lucas said. “Everything. I want everything sampled, swept, vacuumed. I want every test there is, on both women. I want interviews with everyone at the party—ask everybody for a list of names, and make sure you get every goddamn last one.”
    “Sure.”
    “Who takes over when you get off?”
    “I think . . . Thompson.”
    “Brief him. Do everything. We’ll pay for every bit of science anybody can think of.” He looked back at the room. “Did you look at her fingernails?”
    “Yeah. They’re clean. We’ll get her vagina swabbed and get a rush on the semen.”
    “And blood, we need blood right away. I want to know what kind of shit she was shooting.”
    “Heroin.”
    “Yeah, I know, but I wanna know. ”
    “You gonna call Del?”
    “In a minute.”
    “There’s a phone in the office. I was keeping it clear for incomings,” Swanson said.
    “Show me the unlocked window. . . . This place doesn’t look like the windows should be unlocked.”
    “Hanson says they never are,” Swanson said. “But she got them washed a couple of weeks ago, and they were all opened then—they’re some kind of tilt thing, so you can wash both sides from the inside.”
    “I dunno.”
    “Yeah, well, the window could have been unlocked then. Hanson says she never went around and checked them. She assumed they were all locked.”
    The unlocked window was in another guest room, one door down the hall; this room had a different set of coordinated bedspreads, window treatments, and carpet. Lucas looked out through the window glass. Nothing but lawn and shrubs. “Any muddy footprints outside the window, with a unique brand-logo impressed in the mud?”
    “No fuckin’ mud. It ain’t rained in two weeks.”
    “I was joking,” Lucas said.
    “I wasn’t. I went out and looked,” Swanson said. “The grass ain’t even crinkled.”
    “All right. Where’s that phone?”
    Hanson’s home office was a small, purpose-built cubicle with cherry-wood shelves at one end for phone books, references, and a compact stereo. The cherry desk had four drawers, filing drawers to the left, envelope drawers to the right. A wooden Rolodex sat on the right side of the desk, a telephone on the left. A Dell