Easy Prey by John Sandford Page A

everybody’s life. . . .
    Sandy Lansing was panicking, she was going to run. He’d had to talk with her, to discipline her: You did not run when there was business to be done. He’d reached out, intending to push her against the wall. Somehow the pit of his palm had landed under her chin, and when he pushed, her head snapped back, into a molding around a door. He’d actually felt her skull crack, the vibration through the heel of his hand—like feeling a raw egg crack on the edge of a china cup.
    Her eyes had gone up, and she’d slipped down the wall, and he’d glanced back up the hallway toward the party. If the door opened . . . “Get up,” he said. “Come on, get the fuck up.”
    He’d taken her arm and pulled, but her arm was deathly slack. And after a minute, he’d believed. He’d looked for a pulse, tried to find a heartbeat, but could find neither. He’d been seized by fear: Christ, she was dead. He crouched over the body, like a jackal over a baked ham, looking from her face to the still-closed door. He hadn’t meant to kill her.
    But nobody knew. . . .
    The body was next to a door. He pulled the door open: a closet, with a rack of cold-weather jackets and coats. He lifted her, her heels dragging, and shoved her into the closet. She wouldn’t fit; she kept slumping, and she had to be upright to fit. He was holding her by the throat with one hand, trying to get the door shut, when a voice said from a few inches behind his ear, “What are you doing ?”
    He’d almost had a heart attack. He turned and saw the green eyes; and the closet door finally clicked shut. Alie’e asked again, “Why did you put her in the closet?”
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THE SECOND MAN heard about Alie’e’s death from his dashboard radio. At first, he thought he’d misheard; and then it occurred to him that he was crazy—that he wasn’t hearing this at all. But the radio kept talking, talking, talking . . . and when he changed stations they were talking, talking . . .
    Alie’e this, Alie’e that.
    Alie’e with lesbians.
    Alie’e nude in a photo shoot.
    Alie’e dead.
    The second man swerved to the side of the road, pulled on the park brake, put his head on the steering wheel, and wept. Couldn’t stop: his shoulders shaking, his mouth open, breathing in stuttering gasps.
    After a long five minutes, he wiped his eyes on his shirtsleeve, turned, found a clipboard in the back, clipped in a piece of notepaper.
    He wrote: Who did this? And drew a line under it.
    And under that, he wrote the first name.
    There would, he thought, be quite a few names before he finished the list.

8
    ON THE WAY back to police headquarters, Lucas took out his cell phone, thumbed it on, and called Rose Marie Roux on her command line. She picked up and Lucas said, “We got the media fixed. The raid turned up a ton of grass, and a bunch of coke and heroin. I think they all bought it.”
    â€œGood. Now we need a second act.”
    â€œIt’s like managing the media has gotten more important than finding the killer.”
    Roux said, “You know the truth about that, Lucas. We’ll either get the killer or we won’t, no matter what the media does. But the media can kill us. And I don’t have anything else I’d rather be doing right now.”
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FOR THE REST of the day, Lucas hung around the interrogation rooms, listening in. One item came up early—Alie’e didn’t have any dope in her possession, or any cooking equipment for the heroin, or a syringe or needles. Somebody else put the dope on her, but nobody at the party was admitting to the use of dope, and nobody knew anybody else who was using.
    A question they asked everyone involved the scribble on Sandy Lansing’s wrist. They got the answer to that in the early afternoon.
    â€œA woman named Pella,” Swanson told Lucas. “She’s going to