Easy Prey Read Online Free PDF Page B

expensive, a hotel where poised young blond women in pearl-gray suits took the guests to their suites, while bellhops in red-and-black monkey suits toted the luggage and kept their mouths shut.
    Lucas squatted beside the body; one knee cracked. “Know what did it?” Lucas asked the AME.
    The AME was older, like Swanson, with the same tired hound-dog eyes. He had a pack of Marlboros in his shirt pocket, and a black medical bag, which was open on the rug behind him. “I think her skull is cracked,” he said. “That’s the only trauma I can find, but that was probably enough. There’s a cleft, looks like a V-shaped cleft. She could have been hit by something with a narrow edge on it, a board, maybe the end of a cane—a walking stick. Not a pipe, nothing round.”
    “A cane? Did somebody have a cane?” Lucas asked, looking up at Swanson. Swanson shrugged.
    “But could have been a doorjamb, or something like that,” the AME continued. “Here . . .” He picked up the woman’s head, gently, as though he might have had a daughter of his own, and turned it. A small indentation marked the back of the woman’s head, near the top; there was a smear of blood, enough to show the line of the injury.
    “We think she might have walked in on the murder, by accident, and the killer went after her. Hit her with anything he had,” Swanson said. “Maybe banged her head against the wall.”
    “Why would he stuff her in the closet?” Lucas objected, but the AME interrupted: “Look at this.”
    “What?”
    He was peering closely at the woman’s scalp, then reached back, felt in his bag, and took out a hand lens. “I think, uh, it looks like a little flake of paint in her hair. . . .” He looked up at Swanson. “Don’t let anybody touch the doorjambs or any of the wooden trim. Anywhere she could whack her head. You might find an impact mark and maybe a hair or two.” That could make the difference between murder and manslaughter, or even an accident.
    “All right,” Swanson said. He looked up and down the hall at all the doorjambs; there seemed to be dozens.
    Lucas went back to his first thought. “Why couldn’t this one have been killed first, and then--”
    “’Cause Maison was strangled and she wasn’t wearing any underpants, and the condition of her vulva and her pubic hair would suggest that she’d very recently been engaged in sex,” Swanson said. “If somebody had killed Lansing first, we thought it was pretty unlikely that he’d stop off to bang Maison and then strangle her.”
    “Okay.” Made sense.
    “She’s got something written on her wrist in ballpoint, but it’s kinda smeared, so it probably didn’t happen right at the time she was killed,” the AME said. He turned a wrist, and Lucas looked at the smear of blue ink.
    “Looks like . . . Ella? Fella? Della?”
    “Probably not fella,” Swanson said. “Why would anybody write ‘fella’ on their wrist?”
    “Could be a name,” the AME suggested.
    “Strange name,” Swanson said.
    “See what you can do to bring it up,” Lucas said. “Get some photos over to homicide.”
    “Okay.”
    Lucas stood. “Let’s see the other one.”
    The door to the guest bedroom was another six feet down the hall, and Lucas stepped over Lansing’s body, Swanson following along behind. Two crime-scene guys stepped out of the room just as Lucas came up. “Video,” one of them said. “Crying goddamned shame,” said the other.
    Inside, a photographer lit up, and began taping the crime scene, while a second guy maneuvered a light. All Lucas could see of Alie’e Maison was one bare foot, sticking out from behind the bed; the body was lodged in the space between the bed and the wall.
    He waited until the video guy was finished, then looked over the edge of the bed. Maison was lying faceup, one hand over her head, one trapped beneath her back. Her filmy green dress had been pulled up under her arms, exposing her body from the navel down. Her hips were canted