Easy Prey by John Sandford

it.”
    â€œYou got anyone on there named Amnon? Or Jael?”
    Swanson said, “Yeah, somewhere. I remember the names. They’re brother and sister.” He flipped through his notebook, found the names. “Amnon Plain and a Jael Corbeau. Why?”
    â€œThere’s a rumor that Alie’e jilted Amnon and went off with Jael, and this Amnon guy was pretty pissed about it. So let’s get them downtown.” He looked at Sloan. “Why don’t you fix it? Call me when you get them: I want to sit in.”
    â€œOkay.”
    â€œThose are both Bible names,” Swanson said. “Amnon and Jael.”
    â€œYeah? What’d they do in the Bible?”
    â€œFuck if I know,” Swanson said. “I just remember them from Sunday school.”
    â€œLet’s get them downtown. We can ask them about it,” Lucas said.
    Â 
 
LUCAS LOOKED IN on Rowena Cooper, the woman who’d found Alie’e’s body. Cooper was a thin, morose woman with dark hair and red-rimmed eyes; she was sitting with a chubby baby-sitter cop named Dorothy Shaw. “I just wanted to say hello,” Cooper said. “The last time Alie’e came to town, we went to a movie together. I just wanted to see how she was doing.”
    â€œYou didn’t have a chance to talk to her earlier?” Lucas asked.
    â€œNo, no, I didn’t get here until midnight. She’d already gone back to take her nap by then.”
    She really knew nothing else: She’d hung around the party for better than two hours, mostly because she wanted to talk to Alie’e, if only for a moment. “We shared some concerns about current fashion, and where it’s going. . . .”
    She seemed genuinely upset about the murder, without Hanson’s undertone of excitement. Lucas tried to reassure her, without much luck, and left her with Shaw.
    â€œDel’s on the porch,” Swanson said when Lucas wandered back into the living room.
    Â 
 
DEL HAD TAKEN the time to dress up; he was wearing clean jeans, sneakers without holes, and a gray sweatshirt with the sleeves pulled up over the elbows. He smelled vaguely of musk-scented deodorant, and his long hair was still damp.
    â€œWe’re gonna have to talk to Internal Affairs. You’re gonna have to meet with them,” Lucas said. “Just to keep the record straight.”
    Del nodded. “No problem. I picked up on this party yesterday afternoon, and told Lane where I was going. So I’m covered.”
    â€œGood.” Lane was the other man in Lucas’s two-man Strategic Studies and Planning Group.
    Del said, “But I never told you why I was calling you . . . why I was looking for you. Did anybody tell you about Trick? Anybody call you from downtown?”
    â€œWhat trick?”
    â€œTrick Bentoin. He was at the party last night. He just got back from Panama,” Del said.
    Lucas took a long look at him and finally showed a small smile. “You gotta be bullshitting me.”
    â€œI’m not, man,” Del said, his eyes round. “I talked to him. He thought it was funnier than hell. He hardly ever laughs; he goddamn near fell down in the hallway.”
    â€œAh, fuck.” Then Lucas started to laugh, and a minute later Del joined in. A uniformed cop with a solemn murder-scene face poked his head around the corner, saw who it was, and pulled back.
    â€œThat’s gonna be a little hard to explain,” Lucas said finally.
    Narcotics and Homicide had worked together, with the county attorney’s investigators, for more than four months to build a murder case against Rashid Al-Balah. Al-Balah had killed Trick Bentoin, and had thrown his body in a bog at the Carlos Avery Wildlife Area, the traditional murdered-body-disposal area for the Twin Cities, the state claimed. The case had been a jigsaw puzzle of evidence: weed seeds in the backseat of the Cadillac, identified by a University of Minnesota botanist