Read Online Easy Prey by John Sandford - Free Book Online Page B

he’d dozed off. He sighed and fumbled for the phone. “Yeah?”
    Sloan: “I got this Amnon kid coming down here. And his sister, uh, Jail, however you pronounce it. Ya-el, whatever.”
    â€œYeah. Jael.” Lucas rubbed his eyes, held on to the phone and stumbled to the light switch, and then looked at his watch. Seven-fifteen. “When are they due in?”
    â€œAmnon’s in St. Paul. He said he was in the middle of something, but he could leave there in ten minutes or so. He ought to be here in a half an hour. The sister said she’d be here about nine. She sounded pretty freaked out. I could hear somebody crying in the background. Anyway, you said you might want to sit in.”
    â€œYeah, I would. Are they bringing lawyers?”
    â€œI don’t know. I do know that they moved Maison to the ME’s, and he was coming in to take a look. I’m going over.”
    â€œWait for me—I’ll walk along.”
    Â 
 
THE ME WAS a middle-sized man with long graying hair tied in a neat ponytail, gold-rimmed glasses, and a distracted air. They talked in his office, a routine government cubicle with no bodies in sight. “I’ve taken a preliminary look, is all I’ve done—we’ll get right on the full autopsy. I’ll do it myself. We’ll start getting some chemistry back by late afternoon. But I can tell you three things,” he said. “Your guys told me that she was strangled, and I can confirm that that’s almost certainly the case. This wasn’t accidental sexual asphyxiation or anything like that. Her hyoid bone’s broken, and that takes direct pressure, probably with the thumbs, from a pair of strong hands.”
    â€œA man, then,” Sloan said.
    Lucas frowned. “Why wouldn’t it be?”
    â€œThere are some rumors that she swung the other way,” Sloan said. “Really, that she swung both ways, but recently, mostly with women.”
    The ME shook his head. “I can’t tell you that it was a man, for sure. Just that it was somebody with strong hands. The second thing is this: The crime-scene people say that her condition suggested sexual activity before her death. And I can tell you that she did engage in sexual activity, not long before her death, but at least some time before. An hour, maybe as many as two hours. There are two or three small scratches and some light bruising next to her vulva. Fingernails, I think, just enough to draw a little blood—but the bruises had time to develop before she was killed. And it appears—I’ll tell you for sure after the autopsy—that while there is light bruising suggestive of rough sexual play, she was not fully penetrated. Not by a penis, anyway. It appears that the sexual play was primarily manual and oral. There’s no semen.”
    Lucas looked at Sloan, who asked, “Is that two things or three things?”
    â€œTwo things,” the ME said.
    â€œWhat’s the third thing?” Lucas said.
    â€œThere are no defensive wounds. No other bruises, no indications of a struggle, no sign that the killer had to fight to hold his grip. She didn’t scratch him—her fingernails are clean. I couldn’t even find any signs that she thrashed around. She just . . . let herself go. For whoever did it, she was an easy kill.”
    â€œDope,” Sloan said. “She might not even have known she was dying.”
    â€œOh, yeah, that’s a fourth thing,” the ME said. “That is a needle stick on her arm, and there are more between her toes. She was taking a lot of sticks.”
    â€œAn addict?”
    â€œTell you later. None of this is final. I’ll have some definitive stuff this afternoon.”
    Â 
 
LUCAS STOPPED AT the chief’s office, gave her a quick capsule of what the ME had said. She made a few notes and said, “So it really could be drug-related.”
    â€œYeah. Maybe even probably.