Free Easy Prey by John Sandford Page A

see. Plain did not hesitate.
    â€œNo. I don’t use any chemicals. I did, for two years, when I was a teenager. I used cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine, ecstasy, LSD, peyote, marijuana, alcohol, nicotine, and a couple of other things. Hypnotics. Quaaludes. I found out that each and every one of them made me stupider than I already was, and I decided I couldn’t afford that. So, eleven years ago, I stopped.”
    â€œAspirin?” Lucas asked. A little sarcasm.
    â€œI still use aspirin and ibuprofen. I’m not a moron.” His tone of voice showed no reaction to the sarcasm, and somehow left Lucas feeling that the sarcasm had been juvenile. Plain was ahead on points.
    â€œSo what happened next?” Sloan asked.
    At about midnight, Plain said, he left the party at Sallance Hanson’s and went back to his studio in St. Paul’s Lowertown with a friend, Sandy Smith, where they met an employee, James Graf, to look at scanned negatives from that morning’s photo shoot. After half an hour of looking at the negs, Smith left for his home while Plain and Graf continued to work with the negatives.
    â€œWhat were the pictures of?” Lucas asked.
    Plain tilted his head. “You don’t know?”
    â€œNo.”
    â€œSome investigation,” he said to the brown-haired man. Then: “I spent all yesterday morning and the early part of the afternoon doing a fashion shoot with Alie’e.”
    â€œDid you have a personal relationship with Alie’e?” Sloan asked.
    â€œWhat do you mean, personal? You mean, was I fucking her?”
    â€œOr anything else,” Lucas said.
    â€œNo. I wasn’t fucking her. I wasn’t interested in her. She was a dummy. She was like a toy that you plugged your dick into. Or, if you were a woman, that you stuck your tongue into. She was interested in feeling good, and that was about it,” he said.
    â€œYour sister was involved with her?” Lucas asked.
    â€œYeah. They were gobbling each other, or whatever women do. Sticking heroin in their arms, putting coke up their noses.”
    Sloan said, “Hmph,” and Lucas asked, “I was talking to some woman who was at the party, and she said you were so jealous of the relationship between Alie’e and your sister that you might kill Jael if you had the chance. Which suggests that Alie’e was more to you than just another model.”
    Plain tipped his head, regarding Lucas with some curiosity, and said, “You’re lying. Nobody told you that. But that’s interesting. You apparently got hold of something, somewhere, and you don’t know quite what it is.”
    â€œGet a lawyer,” his friend said from the corner.
    Lucas grinned involuntarily. He’d been caught—and that made him curious. “Tell me why you think I’m lying.”
    â€œBecause you got it just backwards,” Plain said.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œI wasn’t jealous because my sister took Alie’e away from me. I’m a little jealous—I admit it—because Alie’e took Jael away from me.”
    In the immediate silence, the brown-haired friend said, “Oh shit,” and Lucas and Sloan looked at each other, trying to figure out what Plain had just said. Plain, picking on Sloan because he was the straighter-looking of the two cops, leaned toward him and said, “Yup. I was fucking my sister.”
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“NOW, THAT WAS an interview and a half,” Sloan said when they’d finished and Plain and his friend had gone. They had an hour of tape.
    Lucas rubbed his forehead. “I was feeling almost sympathetic there, toward the end. Two arty parents, rich dipshits, get divorced. Each one takes a kid. The kids don’t see or speak to each other for fifteen years, then they run into each other, virtual strangers, good-looking, one is a model and the other one is working in photography, both running with the same crowd. If they