"No, no, no. I ain't going on TV," Del said. "I gotta stay out of this."

"I'll do what I can, but if the word leaks, we might need a major plane crash. And you know how the goddamn department leaks."

"Plane crash wouldn't do it," Del said gloomily, looking at the lights down the street. "Not with Alie'e Maison dead. Beautiful, rich, famous, and strangled. It's a CNN wet dream. They're gonna run down everybody who had anything to do with her. Once my cat gets outa the bag shit. We got to find this guy." He nodded toward the house, meaning the killer. "We got to find him quick."

Chapter 4

Rose Marie Roux had lost thirty pounds on a new all-protein diet and now was thinking about a face-lift. "Just a couple of snips, to pull me up around the sides," she told Lucas. Rose Marie was the chief of police. She put her fingertips on her face just below her cheekbones and pushed the skin back until it began pulling on her lips. The mayor stepped into her office, looked at her and said, "What?"

She let go of the skin, and her face slid back to its usual shape. "Face-lift," Lucas said. He yawned; he liked late nights, but not early mornings.

"I been thinking about getting some hair," the mayor said. He was balding, but still had the remnants of a hairline. "Think anyone would notice?"

"They look like little bushes planted into the side of a grassy hill, the hair plugs do," Rose Marie said. "You don't ever want anybody on a staircase above you, looking down."

"Ah, that's the old-style plugs," the mayor said. "I'm thinking about micro-implantsthey're supposed to be really natural." They chatted about plastic surgery and micro-implants for a few minutes, aging politicians doing what they did bestschmoozinguntil Lucas yawned again. The mayor stopped the chitchat in the middle of a sentence and asked, "How dead is she?"

"Pretty dead," Lucas said, sitting up. "Strangled. Maybe raped. Did Rose Marie tell you about the second woman?"

The mayor's head went back, and he gave Lucas a startled-deer look, as much as a short, barrel-chested, balding, former personal-injury attorney can have a startled-deer look. "A second woman?"

He turned to Rose Marie, who shrugged and said, "Not my fault. A second body turned up, stuffed in a closet. I just found out."

"Another model?" Swiveling to Lucas.

"No," Lucas said. He gave the mayor a short rundown on the double murder. "Your friend Sallance Hanson says if we give her any trouble, she's gonna call you."

"Fuck her," the mayor said. "Chain-whip her if you want."

"Really?" Rose Marie's eyebrows went up.

"She gave me two hundred bucks," the mayor said. "For that much, she gets a signed photograph. I sure as shit don't run interference on a murder." He looked back at Lucas. "Do we have any leads?"

"Probably, but not that I know of," Lucas said. "We're still processing the scene. Maison had been putting some dope in her arm, heroin probably. The other woman was red around the nose, like she'd seen a lot of coke."

"Chamber of Commerce is gonna love that, coke and heroin," the mayor said. "What do we tell the movie people?" The movie people were television reporters.

"We tell them it's probably a dope-related murder," Lucas said.

The mayor frowned. "Dope-related sounds bad."

"Everythingsounds bad," Lucas said. "But saying that it's dope makes it simple to understand. And that's what we need. Simple. Boring. Understandable. Nothing exotic. No orgies, no weird sex, no big money or jealous lovers, no scandal. Just a bad guy somewhere. And the movie people'll believe heroin. There's so much heroin in the fashion business that it was alook not very long ago. All the models had this fagged-out doper look. It won't surprise anybody."

"We don't want it to drag out: We don't want it to become some culture thing for the movie intellectuals to get onto."

"That's what I'm saying," Lucas said. "We don't want anything mysterious or exotic. A dope-related killing fits."

"Tell him about the window," Rose Marie said.

"Window?"

"A bedroom down from the murder roomthe room where Maison's body was, if that was the murder room, and it probably washad an unlocked window. Somebody could have gone out that way. Or, more to the point, might have come in. A cat burglar."

"With all the people in there? There must've been lights."

"Lights seem to pull cat burglars in," Lucas said. "They get a buzz from going into a house where people are'cause they're nuts. Generally, you get a cat burglar, you get a guy who's gonna start raping the victims. Or killing them. They're thrill freaks."

"Ah, man." The mayor shook his head.

"It's better to stay with the dope story," Lucas said. "If a dealer killed her, or she was killed because of dope, everybody understands. It's a one-time thing and she's partially at fault. If she hadn't been using dope, she'd still be alive. But if it's a cat burglar, then we've got a serial killer on the loose, and the worst kind of serial killerthe kind who'll come creeping into your bedroom and strangle you, even with other people in the house."

"Like one of those horror movies. Halloween, or the one with the guy with the fingers that are knives," Rose Marie said.

"No, no, no, we don't want that," the mayor said, waving off the idea.

"That's what we thought," Rose Marie said wryly.

"So it's dope," the mayor said. "Who's running the show?"

"Frank Lester," said Rose Marie. "Lucas and his group will fit in sideways, like we did before. Everybody's comfortable with that."

"Good. It's Strategic Planning"

"Strategic Studies and Planning," Lucas said. "And I need a woman in the group. Marcy Sherrill wants to come over from Homicide."

Rose Marie shook her head. "Then I got to give Homicide somebody else. Everything is too tight."

"We're paying for ourselves about twenty times over," Lucas said patiently. "And I need a woman if I'm going to operate."

"There's politics"

"Murder is down fourteen percent, and a lot of it's because of my guysthree guys, including mespotting the assholes," Lucas said. "That's politics."

The mayor held up his hands to stop the argument. To Rose Marie he said, "Half the people in Homicide are going to be working on this anyway, so why don't you give him Marcy for the duration of the Maison case? When that's done, well figure something out."

Rose Marie sighed and said, "All right. But I want some more money."

The mayor rolled his eyes, then said, "Yeah, who doesn't?" Then: "You'll do the media?"

Rose Marie nodded. "But you'll have to be there, too, the first time. This is gonna be large, media-wise."

"Who do you think'll come in?"

"Everybody," she said. "Four locals and a freelancer for CNN are already outside the house. All the other networks are on the way. And most of the picture-and-gossip magazines. People. The Star."

"Then we're gonna need something more than just saying it's a 'dope-related killing.' " He looked at Lucas. "Do we have somebody we can throw to them? Some doper asshole they can chase for a couple of days?"

"I can ask," Lucas said.

"Do that. The more they've got to occupy them, the less time they're gonna spend asking why nothing's been done yet." The mayor touched his forehead. "Wish I'd gotten the new hair, though, you know? Like last year."

Rose Marie stretched the skin back from her nose. "Never too late," she said.

The meeting lasted fifteen minutes. As Lucas was leaving, Rose Marie said, "Heyturn on your cell phone, okay? For the duration."

Lucas shrugged noncommittally. On the way back to his office, he poked Del's number on his phones speed-dial. Del was in the middle of the Internal Affairs interview, and when Lucas passed on the mayor's request, he said, "I'll see what we got, as soon as I get out of here."