Wicked Prey (12 page)

Lucas watched Wilson as he talked on the phone. He was a small man with a button nose and tidy bow lips, dressed in a hospital gown. He had double black eyes, an aluminum brace on his nose, held in place with tape, a scrape on one cheek that might have been made by the heel of a shoe, and a bandaged ear. A lunch tray sat on a pull-out table, with a piece of white-bread sandwich crust, and a cup of brown stuff which might have been pudding.

Jones, not wanting to interrupt the phone conversation, leaned to Lucas and nodded at the woman and said quietly, “Miz Johnson.”

Wilson said, “Yeah, yeah. Get back to ya on that. Talk to ya, man,” and hung up and looked at Jones and asked, “You get them?”

“Not yet.” Jones turned a hand to Lucas and said, “This is Lucas Davenport, he’s an agent with the state Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. He’s going to be working the case along with me.”

Wilson said to Lucas, “You know Neil Mitford.”

Lucas nodded: “Yeah.”

“They told me you’d be coming along,” Wilson said. “What do you think? Full-court press, or piss on the fire and go on home?”

“Well,
we’re
going to push it,” Lucas said.

“Lucas thinks we might have a line on the robbers,” Jones said. “Not that we’ll get back your four hundred dollars, but it’d be nice to get them off the street.”

“You’ve
got
to get them off the street,” the woman said. She hunched forward, her elbows on her thighs, her hands clasped, twisting. “They’re
animals.
”

“Lori’s still pretty shook up,” Wilson said.

“If they . . . if they . . .” she stuttered. “I mean, if they’d had me in a place . . .”

“The guy was pretty brutal, pretty . . . sexual,” Wilson said.

“There’s therapy . . .” Lucas began, but the woman waved him off.

“I’m scared. And appalled. What kind of place is this?” she asked.

“Pretty quiet, for the most part,” Lucas said. “These guys weren’t off the street: they came right at you. They had some intelligence, they had intelligence on the other man they hit . . .”

“Spellman,” Wilson said.

Lucas nodded. “In any case, they weren’t from here. They’re from Alabama, we think.”

“Weird thing, for four hundred dollars,” Jones said, and Lucas looked at him and gave a tight shake of his head.

“Don’t shake me off, man,” Jones said, irritably.

Wilson picked it up and said to Johnson, “Maybe head on home, when we get out of here.”

“Everybody slow down,” Lucas said. To Wilson: “I was told that one of the guys was black, another one was white, and the third you don’t know.”

“Yeah, but I couldn’t identify any of them, and that’s the truth,” Wilson said. “I sorta saw the black guy from the peephole, when he was holding the FedEx envelope, but I mostly saw his uniform and the FedEx. When they kicked open the door, he already had his mask back on. I couldn’t pick him out of a two-man lineup.”

Lucas said, “And you only know about the white guy because you saw his arms.”

“Just his wrists,” Johnson said. “He had swastikas tattooed on his wrists, just where a watch would be. They were even tattooed to look like a watch. A swastika in a circle, with a little tattooed band going around his wrists.”

“I didn’t see that,” Wilson said.

Jones said to Lucas, “We’re going through all the tattoo registries, haven’t found anything like that. Nothing at all.”

“I saw what I saw,” Johnson said.

“I believe you,” Lucas said. “Though it’s kind of weird, a Nazi guy with a black partner . . . what about the third guy?”

“I think the third guy was white, too,” Wilson said. “I can’t tell you why, he was completely covered up.”

“I think so, too,” Johnson said. “You couldn’t see their eyes very well, but I think his might have been blue or green—light-colored.”

“Tall,” Lucas asked.

“Yes. Really tall, the guy we couldn’t see. The other two were big guys, over six feet, but the one guy was really tall.”

Cohn, Lucas thought.

* * *

LUCAS WALKED them back through the entry and the robbery, the beating, the departure, with the unknown swastika man hanging on for five minutes, apparently while the other two robbed Spellman. “He just
hovered
over me,” Johnson said. “I thought he might, you know, force himself on me.”

“But all he did was talk?”

“He
ripped
my blouse off, almost!”

“But he didn’t unzip himself or expose himself in any way?” Lucas asked.

“No, but . . . What are you saying?”

“He was intimidating you to keep you quiet,” Lucas said. “There was never any intention of raping you.”

“You weren’t even there!” she blurted.

“I’m not saying that he wouldn’t rape you, under other circumstances. Under
these
circumstances, he didn’t have the time. He might have strangled you, or beaten you to death, but raping you would have taken too long and would have left DNA behind. These guys were too professional to do that—to leave the DNA. And Mr. Wilson, here, you say the attack was brutal, but here you are, sitting up and you just ate lunch. If they’d been serious about beating you, you’d be getting fed through a tube. They weren’t taking any chances of actually killing you. If they’d killed you, then they would have gotten a lot of attention. As it is, a four-hundred-dollar robbery . . .” Lucas shrugged.

After a moment, Wilson said, “I sort of wondered about that. When they were beating me, I was scared, but it didn’t hurt too bad, except for the nose. The nose hurt like hell—still does. I even thought about it at the time; it was like they were pulling their punches.”

“Pretty interesting,” Lucas said.

“If they weren’t gonna hurt me, why even bother pretending?” Wilson asked.

“To intimidate you, so one guy could control you while the others went down to rob Spellman. Another thing—how many people have you told about this?”

“I don’t know—a few.”

“Those people probably told a few more, and all of those people probably told a few, so now it’s all over the place that you got brutally beat up and robbed and Miz Johnson almost got raped,” Lucas said. “If they’re going after somebody else, somebody who might have heard about this, they’ve prepared the way.”

“That’s awful,” Johnson said.

“Yeah, it is,” Lucas said. “It’s cold and calculated. On the bright side, you’re both still alive and nobody got raped.”

BART SPELLMAN was sitting in the High Hat bar, drinking a soda water with a slice of lemon, reading the Sunday funnies from the
Star Tribune
. He saw Jones coming and folded the paper and asked, “Get them?”

Jones said, “No,” and “This is Lucas Davenport.”

He made the introductions and Lucas and Jones got Diet Pepsis because the High Hat didn’t sell Coke products, and Spellman lifted a corner of the gauze pad on his eye. He had a black eye the size of a child’s hand, with a nasty cut held together with a dozen stitches. Lucas winced and said, “Got whacked pretty good.”

“Not like Wilson . . . bet old Jackie ran his mouth at them,” Spellman said. “I fell on the floor and rolled around and moaned and let them see the blood and they left me alone.”

“Been robbed before?” Lucas asked.

Spellman spit an ice cube back into his drink and nodded. “Once. In Washington. Beat the shit out of me, got three hundred dollars and my shoes.”

“Your shoes,” Jones said.

“Yeah. Alligator driving slippers from Italy. Last time I wore alligator shoes in Washington.”

The attack on Spellman was virtually identical to the one on Wilson and Johnson: violent, fast, in-and-out. Hotel uniform and FedEx package. Spellman said that one man was black and one was white, but he had no further details. “I spent most of my time on the floor with my hands over my eyes,” he said.

Lucas thanked him when they were done, and he and Jones walked back to their cars.

“Annoys the hell out of me that they won’t tell us about the money,” Jones said.

“Self-incrimination,” Lucas said.

“I know. Still pisses me off. You gonna send those pictures to me?”

“Soon as I get back to the office.”

* * *

LETTY.

The Channel Three newsroom was a long, narrow space divided into hip-high gray cubicles, each with a desk, file cabinet, and computer, some neat, some a garbage dump of notebooks and PR releases.

Letty didn’t have her own desk, but Jennifer Carey, her mentor, not only had an office, but the office had a door, a sign of status. Carey wasn’t in yet—there was hardly anybody around, early on a Sunday morning, even with the convention in town—so Letty sat at Carey’s desk and typed in her password and went to the DMV site and entered the license-plate number she’d gotten from the van the afternoon before.

The owner was listed as Randy Whitcomb, and Whitcomb had an address on St. Paul’s east side, off Seventh Street. She clicked off the DMV and ran the address through Google Maps, came up with an exact location, and printed it out. She didn’t know the area, but it’d be easy enough to get to.

Then she switched to the Channel Three library and did a search, not expecting much. Whitcomb’s name popped right up, and another name: Lucas Davenport.

Into it now, she started pulling up the archives, then went out to the
Star Tribune
library where she found much more: Lucas had once beaten Randy Whitcomb so badly that he’d been forced to resign from the Minneapolis police force. The beating came after Whitcomb had church-keyed one of Lucas’s informants, and an editorial on the fight suggested that Lucas might even have been charged with a crime except that witnesses characterized the encounter as an attempted arrest and resisting-arrest, and because the church-keyed woman was black, and an “after” photograph had been circulated through Minneapolis’s black areas by the police union.

So he’d walked, but had been out of law enforcement for a while—making a lot of money while he was out—until he slipped back in with a political appointment.

Letty went into the files for more on Whitcomb. After the beating by Davenport, Whitcomb had been sentenced to two years in prison for the church-key attack, but had gotten out in thirteen months. He’d been arrested once more for soliciting for prostitution, and fined; and then, a couple of years later, during an investigation of a serial killer, he’d been involved in a shootout that left him paralyzed. Lucas had been at the shootout but hadn’t done any shooting.

In that case, Whitcomb had later gone to prison for perjury and obstruction of justice. He’d lied at a preliminary hearing, which resulted in the release on bond of the murder suspect, and
that
resulted in the suspect’s murder. For the total sum of crime and effects, he’d drawn a six-year term. He’d lied, the
Star Tribune
’s report said, because he hated Lucas, and blamed Lucas for his paralysis.

The six-year term wasn’t up, and why he was out, Letty couldn’t discover in any of the newspaper records—probably paroled, or maybe because of some medically related problem, but whatever it was, he hadn’t escaped.
That
would have been in the papers.

Letty kicked back from the desk and thought it over. Randy Whitcomb was a pimp, who apparently hated Lucas, and now was tracking her, and making nice. He had something on his mind.

The information was like a winter wind blowing on her face. She turned into the cold, and her nose quivered, like a hunter’s.

* * *

 

LUCAS SENT the New York photos to Jones, and told Carol, his secretary, who was pleased to be working her second straight day of overtime, to put together a list of hotels and motels and to figure out a distribution scheme, so he wouldn’t have to hit all the hotels himself. Then he called Lily Rothenburg at her home in Manhattan.

“What’d you get?” she asked, when she picked up the phone.

“Something interesting. We had a couple of guys hit for large amounts of cash money last night . . .”

He told her the story, and when he was done, she said, “Lucas, that’s them. The intelligence and the coordination are right. In the other jobs that the feds put them on, the intelligence was impeccable. They always hit at the moment when they’d get the most money and there was the least chance of getting caught. The coordination, the timing, the intimidation—it’s all them. Damnit, I wish I could be out there.”

“We’re taking the photographs around to every hotel and motel in town. There’s no reason for them to know we’re coming, so we’ve got a chance,” Lucas said.

“I hope they didn’t pull out after last night—but I don’t think that’s enough money for Cohn. He needs to take out three or four million for himself, so he’s probably got to take down ten, when you count the shares going to the gang. I don’t think he’ll leave any easy money on the table.”

“Well, we could put him on CNN,” Lucas suggested. “If we can’t get him any other way.”