John Sandford - Wicked Prey

"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.