Wicked Prey

Chapter 7

Hennepin General was a rabbit warren, but Jones seemed to know where he was going. Lucas tagged along, stopping only to squirt a handful of alcohol foam onto his palms, because he liked the feel of it. When they got to John Wilson's room, Jones knocked on the door panel and Wilson waved them in, and said into his telephone, "I gotta go-the cops are back ' Maybe, I haven't seen him yet. Conway called this morning ' yeah."

A woman was sitting in the corner of the private room, on a rolling chair. She was conventionally pretty, dark-haired, brown-eyed, probably-not-yet-thirty, but tired, and Lucas could see forty in the wrinkles on her face. She had a bad bruise, as deep as a port-wine stain, on her left cheek.

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."

"I think he's got a way out of the country. Something slick. Something we'd have a hard time stopping. After the killings here, he vanished," she said. "We don't want to lose him again. If you put him on CNN, he'll probably take off."

"All right. Last resort, only," Lucas said.

"Another thing: the Brits take pictures of everything, everywhere-kind of scares me, actually. It's like 1984 over there," Lily said. "Anyway they backtracked him right out of Heathrow and across London to a train station, and then picked him up getting on the train in York."

"York?"

"Yeah. Like in New York. York. It's up north of London somewhere. Small place, a couple hundred thousand, I guess. He rented a house, told people that he was an American engineer named George Mason. He played golf, had a casual relationship with a woman who worked at a PR firm in another town. Harrogate.

Mmm…" Lucas could hear her shuffling through papers. "That's about it. He cleared out at the end of his lease; the owner of the house was sorry to see him go. He was neat, he was quiet, the rent was always paid a few days early."

"How in the hell did he get to York?" Lucas asked.

"That's the thing that makes him so tricky-I think he chose the place at random. For no reason, except that people speak English. Oh, yeah. He took Spanish lessons while he was there, at a local university."

"Spanish lessons."

"He's headed for Mexico or Central America or Chile or Argentina," Lily said. "When he's gone this time, he's gone."

"What about the photography-the British photography?" Lucas asked. "The pictures might be better than the Photoshop stuff you sent me."

"They're not," Lily said. "The film was good enough to track him, but it's kind of grainy black-and-white. I've seen it-our Photoshop stuff is better."

"Well, we'll push it," Lucas said. "I got yanked out of bed by one of the local political hotshots, and he wants this fixed. Quietly."

"I don't care how it's fixed, as long as Cohn's clock is fixed at the same time," she said.

Carol came back with a list of hotels. "I talked to Jones. He'll take care of Hennepin County. I'll e-mail the Cohn photographs to Bloomington, and the sheriffs' departments in Dakota and Washington

County, and across the St. Croix to Hudson and River Falls and Prescott. So, you've got St. Paul."

"Do we actually have people walking them around, or are we dropping them in a black hole?" Lucas asked.

"I've got commitments," Carol said. "I'll call them every hour or so to get reports. Though, there are quite a few cops from the suburbs already here in St. Paul, working the convention."

"Hell, it's one guy walking the papers around…"

"That's what I told them," Carol said. "One guy, no problem. Trouble is, everybody's so short that it is a problem."

Letty had begged a ride to Channel Three from Weather, and Jennifer Carey was supposed to drive her home-but she had experience with local buses, and decided to head back to St. Paul. When she left, producers and cameramen were coming in, gearing up for convention coverage. Some kind of march was scheduled for St. Paul, and a couple of producers were talking about possible trouble in the streets.

She left a note for Carey and caught the 94 bus out of Minneapolis, transferred to the 84 at Midway Center, rode south down Snelling, then caught a 74, which took her to a couple blocks from the house. On the trip across the river, she mulled the problem. Randy Whitcomb had been feuding with Lucas for years, and now he was coming after her.

What did he want? Revenge, most likely. To hurt her, to get at Lucas.

She'd grown up out in the countryside, and had firsthand knowledge of the kind of focused dislike, hatred, disdain, that might lead to violence. Whitcomb blamed Lucas for a beating that put him in the hospital and in jail, and then for a shooting that crippled him.

So what kind of revenge would it be? Well, he'd cut up the face of one of his hookers with a beer-can opener; that seemed like a possibility. Maybe he'd torture and kill her-though how he'd go about that, she didn't know. He was crippled, and during the encounter at the McDonald's, he didn't look especially strong in his upper body; nor did the woman with him look especially competent. Rape? Could a crippled person rape somebody? She didn't know.

Probably planned to trick her somehow. Or maybe he'd have help. From what she'd read, he didn't seem to be a likeable sort, a leader, the kind of person who'd inspire any particular loyalty, in something as desperate as the kidnapping and murder of a cop's kid. Or almost kid, she thought. But, who knows? Maybe he'd met somebody in prison, somebody who also had a grudge against Lucas.

One thing, though, was clear in her mind-if Lucas heard about this, he'd kill Whitcomb. Not theoretically kill, but actually kill. He'd probably do it in a clever way that would be undetectable, unprovable. But there were always accidents. Lucas himself had told her that: that sometimes, the cleverest of crimes was foiled by an unforeseeable accident.

He would take the risk, she thought.

Letty needed a father, and a mother, and when her mother was murdered, Davenport and Weather had been there.

If there was any way she could prevent Lucas from taking the risk by acting against Whitcomb, she'd do it. She had, in fact, in the ugly denouement of the case where she'd met Lucas, shot a cop-actually, she'd shot the same cop on two different occasions-and had never felt the slightest regret. She'd never had a problem being decisive.

She slipped the piece of paper out of her backpack, with Whitcomb's address on it, contemplated it. All right, she thought. Take a look.

Ellen, the housekeeper, was changing sheets when Letty walked through the door; Letty said hello, got a Coke from the refrigerator, put it in her backpack, and went quietly through the house and down the basement stairs. Lucas had a workbench in the basement, and a gun safe. She found the hidden key for the gun safe, unlocked it, dragged out a nylon bag of miscellaneous cop stuff, and took out the switchblade sheath. Lucas never used the knife, as far as she knew, and would never miss it. The sheath was made of black nylon with a safety buckle. She took the knife out of the sheath, put the sheath back, and pressed the button on the knife and felt the satisfying shock of the blade slamming out.

Good. Five inches of sharp steel, with a good point, and, halfway down the razor-sharp blade, two inches of serrations that would cut through the toughest nylon or Kevlar rope. The knife was flat and fairly thin, the handle made of a high-tech black plastic with a metal belt clip. She clipped it inside the waistband of her pants, where it would be handy.

The day was gorgeous, warm, delightful biking.

She got her helmet and bike out of the garage, and headed north to Summit Avenue, then east, planning to cross St. Paul's downtown, only remembering about the convention detours when she got to St. Paul Cathedral and saw a band of protesters marching down the hill toward the downtown. They appeared to be towing a coffin. A veterans-for-peace march: she'd heard a couple of producers talking about it.

She sat at the top of the hill, in the shade of the cathedral, watching, drank a couple ounces of Coke, got out the map and figured out a detour down University Avenue behind the Capitol and Regions Hospital.

A little longer, but not much trouble, riding through an industrial area, across the railroad tracks, up behind Swede Hollow Park. From the map, it looked like Whitcomb's house was right on the edge of the park, but the other side from where she was, so she pedaled down to East Seventh and looked up the hill toward Metro State University.

All right. Here she was. Now what?

She had her hair up under her helmet, and was wearing sunglasses; that was enough of a disguise. Pedaling up the hill, she decided that she'd cruise Whitcomb's place on the downhill. If they spotted her, it'd be an easy run down to Seventh and into downtown, where there'd be lots of cops around as convention security.

She did that, climbing the hill, taking the left on Hope to Margaret, and paused there. She could see the trees from the park behind the houses on Greenbriar, but there must be, she thought, a huge hole behind the houses, because she was looking at treetops.

Needed more scouting; but the house was right there, or should be, about halfway down the street. She got up her guts, and pedaled on down. Before she could spot Whitcomb's number, she saw the van, sitting by the side of the house.

The house was old and decrepit, with peeling paint, a crumbling front porch, a sagging roof, and a front sidewalk of poured concrete slabs that were tilted this way and that. The grass on the postage-stamp lawn had rarely been cut, she thought; it lay flat, like the fescue grass in a cow pasture.

She rolled on by, saw nobody, looked to her left and saw the break in the line of houses. From a block over, she could look between two houses and see the front of Whitcomb's place. She'd heard Lucas and Del and Sloan and Virgil and all the others talk about the boredom of surveillance, and the sometimes spectacular payoffs.

She'd watch for a while, she decided. She could cruise the area around the park, and check the van every few minutes. Get the lay of the land '

A bike path wound down through the park, as it turned out. The place was essentially a hole in the ground, but not just an ordinary hole: it was a huge, spectacular hole, almost like a quarry. She could see houses along the top rim, through breaks in the trees. As a park, there wasn't much, and what there was, was overgrown, weedy. A bum was wandering through, carrying a backpack, watching her curiously, as though she were a strange sight. Maybe she was, she thought.

She pedaled out of the park, around the back, up the hill, and found a spot one block over from Whitcomb's place.

Got lucky. She'd sat there, with her bike, for ten minutes, when Whitcomb's door banged open, and Randy Whitcomb, followed by the woman, rolled down the wooden handicap ramp to the van. They were trailed by a third man, rail-thin, with a scruffy beard.

Whitcomb pointed a remote control at the van, and the side door rolled back, and a ramp unfolded onto the driveway. Whitcomb rolled himself up the ramp, and the woman strapped him in, the straps anchored to the floor. When she was done, the woman yanked on the straps, testing them, then walked around the van and got into the driver's seat, and the second man got in the passenger side.

The van backed out of the driveway, into the street, and turned down the hill. Letty ran parallel, to Seventh Street, saw the van heading into town.

AS a young girl, she'd learned that if she decided to do something, it was best to do it immediately: otherwise, somebody would stop you from doing it, or you'd start thinking too much and chicken out. She'd taught herself to drive when she was eight, bumping around the field behind the house, and though the cops would get pissed when they caught her at it, she'd driven herself all over the county by the time she was eleven.

An old drunk would sometimes lend her his truck in return for a late-night pickup at the town bar; and when her mom got drunk, she'd provided the same service. In her driving years, she'd never had an accident.

Now, as the van dwindled in the distance, she looked back at the house. How quickly could they get back, anyway? With the snarl of traffic in town, with streets blocked by marches '

She turned around and pulled up the hill, pedaling hard, straight up the street to Whitcomb's place, down the side, turned the bike so it was facing out the drive.

The handicapped ramp ended in a newer-looking door with six small panes arranged in a square looking into a mudroom off a kitchen, just like the country farmhouse where she'd grown up. She knocked, loudly, heard nothing. Looked around. She could be seen from the street, but jeez, she was a young girl on a back porch.

Letty knew about burglary from Lucas and Del and Shrake and Jenkins and all the other cops who hung around with Lucas; and from the reporters and producers at the station. She knew you were allowed one loud noise, or two quiet ones '

She took the switchblade out of her waistband, flicked the blade out, took another quick look around, and shoved the blade through the glass next to the door lock. The glass dropped inside the door and she had to punch it again to get the last of it out. Then she reached through and flicked the turn-lock.

The house was quiet inside, smelled of rotten vegetables and dirty diapers and smoke. In fact, it was only half a house-an apartment. The front door led to the porch, but there was no way to get into the other side of the house.

She went back to the kitchen after the first look, got a dish rag off the sink, wiped the lock where she'd touched it, then moved through the house, looking for targets of interest. She found that there was almost nothing to see-a ratty old couch, two scarred tables, a couple of chairs, a broken-down bed in a room that may once have been a dining room, a new TV set with a cable connection. She found stairs going up to what might have originally been a bedroom, but the bedroom was empty, nothing but a half-dozen Snickers candy bar wrappers on the floor, and three or four cigarette butts.

Whitcomb had a lot of clothes, and so did the woman, most of them hung in a doorless closet, the others in a plastic-laminate chest of drawers. The woman wore cheap fashion jeans and low-cut blouses and black brassieres and thong underwear. Tucked in the rickety chest of drawers was a box of Reality female condoms. The woman, Letty understood, was a hooker.

She stopped to listen, heard nothing. Saw a flash of amber on a windowsill, checked it, found five empty pill containers. The names of the drugs meant nothing to her.

In the whole house, the only new thing was the high-def Sony television with an Xbox 360 game machine and a couple of controllers.

Then she found Randy's switch.

She knew what it was, because she'd known a man who'd beaten his children with a switch just like it, until one day, after whipping one of his daughters for some imagined moral infraction, his two older sons had taken him out into the side yard and had beaten him so badly that he hadn't been able to walk for the best part of a year.

Anyway, she knew what it was, and she took it out from behind the couch, handling it with the dish rag from the kitchen, and she looked at the blood spots. He's a pimp, she's a hooker, and he beats her with it. Letty considered breaking it into pieces, then thought, Huh, and put it back.

Took a last look around, and backed out of the house.

Pulled the door shut, got on her bike, and rode away, down the hill, toward town.

Things to think about.