Wicked Prey

by John Sandford

  "Why not? If you've got the information, it's easy pickings," Mitford said. "These guys are like accountants, pencil-necked geeks with sugar money, ethanol money, oil money, automobile money, union money ' they don't know from robbery. They've got no security, because they can't afford to have other people know what they're doing. But these robbers, man-they're crazy. They must be coked up, cranked up, something. They beat the shit out of this one guy."

  "Could be a technique," Lucas suggested.

  "Yeah?" Mitford was interested.

  "Get on top of people, intimidate them, scare them so bad that they won't resist," Lucas said. "Pro robbers'll do that, get on top and stay on top. Of course, some of them just like to hurt people."

  "Can you take a look at it?"

  Lucas shrugged. "Sure, I'll take a look. But I'm not going to jail. If somebody mentions big money, I'll make a note."

  Mitford sighed and shook his head, turning, and looked at a blank wall, where, in most offices, there'd be a window. "When we went with you, there was an argument. We knew you were flexible, because you've always operated that way. But you've got so goddamn much money, the question was, were you flexible enough? Some guys, most guys, can't tell us to go fuck ourselves."

  "I'm not telling you to go fuck yourself," Lucas said. "I can call you a confidential informant, that doesn't bother me. But I'm not a cover-up guy. There might come a time when I've got to go public with it. But not necessarily…"

  "Not necessarily…" Mitford gnawed at a fingernail, spit a piece of nail at his wastebasket. "Well' take it easy. If you really get in a crack, and have to make a record, let me know ahead of time. Let me get a jump on the PR. But I'll tell you, I know for sure that none of these people will admit that they had the cash."

  "So why do anything?"' Lucas asked. "Why not call it a day and go home?"

  "Because they're some of us," Mitford said. He patted himself on the chest. "Us political guys. We're like cops. Everybody hates us, so we've got to take care of each other. And I really don't want to see anybody get killed by these assholes."

  "If I get them, if there's a trial'"

  "I'll worry about that when I get to it," Mitford said. "Prosecutors are politicians-plea bargains are out there, things can be done. But right now, Lucas: stop them."

  Lucas just looked at him for a moment.

  Mitford pushed some paper across his desk. "Names, room numbers, cell phones. Please?"

  "I'll take a look," he said.

  "And ' one more thing," Mitford said. "Keep it to yourself? Much as you can?"

  ***

  Lucas went back home, got undressed, crawled into bed, and went back to sleep. He woke again when Weather got up. She pulled a drape halfway back, and a shaft of sunlight cut across the room. "What are you doing here?" she asked.

  "Need to talk," he said, rolling onto his back.

  "Uh-oh. What happened?"

  "Get cleaned up, then I'll come brush my teeth and we can get some coffee."

  ***

  Seven o'clock, and quiet, though they'd all be up soon enough. Weather usually got up at five-fifteen on weekdays, and was at the hospital by a little after six: sleeping to seven o'clock was a weekly treat. Lucas rarely got up before nine o'clock, rarely went back to bed before 1:30 or two o'clock. He got up with her Sunday so they could get an hour together with a little quiet.

  They got coffee going, and oatmeal, and some ready-made hot-cross buns from a can, and odors mixed pleasantly across the kitchen. When she sat down with the coffee, he told her about the robberies, about the no-tell cash.

  "So Neil wants you to catch these people, or at least stop them, without telling anybody about the money," she said.

  "That's about it," Lucas said.

  "Why'd he tell you about the money? He could have asked you to look into it, without telling you about it," Weather said. "He could have told you that these people were important, or were political friends, and that would have kept you out of it, ethically…"

  "He knew I'd find out," Lucas said. "He wanted to be able to predict what I'll do."

  "All right."

  "The thing is, I already have an idea who they might be. They might be some guys who killed a couple of cops in New York."

  He told her about the Friday call from Lily Rothenburg. She'd heard a story from Del or Sloan about Lucas and Lily and the front seat of an earlier Porsche; she said now, "Old Bucket Seat."

  Lucas rolled his eyes, "C'mon. It was years ago. She's married and has a family…"

  "You never tried to get me in the Porsche…"

  "At our age, we'd have to take a year of yoga first," Lucas said. "Anyway she called to tell me that there's this heavy-duty stickup gang in town. They only go for large amounts of cash, and they're good at it-always work off a plan, bold, but very careful. This sounds like them."

  "Then you've got a problem," Weather said. "You're going to have to bring some other people in on the deal. Other cops. You can't go up against them by yourself. Then you've got to tell the other guys."

  "That can be handled," Lucas said. "Cohn might be down in Texas by now. On the other hand, he might have a list. If I can spot the gang, there'd be no problem bringing in a SWAT team to take them down. I mean, there're already two robberies on the table. Formal complaints, one guy in the hospital. It's more ' You know, if I do this, I'm sort of one of them. The political guys."

  "You already are," Weather said.

  He wagged a finger at her. "No. I've taken assignments that had a political component, but the assignments were legit. You know, chasing down some asshole because Henderson owes some sheriff a favor. This is different-I know about a pretty serious crime. I'm going to have to ignore it. Probably."

  "You've ignored crimes before," Weather said. "When we got Letty, all those nuns were bringing illegal drugs across the border. You knew about it and let it go."

  "There was a certain morality involved, there," Lucas said. "I was on the right side of it. One of the women said, you know, they weren't smuggling illegal drugs-the drugs were legal both here and in Canada. What they were smuggling was illegal prices. They were doing right, even if it was against the law. These people, this money ' you know, they're going to buy votes or something."

  Weather said, "I can't help you on the morality thing. I can give you something to think about-whether or not there's all this money involved, you've got a lead on a gang that killed some cops. It's worth bringing them down no matter how much money might be involved."

  "What do I tell the Minneapolis guys?"

  "Tell them ' something's going on. Something's going on, and that this gang sounds like the gang that Lily Bucket Seat was talking about."

  Lucas thought about it: "Okay, you're right. If this is Lily's gang, they need to be taken down. But I've got to tell Minneapolis something-I can't send them up against Cohn without knowing."

  She nodded: "There's gonna be some tap dancing, though. You won't get through this without your best Fred Astaire."

  ***

  Letty wandered into the kitchen, wrapped in a ratty blue terry-cloth robe, looking sleepy, rubbing one hand through her tangled blond hair. "Smells good," she said. "God, I need some caffeine."

  Lucas grinned at her and said, "Long night?"

  "I should have read it last month ' Is there any Coke?" She opened the refrigerator and peered inside. She'd been assigned to read To Kill a Mockingbird over the summer, and to write a paper on it, and had let it go until the last minute.

  "How much more do you have to read?" Weather asked.

  "Eighty pages," she said, twisting the cap off a bottle of Coke. "But I've got to get over to the station. I'm getting a camera, I'm going to do a piece on the kids up at the Capitol. I mean, like, you know, people my age in politics."

  Lucas dropped his eyelids and made a snoring sound, and Weather snapped: "Lucas!"

  "Ah, he's right," Letty said. "Another thumb-sucker. But, I get the camera time. The kids at school freak out. Emily
Grissom can't stand it. She thinks I'm sleeping with somebody over there."

  "Ah, God," Weather said, outraged. "Letty, do you really have to do this stuff? You could be a surgeon, or-well, you probably wouldn't want to be a lawyer…"

  Lucas stood up, kissed Weather on the forehead, and said, "Thanks," and "Counsel your daughter," and headed out the door.

  As he went, he heard Letty ask, "Mom, could you give me a lift over to the station? I need to get there early…"

  ***

  A Minneapolis cop named Rick Jones had caught the robberies. Lucas found him at the Dairy Delight, a downtown ice-cream stand modeled after a Dairy Queen, getting a chocolate-dipped vanilla cone. Jones was a tall, slender black man with a shaved head and a diamond earring. He not only thought he looked like a pro basketball player, but he actually did. He was wearing jeans, a loose gray army T-shirt, running shoes, and dark wraparound sunglasses.

  "Lucas motherfucking Davenport," he said, as Lucas wandered up.

  "That'd be mister motherfucking Davenport to the likes of you," Lucas said. He checked the menu behind the Dairy Delight window, ordered a small hot fudge softie from the girl behind the counter, and said to Jones, "I was just over at the office. They say you caught those robberies at the High Hat."

  "Yeah. I said to myself, "RJ, there's something going on here that you don't know about." And guess what-here comes Davenport."

  "Well, you're right about that," Lucas said. "I got my ass jerked out of bed by a guy who works for the governor. These folks were here for the convention…"

  "That's what they told me," Jones said.

  "… representing some big-time special interests. They get hit, they start making phone calls. I don't like it any better than you do, but they did get hit."

  "They lied to me about it," Jones said. "I asked them how much was stolen, they said, you know, "hundreds of dollars." I was like, right-you're in a six-hundred-dollar-a-night hotel suite, and they got your money clip."

  Lucas didn't try to deny it. "Anyway…"

  Jones was crunching through the chocolate, dabbed his lips with a napkin, and said, "So they sent you along to put a wrench on my nuts."

  "No, they sent me along to look into the robberies on my own. I talked to Danny…" Danny Lake was the head of robbery-homicide, "… and he said I could sit in. The thing is…"

  The counter girl passed Lucas his hot fudge and a plastic spoon, and Lucas paid and they ambled down the street. "… The thing is, it's possible that I got a line on these guys."

  Jones's eyebrows went up. "How'd that happen?"

  "An old friend called me from New York. Nothing to do with politics, she just called out of the blue," Lucas said. He outlined what Lily Rothenburg had passed along, and mentioned the Photoshopped mug shots.

  "You got these pictures?" Jones asked.

  "Got them, but I haven't printed them," Lucas said. "Everybody's working this weekend, so I can get that done right away. I wanted to check with you first, so, you know-I don't step on your feet."

  "I'll tell you what, I don't mind too much, you looking over my shoulder," Jones said, serious now. "Maybe some other time, I'd mind. But right now-everybody's used up. If we're gonna run these around to the hotels and motels, it's gonna be you and me. Everybody else is working the Republicans."

  "I could probably get one guy to help out," Lucas said. "I can e-mail you the jpegs, you can pass them out on this side of the river, I'll take the other side."

  "It's something. You wanna talk to the victims?" Jones asked.

  "Yeah-but I wanted to talk to you first," Lucas said.

  "I knew something was up with them," Jones said. "You got any idea how much these assholes really took?"

  "Nobody talks about money-but these guys, Brutus Cohn, whoever, they don't steal four hundred dollars and an engagement ring," Lucas said. "They know what they're doing."

  "Fuckin' Republicans," Jones said.

  "Yeah, well-I was told that these guys were in Denver last week," Lucas said.

  "Way of the world, baby," Jones said.

  Lucas wadded up the hot-fudge sundae cup and tossed it at a trash basket. Hit the rim and went in. "Brick," Jones said.

  "Brick my ass," Lucas said. "With my skills, looks, intelligence, and speed, and your tennis shoes, we coulda been in the NBA."

  Jones laughed and said, "Well, maybe. If you could jump more than four inches off the ground. You wanna walk over to Hennepin? We could talk to Wilson again, if he's awake."

  "Let's go. And fuck a bunch of jumping. With my skills, you don't need to jump."

  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.