Wicked Prey

“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,”