Wicked Prey

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