Wicked Prey

how that worked,” Dickens said.
    “So who’d have access to both lists?” Lucas asked. “Just you three?”
    Fumaro scratched at her hair part with a Number Two pencil. “Well . . . everything we’ve got is mostly on our computers here . . .” She waved at three laptops. “We’re networked and we’re online, but . . . I mean, when we leave, we turn off the computers.” She looked at the door to the skyway. “If somebody sneaked in here at night . . . but then they’d need the passwords . . .” She looked at the other two women. “Any ideas?”
    They sat mute, shaking their heads.
    “What about in Washington?” Dickens asked.
    “You know, nobody in Washington cares, as long as the work gets done,” Fumaro said.
    Another one of the women, whose name was Cheryl Ann, said, “You know, really, what we do is clerical work. That’s all. We get lists, we put them in a computer, and match them to available rooms. If we get a match, we send a confirmation. If it doesn’t match, we call up people and see if we can figure out what to do. We put names in little squares. We don’t know these people.”
    The third woman, whose name was Lucy, said, “You know . . . never mind.”
    Fumaro asked, “These people who were beaten up. What were their names?”
    “John Wilson, Bart Spellman, Lorelei Johnson,” Lucas said.
    She scooted her office chair over to one of the laptops, called up a form and typed John Wilson into a blank. Another form blinked up, with Wilson’s registration, showing the bare information of name, room assignment, billing address, and credit card guarantee. Lucas, looking over her shoulder with Dickens, said, “But that doesn’t say who he worked for.”
    “That’s on another input form,” Fumaro said. She popped up another form, which showed Wilson’s employer and a payment guarantee from a travel agency.
    “But that doesn’t have the room assignment,” Dickens said. “You’d have to get both of these forms to put those together?”
    They hashed that over, and decided that if you knew who you were looking for, you could find the room number; but you’d need the name first. Dickens said to Lucas, “Whoever did it had to have a fix on the targets. Then he could get the room assignments . . .”
    “But he would have had to get them from these computers, or access to these computers,” Lucas said. “In Washington, I think.”
    He told Dickens about the line of reasoning they’d worked out in Wilson’s hospital room. “Cohn and the gang members had to have the names quite a long time ago.”
    “The logic is a little leaky,” Dickens said. “But I see what you’re saying.”
    Lucy, the third woman, asked Fumaro, “When was Wilson registered?”
    Fumaro checked and said, “May seventeenth.”
    Lucy asked, “How about Spellman?”
    Fumaro checked. “May ninth.” To Lucas and Dickens: “That was just before the big rush. The big rush started around the first of June. That’s when everybody was getting set with their rooms.”
    “So they were before . . . Raphael,” Lucy said.
    The three women all looked at one another, and Lucas looked at the three of them looking at one another, and then he asked, “Who’s Raphael?”
    “Raphael’s dead,” Lucy said.

11
    BETWEEN THE TIME LUCAS GOT THE call about Letty, and the time he got home, he’d bumped and stumbled over what might be critical information about the Cohn gang. His initial dismay about Letty had dissipated; but it all came back as he got closer to home.
    Her bicycle was in the driveway, so she was home, and by the time he went through the connecting door between the garage and the kitchen, he was steaming.
    Weather, Sam, and Ellen the housekeeper were in the kitchen when he went through. He snapped, “Where’s Letty?” and Weather looked at his face and asked, “What happened?” and Letty said from the living room, “I’m in here.”
    She’d been waiting. Her voice had a hard edge to it and Weather stood up and asked again, “What happened?” and Lucas started for the living room.
    * * *
    LETTY AND JULIET BRIAR had ridden around in the Channel Three van for a while, and Letty borrowed a hundred dollars, fifty each from Frank and Lois, promising to pay them back “as soon as I can steal it from Dad.” She gave the money to Briar and said, “Now you’re covered. You don’t have to go around making dates.”
    Juliet said, uncertainly, “Randy might make me tell.”
    “You don’t have to