"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.

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?"