“Halle-fucking-lujah,” Preacher said. “In other news, nothing yet on that shooting death from the 2000 block of Second. We’re waiting for suspect info from Homicide. I’m thinking someone from the neighborhood, as are you all, but we’re waiting for something, anything, more specific.”
“Who caught it?” Maureen asked.
“Drayton,” Preacher said.
A collective groan went up.
“Enough with that,” Preacher said. “Y’all are cops, too. Y’all have people out there you can put the lean on. Here’s an idea, do some police work for a change. Who knows what might happen?” He held up a piece of paper. “Maybe something like this, for instance. This here is a memo from Sergeant Hardin of the Eighth District.”
Maureen’s ears perked up at the mention of Hardin. The Eighth District included the Quarter and the Marigny, where she had been looking for Dice and Madison Leary. Hardin knew they were both part of Atkinson’s murder case.
“If you haven’t already heard,” Preacher said, “someone took a bad beating in the Channel two nights ago.”
Maureen’s heart sank. This was not what she wanted talked about at roll call.
“Victim is a Caucasian male, mid-twenties,” Preacher said. “An unknown person or persons snuck up on him and put down the hurt with a blunt weapon of some sort. Left him lying in the bushes outside a residence with a punctured lung. This was damn close, people, to being a homicide.” He shrugged. “But it’s not, so it’s staying here in the district. Detective Lamb has it.
“The fun part is this. You may also recall we’ve gotten calls in recent weeks about young women being followed home from bars on Magazine, the Irish Garden, especially. Morello, you caught one of those, I think. We have reason to think this may be our guy. One of the girls said something about a ring. This guy had a heavy college ring on his hand. The young lady who called him in, she had been drinking in the Garden that night. She was arriving home when the beating happened, and it happened in her front yard. Like I said, I think this is our guy, which would make this good news. We’ll see if the calls stop coming.”
“So that’s it, then?” Maureen asked, before she could stop herself. “We’re letting Lamb take it from here?”
Preacher was quiet a long time. Maureen worried that she’d said too much.
“If Lamb needs anything from us,” Preacher said, “he’ll ask, I’m sure. I know he talked to the kid this afternoon. How that conversation went, I don’t have details. If you feel really compelled, Coughlin, you can offer your services to Detective Lamb. Can I continue?” He held up the paper again. “Unlike many of you lesser cops, Sergeant Hardin pays attention to shit. This attention-paying compulsion has caused him to notice that this beating, instead of being an isolated incident, fits into an emerging pattern. This is the fifth assault of this kind in the past three weeks.”
These assaults we pay attention to, Maureen thought. She crossed her arms and slouched in her chair. We count them. We write memos. God save the young white men.
Preacher ticked off the connections on his fingers. “The victims are male, young, early to mid-twenties, fairly well off, and white. None of them have a record. None of them actually live in the neighborhood where they were assaulted. If you’ve been by Fat Harry’s during an LSU game, you know the type of guy I mean. The five of them are so alike they could be frat brothers.”
Maureen folded her arms as she listened. She hadn’t realized she’d been so predictable. Just another reason to hang it up, she thought. Patterns got people caught.
“One aberration: last night’s beating was the first one of its kind in the Irish Channel. Every victim suffered the same kind of injuries. A pipe, a baton, to the joints or the bones. Whoever’s doing it, he wants it to hurt. For a long time. I hesitate to use the word vigilante, because as far as we can tell none of these guys who got their asses kicked had committed any crimes. But whoever is doing this, he seems to think they had it coming.”
“Word gets out there’s a pattern,” Morello said, “and we’re gonna have frat boys all over town wanting police escorts back to their cars.”
“That’s what neighborhood security is for,” Wilburn said. “Let them babysit.”
“So robbery is out as a motive?” Maureen asked.
Preacher wagged a finger. “Good question. No, nothing was taken. Which emphasizes to us that the beating was the point. Right now, I’m issuing a be-advised kind of order. If whoever is doing this has started hunting uptown, we need to be on the lookout.”
“And girls walking home from the bars at night?” Maureen asked. “We looking out for them, too?”
To Maureen’s surprise, Preacher grinned. “Officer Coughlin. We’ve missed your particular brand of … you around here. Not only are we as a police department looking out for those very women”—he tilted his finger back and forth between himself and her—“but we are looking out for them, personally, you and me. You’re with me tonight on Magazine Street.”
A slow clap broke out among the officers.