Wicked Prey

to look up his old acquaintances, his relatives, dear old Mom. They got some TV time, it was sort of a thing, you know, a modern Jesse James. Got some attention down there.”
    “You want him pretty bad,” Lucas said.
    “Yes, we do.”
    “Send me what you got,” Lucas said. “I’ll spread it around to the TV stations.”
    “Ah—don’t do that,” Lily said. “He’s very careful. You could almost call that his MO. If he suspected we were onto him, he’d be gone in a minute.”
    The problem, she said, was that New York really had no solid proof that he’d been involved in the armored car robbery. They had DNA that they believed had come out of the struggle between the cops and the shooter, but they didn’t know whether it was Cohn’s DNA, or DNA from somebody else in the gang.
    “Cohn would have done the killing, if he thought he needed to, but we don’t know that he was the shooter. He was there, but maybe didn’t pull the trigger. Then, we think we found the place where they got together before the robbery, a motel out in Queens, but they burned it down, so we got nothing. No DNA, nothing.”
    “Burned it down?”
    “Yeah. Fire guys say somebody doused the place with a mix of gasoline and motor oil, and torched it,” Lily said. “Fire kills DNA . . .”
    “I know. But it seems kind of extreme,” Lucas said.
    “That’s Cohn. He’s Mr. Extreme. He did three years in prison in Alabama, a newbie, but he was running the place by the time he left.”
    “So if you don’t want us to spread his face around, what do you want?” Lucas asked.
    “We want to send you a bunch of photos,” Lily said. “They’re twelve years old, but we Photoshopped them to age him, and we added the beard. We thought some of your guys could walk them around to the local hotels and motels, see if you can spot him. And then . . . see what he’s doing.”
    “You mean, let him take a shot at another armored car?”
    “You wouldn’t have to wait until the last second,” she said, but her tone was rich with suggestion.
    “But they’d have to be making a move . . .”
    “Yeah, well. Life in the big city, huh?” Lily said. “The thing is, if he knows he put some DNA on somebody, here in New York, he’ll try to shoot his way free.”
    “You want us to kill him,” Lucas said.
    “I didn’t say that. I said, he killed two of our guys, and probably three more people, along the way,” Lily said.
    Lucas thought about it for a moment, then said, “Send the stuff. I’ll get it to the people who need it.”
    “Lucas . . . thank you. And stay in touch.”

    “INTERESTING little conversation,” Del said.
    * * *
    CAROL ROUTED THROUGH a call from Dan Coates, his opposite number in Wisconsin. Lucas filled him in on Justice Shafer. “We sent the file across the river, to the sheriffs’ departments between us and Eau Claire, but it’d help if you goosed them along a little. You know, so you can deflect the blame when something goes wrong.”
    “Who’d point the finger at us? If something went wrong?” Coates asked. He was crunching on something like a carrot or a celery stick.
    “Listen, if something goes wrong at the convention, with a seven-hundred-and-fifty-yard shot from a .50-cal, everybody will point the finger at you. And at me, and every other local cop. Think about it.”
    “I’ll call everybody,” Coates said. “How much you want to put on the Vikings?”
    “Screw the Vikings. They’re a bunch of criminals,” Lucas said. “Not that Green Bay won’t stink the place up.”
    “Let me tell you . . .”
    They were discussing the possibilities when Del yawned and stood up and said, “I’m gonna go see that Arab dude in the sandwich shop.”
    Lucas took the phone away from his mouth: “Careful.”
    “Think about a disguise,” Del said. “If you go out on the street.”
    From the outer office, Carol called, “Why don’t you drive the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile? Nobody would suspect.”
    Lucas said, “Del . . . shut the door on the way out, okay?”
    * * *
    DEL DIDN’T SHUT the door. Carol propped herself in it, and when Lucas got off the phone, asked, “Are you serious about going out there?”
    “Yeah. There are about a million people wandering around out there, and I’d like to go out and see it,” Lucas said.
    She nodded: “Listen, I was looking at National Geographic . . .”
    “Didn’t know you were an intellectual . . .”
    “. . . and one of the guys in it, one of the