Wicked Prey

red-faced tap dance until Lucas stuck his ID out the car window, and then the cop pointed Lucas into a far parking space and Lucas took it.
    The parking lot was full of cop cars, with two fire trucks and two ambulances butted up to the soaking ruin at the corner of the motel. The fire had been intense, and anything wooden was charred, and anything cloth was burned to ash. The body-mound by the door, with the charred and cracking skin on the man’s seared back, looked like a dirty roast hog.
    Lucas found the police and fire chiefs, the mayor and a city councilman standing by one of the trucks looking at a couple of medical examiner’s investigators, who were standing back away from the body. Lucas nodded at the chief, who asked, “Who’re you?” and Lucas said, “Davenport, Minnesota BCA. We put out the request on the photos.”
    The chief nodded at the body: “Charles found him. We think.”
    “Was he by himself? You know what happened?”
    “Yeah, he was by himself. Damn fool didn’t call in,” the chief said, and a tear trickled out of one eye and he wiped it away.
    The fire chief said, “See the skinny kid up there?” He pointed toward the motel office, where a kid in an ill-fitting brown suit and necktie was looking down at them. “He’s the last guy Charles talked to, if you want to know exactly what happened.”
    Lucas nodded and asked, “What about the fire? Was there an accelerant? How long did it take . . . ?”
    The fire chief was nodding. “The arson guys are here, walking around. They say gasoline and oil, probably. Molotov cocktail. There’s a melted two-gallon plastic gas container in there, by the end of the bed.” The bed frame and box spring was a tangled mass of metal.
    Lucas stepped over to the burnt-out front wall of the room and looked through the hole that had been a window. Aside from the body, he could see nothing but motel equipment: beds, burned tables, telephones, lamps, television, a melted alarm clock, two burned picture frames.
    “Doesn’t look like they left much behind,” Lucas said.
    “They didn’t—first thing the arson guys checked. They cleaned the place out.”
    * * *
    “DON’T KNOW WHY this Cohn had to do this ,” the chief said. “He wasn’t covering up anything. If he hadn’t set it on fire, might have been longer before we found out about it.”
    “DNA,” Lucas said. “Fire messes up the possibilities of pulling up DNA. If he’d been living there for a while, it’d be all over—body hair, skin, blood, semen, whatever. With this fire . . .”
    “But you know who he is,” the chief said.
    “Can’t prove it—but we do know it,” Lucas said. “These guys killed a couple of cops in New York and pulled the same stunt. Burned the motel room. The NYPD got nothing out of it. No prints, no DNA, no nothing.”
    The chief’s face stormed up. “New York? If he killed cops there, why in the hell weren’t we warned? If we’d known he killed cops . . .”
    “It was right on the photo,” Lucas said. “With all the other personal information.”
    The chief looked down at a uniformed sergeant, a fortyish sandy-haired man with a brush mustache and small round glasses, who looked away, shrugged, and said, “Nobody thought he’d find anything. I mean, the guys sent him up here because . . . you know.”
    Lucas said, “Because he was a fuckup?”
    “Because they were busy with other stuff,” the sergeant said, but his eyes said, Yeah, Charles was a fuckup.
    “What was his first name?” Lucas said.
    “Charles. His name was Charles Dee.”
    * * *
    A HALF-DOZEN motel employees clustered in the office and on the concrete slab outside, their voices buzzing with suppressed excitement, and Lucas pulled two of them, Joshua Martin and Kyle Wayne, into the stairway to the second floor. “Tell me exactly what Officer Dee said to you. Every word, from the minute he walked in the door.”
    The two looked at each other: Kyle had dim gray eyes, and Lucas suspected there wasn’t much content behind them. Kyle shrugged and Joshua said to him, “Okay, you tell me if I go wrong, okay?”
    Kyle bobbed his head: “Go.”
    “We were standing behind the desk . . .”
    “Alone in the office,” Lucas interjected.
    Joshua nodded. “Yup. We were standing behind the desk, alone, and Kyle had come back from carrying some old lady’s stuff up the stairs, she couldn’t walk very good. I was counting out my change drawer, and we see this cop car pull through the