Wicked Prey

he was coming? They had to know, they had to start cleaning the place out before he got there. Dee pulled into the parking lot, talked to the kids, walked down there . . . they didn’t have more than three or four minutes before he was knocking at their door. But they were ready for him, apparently, and got out within another minute or so.”
    “Yeah. Huh.”
    Lucas looked around at the range of buildings, at the motels farther down the strip. “They were warned. They’ve got a lookout. Might be looking at us right now.”
    The arson guy looked around, turned some more, and said, “Lotta windows.”

9
    LUCAS GOT THE HUDSON COPS CRAWLING through the surrounding motels, looking for anyone who’d checked out of a room overlooking the corner room where Charles Dee had died. Somebody, he believed, had warned Cohn that the cop was coming; why Dee had gone inside the room, he didn’t know, unless he’d been met at the door by Cohn, with a gun.
    Nobody had heard a gunshot . . . There’d been a guest on the other side of Cohn’s double room, and he’d been in the room at the time of the fire, asleep, but he should have heard a shot. He’d heard the gasoline explode, had gotten up to see what it was, but hadn’t heard a shot.
    Goddamned Hudson cops, he thought: they’d sent out one guy to look for a cop killer. And they knew it. They were tap dancing like crazy, but everybody else would know it, too, by the six o’clock news.
    Which reminded him. He got on the phone to Carol and said, “Get those pictures of Cohn out to everybody. Everybody. Beg and plead if you have to, but get his face on the air. Get it to the newspapers, ask them if we can get it on the front.”
    “What’re we doing?” she asked.
    “Changing direction. He knows we’re all over him, so if he’s going to run, he’s already on the way. See if we can get it on CNN and the networks, all the local TV, go out two tiers of states—down to Missouri, over to Indiana, out to Montana. Get it out to every airport police department in, say, six hundred miles. Border Patrol, Grand Portage, International Falls. Maybe we’ll freeze him here in the Cities, so we’ll get another shot at him. If he gets out to LA or down to Miami, he’s going to be harder to spot. Beg for help.”
    “I’ll get it started,” she said. “But there was trouble downtown with one of the marches, a bunch of people are being arrested. Lot of them. That’ll be the big story tomorrow . . .”
    “Tell them about this cop getting killed,” Lucas said. “Tell them . . . tell them he was left behind when they torched the motel. Tell them we don’t know if the guy was dead. That’ll catch them.”
    “Was he dead?”
    “Yeah, probably. We really don’t know,” Lucas said. “We need to stress that, Carol— we don’t know . Maybe he burned alive. We need the attention.”
    Lucas stayed until the reports came back from the adjoining hotels: nobody in any of the rooms in question had checked out.
    “Nothing there,” the chief said, as though Lucas had screwed up somehow.
    “There’s something there,” Lucas said. “We just haven’t found it yet.”
    “Yeah, well . . . any more ideas?” the chief asked.
    “One,” Lucas said.
    * * *
     
    COHN AND LINDY headed west on I-94 toward the Cities, and as soon as they were clear of Hudson, across the bridge in Minnesota, Cohn got on his cell phone and called Cruz.
    “I talked to the boys and told them to stay put at least until tonight,” Cruz said. “They’re cleaning out their rooms, wiping everything down. Do you know where you’re going?”
    “I get off at the Sixth Street exit? Is that right? Then straight ahead to the parking structure.”
    “Do not take the elevator,” Cruz said. “There’s only one, and if there’s anybody waiting for a ride, they’ll see you, and we can’t afford that anymore. You’ve got to keep out of sight until we can change your appearance. I’ll get some hair dye, we’ll give you black hair and a mustache, no beard. We can wipe down the condo tonight and get out of here.”
    “Okay. Maybe. When are you coming over?”
    “I’ll be a half hour behind you,” she said. “I’ve got to get that dye.”
    “See you then.”
    While he was talking, Lindy had organized all the loose stuff into the two sheets, then flattened them and pushed them onto the floor of the backseat, and pulled their two suitcases over them. When she’d tidied up, she waited until Cohn had