Wicked Prey

Chapter 8

Lucas talked to every manager, assistant manager, and bellman he could find, in all of St. Paul's hotels, got unanimous head-shakes, and was headed out the door of his last stop when he saw Mitford walking toward the bar with a couple of other guys. "Neil!"

Mitford turned, spotted him, walked over: "How's it going?"

"Slowly. I'm walking a picture around…" He showed Mitford the shot of Cohn, told him about the victim interviews, and about Jones's impatience with the victims.

"You told him about the money?" Mitford asked.

"He knew about the money. He knew there was something going on." Lucas shook his head. "There're going to be rumors, and when it gets out to the blogs, you'll have some damage control to do."

"It'll get swamped by all the other noise ' Listen, come on over and meet these guys. They might have some ideas."

The guys were out-of-towners, professional handlers, Democrats in town to watch the Republicans do their stuff. Ray Landy and Dick

McCollum were talking about McCain and his vice-presidential pick, the unknown governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin. They couldn't stop talking about her, veering from amazement to ridicule, watching their BlackBerrys as commentary poured in from friends, reading the messages aloud. They got a table in the tiny bar, and Landy said to Lucas: "You're an outside guy. What do you outside guys think about Palin?"

Lucas said, "I'm mostly a Democrat, so ' maybe I'm not the best judge."

"Oh, bullshit," Landy said. "What do you think?"

"I don't know anything about her. What bothers me is that it was a quick decision, I guess-that's what the papers all say," Lucas said. "They say that McCain is rolling the bones. I don't know about Palin, but I'm not sure I want to vote for a guy who'd roll the bones on a presidential election. Doesn't make him seem like a calm, rational decision-maker."

"Bless you," Landy said. "I hope everybody's thinking that way."

The three pols ordered Bloody Marys and Lucas got a Diet Coke. Mitford said, "Guys, Lucas is a big shot in our Bureau of Criminal Apprehension. He's looking into the robberies…"

McCollum was a pale-eyed man who fiddled with an unlit cigarette, twiddling it like a pencil between his nicotine-stained fingers: "You a cop?"

Lucas nodded. "Yup."

"He's handled things for the governor for a while-I asked him to look into these things," Mitford said.

The drinks came and they stopped talking until they'd all had a sip, and the waitress left, and McCollum said, "There are fifteen guys like them. Well, there were, anyway. Some of them might have taken off."

"You ever heard of anything like this before?" Lucas asked.

Both men shook their heads, and Landy said, "You hear about it at a lot lower level-but not at this level. You know, when the money gets down to the street, you'll have robberies, but they're random, small-time stuff. A few hundred here or there. That's what happens when you walk around in a bad area with your pockets full of twenty-dollar bills." He said "bad air-ee-a" in a way that suggested it was a clich`e wherever he came from.

"I never quite understood where the money was going," Lucas said.

Landy looked at Mitford, who shrugged, and Landy said, "When you're running a campaign, you've got all these people down at the bottom who need walking-around money. They want to get lunch, or buy lunch for somebody, or catch a cab, or get somebody a cab, or pay for gas, or even get some lawn signs together. These are people who turn out the vote. You can't issue a check to all of them-and a lot of them don't have money to do it on their own. I mean, any money."

"Say you're working an area with gangs," McCollum said. "There might be somebody who is, like, an officer in a gang. He can turn out a certain vote-fifty people, seventy-five people, a hundred people, maybe even a few hundred people. He needs to get around for a few weeks. Somebody might toss him a few hundred dollars, depending on what he does…"

"A couple grand, maybe," Landy said.

"And the candidate might not want his name on a check going to a gang leader," McCollum said. "So, the cash is like oil. It greases the wheel."

"Seems like a lot of money," Lucas said. "A million bucks, more…"

"It is a lot, at this level, when it's in a suitcase. Once you get down to the street, it's pretty parceled out. You might put a couple of million in a big place like Philly or Dade County, or Cleveland, but it's mostly in handfuls. Mostly, less than a grand. You know, you get two or three thousand people working informally, they need lunch and cab fare and so on ' you can go through a mil pretty damn fast."

"Inflation," Mitford said.

"Damn right. Back in "eighty-eight, I bet the dollar amounts were maybe a quarter of what you see now," Landy said. "Gas was cheap, food was cheap, everything was cheap. Now, it's more. Million doesn't go as far as it used to."

"If it's a million in Philly or Miami, what's it in Chicago or LA?" Lucas asked.

"Mmm, doesn't really work that way. Pennsylvania's in play, so's Florida," Landy said. "They could go either way, so getting out the street vote is critical. Illinois and California are pretty safe for us, so it's not that critical. Republicans won't spend much, either. There's going to be money, but' maybe not quite as intense."

While Lucas was sitting in the bar, sipping on his Coke, talking political money, Rosie Cruz was walking back toward her room from the Coke machine, and saw the cop in the lobby. The cop car was parked a few spaces down from the lobby door, andwitha bad feeling, Cruz pushed through the lobby door and walked up beside the cop, a pudgy young blond guy, who was talking to a couple of desk clerks.

The cop was showing the clerks a badly colored Xerox printout of a photograph of Brutus Cohn. One of the clerks glanced at her and she asked, brightly, "What time is the shuttle to the airport?"

The clerk pointed at a sign, which said that the shuttle left every four hours starting at 7 a.m., and turned back to the cop. The other clerk was saying, "It sorta looks like a guy. But it sorta doesn't, too. Let me see, he's in a corner room, let me see…" And he hunched over a schematic of the hotel and the cop crooked his neck to look at it.

Cruz walked out the door and turned away from Cohn's room, and as soon as she was out of sight, called Cohn on her cell. Cohn's phone rang four times before he answered, and he said, "Yeah?"

"Get out of there. There's a cop in the lobby with a picture of you and he's coming down to your room. Get out, get out'"

"How many?"

"One, here, but he could call in more," she said. "Get out."

Then Cohn was gone and she snapped the phone shut and walked up a flight of stairs to an exposed walkway where she could see the parking lot. A minute or two later, she saw the cop, one hand on his gun, walking down the parking lot toward Cohn's room. She punched the speed dial and Cohn came up: "Yeah?"

"He's walking toward your room. He's alone. He'll be there in one minute," she said. And he was gone again.

Brutus Cohn was buck-ass naked, in bed with Lindy, when Cruz called with the warning. He jumped up, looked around: normally neat, he was with Lindy, now, and she was a walking hurricane. Clothes were strewn all over the room, shoes, papers, everything. "Get dressed," he snapped.

They had a picture of him. They had fingerprints, too, but they'd never taken a DNA sample, because they didn't do DNA samples the last time he was in jail. Now his prints and his DNA were all over the place '

"What's going on?" But she'd been a criminal's girlfriend long enough not to ask too many questions, and she was already pulling up her underpants and the phone rang again and he said, "Yeah?" listened and snapped it shut.

"Take your pants off," he said.

"What?"

"Take your fuckin' pants off. A cop is coming down here, he'll be here in ten seconds and I want you to answer the door."

"Naked?" Now she sounded interested.

"Yeah, goddamned right, naked. Get your goddamned pants off'"

He looked around, picked up an end table by the legs, and smashed it against the floor. The legs broke, but didn't come completely free, and he flipped the table and wrenched one loose. It was half the length of a pool cue, but shaped like a ball bat.

"When he knocks, say, "Just a minute," and then pull the door all the way open and step back. Just let it swing. I'll be right behind it. Goddamnit, wake up…"

Charles Dee ("call me Charles") was about ninety-eight percent sure that the whole thing was the weekly windup by the guys back at the shop: send Dee around with a Xerox of some weird-looking guy with a red beard-the beard looked like it was painted on-to ask who'd seen him. This was a request, they said, from fuckin' Minnesota. Just about ninety-eight percent that somebody was about to hit him with an air horn or some other joke '

The fact was, Hudson was too big a town for him. He wasn't a metro cop, he was a small-town guy. He needed to be on a five-man force somewhere where the people liked you. Where everybody knew your name '

He got down to 120, looked around, sighed, wondered what was behind the door, and knocked. A woman called out, "Just a minute," and he thought, Here it comes '

Lindy pulled open the door, and stood there in all her big-boobed and bikini-shaved glory. Dee had time to take a breath and notice how crispy her pubic hair looked, when a big naked guy reached out from behind the door, grabbed him by the shirt and yanked him inside.

Dee had learned to handle himself in the Hudson bars, the Friday night fights, but he was off-balance and falling into the room and turning and trying to look and he saw the club coming right at his eyes and he never even had the time to yell.

Cohn whipped the club through a tight arc and smashed the cop right across the bridge of the nose and he spun as he fell onto his face. Cohn clubbed him at the base of his skull and the cop went flat and Cohn hit him twice more and then tossed the club in the corner and said, "Get dressed."

"What about him?" Lindy asked, looking at the cop.

"What about him?"

"He saw us," she said.

"He's dead," Cohn said. "Get dressed. Pick up everything. Get the sheets off the bed."

"He's dead?" She was stunned. Her brother was a small-town cop and she didn't like the look of this. Dead?

"He's dead," Cohn said. He was half-dressed. "Come on: move."

She started crying but Cohn kept her moving. They stuffed everything into their suitcases, dressed, Cohn stripped the sheets off the bed, threw all the blankets in them, tied them tight, called Cruz.

"Take a walk on the walkway. See if anybody's looking at us," he told her.

"I'm up there now. I don't see anybody," she said.

"Let's go," Cohn said. He let Lindy lead the way through the door, propped the door open with the chair leg, walked down to the car, threw everything in the trunk, took out the two-gallon plastic jug of gasoline, said, "Start the car," and walked back to the room.

Inside, he gave the jug a shake, threw all the dry towels from the bathroom in a heap, soaked them with a half gallon of gas, threw one of the towels on the shower drain, poured the rest of the gas around the two rooms, including the beds, and backed out in a cloud of fumes.

Two gallons of gas is condensed energy: enough energy to drive a Ford F150 thirty miles or so. The rooms would burn. He picked up the club he'd used to kill Dee, wiped it, just in case, tossed it inside, shook his head: this was bad.

He trailed the last bit of gas onto the concrete walk, tossed the container into the room, dropped a match on the gas and hurried to the car.

The flame just sat on the gas patch for a moment, then crept over the door sill and then with a loud, attention-grabbing Whump! blew through the motel rooms.

They rolled down the parking lot, around the corner on the back, down a street, and headed back to the I-94 entrance ramp, passing the motel, and saw black smoke boiling from the room and a man running toward the motel office.

They ran down onto I-94 and saw even more smoke, and Lindy said, "The whole place must be burning down," and then, "What if he wasn't dead?"

"He was dead," Cohn said, and then they were coming down on the St. Croix River and the bridge to Minnesota and they never heard a fire engine.

Lucas got a phone call, saw it was from Carol, pulled his cell and asked, "What?"

She said, "Something awful happened in Hudson."

The fire was gone by the time Lucas got there. An angry Hudson cop lost his temper when he saw the Porsche nosing into the parking lot, past the warning tape, and did a fat man's arm-swinging 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: "G."

"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 lot and he parks. Then this guy comes in, Charles…"

"You knew him?"

Joshua shrugged. "We knew who he was. They sometimes put him on school patrol. Anyway, he comes in, and he's got this picture, and he says, "You ever seen this guy?"' We look at the picture, and Kyle says, "Whoa, dude, he looks just like that big tall dude."

Kyle did a body-bob and said, "Yup."

"I don't know what he's talking about, but Kyle says this guy was down in one-twenty, which is the one that's burned, so I guess he was," Joshua said. "Charles asked Kyle if he was sure, and Kyle said, "Dude, I don't know. Maybe not."

Kyle said, "I said, "Maybe not. But maybe yes." Not or yes, I said them both."

Joshua picked it up. "So, Charles went out of here, and Kyle went to watch him. I went to counting the money again."

"You watched him?" Lucas asked Kyle.

"Yeah, kinda. I didn't want him to see me, but I stuck my head out. He went down there and knocked on the door, and then he went inside. That's all I saw. I came back and got my plunger, "cause we've got a bad toilet, some asshole woman stuck a whole roll of toilet paper down it' anyway, I came back, and we heard this ' Vooooommtnm. We ran outside and saw the fire and called nine-one-one."

"Didn't see anybody else?" Lucas asked.

"Not then," Kyle said. "But, there was this chick…"

He and Joshua exchanged glances again, and Joshua said, "She has, like, this amazing rack, you know? I mean, we're talking Hollywood, and she's showing them off. We think she went into that room, when we both saw her that once. We didn't see her go in, but she was headed that way, and she wasn't checked in here."

"You boys know a hooker when you see one?" Lucas asked.

Kyle did: he shook his head and said, "Not a hooker. Hookers always carry these big bags. She wasn't carrying anything. Maybe car keys. She was coming back from somewhere and I think she went in that room."

"Would you recognize her if you saw her again?" Lucas asked.

"Oh, yeah," Joshua said. "I'd recognize her."

Lucas took down the description: mid-thirties, blond, long hair, mid-height. Hollywood tits.

"Looked me right in the eyes for a long time," Joshua said. "Really sorta…" His voice trailed away.

"… stroked your rod," Kyle finished.

Lucas was walking out of the office, then paused and turned back. "Kyle ' you said you came in here to get your plunger, and then you heard the explosion. How much time between the time you came back in and the explosion?"

Kyle said, "Well'"

He walked over to the door, pushed it open, then stepped back through and stomped around the desk and down a short hallway to a closet, opened it, got out a plunger, and walked back to the desk. "How long was that?"

Lucas said, "Thirty seconds."

"Then that's how long it was. Wasn't long."

"You didn't stop to chat or anything…"

"Nope. Went right back to the closet and got the plunger," he said.

"He did," Joshua said.

"When Officer Dee pulled into the parking lot, did he hang around outside, or did he come right in?"

"He came right in. You know, however long it takes to walk from his car to here."

Dee's car was thirty feet from the door. Fifteen seconds.

"And how long did you talk to him in here?" Lucas asked.

"Showed us the picture, Kyle said that thing about the corner room. We talked about it, and he walked out. Just, you know ' not too long."

"No conversation…"

"Not really. Not long, anyway."

Lucas nodded, gave them business cards and said, "If you think of anything else, give me a call."

Outside again, Lucas walked back to the crowd of cops, sorted out an arson guy.

"Is there any personal stuff in there? Anything left behind? Anything? Toothbrush?"

"Not that I've seen so far. But everything that wasn't nailed down, fell down, so there could be something under all the crap."

"Call me when you've worked through it; I need to know," Lucas said, and handed over a business card.

The arson guy nodded and stuck the card in his wallet. "What's up with that?"

"The kids up at the office say the fire started a couple of minutes after Dee went through the door-probably less than five minutes. The question is, since they can't see the office from their room, how'd they know 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."