"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."