Free The Butcher's Boy by Thomas Perry Page B

the case was important— that is, a murder—you wouldn't care if they took us off it."

    As she spoke, the words came faster and faster until Hart could hardly follow her. He took his eyes off the road for a second and saw Elizabeth was staring straight ahead with her brows knitted a little, which meant she had settled that part of it and was already launched into the next stage, whatever that might be, so before she got too far he'd better tell her. "Do you want to know what I found this morning in the union hall parking lot?"

    She turned to him again and smiled. "Of course, Bob." He wasn't sure if she was humoring him or not, but he went on.

    "A few bits of wire and a fragment of the jacket of a blasting cap. Both charred. So I guess we know that much, anyway."

    "Yes," said Elizabeth . "That much is for certain. Now if only we didn't have to go on a side trip to Colorado . I wonder what it's like there this time of year."

    "Cold, clear. Now and then some snow."

    "Terrific," she said. "And all just so the Senate staff can look at a report in two months and see that two people from Washington were there."

    "Oh, I'm afraid it's worse than that, Elizabeth . They won't have to wait more than a day. There'll be reporters, photographers, probably national television. Senator Claremont was a very important man. That's the real reason why they sent us, I think. After tomorrow's newspapers whoever's there won't be of much use in undercover stuff, and we're home office."

    "Oh, God," she said, and slumped back in the seat. She thought, wonderful. Elizabeth Waring on national news in her thin California clothes investigating a death by old age. On national television. While somewhere in Southern California there would be two clerks, both of them busy forgetting what the man looked like that bought the hundred-pound bags of fertilizer and the blasting caps last Friday around supper time. Probably they'd be watching television. And what they'd see was . . . Elizabeth Waring. In Denver, Colorado, there, by her official presence alone to reassure ninety-nine men over sixty that there was no such thing as a death by old age.

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    By now most of it had probably happened, he thought. Just after daylight somebody would have gone through the alley and seen the two of them lying there. Around 7:30 or so whoever owned the car would have come out expecting to drive it to work. And the Senator—hard to say what time a senator would get up in the morning, but it would be before now. There was no question he was already dead.

    It had been a long, cold night, he thought. It wasn't so bad now—almost a different world. But he was tired, and some of the aches and pains were beginning to feel as if they might be more than that. He went over it in his mind again. He had waited to get a couple of miles away before he'd even looked for a car to hotwire. He'd found a two-year-old Pontiac parked on the street and taken it north on Route 87 to Cheyenne, Wyoming . Cheyenne had been the only choice, really, and that worried him a little—only two hours of driving time from Denver . But he'd have a long lead before anybody noticed it, where he'd left it.
    He was proud of that one, and it cancelled out the fact that Cheyenne was too obvious. It takes someone a day or so to decide that a car in a parking lot attached to a housing complex not only doesn't belong to him, it doesn't belong to anyone else either. Then it takes a day for somebody to get up the nerve to complain about it. The walk to the airport had taken some more time, but at least it had been too dark for anyone to see him.

    He had managed to get on the 7:00 a.m. flight from Cheyenne to Salt Lake City, and now he was on the noon plane to Las Vegas . He'd phoned in a reservation to Caesar's Palace from Brigham Young Airport. The warm, clean air of the plane was a foretaste of what would be waiting for him in Las Vegas. And then, he told himself, it would all be over. No more fear, no more