“I don’t know. I need to think this through. There’s a motel up there on the right. I’m going to stop. Let’s just hope they have available rooms.” Bell hunched over the wheel to see better out the window, between the wiper blades. His cell phone took that moment to ring.

“Don’t answer it, Baron. They can tell by the pings where you are. I saw that just recently on television, in some kidnap case.”

Like he was going to answer the phone. He knew without looking at the phone that it was his wife checking on him, the way she did every night before she went to bed and he wasn’t home. Right now, right this minute, he’d give up everything he owned if he could turn the clock back and be sitting in the den with his wife, in front of a nice cherrywood fire, eating popcorn. His wife always gave him the fluffies right off the top. She was such a good woman. She was also a wonderful mother. She was also a wonderful wife in all ways except the bedroom.

Bell had to physically restrain himself from knocking Adel silly when she said, “This looks like a fleabag, one of those places that charges by the hour.”

Bell stopped the car. “You go in and register. I’m too well known. Pay cash. Try to get an outside room.”

Adel looked like she was going to protest, but in the end she opened the car door and got out.

I should just drive off and leave her here, Bell thought. The moment the thought entered his mind, he had the car back in gear and was headed around the circle that would lead him back to the turnpike.

Now he could think.

The Mercedes’s taillights were just a pinpoint of red light when Adel Newsom exited the lobby of the Blue Jay Motel, room key in hand. She knew instantly that she was on her own. “You miserable, lousy, rotten piece of crap,” she shouted, her words carried off by the swirling snow. Tears rolling down her face, her high-heeled leather boots soaking wet, she walked around the side of the building to room twelve.

The only thing that could be said for the brown and yellow decorated motel room was that it was warm. Very warm. Maybe she was having a hot flash. All the plastic surgery she’d had was external. Internally, her body was way over fifty and allowed for hot flashes, along with a host of other female problems. She shuddered as she slipped out of her fluffy down coat and tossed it on the bed.