in the wind
Just happened across a remarkably poetic phrase that I've never heard used this way before.
I was reading an article about a woman who stabbed an attacker; the woman fled the scene, and near the end of the article it notes:
The woman was still in the wind Thursday night, police said.
At first I thought that must be a typo of some sort. But a quick search finds some other occurrences, such as this headline from an unrelated article: "Shooting victim shows up at hospital, perp still in the wind."
Urbandictionary suggests that the term can mean various things, including "unable to be found" and "on the run."
The derivation seems obvious, but I do wonder (a) where and when the phrase was first used this way, and (b) why I've never encountered it before.