Winter Prey ld-5

by John Sandford

  Lucas nodded.

  "Another thing," Climpt said. "Those damn tiles were cold. You could frostbite your ass on those tiles. I mean, it'd hurt."

  "So you couldn't add it up."

  "That's about it," Climpt said.

  "Got any ideas about it?"

  "I'd talk to Russ Harper if I was gonna go back into it," Climpt said.

  "They talked to him," Lucas said, flipping through the stack of paper. "The state guys did."

  "Well…" His eyes were on Lucas, judging: "What I mean was, I'd take him out back to my workshop, put his hand in the vise, close it about six turns and then ask him. And if that didn't work, I'd turn on the grinder." He wasn't smiling when he said it.

  "You think he knows who killed his boy?" Lucas asked.

  "If you asked me the most likely guy to commit a sneaky-type murder in this county, I'd say Russ Harper. Hands down. If his son gets killed, sneaky-like… that's no coincidence, to my way of thinkin'. Russ might not know who killed him, but I bet he'd have some ideas."

  "I'm thinking of going out there tonight, talking to Harper," Lucas said. "Maybe take him out back to the shop."

  "I'm not doin' nothing. Invite me along," Climpt said, stretching his legs out.

  "You don't care for him?"

  "If that son-of-a-bitch's heart caught on fire," Climpt said, "I wouldn't piss down his throat to put it out."

  Climpt said he'd get dinner and hang around his house until Lucas was ready to go after Harper. Helen Arris had already gone, and much of the department was dark. Lucas tossed the Jim Harper file in his new file cabinet and banged the drawer shut. The drawer got off-track and jammed. When he tried to pull it back open, it wouldn't come. He knelt down, inspecting it, found that a thin metal rail had bent, and tried to pry it out with his fingernails. He got it out, but his hand slipped and he ripped the fingernail on his left ring finger.

  "Mother-" He was dripping blood. He went down to the men's room, rinsed it, looked at it. The nail rip went deep and it'd have to be clipped. He wrapped a paper towel around it, got his coat, and walked out through the darkened hallways of the courthouse. He turned a corner and saw an elderly man pushing a broom, and then a woman's voice echoed down a side hallway: "Heck of a day, Odie," it said.

  The doctor. Weather. Again. The old man nodded, looking down a hall at right angles to the one he and Lucas were in. "Cold day, miz."

  She walked out of the intersecting corridor, still carrying her bag, a globe light shining down on her hair as she passed under it. Her hair looked like clover honey. She heard him in the hallway, glanced his way, recognized him, stopped. "Davenport," she said. "Killed anybody yet?"

  Lucas had automatically smiled when he saw her, but he cut it off: "That's getting pretty fuckin' tiresome," he snapped.

  "Sorry," she said. She straightened and smiled, tentatively. "I didn't mean… I don't know what I didn't mean. Whatever it was, I didn't mean it when I saw you at the school, either."

  What? He didn't understand what she'd just said, but it sounded like an apology. He let it go. "You work for the county, too?"

  She glanced around the building. "No, not really. The board cut out the public health nurse and I do some of her old route. Volunteer thing. I go around and see people out in the country."

  "Pretty noble," Lucas said. The line came out sounding skeptical instead of wry. Before she could say anything, he put up a hand. "Sorry. That came out wrong."

  She shrugged. "I owed you one." She looked at his hand. He was holding it at his side, waist height, clenching the towel in his fist. "What happened to your hand?"

  "Broke a nail."

  "You oughta use a good acrylic hardener," she said. And then quickly, "Sorry again. Let me see it."

  "Aw…"

  "Come on."

  He unwrapped the towel and she held his finger in her hand, turned it in the weak light. "Nasty. Let me, uh… come more under the light." She opened her bag.

  "Listen, why don't I… Is this gonna hurt?"

  "Don't be a baby," she said. She used a pair of surgical scissors on the nail, trimming it away. No pain. She dabbed on a drop of an ointment and wrapped it with a Band-Aid. "I'll send you a bill."

  "Send it to the sheriff, I got it on the job," he said. Then: "Thanks."

  They stopped at the door, looked out at the snow. "Where're you going?" Lucas asked.

  She glanced at her wristwatch. No rings. "Get something to eat."

  "Could I buy you dinner?" he asked.

  "All right," she said simply. She didn't look at him. She just pushed through the door and said all right.

  "Where?" following her onto the porch.

  "Well, we have six choices," she said.

  "Is that a guess?"

  "No." A grin flickered across her face and she counted the restaurants off on her fingertips. Lucas noticed that her fingers were long and slender, like a pianist's were supposed to be. Or a surgeon's. "There's Al's Pizza, there's a Hardee's, the Fisherman Inn, the Uncle Steve's American Style, Granddaddy's Cafe, and the Mill."

  "What's the classiest joint?"

  "Mmm." She tilted her head, thought about it, and said, "Do you prefer stuffed ducks or stuffed fish? On the wall, I mean, not the menu."

  "That's a hard one. Fish, I guess."

  "Then we'll go to the Inn," she said.

  "Do you play piano?"

  "What?" She stopped and looked up at him. "Have you been asking about me?"

  "Huh?" He was puzzled.

  "How did you know I play?"

  "I didn't," he said. "I was just thinking your hands… they look like a pianist's."

  "Oh." She looked at her hands. "Most of the pianists I've known have heavy hands."

  "Like a surgeon's hands, then," he said.

  "Most surgeons' hands are ordinary."

  "Okay, okay." He started to laugh.

  "Ordinary. They are."

  "Why are you grumping at me?" Lucas asked.

  She shrugged. "We're just getting over being awkward. It's always hard on a first date."

  "What?" he asked, following down the sidewalk. He had the sense that something had just flown past him.

  The restaurant had been built from two double-wide trailers set at right angles to each other, both covered with vinyl siding disguised as weathered wood. A neon Coors sign hung in the window. Lucas pulled into the parking lot and killed his light, trailed a few seconds later by Weather in her Jeep.

  "Elegant," he said.

  She pivoted her feet out of the Jeep, pulled off her pac boots. "I want to change shoes… elegant, what? The restaurant?"

  "I think the vinyl siding combined with the sparkle of the Coors sign gives it a certain European ambiance. Swiss, I'd say, or possibly Old Amsterdam."

  "Wait'll you find out that each table has its own red votive candle, personally lit by the maitre d', and a basket of cellophane-wrapped crackers and breadsticks," Weather said.

  "Hey, it's a gourmet joint," Lucas said. "I expected nothing less. And a choice of wines, I bet."

  "Yup."

  And they both said, simultaneously, "Red or white," and laughed. Weather added, "If you ask for rose, they say fine, and you see the bartender running into the back with a bottle of white and bottle of red."

  "Where'd you get your name?" Lucas asked.

  "My father was a sailboat freak. Homemade fourteen-foot dinghys and scows. He used to build them in the garage in the summer," she said. She pulled on the second loafer, tossed the pac boot onto the floor on the passenger side, stood up and slammed the car door with authority. And left it unlocked. "Anyway, Mom says he was always talking about the weather-'If the weather holds, if the weather turns.' Like that. So when I was born, they called me Weather."

  "Does your mother live in town?"

  "No, no. Dad died ten years ago, and then she went, three or four years later," Weather said, with just a color of sadness. "There was nothing particularly wrong with her. She just sorta died. I think she
wanted to."

  The maitre d' was a chubby man with a neatly clipped black mustache and a Las Vegas manner. "Hello, Weather," he said. His eyes shifted to Lucas' throat and refused to lift any higher. "Two? No smoking?"

  "Yeah, two," Lucas said.

  "A booth," said Weather.

  When he left them with the menus, Weather leaned forward and muttered, "I forgot about Arlen. The maitre d'. He'd like to get me in bed. Not actually leave Mother and the Kids, you understand, just do a little Mm-hmm with the lady doctor, preferably in some place like Hurley, where we might not get caught."

  "What are his chances?" Lucas asked.

  "Zero," she said. "There's something about the Alfred Hitchcock profile that turns me off."

  The salad came with a French dressing redolent of catsup, sprinkled with a handful of croutons.

  "I remember the news stories when you left Minneapolis. Very strange, all those stories about a cop. A lot of people at the ER knew you, I guess. They were all pissed. It made an impression on me."

  "I used to come in there quite a bit," Lucas said. "I'd have these street guys working for me, and they'd get messed up and not have anybody to call. I'd go over and try to fix them up."

  "Why'd you leave? Tired of the bullshit?"

  "No…" He found himself opening up, told her about the internal games played in the department.

  And the lure of money: "When you're a cop, you're always running into rich assholes who treat you like some kind of servant. Guys who oughta be in jail, but they're driving around in Lexuses and Cadillacs and Mercedes," he said, toying with his wine. "People tell you, yeah, but you're doing a public service, blah blah blah, but after twenty years, you realize you wouldn't mind having a little money yourself. Nice house, nice car."

  "You had a Porsche. You were famous for it."

  "That was different. A rich guy has a Porsche, he does it because he's an asshole. A cop has a Porsche, it's like a comment on the assholes," he said. "Every cop in the department liked me driving a Porsche. It was like a fuck-you to the assholes."

  "God, you have a rich ability to rationalize," she said, laughing at him. "Anyway, what're you doing now? Just consulting?"

  "No, no. Actually, I write games. That's where I made my money. And I've started another little sideline that…"

  "Games?"

  "Yeah. I've done it for years, now I'm doing it full time."

  "You mean like Monopoly?" she asked. She was interested.

  "Like Dungeons and Dragons, and sometimes war games. They used to be mostly on paper, now it's mostly computers. I'm in a semipartnership with this college kid-he's a graduate student in computer science. I write the games and he programs them."

  "And you can make a living at this?"

  "Yeah. And now I've started writing simulation software for police crisis management, for training dispatch people. Most of that's computers, dispatch is. And you get in a crisis situation, the dispatchers are virtually running things for a while. This software lets them simulate it, and scores them. It's kind of taking off."

  "If you're not careful, you could get rich," Weather said.

  "I kind of am," Lucas said gloomily. "But goddamn, I'm bored. I don't miss the bullshit part of the PD, but I miss the movement."

  And later, over walleye in beer batter:

  "You can't hold together a heavy-duty relationship when you're in medical school and working to pay for it," Weather said. He enjoyed watching her work with her knife, taking the walleye apart. Like a surgeon. "Then a surgical residency kills you. You've got no time for anything. You sit there and think about men, but it's impossible. You can fool around, but if you get serious about somebody, you can get torn apart between the work and the relationship. So you find it's easiest, if you meet somebody you might love, to turn away. Turning away isn't that hard if you do it right away, when you first meet."

  "Sounds lonely," Lucas said.

  "Yeah, but you can tolerate it if you're working all the time and you're convinced that you're right. You keep thinking, if I can just clear away this last thing, if I can just make it through next Wednesday or next month or through the winter, then I can get my life going. But time passes. Sneaks past. And all of a sudden your life is rushing up on you."

  "Ah… the old biological clock," Lucas said.

  "Yeah. And it's not just ticking for women. Men get it just as bad."

  "I know."

  She rolled on: "How many men do you know who decided that life was passing them by, and they jumped out of their jobs or their marriages and tried to… escape, or something?"

  "A few. More felt trapped but hung on," said Lucas.

  "And got sadder and sadder."

  "You're talking about me, I think," she said.

  "I'm talking about everybody," Lucas said. "I'm talking about me."

  After a carafe of wine: "Do you worry about the people you've killed?" She wasn't joking. No smile this time.

  "They were hairballs, every one of them."

  "I asked that wrong," she said. "What I meant to ask was, has killing people screwed up your head?"

  He considered the question for a moment. "I don't know. I don't brood about them, if that's what you mean. I had a problem with depression a couple of years ago. The chief at the time…"

  "Quentin Daniel," she said.

  "Yeah. You know him?"

  "I met him a couple of times. You were saying…"

  "He thought I needed a shrink. But I decided I didn't need a shrink, I needed a philosopher. Someone who knows how the world works."

  "An interesting idea," she said. "The problem isn't you, the problem is Being."

  "My God, that does make me sound like an asshole."

  "Carr seems like a decent sort," Lucas said.

  "He is. Very decent," Weather agreed.

  "Religious."

  "Very. You want pie? They have key lime."

  "I'll take coffee; I'm bloated," Lucas said.

  Weather waved at the waitress, said, two coffees, and turned back to Lucas. "Are you a Catholic?"

  "Everybody asks me that. I am, but I'm seriously lapsed," he said.

  "So you won't be going to the Tuesday meetings, huh?"

  "No."

  "But you're going over tonight, to talk to Phil." She made it a statement.

  "I really don't…"

  "It's all over town," Weather said. "He's the main suspect."

  "He's not," Lucas said with a touch of asperity.

  "That's not what I heard," she said. "Or everybody else hears, for that matter."

  "Jesus, that's just wrong," Lucas said, shaking his head.

  "If you say so," she said.

  "You don't believe me."

  "Why should I? You're going to question him again tonight after Shelly gets out of the Tuesday service."

  The coffee came and Lucas waited until the waitress was gone before he picked up the conversation. "Is there anything that everybody in town doesn't know?"

  "Not much," Weather admitted. "There are sixty people working for the sheriff and only about four thousand people in town, in winter. You figure it out. And have you wondered why Shelly's going to Tuesday service when he should be questioning Phil?"

  "I'm afraid to ask," Lucas said.

  "Because he wants to see Jeanine Perkins. He and Jeanine have been screwing at motels in Hayward and Park Falls."

  "And everybody in town knows?" Lucas asked.

  "Not yet. But they will."

  "Carr's married."

  "Yup. His wife is mad," Weather said.

  "Uh…"

  "She has a severe psychological affliction. She can't stop doing housework."

  "What?" He started to laugh.

  "It's true," Weather said solemnly. "It's not funny, buster. She washes the floors and the walls and the blinds and the toilets and sinks and pipes and the washer and drier and the furnace. And then she washes all the clothes over and over. Once she washed her own hands so many times that she rubbe
d a part of the skin off and we had to treat her for burns."

  "My God." He still thought it was mildly funny.

  "Nothing anybody can do about it. She's in therapy, but it doesn't help," Weather said. "A friend told me that she won't have sex with Shelly because it's dirty. I mean, not psychologically dirty, but you know-dirty. Physically dirty."

  "So Carr solves his problem by having it off with a woman in his Pentecostal group."

  "Having it off is such a romantic way to put it; British, isn't it?" she teased.

  "You don't act like a doctor," Lucas said.

  "You mean because I gossip and flirt?"

  "Mmmm."

  "You have to live here a while," she said with a hint of tension in her voice. She looked around the room, at the people talking over the red votive candles. "There's nothing to do but work. Nothing."

  "Then why stay?"

  "I have to," she said. "My dad came here from Finland, and spent his life working in the woods, in the timber. And sailing on the lakes. Never had any money. But I maxed out in everything at school."

  "You went to the high school here in Grant?"

  "Yup. Anyway, I was trying to save money to go to college, but it looked tough. Then some of the teachers got together and chipped in, and this old fart county commissioner who I didn't know from Adam called down to Madison and pulled some strings and got me a full-load scholarship. And they kept the money coming all the way through medical school. I paid it all back. I even set up a little scholarship fund at the high school while I was working in Minneapolis, but that's not what everybody wanted."

  "They wanted you back here," Lucas said.

  "Yes." She nodded. She picked up her empty wineglass and turned it in her hands. "Everything around here is timber and tourism, with a little farming. The roads are not much good and there's a lot of drinking. The timber accidents are terrible-you ought to see somebody caught by a log when it's rolling down to a sawmill. And with tractor accidents and people run over with boat propellers… They had an old guy here who could do enough general surgery to get you on a helicopter to Duluth or down to the Cities, and as long as he was here I didn't feel like I had to come back."