Winter Prey ld-5

by John Sandford

  "Russ," said the Iceman, as Harper brushed past. "Andy. Doug. How're you doin', Judy?"

  "We gotta talk," Harper said, pulling off his gloves. The other three wouldn't directly meet the Iceman's inquiring eyes, but looked instead to Harper. Harper was the one the Iceman would have to deal with.

  "What's going on?" he said. On the surface, his face was slack, sleepy. Inside, the beast began to stir, to unwind.

  "Did you kill the LaCourts?" Harper asked, stepping close to him. The Iceman's heart jumped, and for just a moment he found it hard to breathe. But he was a good liar. He'd always been good.

  "What? No-of course not. I was here." He put shock on his face and Harper said "Motherfucker," and turned away, shaking his head. He touched his lip and winced, and the Iceman saw what looked like a tiny rime of blood.

  "What are you talking about, Russ?" he asked. "I didn't have a goddamned thing to do with it. I was here, there were witnesses," he complained. Public consumption: I didn't mean to; they just fell down…

  As his voice rose, Harper was pulling off his coat. He tossed it on a card table, hitched his pants. "Motherfucker," he said again, and he turned and grabbed the Iceman by his pajama shirt, pulled him forward on his toes, off-balance.

  "You motherfucker-you better not have," Harper breathed in his face. His breath smelled of sausage and bad teeth, and the Iceman nearly retched. "We don't want nothing to do with no goddamned half-assed killer."

  The Iceman brought his hands up, shoulder height, shrugged, tried not to struggle against Harper's hold, tried not to breathe. Kill him now…

  Of the people in their group, Harper was the only one who worried him. Harper might do anything. Harper had a craziness, a killer feel about him: scars on his shiny forehead, lumps. And when he was angry, there was nothing calculated about it. He was a nightmare you met in a biker bar, a man who liked to hurt, a man who never stopped to think that he might be the one to get damaged. He worried the Iceman, but didn't frighten him. He could deal with him, in his own time.

  "Honest to God, Russ," he said, throwing his hands out to his sides. "I mean, calm down."

  "I'm having a hard time calmin' down. The cops was out to my house tonight and they flat jacked me up," Harper said. "That fuckin' guy from Minneapolis and old Gene Climpt, they jacked my ass off the floor, you know what I'm telling you?" Spit was spraying out of his mouth, and the Iceman averted his face. "You know?"

  "C'mon, Russ…"

  Harper was inflexible, boosted him an inch higher, his work-hardened knuckles cutting into soft flesh under the Iceman's chin. "You know what we been doing? We been diddlin' kids. Fuckin' juveniles, that's what we been doin', all of us. All that fancy bullshit talk about teachin' 'em this or that-it don't mean squat to the cops. They'd put us all in the fuckin' penitentiary, sure as bears shit in the woods."

  "There's no reason to think I did it," the Iceman said, forcing sincerity into his voice. And the beast whispered, Let's kill him. Now now now…

  "Horseshit," Harper snarled. He snapped the Iceman away as though he were a bug. "You sure you didn't have nothing to do with it?" Harper looked straight into his eyes.

  "I promise you," the Iceman said, his eyes turning away, down, then back up. He pushed the beast down, caught his breath. "Listen, this is a time to be calm."

  The man called Doug was bearded, with the rims of old pock-scars showing above the beard and dimpling his purple nose. "The Indians think a windigo did it," he said.

  "That's the most damn-fool thing I ever did hear," Harper said, turning his hostility toward Doug. "Fuckin' windigo."

  Doug shrugged. "I'm just telling you what I hear. Everybody's talking about it, out at the Res."

  "Jesus Christ."

  "Judy and I are outa here," the man called Andy said abruptly, and they all turned to him. Judy nodded. "We're going to Florida."

  "Wait-if you take off…" the Iceman began.

  "No law against taking a vacation," Andy said. He glanced sideways at Harper. "And we're out of this. Out of the whole deal. I don't want to have nothing to do with you. Or any of the others, neither. We're taking the girls."

  Harper stepped toward them, but Andy set his feet, unafraid, and Harper stopped.

  "And I won't talk to the cops. You know I can't do that, so you're all safe. There's no percentage in any of you coming looking for us," Andy finished.

  "That's a bullshit idea, running," Harper said. "Runnin'll only make people suspicious. If something does break, bein' in Florida won't help none. They'll just come and get you."

  "Yeah, but if somebody just wants to come and talk, offhand, and we're not around… Well, then, maybe they'll just forget about it," Andy said. "Anyway, Judy and I decided: we're outa here. We already told the neighbors. Told them this weather was too much, that we're going away for a while. Nobody'll suspect nothing."

  "I got a bad feeling about this," said Doug.

  A car rolled by outside, the lights flashing through the window, then away. They all looked at the window.

  "We gotta get going," Andy said finally, pulling on his gloves. To the Iceman he said, "I don't know whether to believe you or not. If I thought you did it…"

  "What?"

  "I don't know…" Andy said.

  "Why did you people think…"

  "Because of that goddamn picture Frank LaCourt had. As far as I know, the only person he talked to was me. And the only person I talked to was you."

  "Russ… I…" The Iceman shook his head, put a sad look on his face. He turned to Andy. "When're you leaving?"

  "Probably tomorrow night or the next day," Judy said. Her husband's eyes flicked toward her, and he nodded.

  "Got a few things to wind up," he muttered.

  Andy and Judy left first, flipping up their hoods, stooping to look through the window for car lights before they went out into the parking lot. As Harper zipped his parka he said, "You better not be bullshitting us."

  "I'm not." The Iceman stood with his heels together, fingertips in his pants pockets, the querulous, honest smile fixed on his face.

  " 'Cause if you are, I'm going to get me a knife, and I'm gonna come over here and cut off your nuts, cook them up, and make you eat them," Harper said.

  "C'mon, Russ…"

  Doug was peering at him, and then turned to look at Harper. "I don't know if he did it or not. But I'll tell you one thing: Shelly Carr couldn't find his own asshole with both hands and a flashlight. No matter who did it, we'd be safe enough if Shelly is doing the investigation."

  "So?"

  "So if something happened to that cop from Minneapolis…"

  Harper put the lizard look on him. "If something happened to him, it'd be too goddamned bad, but a man'd be a fool to talk about it to anyone else," he said. "Anyone else."

  "Right," said Doug. "You're right."

  When they were gone, the Iceman took a turn around the room, the beast rising in his throat. He ran a hand through his hair, kicked at a chair in frustration. "Stupid," he said. He shouted it: "STUPID!"

  And caught himself. Controlled himself, closed his eyes, let himself flow, regulated his breathing, felt his heartbeat slow. He locked the door, turned off the lights, waited until the last vehicle had left the parking lot, then climbed the stairs again.

  He could go to Harper's tonight, with the.44. Take him off. Harper had handled him like he was a piece of junk, a piece of garbage. Yes, said the beast, take him.

  No. He'd already taken too many risks. Besides, Harper might be useful. Harper might be a fall guy.

  Doug and Judy and Andy… so many problems. So many branching pathways to trouble. If anybody cracked…

  Judy's face came to mind. She was a plain woman, her face lined by forty-five winters in the North Woods. She worked in a video rental store, and she looked like… anybody. If you saw her in a K Mart, you wouldn't notice her. But the Iceman had seen her having sex with the Harpers, father and son, simultaneously, one at each end, while her husband watched. Had
watched her, watching the Iceman, as he taught her daughters to do proper blowjobs. She had seen her husband with their own daughters, had seen the Iceman with Rosie Harris and Mark Harris and Ginny Harris, the yellow-haired girl.

  She'd seen all that, done all that, and yet she could lose herself in a K Mart.

  He again approached the problem of what to do. Fight or run? This time, though, the problem seemed less like an endless snaky ball of possibilities and more like a single intricate but manageable organism.

  He was far from cornered. There were many things he might do. The image of John Mueller came to mind: red spots on white, like the eight of hearts, the red in the snow around the boy.

  John Mueller was an example.

  Action eliminated problems.

  It was time for action again.

  CHAPTER 11

  Lucas stepped quietly into the house, pulled off his boots, and stopped to listen. The furnace had apparently just come on: the heating ducts were clicking and snapping as they filled with hot air and expanded. Weather had left a small light on over the sink. He tiptoed through the kitchen and living room, down the hall to the guest room, and turned on the light.

  The room felt unused, lonely. The bureau had been dusted, but there was nothing on top of it and the drawers were empty. A lamp and a small travel alarm sat on a bedstand, with a paper pad and a pen; the pad appeared to be untouched. The room was ready for guests, Lucas thought, but no guests ever came.

  He peeled off his parka, shirt, pants, and thermal underwear and tossed them on the bureau. He'd stopped at the motel and picked up his shaving kit and fresh underwear. He put them on the bedstand with his watch, took his.45 from its holster, jacked a shell into the chamber, and laid it next to the clock. After listening for another moment at the open bedroom door, he turned off the light and crawled into bed. The bed was too solid, too springy, as though it had never been slept in. The pillow pushed his head up. He'd never get to sleep.

  The bed sagged.

  Somebody there. Disoriented for a moment, he turned his head, opened his eyes. Saw a light in the hallway, remembered the weight. He half-sat, supporting himself with his elbows, and found Weather sitting on the end of the bed. She was dressed for work, carrying a cup of coffee, sipping from it.

  "Jesus, what time is it?"

  "A little after six. I'm outa here," she said. She was stone-cold awake. "Thanks for coming over."

  "Let me get up."

  "No, no. Shelly's sending a deputy over. I feel silly."

  "Don't. There's nothing silly about it," he said sharply.

  "And you should go somewhere else at night. Pick someplace at random. A motel in Park Falls. Tell us you're leaving, and we'll have somebody run interference for you out the highway to make sure you're not followed."

  "I'll think about it," she said. She patted his foot. "You look like a bear in the morning," she said. "And your long underwear is cute. I like the color."

  Lucas looked down at the long underwear; it was vaguely pink. "Washed it with a red shirt," he mumbled. "And this is not the goddamn morning. Morning starts when the mailman arrives."

  "He doesn't get here until one o'clock," Weather said.

  "Then morning starts at one o'clock," he said. He dropped back on the pillow. "John Mueller?"

  "They never found him," she said. "When the deputy called, I asked."

  "Ah, God."

  "I'm afraid he's gone," she said. She glanced at her watch.

  "And I've got to go. Make sure all the doors are locked, and go out through the garage when you leave. The garage door locks automatically."

  "Sure. Would you…"

  "What?"

  "Have dinner with me tonight? Again?"

  "God, you're rushing me," she said. "I like that in a man. Sure. But why don't we have it here? I'll cook."

  "Terrific."

  "Six o'clock," she said. She nodded at the bedstand as she went out the door. "That's a big gun."

  He heard the door to the garage open and close, and after that the house was silent. Lucas drifted back to sleep, now comfortable in the strange bedroom. When he woke again, it was eight o'clock. He sat on the edge of the bed for a moment, then staggered down the hall to the bathroom, shaved, half-fell into the shower, got a dose of icy water for his trouble, huddled outside the plastic curtain until the water turned hot, then stood under it, letting the stinging jets of water beat on his neck.

  Harper. They had to put the screws on Harper. So far, he was the only person who might know something. He stepped out of the shower, looked in the medicine cabinet for shampoo. There wasn't any, but there were two packs of birth control pills. He picked them up, turned them over, looked at the prescription label. More than two years old. Huh. He'd hoped he'd find that they'd been taken out the day before. Vanity. He dropped them back where he'd found them. Of course, if she hadn't been on the pill for two years, she probably didn't have much going.

  He looked under the sink, found a bottle of Pert, got back in the shower and washed his hair.

  Harper wasn't the only problem. There was still the time discrepancy. Something happened there. Something was going on with the priest. He didn't seem to fit with the child-sex angle. There'd been a notorious string of cases in Minnesota of priests abusing parish children, but in those cases, the men had invariably acted alone. The standing of a priest in a small community would almost seem automatically to preclude any kind of ring.

  "Aw, no," Lucas sputtered.

  He should have seen it. He stepped out of the shower, mopped his face and walked down the hall to the kitchen, found the telephone. He got Carr at his office.

  "You get any sleep?" he asked.

  "Couple hours on the office couch," Carr said. "We got a search warrant for Judy Schoenecker's place. You can take it out there."

  "I'd like to take Gene along. He was pretty good with Harper."

  "I understand Russ might have a sore nose this morning," Carr said.

  "It's the cold weather," Lucas said. "Listen, how many people live down Storm Lake Road, beyond the LaCourts' house? How many other residences?"

  "Hmp. Twenty or thirty, maybe. Plus a couple resorts, but those are closed, of course. Nobody there but the owners."

  "Could you get a list for me?"

  "Sure. The assessor'll know. We can get his plat books. What're you looking for?"

  "I'll know it when I see it. I'll be there in twenty minutes," Lucas said.

  When he hung up, he realized he was freezing, hustled back to the bathroom, and jumped into the shower. After two more minutes of hot water, he toweled off, dressed, and let himself out of the house.

  Carr was munching on a powdered doughnut hole when Lucas got in. He pointed at a white paper bag and said, "Have one. Why do you want those names down the road?"

  "Just to see what's down there," Lucas said, fishing a sweet roll out of the bag. "Did you get them?"

  "I told George-he's the assessor-I told him we needed them ASAP, so they should be ready," Carr said. "I'll take you down."

  George was tall and dark, balding, with fingers pointed like crow-quill pens. He pulled out a plat map of the lake area and used a sharp-nailed index finger to trace the road and tick off the inhabitants, right down to the infants. Three of the houses were lived in by single men.

  "Do you know these guys?" Lucas asked Carr, touching the houses of the three single men.

  "Yup," Carr said. "But the only one I know well is Donny Riley, he's in the Ojibway Rod and Gun Club. Pretty good guy. He's a retired mail carrier. The other two, Bob Dell works up in a sawmill and Darrell Anderson runs the Stone Hawk Resort."

  "Are they married? Divorced, widowed? What?"

  "Riley was married for years. His wife died. Darrell's gone off-and-on with one of the gals from the hospital, but I don't know much about him. Bob is pretty much a bachelor-farmer type."

  "Any of them Catholics?" Lucas asked.

  "Well…" Carr looked at the assessor, and then they bo
th looked at Lucas. "I believe Bob goes to Sunday Mass."

  "Does he come from here?"

  "No, no, he comes from Milwaukee," Carr said. "What're we pushing toward here?"

  "Nothing special," Lucas said. "Let's go back upstairs." And to the assessor he said, "Thanks."

  Lacey was sitting in Carr's office, his feet on the corner of the sheriff's desk. When they came in, he quickly pulled his feet off, then crossed his legs.

  "You're gonna ruin my desk and I'll take it out of your paycheck," Carr grumbled.

  "Sorry," Lacey said.

  "Now what the heck was all that about? Down there with George?" Carr asked Lucas as he settled into his swivel chair.

  "There's a rumor around-just a rumor-that Phil Bergen's gay. That why I asked him last night if he'd ever had any homosexual contacts."

  "That's the worst kind of bull," Carr blurted. "Where'd you hear that gay stuff?"

  "Look: I keep trying to figure why he says he was at the LaCourts' when the LaCourts were dead," Lucas said. "Why he won't back off of it. And I got to thinking, what if he was somewhere else down the road, but can't say so?"

  "Dammit," Carr said. He spun and looked out his window through the half-open venetian blinds. "You got a dirty mind, Davenport."

  "Are you thinking about anybody in particular?" Lacey asked. Lucas repeated the three names. Lacey stared at him for a moment, then cleared his throat, edged forward in his chair, and looked at the sheriff. "Um, Shelly, listen. My wife knows Bob Dell. I once said something about he's a good-looking guy, just kidding her, and she said, 'Bob's not the sort that goes for women, I kinda think.' That's what she said."

  "She was saying he's gay?" Carr asked, turning, pulling his head back, staring owlishly at his deputy.