Winter Prey ld-5

by John Sandford

  "Well, not exactly," Lacey said. "Just that he wasn't the type who was interested in women."

  "This is awful," Carr said, looking back to Lucas.

  "It would explain a hell of a lot," Lucas said. "If people down there know that this Bob Dell is gay… maybe Bergen was down there, got caught in a lie, and then couldn't back off of it. Look at his drinking. If he's innocent, where's all the pressure coming from?"

  "From this office for one thing," Carr said. He climbed out of his chair, took a meandering walk around the office, a knuckle pressed to his teeth. "We've got to check on Dell," he said finally.

  "See if you can get his birthdate. Query the NCIC and Milwaukee, if that's where he's from," Lucas said. "And think about it: if this is Bergen's problem, then he's in the clear on the murder."

  "Yeah." Carr spun and stared through his window, which looked out at a snowpile, a drifted-in fence and the backs of several houses on the next street. "But he wouldn't be clear on the gay thing. And that'd kill him."

  They all thought about it for a minute, then Carr said, "Gene Climpt will meet you out at the Mill restaurant at noon." He passed Lucas a warrant.

  Lucas glanced at it and stuck it in his coat pocket. "Nothing at all on John Mueller?"

  Carr shook his head: "Nothing. We're looking for a body now."

  Lucas spent the morning at the LaCourts'. An electric heater tried to keep the garage warm, but without insulation, and with the coming and going of the lab crew, couldn't keep up. Everybody inside wore their parkas, open, or sweaters; it was barely warm enough to dispense with gloves. A long makeshift table had been built out of two-by-fours and particle board, and was stacked with paper, electronic equipment, and a computer with a printer.

  The crew had found a badly deformed slug in the kitchen wall. Judging from the base and the weight, allowing for some loss of jacketing material, the techs thought it was probably a.44 Magnum. Definitely not a.357. The gun Lucas found the night of the killings had not been fired.

  "The girl was alive when her ear was cut off, and also some other parts of her face apparently were cut away while she was alive," a tech said, reading from a fax. "The autopsy's done, but there are a lot of tests still outstanding."

  The tech began droning through a list of other findings. Lucas listened, but every few seconds his mind would drift from the job to Weather. He'd always been attracted to smart women, but few of his affairs had gone anywhere. He had a daughter with a woman he'd never loved, though he'd liked her a lot. She was a reporter, and they'd been held together by a common addiction to pressure and movement. He'd loved another woman, or might have, who was consumed by her career as a cop. Weather fit the mold of the cop. She was serious, and tough, but seemed to have an intact sense of humor.

  Can't fuck this up with Weather, he thought, and again, Can't fuck this thing up.

  Crane came in, blowing steam, stamping his feet, walked behind Lucas to a coffee urn. "He used the water heater to start the fire," he said to the back of Lucas' head.

  "What?"

  Lucas turned in his chair. Crane, still wrapped in his parka, was pouring himself a cup of coffee. "The hot water faucet was turned on over the laundry tub, and a lot of premix was splashed around the water heater. The heater's a mess, of course, but it looks like there might be traces of charred cotton coming out of the pilot port."

  "Say it in English," Lucas suggested.

  Crane grinned. "He splashed his premix around the house, soaked a rag in it and laid it across the burner in the water heater. He had to be careful to keep it away from the pilot light. Then he turned on the hot water faucet, let the water dribble out. Not too fast. Then he left. In a few minutes, the water level drops in the tank, cold water refills it…"

  "And the burner lights up."

  "Boom," said Crane.

  "Why would he do that?"

  "Probably to make sure he could get out. We figure there were fifteen gallons of premix spread around the place. He might've been afraid to toss a match into it. But it does mean he must've thought about burning the place. That's not something that would occur to you while you were standing there… if it happened at all."

  "If it did happen, that means there'd be a delay between the time he left and the time the fire started, right?"

  "Right."

  "How much?"

  "Don't know," Crane said. "We don't know the condition of the water tank before he turned the water on-how hot the water already was. He didn't turn the faucet on very far, just a steady dribble. Could have been anything from four or five minutes to twenty minutes."

  More delay, Lucas thought. More time between the killings and the moment the Jeep passed the fire station. There was no hope for a minor error anymore, a time mixup. The priest could not have been at the LaCourts'.

  "… through the surviving files…" Crane was talking about the search for the missing photograph.

  "It wouldn't be in a file," Lucas said abruptly. "They would have stuffed it someplace where they could get at it-someplace both casual and safe. Where if somebody needed to see it, they could just pick it up and say, 'Here it is.' "

  "Okay. But where?" Crane asked.

  "Cookie jar-like that."

  "We've looked through most of the stuff in the kitchen and their bedroom, the stuff that survived. We haven't found anything like it."

  "Okay."

  "We'll take it apart inch-by-inch," Crane said. "But it's gonna take time."

  Lucas made two phone calls and took one. The first call went to a nun in the Twin Cities, an old friend, a college psychology professor. Elle Kruger: Sister Mary Joseph.

  "Elle, this is Lucas. How're things?"

  "Fine," she said promptly. "I got Winston's preproduction beta-copy of the new Grove of Trees. I ran it with Sister Louisa over the weekend, and we froze it up right away, some kind of stack-overflow error."

  "Dammit, they said they fixed that." Grove of Trees was an intricate simulation of the battle of Gettysburg that he'd been working on for years. Elle Kruger was a games freak.

  "Well, we were on Sister Louisa's Radio Shack compatible," she said. "There's something goofy about that machine, because I ran the same disk on my Compaq and it worked fine."

  "All right, I'll talk to them. We ought to be compatible with everything, though," Lucas said. "Listen, I've got another problem and it involves the Church. I don't know if you can help me, but there are people being killed."

  "There always are, aren't there?" she said. "Where are you? And how does it involve the Church?"

  He sketched the problem out quickly: the priest, the missing time, the question about the man at the end of the road.

  "Lucas, you should go through the archdiocese of Milwaukee," Elle said.

  "Elle, I don't have time to fool around with Church bureaucracy, and you know what they're like when there's a possible scandal involved. It's like trying to get information out of a Swiss bank. This guy-priest-Bergen is about our age, and I bet you know people who know him. All I'm asking is that you make a couple of calls, see if you can find some friends of his. I understand he went to Marquette. Get a reading. Nothing formal, no big deal."

  "Lucas, this could hurt me. With the Church. I have relationships."

  "Elle…" Lucas pressed.

  "Let me pray over it."

  "Do that. Try to get back to me tonight. Elle, there are people being killed, including at least one junior high boy and maybe two. Children abused. There are homosexual photos published in underground magazines."

  "I get it," she snapped. "Leave me to pray. Just leave me."

  A deputy came in as Lucas hung up. "Shelly was on the radio. He's on the way out, and he wants you to wait."

  "Okay."

  The second call went to the Minneapolis police department, to a burglary specialist named Carl Snyder.

  "If you were a woman casually hiding something in your house for a couple of days, a dirty picture, where drop-in neighbors wouldn't see it, but where you
could get at it quickly, where'd you put it?"

  "Mmm… got a pencil?" Snyder asked. Snyder knew so much about burglary that Lucas suspected that he might have done some field research. There had been a series of extremely elegant coin and jewel thefts in the Cities, stretching back twelve years. Nothing had ever been recovered.

  "Don't talk to me," Lucas said. "There's a guy named Crane here, from the Wisconsin state crime labs. I'll put him on."

  Crane talked to Snyder, saying Yeah a lot, his head nodding, and after hanging up, pulled on his parka and said, "Wanna come?"

  "Might as well. Where're we going to look?" Lucas asked.

  "Around the refrigerator. Then under boxes in the cupboard. Of course, there's not much left there."

  The yard outside the house had been flattened by ice and the army of people working around it. They tramped across the frozen ground, pushed past a heavy canvas sheet, and went inside. Banks of tripod-mounted lights lit most of the interior; two refrigerator-sized electric heaters kept it vaguely warm. Most of the loose wreckage had been cleared away from the floors. Through the open door to the mudroom, Lucas could see a white chalk circle around the hole where they'd found the.44 slug.

  "All right: around the refrigerator, on the kitchen counter," Crane muttered.

  Wearing plastic gloves, he began sifting carefully through the wreckage on the kitchen counter top. The counter top had been yellowed by heat except where it had been covered. A bowl, a peanut butter jar, salt and pepper shakers left their bottom-shapes stenciled in white.

  "No paper… how about the refrigerator?"

  Crane found the remains of the photograph behind the magnetic message slate on the door of the refrigerator. He pried the message slate away from the door, was about to put it back and then said, "Whoa…"

  "What is it?" Lucas felt a thump in his stomach.

  Crane carried it to the window, held it to the light. A square of folded newsprint was stuck to the back of the slate, half of it charred black and imbedded in melted plastic. The other half was brown.

  "I don't know; maybe we ought to send it down to Madison, have them separate it," Crane said. But as he said it, he slipped a finger under one edge of the newsprint and lifted. It broke at the burn line, and the browned part came free. Crane turned it over in his hand.

  "It's kind of fucked up," he said. He looked at the paper melted into the plastic. "We might be able to recover part of that."

  The browned portion of the paper was the left side of a photo, showing the back and buttocks of a nude man. The remaining caption under the photo said: LOOK AT THIS BIG BOY. DINNER.

  Beneath the photo and caption was a series of jokes:

  Guy walks into a bar, he's got a head the size of a baseball, says, "Gimme a beer." The bartender shoves a glass of Bud across the bar and says, "Listen, pal, it's none of my business, but a big guy like you-how'd you get a little teeny head like that?" The guy says, "Well, I was down in Jamaica, walking on the beach, when I see this bottle. I pull the top off, and holy shit, a genie pops out. I mean, she was gorgeous. She had a body that wouldn't quit, great ass, tits the size of watermelons. And she says I can have a wish. So I said, 'Well look, you know, what I'd wish for, is to make love to you.' And the genie says, 'Sorry, that's one thing I'm not allowed to do.' So then I say, 'Okay, how about a little head?' "

  "Who does this kind of shit?" Lucas asked. He held the paper on the flat of his open hands, peering at the type. There was no indication of where it might have come from.

  "Anybody and everybody who can afford a Macintosh computer, a laser printer, and a halftone scanner. You could set up a whole magazine with a few thousand bucks' worth of equipment. Not the printing, just the type."

  "Is there any way to run it down?"

  Crane shrugged. "We can try. Do the best possible copies, circulate it, see what happens."

  "Do that," Lucas said. "We need to see the picture."

  Crane put the photo into an envelope and they carried it back to the garage. Carr was walking up from the car park, and they waited for him at the garage door. Inside, Crane showed him the remnants of the photo.

  "Damn," Carr said. "That could have made us, if we'd got all of it."

  "We'll try to trace it, but I can't promise anything," Crane said.

  Carr looked at Lucas and said, "Come on outside a minute."

  Lucas pulled his parka back on, zipped it, followed Carr through the door.

  "We got Bob Dell's birthdate off his DMV records and ran those through the NCIC," Carr said. "He was arrested a few times in Madison, apparently when he was going to school there. Disturbing the peace and once for assault. The disturbing the peace things were for demonstrations, the assault was for a bar fight. The charge was dropped before it got to court and apparently didn't amount to much. I called Madison, and it was just an ordinary bar, not a gay bar or anything. The demonstrations involved some kind of political thing, but it wasn't gay rights, whatever it was."

  "Nothing there," Lucas said.

  "Well, you remember what Lacey's wife said about Dell not liking women? I called her up, and asked her what she meant, and she hemmed and hawed and finally said yeah, there were rumors among the eligible women in town that you'd be wasting your time chasing Dell."

  "How solid were the rumors? Anything explicit?" Lucas asked.

  "Nothing she knew about."

  "Where's this place he works?"

  "Sawmill, about ten minutes from here," Carr said.

  "Let's go."

  Carr led the way down to the sawmill, a yellow-steel pole barn on a concrete slab. A thirty-foot-high stack of oak logs was racked above a concrete ramp that led into the mill.

  Inside the mill, the temperature hovered just above freezing. A half-dozen men worked around the saws. Lucas waited in the work bay while Carr poked his head into the office to talk to the owner. Lucas heard him say, "No, no, no, there's no problem, honest to God, we're just trying to run down every last…" And then a cut started, and he watched the saws until Carr came back out.

  "That's Bob in the vest," Carr said. "I'll get him when they finish the cut."

  Dell was a tall man, wearing jeans and a sleeveless down vest with heavy leather gloves and a yellow hard hat. He worked with the logs, jockeying them for the cut. When the cut was done, they took him outside, away from the noise of the mill. The tall man lit a cigarette and said, "What can I do for you, Sheriff?"

  Lucas said, "Did you have any visitors, or see anybody out around your place the night the LaCourts were killed?"

  Dell shook his head. "Nope. Didn't see anybody. I came home, watched TV, ate dinner, and then my beeper went off and I hauled my butt up there."

  Carr snapped his fingers. "That's right: you're with the fire department."

  Dell nodded. "Yeah. I figured you'd be around sooner or later, if you didn't catch somebody. I mean, me being a single guy and all, and just down that road."

  "We don't want to cause you any trouble," Carr said.

  "You already have," Dell said, looking back at the mill.

  "So you saw nobody that night. From the time you left work until the time you went to the fire, you saw nobody," Lucas said.

  "Nobody."

  "Didn't Father Bergen stop by?" Lucas asked.

  "No, no." Dell looked mystified. "Why would he?"

  "Aren't you one of his parishioners?"

  "Off and on, I guess," Dell said, "But he doesn't come around."

  "So you're not close to him?"

  "What's this about, Sheriff?" Dell asked, looking at Carr.

  "I gotta ask you something here, Bob, and I swear it'll go no further than the three of us," Carr said. "I mean, I hate to ask…"

  "Ask it," Dell said. He'd stiffened up; he knew what was coming.

  "We've heard some rumors in town that you might be gay, is what I guess it is."

  Dell turned away from them, looked up into the forest. "That's what it is, huh?" And after a minute, "What would that have to d
o with anything?"

  The sheriff stared at him for a minute, then looked at Lucas and said, "Sonofabitch."

  "I never saw Father Phil," Dell said. "Think whatever you want, I never saw him. I haven't laid eyes on him for three weeks, and that sure doesn't have anything to do with… my sex choices."

  The sheriff wouldn't look at him. Instead, he looked at Lucas, but said to Dell, "If you're lying, you'll go to jail. This is critical information."

  "I'm not lying. I'd swear in court," Dell said. "I'd swear in church, for that matter."

  Now Carr looked at him, a level stare, and finally he said, "All right. Lucas, have you got anything more?"

  "Not right now."

  "Thanks, Bob."

  "This is gonna ruin me here," Dell said quietly. "I'll have to leave."

  "Bob, you don't…"

  "Yeah, I will," Dell said. "But I hate to, because I liked it. A lot. Had friends, not gays, just friends. That's gone." He turned and walked away, down to the sawmill.

  "What do you think?" Carr asked as he watched him go.

  "It sounded like the truth," Lucas said. "But I've been lied to before and believed it."

  "Want to go back to Phil?"

  Lucas shook his head. "Not quite yet. We've got both of them denying it and nothing to show otherwise. Let's see what my Church friend has to say. I should hear from her tonight or tomorrow."

  "We don't have time…" Carr started.

  "If this is the answer to the time conflict, then it's not critical to the case," Lucas said. "Bergen would be out of it."

  "It's a sad day," Carr said. He looked back at the mill as Dell disappeared inside. "Bob wasn't a bad guy."

  "Well, he could hang on if he's got real friends."

  "Naw, he's right," Carr said. "With his job and all, he's gonna have to leave, sooner or later."

  Lucas met Climpt at the Mill, a restaurant-motel built on the banks of a frozen creek. The old mill pond, below the restaurant windows, had been finished with a Zamboni to make a skating rink. A dozen men sat on stools at a dining counter, and another dozen people were scattered in twos and threes at tables around the dining room. Climpt was standing by the windows with a mug of chicken broth, looking down at the mill pond, where a solitary old man in a Russian greatcoat turned circles on the ice.