Winter Prey

by John Sandford

  "The tracks come right up to where he was chopped," Lucas said.

  "Yeah-but we don't know if he walked down to the lake on snowshoes to look at something, and then came back up and was killed, or if the killer came in and went out."

  "If they were his snowshoes, where are they now?"

  "There's a set of shoes in the mudroom, but they were so messed up by the firehoses that we don't know if they'd just been used or what...

  no way to tell," Lacey said. "They're the right kind, though.

  Bearpaws. No tails."

  "Okay.

  "But we still got a problem," Carr said, looking reluctantly down at the body. "Look at the snow on him. The firemen threw the tarps over them as soon as they got here, but it looks to me like there's maybe a half-inch of snow on him."

  "So what?"

  Carr stared down at the body for a moment, then dropped his voice.

  "Listen, I'm freezing and there's some strange stuff to talk about. A problem. So do you want to see the other bodies now? Woman was shot in the forehead, the girl's burned. Or we could just go talk."

  "A quick look," Lucas said.

  "Come on, then," Carr said.

  Lacey broke away. "I gotta check that commo gear, Shelly."

  Lucas and Carr trudged across a layer of discolored ice to the house, squeezed past the front door. Inside, sheetrock walls and ceiling panels had buckled and folded, falling across burned furniture and carpet. Dishes, pots and pans, glassware littered the floor, along with a set of ceramic collector's dolls. Picture frames were everywhere. Some were burned, but every step or two, a clear, happy face would look up at him, wide-eyed, well-lit. Better days.

  Two deputies were working through the house with cameras : one with a video camera, the power wire running down his collar under his parka, the other with a 35mm Nikon.

  "My hands are freezing," the video man stuttered.

  "Go on down to the garage," Carr said. "Don't get yourself hurt."

  "There're a couple gallon jugs of hot coffee and some paper cups in my truck. The white Explorer in the parking lot," Lucas said. "Doors are open."

  "Th-thanks."

  "Save some for me," Carr said. And to Lucas: "Where'd you get the coffee?"

  "Stopped at Dow's Corners on the way over and emptied out their coffeemaker. I did six years on patrol and I must've froze my ass off at a hundred of these things."

  "Huh. Dow's." Carr squinted, digging in a mental file.

  "That's still Phil and Vickie?"

  "Yeah. You know them?"

  "I know everybody on Highway 77, from Hayward in Sawyer County to Highway 13 in Ashland County," Carr said matter-of-factly. "This way."

  He led the way down a charred hall past a bathroom door to a small bedroom. The lakeside wall was gone and blowing snow sifted through the debris. The body was under a burnt-out bedframe, the coil springs resting on the girl's chest. One of the portable lights was just outside the window, and cast flat, prying light on the scorched wreckage, but left the girl's face in almost total darkness: but not quite total. Lucas could see her improbably white teeth smiling from the char.

  Lucas squatted, snapped on the flash, grunted, turned it off and stood up again.

  "Made me sick," said Carr. "I was with the highway patrol before I got elected sheriff. I saw some car wrecks you wouldn't believe. They didn't make me sick. This did."

  "Accidents are different," Lucas agreed. He looked around the room.

  "Where's the other one?"

  "Kitchen," Carr said. They started down the hall again.

  "Why'd he burn the place?" Carr asked, his voice pitching up. "It couldn't have been to hide the killings. He left Frank's body right out in the yard. If he'd just taken off, it might have been a day or two before anybody came out.

  Was he bragging about it?"

  "Maybe he was thinking about fingerprints. What'd LaCourt do?"

  "He worked down at the res, at the Eagle Casino. He was a security guy."

  "Lots of money in casinos," Lucas said. "Was he in trouble down there?"

  "I don't know," Carr said simply.

  "How about his wife?"

  "She was a teacher's aide."

  "Any marital problems or ex-husbands wandering around?" Lucas asked.

  "Well, they were both married before. I'll check Frank's ex-wife, but I know her, Jean Hansen, and she wouldn't hurt a fly. And Claudia's ex, is Jimmy Wilson and Jimmy moved out to Phoenix three or four winters back, but he wouldn't do this, either. I'll check on him, but neither one of the divorces was really nasty. The people just didn't like each other anymore. You know?"

  "Yeah, I know. How about the girl? Did she have any boyfriends?"

  "I'll check that too," Carr said. "But, uh, I don't know.

  I'll check. She's pretty young."

  "There's been a rash of teenagers killing their families and friends."

  "Yeah. A generation of weasels."

  "And teenage boys sometimes mix up fire and sex. You get a lot of teenage firebugs. If there was somebody hot for the girl, it'd be something to look into."

  "You could talk to Bob Jones at the junior high. He's the principal and he does the counseling, so he might know," "Urn," Lucas said. His sleeve touched a burnt wall, and he brushed it off.

  "I'm hoping you'll stay around a while," Carr blurted.

  Before Lucas could answer, he said, "Come on down this way."

  They picked their way toward the other end of the house, through the living room, into the kitchen by the back door.

  Two heavily wrapped figures were crouched over a third body.

  The larger of the two people stood up, nodded at Carr.

  He wore a Russian-style hat with the flaps pulled down and a deputy sheriff's patch on the front. The other, with the bag, was using a metal tool to turn the victim's head.

  "Can't believe this weather," the deputy said. "I'M so fuck-uh, cold I can't believe it."

  "Fucking cold is what you meant to say," said the figure still crouched over the body. Her voice was low and uninflected , almost scholarly.

  "I really don't mind the word especially when it's so fucking cold."

  "It wasn't you he was worried about, it was me," Carr said bluntly.

  "You see anything down there, Weather, or are you just fooling around?"

  The woman looked up and said, "We've got to get them down to Milwaukee and let the pros take a look. No amateur nights at the funeral home."

  "Can you see anything at all?" Lucas asked.

  The doctor looked down at the woman under her hands.

  "Claudia was shot, obviously, and with a pretty powerful weapon.

  Could be a rifle. The whole back of her head was shattered and a good part of her brain is gone. The slug went straight through. We'll have to hope the crime lab people can recover it. It's not inside her."

  "How about the girl?" Lucas asked.

  "Yeah. It'll take an autopsy to tell you anything definitive , There are signs of charred cloth around her waist and between her legs, so I'd say she was wearing underpants and maybe even, um, what do you call those fleece pants, like uh..."

  "Sweat pants," Carr said.

  "Yes, like that. And Claudia was definitely dressed, jeans and long underwear."

  "You're saying they weren't raped," Lucas said.

  The woman stood and nodded. Her parka hood was tight around her face, and nothing showed but an oval patch of skin around her eyes and nose.

  "I can't say it for sure, but just up front, it doesn't look like it.

  But what happened to her might have been worse."

  "Worse?" Carr recoiled.

  "Yes." She stooped, opened her bag, and the deputy said, "I don't want to look at this." She stood up again and handed Carr a Ziploc bag.

  Inside was something that looked like a dried apricot that had been left on a charcoal grill. Carr peered at it and then gave it to Lucas.

  "What is it?" Carr asked the woman.

 
; "Ear," she and Lucas said simultaneously. Lucas handed it back to her, "Ear? You can't be serious," Carr said.

  "Taken off before or after she was killed?" Lucas asked, his voice mild, interested. Carr looked at him in horror.

  "You'd need a lab to tell you that," Weather said in her professional voice, matching Lucas. "There are some crusts that look like blood.

  I'm not sure, but I'd say she was alive when it was taken off."

  The sheriff looked at the bag in the doctor's hand and turned and walked two steps away, bent over and retched, a stream of saliva pouring from his mouth. After a moment, he straightened, wiped his mouth on the back of a glove, and said, "I gotta get out of here."

  "And Frank was done with an ax," Lucas said.

  "No, I don't think so. Not an ax," the woman said, shaking her head.

  Lucas peered at her, but could see almost nothing of her face. "A machete, a very sharp machete. Or maybe something even thinner. Maybe something like, um, a scimitar."

  "A what?" The sheriff goggled at her.

  "I don't know," she said defensively. "Whatever it was, the blade was very thin and sharp. Like a five-pound razor.

  It cut through the bone, rather than smashing through Re a wedge-shaped weapon would. But it had weight, too."

  "Don't go telling that to anybody at the Register, " Carr said.

  "They'd go crazy."

  "They're gonna go crazy anyway," she said.

  "Well, don't make them any crazier."

  "What about the guy's face?" Lucas asked. "The bites?"

  "Dog," she said. "Coyote. God knows I see enough dog bites around here and it looks like a dog did it."

  "You can hear them howling at night, bunches of them," the deputy said.

  "Coyotes."

  "Yeah, I've got them up around my place," Lucas said.

  "Are you with the state?" the woman asked.

  "No. I used to be a Minneapolis cop. I've got a cabin over in Sawyer County and the sheriff asked me to run over and take a look."

  "Lucas Davenport," the sheriff said, nodding at him. "I'm sorry, Lucas, this is Weather Karkinnen."

  "I've heard about you," the woman said, nodding.

  "Weather was a surgeon down in the Cities before she came back home," the sheriff said to Lucas.

  "Is that Weather, like 'Stormy Weather'T' Lucas asked.

  "Exactly," the doctor said.

  "I hope what you heard about Davenport was good," Carr said to her.

  The doctor looked up at Lucas and tilted her head. The light on her changed and he could see that her eyes were blue. Her nose seemed to be slightly crooked. "I remember that he killed an awful lot of people," she said.

  The doctor was freezing, she said, and she led the way toward the front door, the deputy following, Carr stumbling behind. Lucas lingered, looking down at the dead woman. As he turned to leave, he saw a slice of nickeled metal under a piece of crumbled and blackened wallboard.

  From the curve of it, he knew what it was: the forepart of a trigger guard.

  "Hey," he called after the others. "Is that camera guy still in the house?"

  Carr called back, "The video guy's in the garage, but the other guy's here."

  "Send him back here, we got a weapon."

  Carr, Weather, and the photographer came back. Lucas pointed out the trigger guard, and the photographer took two shots of the area. Moving carefully, Lucas lifted the wallboard. A revolver. A nickel-finish Smith and Wesson on a heavy frame, walnut grips. He pushed the board back out of the way, then stood back as the photographer shot the gun in relation to the body.

  "You got a chalk or a grease pencil?" Lucas asked.

  "Yeah, and a tape measure." The photographer groped in his pocket, came up with a grease pencil.

  "Shouldn't you leave it for the lab guys?" Carr asked nervously.

  "Big frame, could be the murder weapon," Lucas said.

  He drew a quick outline around the weapon, then measured the distance of the gun from the wall and the dead woman's head and one hand, while the photographer noted them.

  With the measurements done, Lucas handed the grease pencil back to the photographer, looked around, picked up a splinter of wood, pushed it through the fingerguard, behind the trigger, and lifted the pistol from the floor. He looked at the doctor. "Do you have another one of those Ziplocs?"

  Man" "Yes." She opened her bag, supported it against her leg, dug around, and opened a freezer bag for him. He dropped the gun into it, pointed the barrel at the floor, and through the plastic he pushed the ejection level and swung the cylinder.

  "Six shells, unfired," he said. "Shit."

  "Unfired?" Carr asked.

  "Yeah. I don't think it's the murder weapon. The killer wouldn't reload and then drop it on the floor... at least I can't think why he would."

  "So?" Weather looked up at him.

  "So maybe the woman had it out. I found it about a foot from her hand.

  She might have seen the guy coming. That means there might have been a feud going on; she knew she was in trouble," Lucas said. He read the serial number to the photographer, who noted it: "You could try to run it tonight. Check the local gun stores, anyway."

  "I'll get it going," Carr said. Then: "I n-n-need some coffee."

  "I think you're fairly hypothermic, Shelly," Weather said.

  "What you need is to sit in a tub of hot water."

  "Yeah, yeah."

  As they climbed down from the front door, Lucas carrying the pistol, another deputy was walking up the driveway.

  "I got those tarps, Sheriff. They're right behind me in a Guard truck."

  "Good. Get some help and cover up the whole works," Carr said, waving at the house. "There'll be guys in the garage." To Lucas he said, "I got some canvas sheets from the National Guard guys and we're gonna cover the whole house until the guys from Madison get here."

  "Good." Lucas nodded. "You really need the lab guys for this.

  Don't let anybody touch anything. Not even the bodies."

  The garage was warm, with deputies and firemen standing around an old-fashioned iron stove stoked with oak splits.

  The deputy who'd been doing the filming spotted them and came over with one of Lucas' Thermos jugs.

  "I saved some," he said.

  "Thanks, Tommy." The sheriff nodded, took a cup, hand shaking, passed it to Lucas, then took a cup for himself.

  "Let's get over in the corner where we can talk," he said.

  Carr walked around the nose of LaCourt's old Chevy station wagon, away from the gathering of deputies and firemen , turned, took a sip of coffee. He said, "We've got a problem." He stopped, then asked, "You're not a Catholic, are you?"

  "Dominus vobiscum," Lucas said. "So what?"

  "You are? I haven't been in the Church long enough to remember the Latin business," Carr said. He seemed to think about that for a moment, sipped coffee, then said, "I converted a few years back. I was a Lutheran until I met Father Phil. He's the parish priest in Grant."

  "Yeah? I don't have much interest in the Church anymore."

  "Hmph. You should consider..

  "Tell me about the problem," Lucas said impatiently.

  "I'm trying to, but it's complicated," Carr said. "Okay.

  We figure whoever killed these folks must've started the fire. It was snowing all afternoon-we had about four inches of new snow. When the firemen got here, though, the snow'd just about quit. But Frank's body had maybe a half-inch of snow on it. That's why I had them put the tarp over it, I thought we could fix an exact time.

  It wasn't long between the time he was killed and the fire. But it was some time. That's important. Some time.

  And now you tell me the girl might have been tortured...

  more time."

  "Okay." Lucas nodded, nodding at the emphasis.

  "Whoever started the fire did it with gasoline," Carr said.

  "You can still smell it, and the house went up like a torch.

  Maybe the
killer brought the gas with him or maybe he used Frank's.