Winter Prey

by John Sandford

There're a couple boats and a snowmobile out in the back shed but there aren't any gas cans with them, and no cans in here. The cans'd most likely have some gas in them."

  "Anyway, the house went up fast," Lucas said.

  "Yeah. The folks across the lake were watching television. They say that one minute there was nothing out the window but the snow. The next minute there was a fireball.

  They called the firehouse."

  "The one I came by? Down at the corner?"

  "Yeah. There were two guys down there. They were making a snack and one of them saw a black Jeep go by.

  Just a few seconds later, the alarm came in. They thought the Jeep belonged to Phil... the priest. Father Philip Bergen , the pastor at All Souls."

  "Did it?" Lucas asked.

  "Yes. They said it looked like Phil was coming out of the lake road.

  So I called him and asked him if he'd seen anything unusual. A fire or somebody in the road. And he said no. Then, before I could say anything else, he said he was here, at the LaCourts'."

  "Here?" Lucas eyebrows went up.

  "Yeah. Here. He said everything was all right when he left."

  "Huh." Lucas thought about it. "Are we sure the time is right?"

  "It's right. One of the firemen was standing at the microwave,with one of those prefab ham sandwiches. They take two minutes to cook and it was about ready. The other one said, 'There goes Father Phil, hell of a night to be out." Then the microwave alarm went off, the guy got his sandwich out, and before he could unwrap it, the alarm came in."

  "That's tight."

  "Yeah. There wasn't enough time for Frank to have that snow pile up on him. Not if Phil's telling the truth."

  "Time is weird," Lucas said. "Especially in an emergency. If it wasn't just a minute, if it was five minutes, then this Father Phil could have..."

  "That's what I figured... but doesn't look that way."

  Carr shook his head, swirled coffee around the coffee cup, then set it on the hood of the Chevy and flexed his fingers , trying to work some warmth back in them. I got the firemen and went over it a couple of times.

  There just isn't time."

  -No the priest..

  "He said he left the house and drove straight out to the highway and then into town. I asked him how long it took him to get from the house, here, to the highway, and he said three or four minutes. It's about a mile, so that's about right, with the snow and everything."

  "Hmp.

  "But if he had something to do with it, why'd he admit being here?

  That doesn't make any gol-darned -sense," the sheriff said.

  "Have you hit him with this? Sat him down, gone over it?"

  "No. I'm not real experienced with interrogation. I can take some kid who's stolen a car or ripped off a beer sign and sit him down by one of the holding cells and scare the devil out of him, but this would be...

  different. I don't know about this kind of stuff. Killers."

  "Did you tell him about the time bind?" Lucas asked.

  "Not yet."

  "Good.

  "I was stumped," Carr said, turning to stare blankly at the garage wall, remembering. "When he said he was here, I couldn't think what to say. So I said, 'Okay, we'll get back to you." He wanted to come out when we told him the family was dead, do the last rites, but we told him to stay put, in town. We didn't want him to..

  Contaminate his memory."

  "Yeah." Carr nodded, picked up the coffee he'd set on the car hood, and finished it.

  "How about the firemen? Would they have any reason to lie about it?"

  Carr shook his head. "I know them both, and they're not particular friends. So it wouldn't be like a conspiracy."

  "Okay."

  Two firemen came through the door. The first was encased in rubber and canvas, and on top of that, an inch-thick layer of ice.

  __MMMMW "You look like you fell in the lake," Carr said. "You must be freezing to death."

  "It was the spray. I'm not cold, but I can't move," the fireman said.

  The second fireman said, "Stand still." The fireman stood like a fat rubber scarecrow and began chipping the ice away with a wooden mallet and a cold chisel.

  They watched the ice chips fly for a moment, then Carr said, "Something else. When he went by the fire station, he was towing a snowmobile trailer. He's big in one of the snowmobile clubs-he's the president, in fact, or was last year. They'd had a run today, out of a bar across the lake.

  So he was out on the lake with his sled."

  "And those tracks came up from the lake."

  "Where nobody'd be without a sled."

  "Huh. So you think the priest had something to do with it?"

  Carr looked worried. "No. Absolutely not. I know him: he's a friend of mine. But I can't figure it out. He doesn't lie, about anything.

  He's a moral man."

  "If a guy's under pressure..

  Carr shook his head. Once they'd been playing golf, he said, both of them fierce competitors. And they were dead even after seventeen.

  Bergen put his tee shot into a group of pines on the right side of the fairway, made a great recovery and was on the green in two. He two-putted for par, while Carr bogied the hole, and lost.

  "I was bragging about his recovery to the other guys in the locker room, and he just looked sadder and sadder.

  When we were walking down to the bar he grabbed me, and he looked like he was about to cry. His second shot had gone under one of the evergreens, he said, and he'd kicked it out. He wanted to win so bad.

  But cheating, it wrecked him. He couldn't handle it. That's the kind of guy he is. He wouldn't steal a dime, he wouldn't steal a golf stroke. He's absolutely straight, and incapable of being anything else."

  The fireman with the chisel and mallet laid the tools on the floor, grabbed the front of the other fireman's rubber coat, and ripped it open.

  "That's got it," said the second man. "I can take it from here." He looked at Carr: "Fun in the great outdoors , huh?"

  The doctor was edging between the wall and the nose of the station wagon, followed by a tall man wrapped in a heavy arctic parka. The doctor had light hair spiked with strands of white, cut efficiently short. She was small, but athletic with wide shoulders, a nose that was a bit too big and a little crooked, bent to the left. She had high cheekbones and darkblue eyes, a mouth that was wide and mobile.

  She had just a bit of the brawler about her, Lucas thought, with the vaguely Oriental cast that Slavs often carry. She was not pretty, but she was strikingly attractive. "Is this a secret conversation?" she asked.

  She was carrying a cup of coffee.

  "No, not really," Carr said, glancing at Lucas. He gave a tiny backwards wag of his head that meant, Don't say anything about the priest.

  The tall man said, "Shelly, I hit every place on the road.

  Nobody saw anything connected, but we've got three people missing yet.

  I'm trying to track them down now."

  "Thanks, Gene," Carr said, and the tall man headed toward the door. To Lucas, he said, "My lead investigator."

  Lucas nodded, and looked at Weather. "I don't suppose there was any reason to do body temps."

  The doctor shook her head, took another sip of coffee.

  Lucas noticed that she wore no rings. "Not on the two women. The fire and the water and the ice and snow would mess everything up.

  Frank was pretty bundled up, though, and I did take a temp on him.

  Sixtyfour degrees. He hadn't been dead that long."

  "Huh," said Carr, glancing at Lucas.

  The doctor caught it and looked from Lucas to Carr and asked, "Is that critical?"

  "You might want to write it down somewhere," Carr said.

  "There's a question about how long they were dead before the fire started," Lucas said.

  Weather was looking at him oddly. "Maddog, right?"

  "What?"

  "You were the guy who killed the Maddog after he sliced up all those wo
men. And you were in that fight with those Indian guys."

  Lucas nodded. "Yeah." The Crows coming out of that house in the dark,.45s in their hands.... Why'd she have to bring that up?

  "I had a friend who did that New York cop, the woman who was shot in the chest? I can't remember her name, but at the time she was pretty famous."

  "Lily Rothenburg." Damn. Sloan on the steps ofHennepin General, white-faced, saying, "Got your shit together ?... Lily's been shot."

  Sweet Lily.

  "Oh, yes," Weather said, nodding. "I knew it was a flower name.

  She's back in New York?"

  "Yeah. She's a captain now. Your friend was a redheaded surgeon? I remember."

  "Yup. That's her. And she was there when the big shootout happened.

  She says it was the most exciting night of her career. She was doing two ops at the same time, going back and forth between rooms."

  "My God, and now it's here," Carr said, appalled. He looked at Lucas.

  "Listen, I spent five years on the patrol before I got elected up here, and that was twenty years ago.

  Most of my boys are off the patrol or local police forces.

  We really don't know nothin' about multiple murder. What I'm asking' is, are you gonna help us out?"

  "What do you want me to do?" Lucas asked, shaking away the memories.

  "Run the investigation. I'll give you everything I can.

  Eight or ten guys, help with the county attorney, whatever."

  "What authority would I have?"

  Carr dipped one hand in his coat pocket and at the same time said, "Do you swear to uphold the laws of the state of Wisconsin and so forth and so on, so help you God?"' "Sure." Lucas nodded.

  Carr tossed him a star. "You're a deputy," he said, "We can work out the small stuff later."

  Lucas looked at the badge in the palm of his hand.

  "Try not to shoot anybody," Weather said.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Iceman's hands were freezing. He fumbled the can opener twice, then put the soup can aside and turned on the hot water in the kitchen sink.

  As he let the water run over his fingers, his mind drifted....

  He hadn't found the photograph. The girl didn't know where it was, and she'd told the truth: he'd nearly cut her head off before she'd died, cut away her nose and her ears.

  She said her mother had taken it, and finally, he believed her. But by that time Claudia was dead. Too late to ask where she'd put it.

  So he'd killed the girl, chopping her with the corn-knife, and burned the house. The police didn't know there was a photo, and the photo itself was on flimsy newsprint.

  With the fire, with all the water, it'd be a miracle if it had survived.

  Still. He hadn't seen it destroyed. The photo, if it were found, would kill him.

  Now he stood with his fingers under the hot water. They slowly shaded from white to pink, losing the putty-like consistency they'd had from the brutal, cold. For just a moment he closed his eyes, overwhelmed by the sense of things undone. And time was trickling away. A voice at the back of his head said, Run now. Time is trickling away.

  But he had never run away. Not when his parents had beaten him. Not when kids had singled him out at school.

  Instead, he had learned to strike first, but slyly, disguising his aggression: even then, cold as ice. Extortion was his style: I didn't take it, he gave it to me. We were just playing, he fell down, he's just a crybaby, I didn't mean anything.

  In tenth grade he'd learned an important lesson. There were other students as willing to use violence as he was, and violence in tenth grade involved larger bodies, stronger muscles: people got hurt. Noses were broken, shoulders were dislocated in the weekly afternoon fights.

  Most importantly , you couldn't hide the violence. No way to deny you were in a fight if somebody got hurt.

  And somebody got hurt. Darrell Wynan was his name.

  Tough kid. Picked out the Iceman for one of those reasons known only to people who pick fights: in fact, he had seen it coming. Carried a rock in his pocket, a smooth sandstone pebble the size of a golf ball, for the day the fight came.

  Wynan caught him next to the football field, three or four of his remora fish running along behind, carrying their books, delight on their faces. A fight, a fight...

  The fight lasted five seconds. Wynan came at him in the stance of an experienced barehanded fighter, elbows in.

  The Iceman threw the rock at Wynan's forehead. Since his hand was only a foot away when he let go, there was almost no way to miss.

  Wynan went down with a depressive fracture of the skull.

  He almost died.

  And the Iceman to the cops: I was scared, he was coming with his whole gang, that's all he does is beat up kids, I just picked up the rock and threw it.

  His mother had picked him up at the police station (his father was gone by then, never to be seen again). In the car, his mother started in on him: Wait till I get you home, she said. Just wait.

  And the Iceman, in the car, lifted a finger to her face and said, You ever fuckin' touch me again I'll wait until you're asleep and I'll get a hammer and I'll beat your head in.

  You ever touch me again, you better never go to sleep.

  She believed him. A good thing, too. She was still alive.

  He turned off the hot water, dried his hands on a dish towel. Need to think. So much to do. HeJorgot about the soup, went and sat in his, television chair, stared at the blank screen.

  He had never seen the photograph as it had been reproduced , although he'd seen the original Polaroid. He had been stupid to let the boy keep it.

  And when the boy had sent it away...

  "We're gonna be famous, " the kid said "What?" They were smoking cigarettes in the trailer's back bedroom, the boy relaxing against a stack of pillows ; the Iceman had both feet on the floor, his elbows on his knees.

  The boy rolled over, looked under the bed, came up with what looked like a newspaper. Heflipped it at the Iceman.

  There were dozens of pictures, boys and men.

  "What'd you do?" the Iceman asked, but in his heart he knew, and the anger swelled in his chest.

  "Sent in the picture. You know, the one with you and me on the couch.

  "You fuck.

  The Iceman lurched at him; the boy giggled, barely struggling, not understanding. The Iceman was on his chest, straddling him, got his thumbs on the boy's throat... and then Jim Harper knew. His eyes rolled up and his mouth opened and the Iceman...

  Did what? Remembered backing away, looking at the body. Christ.

  He'd killed him.

  The Iceman jumped to his feet, reliving it and the search for a place to dump the body. He thought about throwing it in a swamp. He thought about shooting him with a shotgun, of his head said, Run now. Time is trickling away.

  But he had never run away. Not when his parents had beaten him. Not when kids had singled him out at school.

  Instead, he had learned to strike first, but slyly, disguising his aggression: even then, cold as ice. Extortion was his style: I didn't take it, he gave it to me. We were just playing, he fell down, he's just a crybaby, I didn't mean anything, In tenth grade he'd learned an important lesson. There were other students as willing to use violence as he was, and violence in tenth grade involved larger bodies, stronger muscles: people got hurt. Noses were broken, shoulders were dislocated in the weekly afternoon fights. Most importantly , you couldn't hide the violence. No way to deny you were in a fight if somebody got hurt.

  And somebody got hurt. Darrell Wynan was his name.

  Tough kid. Picked out the Iceman for one of those reasons known only to people who pick fights: in fact, he had seen it coming. Carried a rock in his pocket, a smooth sandstone pebble the size of a golf ball, for the day the fight came.

  Wynan caught him next to the football field, three or four of his remora fish running along behind, carrying their books, delight on their faces. A fight, a fight...

/>   The fight lasted five seconds. Wynan came at him in die stance of an experienced barehanded fighter, elbows in. The Iceman threw the rock at Wynan's forehead. Since his hand was only a foot away when he let go, there was almost no way to miss.

  Wynan went down with a depressive fracture of the skull.