Winter Prey

by John Sandford

  He sat in the sudden silence, out of breath, heart pounding. The Forest Road intersection: he'd forgotten all about it. If he'd kept moving on her, he'd have hit the ends of the steel culvert pipes. He'd be dead. He looked at the embankment, the cold moving into his stomach. Too close. He shook his head, cranked the sled and turned toward home. He looked back before he started out, saw her taillights disappear around a curve. He'd have to go back for her. And soon.

  Plan it this time. Think it out.

  Weather saw the snowmobile slow and fall back. Forest Road flashed He must have read her taillights.

  She'd seen the road-crossing sign in her headlights, realized she wouldn't have time to stop, to warn him, and had frantically pumped her brakes, hoping he'd catch on.

  And he had.

  Okay. She saw his taillight come up, just a pinprick of red in the darkness, and touched the preset channel selector on her radio. Duluth public radio was playing Mozart'sEine kleine Nachtmusik.

  Now about Davenport.

  They really needed to talk again. And that might take some planning.

  She smiled to herself She hadn't felt like this for a while.

  Chapter 4

  Lucas followed Carr down the dark, snow-packed highway.

  A logging truck, six huge logs chained to the trailer, pelted past them and enveloped them in a hurricane of loose snow.

  Carr got his right wheels in the deep snow on the shoulder , nearly didn't make it out. A minute later, a snowplow pushed glumly past them, then a pod of snowmobiles.

  He leaned over the steering wheel, tense, peering into the dark. The night seemed to eat up their headlights. They got past the snowplow and the highway opened up for a moment. He groped in the storage bin under the arm rest, found a tape, shoved it in the tape player. Joe Cocker came up, singing "Black-Eyed Blues."

  Lucas felt like he was waking from an opium dream, spiderwebs and dust blowing off his brain. He'd come back from New York and a brutal manhunt. In Minneapolis, he'd found... nothing. Nothing to do but work for money and amuse himself.

  In September he'd left the Cities for two weeks of muskie fishing at his Wisconsin cabin east of Hayward. He'd never gone back. He'd called, kept in touch with his programmers, but could never quite get back to the new office. The latest in desktop computers waited for him, a six-hundred-dollar swivel chair, an art print on the wall beside the mounted muskie.

  He'd stayed in the north and fought the winter. October had been cold.

  On Halloween, a winter storm had blown in from the southern Rockies.

  Before it was done, there were twenty inches of snow on the ground, with drifts five and six feet high.

  The cold continued through November, with little flurries and the occasional nasty squall. Two or three inches of new snow accumulated almost every week. Then, on the Friday after Thanksgiving, another major storm swept through, dumping a foot of additional snow. The local papers called it Halloween II and reported that half the winter snowplow budget had been used. Winter was still four weeks away.

  December was cold, with off-and-on snow. Then, on January second and third, a blizzard swept the North Woods.

  Halloween III. When it ended, thirty-four more inches of snow had been piled on the rest. The drifts lapped around the eaves of lakeside cabins.

  People said, "Well you shoulda been here back in..

  But nobody had seen anything like it, ever.

  And after the blizzard departed, the cold rang down.

  On the night of the third, the thermometer on his cabin deck fell to minus twenty-nine. The following day, the temperature struggled up to minus twenty: schools were closed everywhere, the radio warned against anything but critical travel. On this night, the temperature in Ojibway County would plunge to minus thirty-two.

  Almost nothing moved. A rogue logging truck, a despondent snowplow, a'few snowmobile freaks. Cop cars. The outdoors was dangerous; so cold as to be weird.

  He'd been napping on the couch in front of the fireplace when he first heard the pounding. He'd sat up, instantly alert, afraid that it might be the furnace. But the pounding stopped. He frowned, wondered if he might have imagined it. Rolled to his feet, walked to the basement stairs, listened. Nothing. Stepped to the kitchen window. He saw the truck in the driveway and a second later the front doorbell rang.

  Ah. Whoever it was had been pounding on the garage door.

  He went to the door, curious. The temperature was well into the minus twenties. He looked through the window inset in the door. A cop, wearing a Russian hat with the ear flaps down.

  "Yeah?" Lucas didn't recognize the uniform parka.

  "Man, we gotta big problem over in Ojibway County.

  The sheriff sent me over to see if you could come back and take a look at it. At least three people murdered."

  "C'mon in. How'd you know about me?"

  Lacey stepped inside, looked around. Books, a few wildlife watercolors on the walls, a television and stereo, pile of embers in the fireplace, the smell of clean-burning pine.

  "Sheriff read that story in the Milwaukee Journal 'bout you in New York, and about living up here. He called around down to Minneapolis and they said you were up here, so he called the Sawyer County sheriff and found out where you live. And here I am."

  "Bad night," Lucas said.

  "You don't know the half of it," said Lacey. "So cold."

  Carr's taillights blinked, then came up, and he slowed and then stopped, turned on his blinkers. Lucas closed up behind, stopped.

  Carr was on the highway, walking around to the front of his truck.

  Lucas opened his door and stepped out: "You okay?"

  "Got a tree down," Carr yelled back.

  Lucas let the engine run, shut the door, hustled around Carr's truck.

  The cold had split a limb off a maple tree and it had fallen across the roadside ditch and halfway across the right traffic lane. Carr grabbed the thickest part of it, gave it a tug, moved it a foot. Lucas joined him, and together they dragged it off the road.

  "Cold," Carr said, and they hurried back to their trucks.

  Weather, Lucas thought. Her image popped up in his mind as he started after Carr again. Now that might be an efficient way to warm up, he thought. He'd been off women for a while, and was beginning to feel the loss.

  Grant appeared as a collection of orange sodium-vapor streetlights, followed by a Pines Motel sign, then a Hardee's and a Unocal station, an LP gas company and a video-rental store with a yellow-light marquee.

  The sheriff turned right at the only traffic light, led him through the threeblocklong business district, took a left at a half-buried stop sign and headed up a low hill. On the left was a patch of pines that might have been a park.

  A white clapboard church stood at the top of the hill, surrounded by a grove of red pine, with a small cemetery in back. The sheriff drove past the church and stopped in the street in front of a small brick house with lighted windows.

  Lucas caught a sign in his headlights: RECTORY. Below that, in cursive letters, REV. PHILIP BERGEN. He pulled in behind Carr, killed the engine, and stepped down from the truck. The air was so cold and dry that he felt as though his skin were being sandpapered. When he breathed, he could feel ice crystals forming on his chin and under his nose.

  "That logging truck almost did us," Lucas said as Carr walked back from his Suburban. Gouts of steam poured from their mouths and noses.

  "Gol-darned fool. I called back and told somebody to pull him over," Carr said. "Give him a breath test, slow him down." And as they started across the street, he added, "I'm not looking forward to this."

  They scuffed through the snow on the rectory walk, up to the covered porch. Carr pushed the doorbell, then dropped his head and bounced on his toes. A man came to the door, peered out the window, then opened it.

  "Shelly, what happened out there?" Bergen held the door open, glanced curiously at Lucas, and said, "They're dead?"

  "Yeah, um... let's get our boo
ts off, we gotta talk," Carr said.

  "This is our new deputy, Lucas Davenport Bergen nodded, peered at Lucas, a wrinkle forming on his forehead, between his eyes. "Pleased to meet you."

  The priest was close to fifty, a square, fleshy Scandinavian with blond hair and a permanently doubtful look on his pale face. He wore a wool Icelandic sweater and black slacks, and was in his stocking feet.

  His words, when he spoke, had a softness to them, a roundness, and Lucas thought that Bergen would not be a fire-and-brimstone preacher, but a mother's-milk sort. ' Lucas and Carr dumped their pac boots in the front hallway and walked in stocking feet down a short hall, past a severe Italian ate crucifix with a bronze Jesus, to the living room.

  Carr peeled off his snowmobile suit and Lucas dumped his parka next to a plain wood chair, and sat down.

  "So what happened?" Bergen said. He leaned on the mantel over a stone fireplace, where the remnants of three birch logs smoldered behind a glass door. A Sacred Heart print of the Virgin Mary peered over his shoulder.

  "There was an odd thing out there." Carr dropped the suit on the floor, then settled on the edge of an overstuffed chair.

  He put his elbows on his knees, laced his fingers, leaning toward the priest.

  "Yes?" Bergen frowned.

  "When I called, you said the LaCourts were okay when you left."

  "Yes, they were fine," Bergen said, his head bobbing.

  He was assured, innocent. "They didn't seem nervous.

  How were they killed, anyway? Is it possible that one of them..."

  He answered his own question, shaking his head. "No, not them."

  "A fireman saw your Jeep passing the station," Carr continued. "A few seconds later the fire call came in. When the firemen got there, maybe five or six minutes later, it appeared that the LaCourts had been dead for some time, A half hour, maybe more."

  "That's not possible," Bergen said promptly. He straightened , looked from Lucas to Carr, a shadow in his eyes.

  Suspicion. "Shelly... you don't think I was involved?"

  "No, no, we're just trying to straighten this out."

  "So what were they doing when you left?" Lucas asked.

  Bergen stared at him, then said, "You're the homicide fellow who lives over in Sawyer County. The man who was fired from Minneapolis."

  "What were you doing?" Lucas repeated.

  "Shelly?" The priest looked at the sheriff, who looked away.

  "We've got to figure this out, Phil."

  "Mr. Davenport is a mercenary, isn't he?" Bergen asked, looking again at Lucas.

  "We need him, Phil," Carr said, almost pleading now.

  "We've got nobody else who can do it. And he's a good Catholic boy."

  "What were you doing?" Lucas asked a third time. He put glass in his voice, a cutting edge.

  The priest pursed his lips, moving them in and out, considering both Lucas and the question, then sighed and said, "When I left, they were fine.

  There was not a hint of a problem. I came right back here, and I was still here when Shelly called."

  "The firemen say there's no mistaking the time," Lucas said.

  "They're certain."

  "I'm certain, too," Bergen snapped.

  Lucas: "How long were you there at the house?"

  "Fifteen minutes, something like that," Bergen said. He'd turned himself to face Lucas more directly.

  "Did you eat anything?"

  "Cupcakes. A glass of milk," Bergen said.

  "Were the cupcakes hot?"

  "No, but as a matter of fact, she was frosting them while we talked."

  "When you left, did you stop anywhere on the way out?

  Even pause?"

  "No."

  "So you went right out to your Jeep, got in, drove as fast as seemed reasonable to get out of the road."

  "Well... I probably fiddled around in the Jeep for a minute before I left, a minute or two," Bergen said. He knew where they were going, and began to stretch the time. "But I didn't see any sign of trouble before I left."

  "Was the television on?" Lucas asked.

  "Mmm, no, I don't think so."

  "How about the radio?"

  "No. We were talking," Bergen said.

  "Was there a newspaper on the table?"

  "I just can't remember," Bergen said, his voice rising.

  "What are these questions?"

  "Can you remember anything that would be peculiar to this day, that you saw inside the LaCourt house, that might still be there, that might have survived the fire? A book sitting on a table? Anything?"

  "Well..." The priest scratched the side of his nose.

  "No, not particularly, I'll think about it. There must be something."

  "Did you look at the clock when you got home?"

  "No. But I hadn't been here long when Shelly called."

  Lucas looked at Carr. "Shelly, could you call in and have somebody patch you through to the LaCourt house, and tell somebody to go into the kitchen and check to see if there was a bowl of frosting."

  He turned his head back to Bergen: "Was the frosting in a bowl or out of one of those cans?"

  "Bowl."

  To Carr: check and see if there was a frosting bowl or a cupcake tin in the sink or around the table."

  "Sure, "She might have washed the dishes," Bergen suggested.

  "There couldn't have been too much time," Lucas said.

  "Use the office phone, Shelly," the priest said to Carr.

  He and Lucas watched the sheriff pad down the hall, then Lucas asked, "Did Frank LaCourt come outside when you left?"

  "No. He said good-bye at the door. At the kitchen table, actually.

  Claudia came to the door. Did you go to Catholic schools?"

  "Through high school," Lucas said.

  "Is this what they taught you? To interrogate priests?"

  "Your being a priest doesn't cut any ice with me," Lucas said.

  "You've seen all the scandals these last few years.

  That stuff was out there for years and you guys hid it.

  There were a half a dozen gay brothers at my school and everybody knew it. And they affected more than a few kids."

  Bergen stared at him for a moment, then half-turned and shook his head.

  "Was Frank LaCourt wearing outdoor clothing or look like he was getting ready to go outside?" Lucas asked, returning to the questions.

  "No." Bergen was subdued now, his voice gone dark.

  "Did you see anyone else there?"

  "No."

  "Did Frank have a pair of snowshoes around?" Lucas asked.

  "Not that I saw."

  "Did you see any snowshoe tracks outside the door?"

  "No." Bergen shook his head. "I didn't. But it was snowing."

  "Did you pass any cars on the way out?"

  "No. How far is it from the corner by the firehouse back to LaCourts'?"

  "One-point-one miles," Lucas said.

  Bergen shook his head. "I'm a careful driver. I said it took a minute or two to get out to the corner, but two minutes would be thirty miles an hour. I wasn't doing thirty. I was probably going a lot slower than that. And I was pulling my trailer."

  "Snowmobile?"

  "Yes, I'd been out with the club, the Grant Scramblers, you can check with them."

  Carr came back: "They're looking," he said. "They'll call back."

  Lucas looked at Carr. "If we have somebody waiting for Father Bergen to leave, and if he lures Frank LaCourt outside somehow, right away, kills him, then kills the other two, burns the place immediately and gets out, in a frenzy, and if you build a little extra time in between the firemen's arrival at the place and finding the bodies-we could almost make it."

  Carr looked at Bergen, who seemed to ponder what Lucas had said.

  He'd chosen Lucas as the enemy, but now Lucas had changed direction.

  "Okay," Carr said, nodding. To Bergen: "I hated to hit you with it, Phil, but there did seem to be a problem. We can probably figu
re it out. When you were there, what were you talking about? I mean, it's not confessional stuff, is it?