Winter Prey

by John Sandford

  There was a noise from inside, a thump, and Carr stood on his tiptoes to peer through the small window set in the door.

  "Oh, no," he groaned. He pulled open the storm door and pushed through the inner door, Lucas trailing behind. The priest stood in the hallway, leaning on one wall, looking at them. He was wearing a white tshirt, pulled out of his black pants, and gray wool socks. His hair stood almost straight up, as though he'd been electrocuted. He was holding a glass and the room smelled of bourbon.

  "You idiot," Carr said quietly. He walked across the room and took the glass from the priest, who let it go, his hand slack. Carr turned back toward Lucas as though looking for a place to throw it.

  "You know what they're saying," Bergen said at Carr's back. "They're saying I did it."

  "Jesus, we've been trying..." Lucas started.

  "Don't you blaspheme in this housel" the priest shouted.

  "I'll kick your ass if you give me trouble," Lucas shouted back. He crossed the carpet, walking around Carr, who caught at his coat sleeve, and confronted the priest: "What happened out at the LaCourts'?"

  "They were alive when I saw them!" Bergen shouted.

  "They were alive-every one of them!"

  "Did you have a relationship with Claudia LaCourt? Now or ever?"

  The priest seemed startled: "A relationship? You mean sexual?"

  "That's what I mean," Lucas snapped. "Were you screwing her?"

  "No. That's ridiculous." The wind went out of him, and he staggered to a La-Z-Boy and dropped into it, looking up a Lucas in wonder. "I mean, I've never... What are you t asking?"

  Carr had stepped into the kitchen, came back with an empty Jim Beam bottle, held it up to Lucas.

  "I've heard rumors that the two of you might be involved."

  "No, no," Bergen said, shaking his head. He seemed genuinely astonished. "When I was in the seminary, I slept with a woman from a neighboring college. I also got drunk and was talked into... having sex with a prostitute. One time. Just once. After I was ordained, never. I never broke my VOWS."

  His face had gone opaque, either from whiskey or calculation.

  "Have.you ever had a homosexual involvement?"

  "Davenport..." Carr said, a warning in his voice.

  "What?" Bergen was back on his feet now, face flushed, furious.

  Ijl@ "Yes or no," Lucas pressed.

  "No. Never."

  Lucas couldn't tell if Bergen was lying or telling the truth. He sounded right, but his eyes had cleared, and Lucas could see him calculating, weighing his responses.

  "How about the booze? Were you drinking that night, at the LaCourts'?"

  The priest turned and let himself fall back into the chair.

  "No. Absolutely not. This is my first bottle in a year. More than a year."

  "There's something wrong with the time," Lucas said.

  "Tell us what's wrong."

  "I don't know," Bergen said. He dropped his head to his hands, then ran his hands halfway up to the top of his head and pulled out at the hair until it was again standing up in spikes. "I keep trying to find ways...

  I wasn't drinking."

  "The firemen. Do you have any trouble with them?"

  Bergen looked up, eyes narrowing. "Dick Westrom doesn't particularly care for me. I take my business to the other hardware store, it belongs to one of the parishioners.

  The other man, Duane... I hardly know him. I can't think what he'd have against me. Maybe something I don't know about."

  "How about the people who reported the fire?" Lucas asked, looking across the room at Carr. Carr was still holding the bottle of Jim Beam as though he were presenting evidence to a jury.

  "They're okay," Carr said. "They're out of it. They saw the fire, made the call. They're too old and have too many physical problems to be involved."

  The three of them looked at each other, waiting for another question, but there were none. The time simply didn't work. Lucas searched Bergen's face. He found nothing but the waxy opacity.

  "All right," he said finally. "Maybe there was another Jeep. Maybe Duane saw Father Bergen's Jeep earlier, going down the lake road, and it stuck in his mind and when he saw a car go by, he thought it was yours."

  "He didn't see a Jeep earlier," Carr said, shaking his head. "I asked him that-if he'd seen Phil's Jeep go down the lake road."

  "I don't know," Lucas said, still studying the priest.

  "Maybe... I don't know."

  Carr looked at Bergen. "I'm dumping the bottle, Phil.

  And I'm calling Joe."

  Bergen's head went down. "Okay."

  "Who's Joe?" Lucas asked.

  "His AA sponsor," Carr said. "We've had this problem before."

  Bergen looked up at Carr, his voice rasping: "Shelly, I don't know if this guy believes me," he said, tipping his head at Lucas. "But I'll tell you: I'd swear on the Holy Eucharist that I had nothing to do with the LaCourts."

  "Yeah," Carr said. He reached out and Bergen took his hand, and Carr pulled him to his feet. "Come on, let's call Joe, get him over here."

  Joe was a dark man, with a drooping black mustache and heavy eyebrows.

  He wore an old green Korean War-style olive-drab billed hat with earflaps. He glanced at Lucas, nodded at Carr and said, "How bad?"

  "Drank at least a fifth," Carr said. "He's gone."

  "God damnit." Joe looked up at the house, then back to Carr. "He'd gone more'n a year. It's the rumors coming out of your office, Shelly."

  "Yeah, I know. I'll try to stop it, but I don't know..

  "Better more'n try. Phil's got the thirst as bad as anyone I've ever seen." Joe stepped toward the door, turned, about to say something else, when Bergen pulled the door open behind him.

  "Shelly!" he called. He was too loud. "Telephone-it's your office.

  They say it's an emergency."

  Carr looked at Lucas and said, "Maybe something broke."

  He hurried inside and Joe took Bergen by the shoulder and said, "Phil, we can handle this."

  "Joe, I.. Bergen seemed overcome, looked glassily at Lucas, still on the sidewalk, and pulled Joe inside, closing the door.

  Lucas waited, hands in his pockets, the warmth he'd accumulated in the house slowly dissipating. Bergen was a smart guy, and no stranger to manipulation. But he didn't have the sociopath edge, the just-below-the-surface glassiness of the real thing.

  Thirty seconds after he'd gone inside, Carr burst out.

  "Come on," he said shortly, striding past Lucas toward the trucks.

  "What happened?"

  "That kid you talked to, the one that told you about the picture?"

  Carr was talking over his shoulder.

  "John Mueller." Jug-cars, off-brand shoes, embarrassed.

  "He's missing. Can't be found."

  "What?" Lucas grabbed Carr's arm. "Fuckin' tell me."

  "His father was working late at his shop, out on the highway ," Carr said.

  They were standing in the street. "He'd left the kid at home watching television. When his mother got home, and the kid wasn't there, she thought he was out at the shop. It wasn't until his parents got together that they realized he was gone. A neighbor kid's got a Nintendo and John's been going down there after school a couple nights a week, and sometimes stays for dinner. They called the neighbors but there wasn't anybody home, and they thought maybe they'd all gone down to the Arby's. So they drove around until they found the neighbors, but they hadn't seen him either."

  "Sonofabitch," Lucas said, looking past Carr at nothing.

  "I might of put a finger on him."

  "Don't even think that," Carr said, his voice grim.

  They headed for the Mueller house, riding together in the sheriff's truck, crimson flashers working on top.

  "You were hard on him," Carr said abruptly. "On Phil."

  "You've got four murder victims and now this," Lucas said. "What do you expect, violin music?"

  "I don't know what I expected," Carr said.
/>   The sheriff was pushing the truck, moving fast. Lucas caught the bank sign: minus twenty-eight.

  if, He said it aloud: "Twenty-eight below."

  "Yeah." The wind had picked up again, and was blowing thin streamers of snow off rooftops and drifts. The sheriff hunched over the steering wheel. "If the kid's been outside, he's dead. He doesn't need anybody to kill him."

  A moment passed in silence. Lucas couldn't think about John Mueller: when he thought about him, he could feel a darkness creeping over his mind.

  Maybe the kid was at another friend's house, maybe...

  "How long has Bergen had the drinking problem?" he asked.

  "Since college. He told me he went to his first AA meeting before he was legal to drink," Carr said. His heavy face was a faint unhealthy green in the dashboard lights.

  "How bad? DTs? Memory loss? Blackouts?"

  "Like that," Carr said.

  "But he's been dry? Lately?"

  "I think so. Sometimes it's hard to tell, if a guy keeps his head down. He can drink at night, hold it together during the day. I used to do a little drinking myself."

  "Lot of cops do."

  Carr looked across the seat at him: "You too?"

  "No, no. I've abused a few things, but not booze. I've always had a taste for uppers."

  "Cocaine?"

  Lucas' laughed, a dry rattle: the kid's face kept popping up. Small kid, sweet-faced. "I can hear the beads of sweat popping out of your forehead, Shelly. No. I'm afraid of that shit. Might be too good, if you know what I mean."

  "Any alcoholic'd know what you mean," Carr said.

  "I've done a little speed from time to time," Lucas continued , looking out at the dark featureless forest that lined the road. "Not lately.

  Speed and alcohol, they're for different personalities."

  "Either one of them'll kill you," Carr said.

  They passed a video rental shop with three people standing outside; they all turned to watch the sheriff's truck go by. Lucas said, "People do weird things when they're drunk.

  And they forget things. If he was drunk, the time..

  ..........

  "He says he wasn't," Carr said.

  "Would he lie about it?"

  "I don't think so," Carr said. "Under other circumstances, he might-,drinkers lie to themselves when they're starting again. But with this, all these dead people, I don't think he'd lie. Like I told you, Phil Bergen's a moral man. That's why he drinks in the first place."

  There were twenty people at the Muellers', mostly neighbors , with three deputies. A half-dozen men on snowmobiles were organizing a patrol of ditches and trails within two miles of the house.

  Carr plunged into it while Lucas drifted around the edges, helpless.

  He didn't know anything about missing persons searches, not out here in the woods, and Carr seemed to know a lot about it.

  A few moments after Carr and Lucas arrived, the boy's father hurried out into the yard, pulling on a snowmobile suit. A woman stood in the door in a white baker's dress, hands clasped to her face. The image stuck with Lucas: it was an effect of pure terror.

  Mueller said something to Carr and they talked for a moment, then Carr shook his head. Lucas heard him say "Three of them up north...

  The father had been looking around the yard, as though his son might walk out of the woods. Instead of the boy, he saw Lucas and stepped toward him. "You sonofabitch," he screamed, eyes rolling. A deputy caught him, jostled him, stayed between them. Faces in the yard turned toward Lucas.

  "Where's my boy, where's my boy?" Mueller screamed.

  Carr came over and said, "You better leave. Take my truck. Call Lacey, tell him to get Gene, and the three of you go on out to Harper's place. There's nothing you can do here."

  "Must be something," Lucas said. A deputy was talking to Mueller, Mueller's eyes still fixed on Lucas.

  "There's nothing," Carr said. "Just get out. Go on down to Harper's like we planned."

  Lucas met Lacey and Climpt at the 77 Tap, a bar ten miles east of Grant. The bar was an old one, a simple cube with shingle siding and a few dark windows up above, living A rooms upstairs for the owner. An antique gas pump sat to one side of the place, with a set of rusting, unused bait tanks, all of it awash in snow. A Leinenkugel's sign provided most of the exterior lighting.

  i Inside, the bar smelled of fried fish and old beer; an Elton John song was playing on the jukebox. Lacey and Climpt were sitting in one of the three booths.

  "No sign of the kid?" Lacey asked as he slid out of the booth.

  Climpt threw two dollars on the table and stood up behind him, chewing on a wooden matchstick.

  "Not when I left," Lucas said.

  Lacey and Climpt looked at each other and Climpt shook his head. "If he ain't at somebody's house..

  "Yeah.

  "Ain't your fault," Climpt said, looking levelly at Lucas.

  "What're you supposed to do?"

  "Yeah." Lucas shook his head and they started for the door. "So tell me about Harper."

  Lacey was pulling on his gloves. "He's our local hood.

  He spent two years in prison over in Minnesota for ag assault-this was way back, must've been a couple of years after he got out of high school. He's been in jail since then, maybe three or four times."

  "For?"

  "Brawling, mostly. Fighting in bars. He'd pick out somebody , get on them, goad them into a fight and then hurt them. You know the type.

  He's beat up some women we know of, but they never wanted to do anything about it.

  Either because they were still hoping to get together with him or because they were scared. You know."

  "Yeah.

  "He's carried a gun off and on, smokes a little marijuana , maybe does a little coke, we've heard both," Lacey continued. "He says he needs the gun to protect himself when he's taking cash home from the station."

  "He's a felon," Lucas said.

  "Got his rights back," Lacey said. "Shouldn't of. There's been rumors that when he's been hard up for money, he'd go down to the Cities and knock over a liquor store or a 7-Eleven. Maybe that's just bar talk."

  "Maybe," Climpt grunted. He looked at Lucas: "He's not like a TV bully. He's a bully, but he's not a coward. He's a mean sonofabitch."

  Climpt and Lacey rode together, and Lucas followed them out, occasional muted cop chatter burbling out of the radio.

  The roads had cleared except for icy corners and intersections , and traffic was light because of the cold. They made good time.

  Knuckle Lake popped up as a fuzzy ball of light far away down the highway, brightening and separating into business signs and streetlights as they got closer. There were a half dozen buildings scattered around the four corners: a motel, two bars, a general store, a cafe, and the Amoco station. The station was brightly lit, with snow piled twenty feet high along the back property lines. One car sat at a gas pump, engine off, the driver elsewhere. An old Chevy was visible through the windows of the single repair bay. They stopped in front of the big window, the other two trucks swinging in behind. A teenager in a ragged trench coat and tennis shoes peered through the glass at them: he was all by himself, like a guppie in a well-lit aquarium.

  Lucas followed Climpt inside. Climpt nodded at the kid and said, "Hello, Tommy. How you doing?"

  "Okay, just fine, Mr. Climpt," the kid said. He was nervous , and a shock of straw-colored hair fell out from under his watch cap, his Adam's apple bobbing spasmodically.

  "How long you been out?" Climpt asked.

  "Oh, two months now," the kid said.

  "Tommy used to borrow cars, go for rides," Climpt said.

  "Bad habit," Lucas said, crossing his arms, leaning against the candy machine. "Everybody gets pissed off at you."

  "I quit," the kid said.

  "He's a good mechanic," Climpt said. Then: "Where's Russ?"' "Down to the house, I guess."

  "Okay."

  "It'd be better if you didn't call him," Lucas said.

&
nbsp; "Whatever," the kid said. "I'm, you know, whatever."

  "Whatever," Climpt said. He pointed a finger at the kid's face, and the kid swallowed. "We won't be tellin' Russ we talked to you."