Winter Prey

by John Sandford

  Back outside, Climpt said, "He won't call."

  "How far is Harper's place?"' "Two minutes from here," Carr said.

  "Think he'll be a problem?"

  "Not if we get right on top of him," Climpt said. "He won't win no college scholarship, but he's not stupid enough to take on a whole...

  whatever we are."

  "A posse," Lucas said.

  Climpt laughed, a short bark. "Right. A posse."

  John Mueller came back to Lucas' mind, like a nagging toothache, a pain that wouldn't go away but couldn't be fixed. Maybe he was at a friend's; maybe they'd already found him....

  Harper's house huddled in a copse of birch and red pine, alone on an unlit stretch of side road, a free-standing garage in back, a mercury-vapor yard-light overhead. Windows were lit in the back of the house. Climpt killed his lights and pulled into the end of the drive, and Lucas pulled in behind him.

  Climpt and Lacey got out, pushed the truck doors shut instead of slamming them. "Are you carrying?" Climpt a ked.

  s -V eah.

  "Might loosen. it up. Russ's always got something around."

  "All right." Lucas turned to Lacey, who had his hands in his pockets and was staring up at the house. "Henry, why don't you sit out here by the truck. Get the shotgun and just hang back."

  Lacey nodded and walked back toward the Suburban.

  "I'll try to get a little edge on him right away," Lucas told Climpt as they started up the driveway. "I won't pull any real shit, but you can act like you think I might."

  Woodsmoke drifted down on them, an acrid odor that cut at the nose and throat. Two feet of pristine snow covered the front porch. "Looks like he doesn't use the front door at all," Climpt said.

  As they walked around the side of the house, they heard the gun rack rattle as Lacey unlocked the shotgun and took it out, then the ratcheting sound of a twelve-gauge shell being pumped home. At the back door, Lucas could hear the sounds of a television-not the words but the rhythms.

  "Stand down at the bottom where he can see you," Lucas told Climpt. He went to the top of the stoop and knocked on the door, then stepped to the side. A moment later the yellow porch light came on, and then a curtain pulled back.

  A man's head appeared behind the window glass. He looked at Climpt, hesitated, made a head gesture, and fumbled with the doorknob.

  "We're okay," Lucas muttered.

  Harper pulled open the inner door, saw Lucas, frowned.

  He was an oval-faced man, with a narrow chin, thick, short lips, and scar tissue on his forehead and under his eyes.

  His eyes were the size of dimes, and black, like a lizard's.

  He was unshaven. He pushed open the storm door, looked down at Climpt and said, "What do you want, Gene?"

  "We need to talk to you about the death of your son, and we need to look through Jim's stuff again," Climpt said.

  Harper's thick lips twisted. "You got a warrant?"

  "Yeah, we got a warrant."

  After another long moment Harper said, "Now what the fuck are you fuckin' with me for, Climpt?" The question came in a low voice, rough and guttural, angry but unafraid.

  "We're not fuckin' with you," Lucas snapped back. He hooked the storm door handle with his left hand and jerked it open. Harper pulled back an inch, then settled in a fighting stance, ready to swing. He was round-shouldered but hard, with hands that looked granite-gray in the bad light.

  Lucas took his right hand out of his pocket, a bare hand with a.45.

  "Swing on me and I'll beat the shit out of you," he said. "And if I start to lose I'll blow your fuckin' nuts off."

  "What?" Harper stepped back, dropping his right hand.

  "You heard me, asshole."

  "Oh, yeah," Harper said. He straightened, let the left hand drop.

  "You're the big city guy, ub? Big city guy, big city asshole gonna blow my nuts off," He took another back, the anger spreading from his eyes over his face, step ready to go again.

  "Come on, motherfucker," Lucas said. He lifted the.45 out to the side. "You put your own boy out on the corner givin' blowJobs to fat guys, there's nobody in this county'd blame me if I spread your brains all over the house. So you wanna do it? Come on, come on..."

  "You're fuckin' nuts," Harper said. But his voice had changed again, uncertainty near the surface, and his eyes shifted past Lucas to Climpt. "Why are you fuckin' with me, Gene?"

  "The LaCourt girl, the one who was killed, had a picture of your boy, naked, with a grown-up male," Climpt said.

  Lucas dropped the gun to his side, moved forward, one foot inside, shoulder against the door, forcing Harper back.

  "She showed it around and then the family was wiped out," he said. "We want to look at Jim's things, see if there's anything that might indicate who it was."

  "Sure as shit wasn't me."

  "We're looking for a guy who's blond and a little fat," Lucas said. He stepped through the storm door into a mudroom, crowding Harper, who backed through an inner door into the kitchen. Climpt was a step behind. "You don't have any friends that look like that, do you?"

  Climpt called out to the truck, "Henry, c'mon."

  I want to see that warrant," Harper said, backing farther into the kitchen. The kitchen smelled of onions and bad meat and old soured milk.

  "Henry's got it," Climpt said. Harper looked past Lucas as Lacey walked up. Lacey pulled a paper out of his pocket and handed it to Lucas, who handed it to Harper. While Harper looked at it, Lucas decocked the.45. At the latching sound, Harper looked up and said, "Smith and Wesson. Is that the.40 or the.45?"

  "The.45," Lucas said.

  "I'd have gone with the.40," Harper said as the two deputies came in behind Carr. He'd gone into the asshole-cooperative mode, an almost imperceptible groveling learned in prisons.

  "Right," said Lucas, ignoring the comment. He put the pistol back in his coat pocket. "Where's the kid's room?"

  "You don't think I know about guns? I..."

  "I don't give a fuck what you know," Lucas snapped.

  "Where's the kid's room?"

  Harper muttered shit, crumbled the warrant in his hand and threw it on the floor, turned and led them through a narrow archway into the living room.

  The TV was tuned to professional wrestling, and a cardboard tray, stained orange from the sauce of an instant spaghetti dinner, sat on a round oak table with an empty crockery coffee cup.

  Harper brushed past it, into a hallway. The first door on the right was open, into a bathroom; the next door, to the left, was half-open, and Harper pulled it closed. "That's mine.

  Nothin' of Jim's in there."

  At the last door, on the right, he stopped and gestured with his thumb: "That was Jim's."

  Lucas pushed the door open. Jim Harper had been dead for more than two months, but his room was like he'd left it: a pair of dirty jeans, a tshirt and pair of underpants tossed in a corner, now covered with dust.

  The bed was unmade, a discolored flat-sheet and an olive-drab Army blanket tangled on a yellowed fitted sheet. The pillow was small, gray, dotted with what might have been blood. Lucas looked closer: blood, all right, but only in small spots, as though the kid had acne and picked at the sores. Clothes were pinched in the drawers of the single bureau, and two of the drawers hung open.

  "Me cops already been through it, messed it up," Harper said over Lucas' shoulder. "Didn't find anything."

  Lucas looked back down the hall at Lacey. "Henry, why don't you and Mr. Harper here go sit and watch some TV?

  Gene and I'll look around."

  "Hey..." Harper said.

  "Shut up," said Lucas.

  "They turned the room over and didn't find anything," Lucas said to Climpt. "If you were a kid, hiding something, where'd you put it?"

  "What I've been thinking is, Russ's such an asshole, why would a kid hide anything from him? Nothing the kid could do would bother him much."

  Lucas shrugged. "Maybe he'd hide something just so he could keep it."
>
  "That's a point," Climpt said. After a moment: "I always hid stuff in the basement. Maybe in a closet if it was just overnight and small-dirty magazines, that sort of thing. I suppose the attic, if they got one."

  "Let's do a quick run through this, then maybe look around a little."

  The house was an old one, with hardwood planked floors covered with patches of linoleum, and lath-and-plaster walls.

  Lucas dug through the kid's closet, shaking out a stack of magazines and comic books, checking shoes and the few shirts hanging inside.

  There were no loose floorboards and the plaster wall was cracked but intact. Climpt tossed the bureau again, pulling out each drawer to turn it over, checked the heat register, found it solid. In ten minutes they'd decided the room was clean.

  "Attic or basement?" asked Climpt.

  "Let's see how much trouble the attic is."

  The attic access was through a hatch in the bathroom.

  Standing on a chair, Lucas pushed up the hatch and was showered with dust and asbestos insulation. He pulled it Id shut again and climbed down, brushing the dirt out of his hair.

  "Hasn't been open in a while," he said.

  "Basement," said Climpt. They headed for the basement stairs, found Lacey digging through a freestanding wardrobe in the living room while Harper slumped in a chair.

  "Anything?"' Lucas asked.

  'Nope.

  "We'll be down the basement," Lucas said.

  Harper watched them go, but said nothing. "I wish that fucker'd give me a reason to slam him up alongside the head," Climpt said.

  The basement smelled of cobwebs, dust, engine oil, and coal. The walls' granite field stone was mortared with crumbling , sandy concrete.

  Two bare bulbs, dangling from ancient fraying wire, provided all the light. There were two small rooms, filled with the clutter of a rural half-century: racks of dusty Ball jars, broken crocks, an antique lawnmower, a lever-action.22 covered with rust. A dozen leg-hold jump traps hung from a nail, and hanging next to them, two dozen tiny feet tied together with twine.

  "Gophers," Climpt said, touching them. They swayed like a grisly wind chime. "County used to pay a bounty on them, way back, nickel a pair on front feet."

  A railroad-tie workbench was wedged into a corner with a rusting vise fitted at one end. A huge old coal furnace hunkered in the middle of the main room like a dead oak, stone cold. A diminutive propane burner stood in what had once been a coal room, galvanized ducts leading to the rooms above. The coal room was the cleanest place in the basement, apparently cleaned when the furnace was installed. At a glance, there was no place to hide anything.

  Lucas wandered over to the coal furnace, pulled open the furnace door, looked at a pile of old ashes, closed it. "This could take a while," he said.

  They took fifteen minutes, Climpt repeating, "Someplace where he could get it quick...." They found nothing, and started up the steps, unsatisfied. The basement had too many nooks and crannies. "If one of those fieldstones pulled out..." Lucas started.

  "We'd never find it: there must be two thousand of them," Climpt said.

  And Lucas said, "Wait a minute," went back down the stairs and looked toward the propane burner.

  "If that's the coal room, shouldn't there be a coal chute?" he asked.

  "Yeah, there should," Climpt said.

  They found the chute door set in the wall behind the propane burner, four feet above the floor and virtually invisible in the bad light.

  Lucas reached back, unlatched the door and felt inside. His hand fell on a stack of paper.

  "Something," he said. "Paper." He pulled it out. Three glossy sex magazines and two sex comics. He handed them to Climpt, reached back inside for another quick check, came up with a small corner of notebook paper, blank, that might have been used as a bookmark. Lucas stuck the paper in his pocket.

  "Porn," said Climpt, standing under one of the hanging light bulbs.

  They shook out the magazines, found nothing inside.

  "Check 'em," Lucas said. "We're looking for a picture of a kid on a bed."

  They flipped through the magazines, but all of the pictures were obviously commercial and involved women. The Mueller kid had described the photo he'd seen as rough, printed on newsprint.

  "Nothing much," Climpt said. "I mean, a lot of pussy...

  Goddamn Shelly'd have a heart attack."

  Lucas went back to the coal chute for a final check, reached far inside, felt just a corner of a piece of plastic.

  He had to stretch to fish it out.

  A Polaroid.

  Climpt came to look over his shoulder.

  A young boy, slender, nude, standing in front of a crouched woman, pushing into her mouth. His hands were wrapped around her skull. All that was visible of the woman was her dark hair, the lower part of her face from her nose down, and part of her neck. She was obviously older, probably in her forties.

  The boy's left hand was visible and a finger was gone.

  "Don't know the woman, just from that," Climpt said.

  "But that's Jim doin' her."

  "Hey, Lucas," Lacey called from upstairs.

  "Yeah?"

  "It's like... ah, Christ!" Lacey blurted.

  Lucas looked at Climpt, who shrugged, and they headed up the stairs.

  Lacey was standing in the door to the living room, his face dead white.

  Harper sat in a chair, a half-amused look on his face. They were looking at the television. The video was cheap, clear enough: two men were lying on a bed, fondling each other.

  "You sell this shit?" Climpt growled at Harper.

  "I told Henry-it all belonged to Jim. I don't look at homo shit."

  "Found it in the wardrobe," Lacey said. "There weren't any labels."

  Lucas handed Lacey the Polaroid.

  "Sonofagun," Lacey whispered.

  "Yeah," Lucas said. "You want to look at this, Harper?"

  No more Russ or Mr. Harper. He held it out in front of Harper, who reached for it, but Lucas pulled it back. "Just look-don't touch."

  Harper peered at the picture and drawled, "Looks like Jim, getting' him some head. Damn, I wish I knew her-she looks like she knows what she's doing."

  He still had the slightly amused look on his face. He was about to say something else when Climpt stepped past Lucas, grabbed Harper by the shirt, and hauled him out of the chair. "You motherfucker."

  Harper covered his gut with his elbows, kept his hands up in front of his face. He didn't want to get hurt, but he wasn't scared, Lucas thought.

  "Hey, hey," said Lacey, trying to intervene. "Let him..."

  Climpt shoved Harper at Lucas, who caught him, still off-balance, said, "Fuck, I don't want him," and spun him into the wall. Climpt caught him on the rebound, dragged him backwards by the collar and as Lacey shouted, "Hey," banged the back of Harper's head against the opposite wall, then pulled him forward, letting go as Lucas put his hand in Harper's face and snapped him backwards into the chair.

  "Knock it off," Lacey said.

  "Set your own kid up for this shit, didn't you?" Climpt said, his face an inch from Harper's. Harper spit at him, a spray of spittle.

  Climpt caught him by the shirt collar and the skin under his neck and hoisted him a foot out of the chair. "Sold his ass to faggots and anybody else who wanted some young stuff. You know what they're gonna do to you in the joint? You know what they do to child fuckers?

  You're gonna wear out your kneecaps kneeling on the floors, blowing those guys."

  Lacey, face red, had Climpt by the shoulder, pulling at him. Lucas put his arm between Harper and Climpt, said, "Gene, let him go. Gene..

  Climpt looked blindly at Lucas, then dropped Harper back in the chair, turned away, wiped his face with his forearm.

  "Motherfucker," Harper said, pulling down his shirt.

  Lucas turned to Lacey. "Could you get Shelly on the radio? Don't mention the Polaroid directly, but tell him we got something. And we need to see him."
/>
  Lacey stepped back, reluctantly. "You guys won't...

  "No, no," Lucas said. "And listen, ask him about the Mueller kid, if there's been any progress."

  "What about the Mueller kid?" Harper asked.

  "He's missing," Lucas said, turning back to him.