Winter Prey

by John Sandford

  Harper wasn't the only problem. There was still the time discrepancy.

  Something happened there. Something was going on with the priest. He didn't seem to fit with the child-sex angle. There'd been a notorious string of cases in Minnesota of priests abusing parish children, but in those cases, the men had invariably acted alone. The standing of a priest in a small community would almost seem automatically to preclude any kind of ring.

  "Aw, no," Lucas sputtered.

  He should have seen it. He stepped out of the shower, mopped his face and walked down the hall to the kitchen, lw@

  found the telephone. He got Carr at his office.

  "You get any sleep?" he asked.

  "Couple hours on the office couch," Carr said. "We got a search warrant for Judy Schoenecker's place. You can take it out there."

  "I'd like to take Gene along. He was pretty good with Harper."

  "I understand Russ might have a sore nose this morning," Carr said.

  "It's the cold weather," Lucas said. "Listen, how many people live down Storm Lake Road, beyond the LaCourts' house? How many other residences?"

  "Hinp. Twenty or thirty, maybe. Plus a couple resorts, but those are closed, of course. Nobody there but the owners."

  "Could you get a list for me?"

  "Sure. The assessor'll know. We can get his plat books.

  What're you looking for?"

  "I'll know it when I see it. I'll be there in twenty minutes," Lucas said.

  When he hung up, he realized he was freezing, hustled back to the bathroom, and jumped into the shower. After two more minutes of hot water, he toweled off, dressed, Md` p.. gamma and let himself out of the house.

  MOM Carr was munching on a powdered doughnut hole when got in. He pointed at a white paper bag and said, "Have Lucas one. Why do you want those names down the road?"

  "Just to see what's down there," Lucas said, fishing a sweet roll out of the bag. "Did you get them?"

  "I told George-he's the assessor-I told him we needed them ASAP, so they should be ready," Carr said. "I'll take you down."

  George was tall and dark, balding, with fingers pointed like crow-quill pens. He pulled out a plat map of the lake and used a sharp-nailed index finger to trace the road.

  area and tick off the inhabitants, right down to the infants. Three of the houses were lived in by single men.

  11do you know these guys?" Lucas asked Carr, touching the houses of the three single men.

  "Yup," Carr said. "But the only one I know well is Donny Riley, he's in the Ojibway Rod and Gun Club. Pretty good guy. He's a retired mail carrier. The other two, Bob Dell works up in a sawmill and Darrell Anderson runs the Stone Hawk Resort."

  "Are they married? Divorced, widowed? What?"

  "Riley was married for years. His wife died. Darrell's gone off-and-on with one of the gals from the hospital, but I don't know much about him. Bob is pretty much a bachelor-farmer type."

  "Any of them Catholics?" Lucas asked.

  "Well..." Carr looked at the assessor, and then they both looked at Lucas. "I believe Bob goes to Sunday Mass."

  "Does he come from here?"

  "No, no, he comes from Milwaukee," Carr said. "What're we pushing toward here?"

  "Nothing special," Lucas said. "Let's go back upstairs."

  And to the assessor he said, "Thanks."

  Lacey was sitting in Carr's office, his feet on the corner of the sheriff's desk. When they came in, he quickly pulled his feet off, then crossed his legs.

  "You're gonna ruin my desk and I'll take it out of your paycheck," Carr grumbled.

  "Sorry," Lacey said.

  "Now what the beck was all that about? Down there with George?"

  Carr asked Lucas as he settled into his swivel chair.

  "There's a rumor around-just a rumor-that Phil Bergen's gay. That why I asked him last night if he'd ever had any homosexual contacts."

  "That's the worst kind of bull," Carr blurted. "Where'd you hear that gay stuff?"

  "Look: I keep trying to figure why he says he was at the LaCourts' when the LaCourts were dead," Lucas said.

  "Why he won't back off of it. And I got to thinking, what if he was somewhere else down the road, but can't say so?"

  "Dammit," Carr said. He spun and looked out his window through the halfopen venetian blinds. "You got a dirty mind, Davenport."

  "Are you thinking about anybody in particular?" Lacey asked. Lucas repeated the three names. Lacey stared at him for a moment, then cleared his throat, edged forward in his chair, and looked at the sheriff. "Um, Shelly, listen. My wife knows Bob Dell. I once said something about he's a d-looking guy, just kidding her, and she said, 'Bob's not the sort that goes for women, I kinda think." That's what she said."

  "She was saying he's gay?" Carr asked, turning, pulling his head back, staring owlishly at his deputy.

  "Well, not exactly," Lacey said. "Just that he wasn't the type who was interested in women."

  "This is awful," Carr said, looking back to Lucas.

  "It would explain a hell of a lot," Lucas said. "If people down there know that this Bob Dell is gay... maybe Bergen was down there, got caught in a lie, and then couldn't back off of it. Look at his drinking.

  If he's innocent, where's all the pressure coming from?"

  "From this office for one thing," Carr said. He climbed out of his chair, took a meandering walk around the office, a knuckle pressed to his teeth.

  "We've got to check on Dell," the said finally.

  "See if you can get his birthdate. Query the NCIC and Milwaukee, if that's where he's from," Lucas said. "And think about it: if this is Bergen's problem, then he's in the clear on the murder."

  "Yeah." Carr spun and stared through his window, @1 which looked out at a snowpile, a drifted-in fence and the backs of several houses on the next street. "But he wouldn't be clear on the gay thing. And that'd kill him."

  They all thought about it for a minute, then Carr said, "Gene Climpt will meet you out at the Mill restaurant at noon." He passed Lucas a warrant.

  Lucas glanced at it and stuck it in his coat pocket. "Nothing at all on John Mueller?"

  Carr shook his head: "Nothing. We're looking for a body now."

  Lucas spent the morning at the LaCourts'. An electric heater tried to keep the garage warm, but without insulation, and with the coming and going of the lab crew, couldn't keep up. Everybody inside wore their parkas, open, or sweaters ; it was barely warm enough to dispense with gloves.

  A long makeshift table had been built out of two-by-fours and particle board, and was stacked with paper, electronic equipment, and a computer with a printer.

  The crew had found a badly deformed slug in the kitchen wall.

  Judging from the base and the weight, allowing for some loss of jacketing material, the techs thought it was probably a.44 Magnum.

  Definitely not a.357. The gun Lucas found the night of the killings had not been fired.

  "The girl was alive when her ear was cut off, and also some other parts of her face apparently were cut away while she was alive," a tech said, reading from a fax. "The autopsy's done, but there are a lot of tests still outstanding."

  The tech began droning through a list of other findings.

  Lucas listened, but every few seconds his mind would drift from the job to Weather. He'd always been attracted to smart women, but few of his affairs had gone anywhere. He had a daughter with a woman he'd never loved, though he'd liked her a lot. She was a reporter, and they'd been held together by a common addiction to pressure and movement.

  He'd loved another woman, or might have, who was consumed by her career as a cop. Weather fit the mold of the cop.

  She was serious, and tough, but seemed to have an intact sense of humor.

  Can't fuck this up with Weather, he thought, and again, Can't,fuck this thing up.

  Crane came in, blowing steam, stamping his feet, walked behind Lucas to a coffee um. "He used the water heater to start the fire," he said to the bac
k of Lucas' head.

  VTAat?"

  doom-_

  Lucas turned in his chair. Crane, still wrapped in his parka, was pouring himself a cup of coffee. "The hot water faucet was turned on over the laundry tub, and a lot of premix was splashed around the water heater.

  The heater's a mess, of course, but it looks like there might be traces of charred cotton coming out of the pilot port."

  "Say it in English," Lucas suggested.

  Crane grinned. "He splashed his premix around the house, P1 soaked a rag in it and laid it across the burner in the water heater. He had to be careful to keep it away from the pilot light. Then he turned on the hot water faucet, let the water dribble out. Not too fast. Then he left. In a few minutes, the water level drops in the tank, cold water refills it.

  .

  "And the burner lights up."

  "Boom," said Crane.

  "Why would he do that?"

  VE "Probably to make sure he could get out. We figure there were fifteen gallons of premix spread around the place. He might've been afraid to toss a match into it. But it does mean he must've thought about burning the place. That's not something that would occur to you while you were standing there... if it happened at all."

  "If it did happen, that means there'd be a delay between the time he left and the time the fire started, right?"

  "Right."

  "How much?"

  "Don't know," Crane said. "We don't know the condition of the water tank before he turned the water on-how hot the water already was. He didn't turn the faucet on very far, just a steady dribble. Could have been anything from four or five minutes to twenty minutes."

  More delay, Lucas thought. More time between the killings and the moment the Jeep passed the fire station. There was no hope for a minor error anymore, a time mixup. The priest could not have been at the LaCourts'.

  through the surviving files..." Crane was talking about the search for the missing photograph.

  "It wouldn't be in a file," Lucas said abruptly. "They would have stuffed it someplace where they could get at Nod it-someplace both casual and safe. Where if somebody needed to see it, they could just pick it up and say, 'Here it is."

  " "Okay. But where?" Crane asked.

  "Cookie jar-like that."

  "We've looked through most of the stuff in the kitchen and their bedroom, the stuff that survived. We haven't found anything like it."' "Okay."

  "We'll take it apart inch-by-inch," Crane said. "But it's gonna take time."

  Lucas made two phone calls and took one. The first call went to a nun in the Twin Cities, an old friend, a college psychology professor.

  Elle Kruger: Sister Mary Joseph.

  "Elle, this is Lucas. How're things?"

  "Fine," she said promptly. '61 got Winston's preproduction beta-copy of the new Grove of Trees. I ran it with Sister Louisa over the weekend, and we froze it up right away, some kind of stack-overflow error."

  "Dammit, they said they fixed that." Grove of Trees was an intricate simulation of the battle of Gettysburg that he'd been working on for.

  years. Elle Kruger was a games freak.

  "Well, we were on Sister Louisa's Radio Shack compatible," she said.

  "There's something goofy about that machine, because I ran the same disk on my Compaq and it worked fine."

  "All right, I'll talk to them. We ought to be compatible with everything, though," Lucas said. "Listen, I've got another problem and it involves the Church. I don't know if you can help me, but there are people being killed."....... 21

  "There always are, aren't there?" she said. "Where are you? And how does it involve the Church?"

  He sketched the problem out quickly: the priest, the _-7-:7-@ missing time, the question about the man at the end of the road.

  "Lucas, you should go through the archdiocese of Milwaukee," Elle said.

  "Elle, I don't have time to fool around with Church bureaucracy, and you know what they're like when there's a possible scandal involved.

  It's like trying to get information out of a Swiss bank. This guy-priest-Bergen is about our age, and I bet you know people who know him.

  All I'm asking is that you make a couple of calls, see if you can find some friends of his. I understand he went to Marquette. Get a reading. Nothing formal, no big deal."

  "Lucas, this could hurt me. With the Church. I have relationships."

  "Elle..." Lucas pressed.

  "Let me pray over it."

  "Do that. Try to get back to me tonight. Elle, there are people being killed, including at least one junior high boy and maybe two.

  Children abused. There are homosexual photos published in underground magazines."

  "I get it," she snapped. "Leave me to pray. Just leave me.

  A deputy came in as Lucas hung up. "Shelly was on the radio. He's on the way out, and he wants you to wait."

  Okay.

  The second call went to the Minneapolis police department , to a burglary specialist named Carl Snyder.

  "If you were a woman casually hiding something in your house for a couple of days, a dirty picture, where drop-in neighbors wouldn't see it, but where you could get at it quickly, where'd you put it?"

  "Mmin... got a pencil?" Snyder asked. Snyder knew so much about burglary that Lucas suspected that he might have done some field research. There had been a series of extremely elegant coin and jewel thefts in the Cities, stretching back twelve years. Nothing had ever been recovered.

  "Don't talk to me," Lucas said. "Theresa guy named Crane here, from the Wisconsin state crime labs. I'll put him on."

  Crane talked to Snyder, saying Yeah a lot, his head nodding , and after hanging up, pulled on his parka and said, "Wanna come?"

  "Might as well. Where're we going to look?" Lucas asked.

  "Around the refrigerator. Then under boxes in the cupboard. Of course, there's not much left there."

  The yard outside the house had been flattened by ice and the army of people working around it. They tramped across the frozen ground, pushed past a heavy canvas sheet, and went inside. Banks of tripod-mounted lights lit most of the interior; two refrigerator-sized electric heaters kept it vaguely warm. Most of the loose wreckage had been cleared away from the floors. Through the open door to the mudroom, Lucas could see a white chalk circle around the hole where they'd found the.44 slug.

  "All right: around the refrigerator, on the kitchen counter ," Crane muttered.

  Wearing plastic gloves, he began sifting carefully through the wreckage on the kitchen counter top. The counter top had been yellowed by heat except where it had been covered. A bowl, a peanut butter jar, salt and pepper shakers left their bottom-shapes stenciled in white.

  "No paper... how about the refrigerator?"

  Crane found the remains of the photograph behind the magnetic message slate on the door of the refrigerator. He pried the message slate away from the door, was about to put it back and then said, "Whoa..."

  "What is it?" Lucas felt a thump in his stomach.

  Crane carried it to the window, held it to the light. A square of folded newsprint was stuck to the back of the slate, half of it charred black and imbedded in melted plastic. The other half was brown.

  "I don't know; maybe we ought to send it down to Madison, have them separate it," Crane said. But as he said it, he slipped a finger under one edge of the newsprint and lifted. It broke at the burn line, and the browned part came free. Crane turned it over in his hand.

  "It's kind of fucked up," he said. He looked at the paper melted into the plastic. "We might be able to recover part of that."

  The browned portion of the paper was the left side of a photo, showing the back and buttocks of a nude man.

  The remaining caption under the photo said: LOOK ATTHIS BIG BOY.

  DINNER.

  Beneath the photo and caption was a series of jokes: Guy walks into a bar, he's got a head the size of a baseball, says, "Gimme a beer." The bartender shoves a glass ofBud across the bar and says, "Lis
ten, pal, it's of my business, but a big guy like you-how'd you none get a little teeny head like that? " The guy says, "Well, I was down in Jamaica, walking on the beach, when I see this bottle. I pull the top off, and holy shit, a genie pops out. I mean, she was gorgeous. She had a body that wouldn't quit, great ass, tits the size of watermelons. And she says I can have a wish. So I said, 'Well look, you know, what I'd wish for, is to make love to you." And the genie says, 'Sorry, that's one thing I'm not allowed to do." So then I say, 'Okay, how about a little head?"' 7--"Who does this kind of shit?" Lucas asked. He held the paper on the flat of his open hands, peering at the type. There was no indication of where it might have come from.