Winter Prey

by John Sandford

  "I'll be gone for the day and I wanted to talk to you," she said. "I found a couple of Phil Bergen's friends. I didn't want to put it on an answering machine."

  "What'd they say?"

  "They say he was awkward around women but that he was certainly oriented toward them. He was not interested in men.

  "For sure?" Lucas thought, Shit.

  "Yes. One of them laughed when I asked the question.

  Bergen's not a complete 'phobe, but he has a distaste for homosexuals and homosexuality. That attitude wasn't a cover for a secret interest, if you were about to ask me that."

  Lucas chewed on his lower lip, then said, "Okay. I appreciate your help."

  "Lucas, these are people who would know," Elle said.

  "One was Bergen's college confessor. He wouldn't have talked to me if homosexuality had ever been broached in confession , so it must not have been. And it would have been."

  "All right," Lucas said. "Dammit. That makes things harder."

  "Sorry," she said. "Will you be down next week?"

  "If I get done up here."

  "We'll see you then. We'll get a game. By the way, something serious was happening at the sheriff's office.

  Nobody had any time to speak to me, something about a lost kid..

  "Oh, my God," Lucas said. "Elle, I'll talk to you later." He hung up, started to punch in the number for the sheriff's office, saw the blinking light on the answering machine and poked it.

  Carr's voice rasped out of the speaker: "Davenport, where'n the heck are you? We found the Mueller kid.

  He's dead and it wasn't an accident. I'm going to send somebody over to wake you up."

  Just before the phone hung up, Carr called to someone in the background, "Get Gene over to Weather Karkinnen's house."

  There was a motor sound outside. Lucas used two fingers to separate the curtain over the kitchen sink and looked out.

  A sheriff's truck was pulling into the driveway. Lucas hurried to Weather's bedroom. The door was unlocked, and he opened it and stuck his head inside. She was curled under a down comforter, and looked small and innocent.

  "Weather, wake up," he said.

  "Huh?" She rolled, half-asleep, and looked up at him.

  "They found the Mueller kid and he's dead," Lucas said.

  "I'm going."

  She sat up, instantly awake, and threw off the bedcovers.

  She was wearing a long-sleeved white flannel nightgown.

  "I'm coming with you."

  "You've got an operation."

  "I'll be okay, a few hours is fine."

  "You really don't..

  "I'm the county coroner, Lucas," she said, "I've got to go anyway."

  Her hair stuck out from her head in a corona and her face was still morningslack. She had a red pillow-wrinkle on one cheek. Her cotton nightgown hid all of her figure except her hips, which shaped and moved the soft fabric. She started toward the bath that opened off her bedroom, felt him watching her, said, "What?"

  "You look terrific."

  "Jesus, I'm a wreck," she said. She stepped back to him, stood on her tiptoes for a kiss, and Climpt began banging on the door.

  "That's Gene," Lucas said, stepping back toward the hall.

  "Five minutes."

  "Fen," she said. "I mean, it won't make any difference to John Mueller."

  She said it off handedly, a surgeon and a coroner who dealt in death.

  But Lucas was stricken. She saw it in his face, a quick tightening, and said, "Oh, God, Lucas, I didn't mean it."

  "You're right, though," he said, his voice gone hard.

  "Ten minutes. It won't make any difference to the kid."

  Lucas let Climpt in, and while the deputy looked at the damage from the night's shooting, went back to the bathroom for a quick cleanup.

  When he came back out, Weather was coming down the hall, dressed in insulated jeans and a wool shirt, carrying the bag she'd had at the LaCourts'. "Ready?"

  "Yeah.

  "You were lucky last night," Climpt said. He was standing in the living room, smoking a cigarette, lookingg at the damage from the firefight.

  "I don't think there was anything lucky about it," Weather said.

  "Look what he did."

  "If 'd been me out there, you'd a been dead. He should of waited until you were right at the door."

  "I'll tell him when I see him," Lucas said.

  John Mueller's body had been dumped in an abandoned sandpit off a blacktopped government road in the Chequamegon National Forest, fifteen miles from his home. A half-dozen sheriff 's vehicles werejammed into the turnoff, and the snow had been beaten down by people walking into the pit.

  "Shelly's freaked out," Climpt said, talking past a new cigarette.

  "Something happened at Mass today."

  "They found Bergen?"

  "Yeah, I guess. He was there."

  They could see the sheriff standing alone, like a fat dark scarecrow, just inside the sandpit. "This is his worst nightmare ," Weather said.

  Climpt nodded. "All he wanted was a nice easy cruise up to retirement, taking care of people. Which he's pretty good at."

  They parked and started up toward a cluster of cops at the edge of the sandpit. A civilian in an orange parka stood off to the side, next to a snowmobile, talking to another deputy. Carr saw them coming and walked down the freshly trampled path to meet them.

  "How are you?" Carr asked Weather. "Get any sleep?"

  "Very little," Weather said. "Is the kid..."

  "Right there. We haven't called his folks yet." Carr looked at Lucas.

  "How long will it take to catch this guy?"

  "That's not a reasonable question," Weather snapped.

  But Lucas looked up the rise to the cluster of cops around the body.

  "Three or four days," he said after a few seconds.

  "He's out of control. Unless we're missing some big connection on this kid, there wasn't any reason to kill him. He took a hell of a risk for no gain."

  "Will he kill more people?" Carr asked. His voice was a compound of anger, tension, and sorrow, as though he'd worked out the answer.

  "He could." Lucas nodded, looking straight into Carr's dry, exhausted eyes. "Yeah, I'd say he could. You better find the Schoeneckers. If they're involved, and they're someplace where he could get at them.

  .

  ."

  "We got bulletins out all over the south, from Florida to Arizona.

  We're interviewing their friends."

  Weather was moving on toward the body, and Lucas trailed after her.

  Carr hooked his elbow. "You gotta figure a way to make something happen, Lucas."

  "I know," Lucas said.

  John Mueller's body had been found by the snowmobiler in the orange parka.

  He'd seen two coyotes working over the spot and assumed they'd killed a deer.

  He'd stopped to see if it was a buck and still had antlers. He chased off the dogs, saw the boy's coat, and called the sheriff's department.

  The first deputy at the scene had shot a coyote and covered the boy with a plastic tarp.

  "Bad," Weather said when she lifted the tarp. Around them, the talking stopped as everybody looked at them crouched over the body. "Is that him?"

  Lucas studied the child's half-eaten face, then nodded.

  "Yeah, that's him. I'm almost sure. Jesus Christ."

  He walked away, unable to handle it. He hadn't had that problem since his third week on patrol: cops looked at dead people, end of story.

  "You all right?" Climpt asked.

  "Got on top of me," Lucas said.

  He was halfway back to the cars when he saw Crane, the crime-scene tech from Madison, walking up the path.

  "Anything for me?" Crane asked.

  "I doubt it. The scene's pretty cut up and coyotes have ;MtUt 4WOO, been at the body. It'll take an ME to figure out how he..........

  was killed."

  "I've got a metal detector, I'll check the
site for shells.

  Listen, I got some news for you this morning. I tried to call and was told you were on the way out here. Remember that burnt-up page from the porno magazine that we sent down to Madison? The one with the picture you want?"

  "Yeah?"' "We shipped it to all the major departments in Wisconsin, "EM.Pa A00.51, L;@ Illinois, and Minnesota, and we actually got a callback. A y named..." Crane patted his pockets, pulled off a glove, u dipped into one, and came up with a slender reporter's notebook. a guy named Curt Domeier with the Milwaukee PD. He says he might know the publisher. He says give him a call."

  Lucas took the notebook page: something to do. He walked down to the truck, called the dispatcher, and was patched through to Milwaukee.

  Domeier worked with the sex unit. He wasn't in his office, but picked up a phone on a page. Lucas introduced himself and said, 'The Madison guys Say you might know who put out the paper."

  "Yeah. I haven't seen this particular one, but he uses those little dingbats-that's what they call them, dingbats-at the ends of the stories. They look like playing-card-suits. Hearts, diamonds, spades, and clubs. I've never seen that anywhere else, but I've seen it with this guy." Domeier's voice was rusty but casual, the kind of cop who chewed gum while he drank coffee.

  "Can we get our hands on him?" Lucas asked.

  "No problem. He works out of his apartment, up on the north side off 1-43. He's a crippled guy, does Macintosh services."

  "Macintosh? Like the computer?"

  "Exactly. He does magazine stuff, cheap," Domeier said.

  "Makeup, layout, that stuff."

  "We got four dead up here," Lucas said.

  "I been reading about it. I thought it was three."

  "There'll be another in the paper tomorrow morning, a little kid."

  "No shit?" Polite interest.

  "We think the killer might have hit the family because of the picture on that page," Lucas said.

  "I can talk to this guy right now or you could come down and we could both go see him," Domeier said. "Whatever you want."

  "Why don't I come down?"

  "Tomorrow?"

  "How about this afternoon or tonight?" Lucas said.

  "I'd have to talk to somebody here about overtime, but if your chief called down... I could use the bucks."

  "I'll get him to call. Where'll we meet?" Lucas asked.

  "There's a doughnut place, right off the interstate."

  Carr was unhappy about the trip: "We need pressure up here. I could send somebody else."

  "I want to talk to this guy," Lucas said. "Think about it: he may have seen our man. He may know him."

  "All right. But hurry, okay?"' Carr said anxiously. "Have you heard about Phil?"

  "Bergen? What?"

  "He showed up for Mass. We'd been looking for him, couldn't find him, then he drove up a half hour before Mass, wouldn't talk to us. After his regular sermon at Mass this morning, he said he needed to talk to us as friends and neighbors. And he just let it out: he said he knew about the talk in town. He said he had nothing to do with the LaCourts or John Mueller, but that the suspicion was killing him. He said that he'd gotten drunk the night we found him, and said last night he'd gone to Hayward and started drinking again. Said he got right to the edge, right to the place where he couldn't get back, and he stopped.

  Said he talked to Jesus and stopped drinking. He asked us to pray for him."

  "And you believe him?" Lucas asked.

  "Absolutely. But you'd have to have been there to understand it.

  The man spoke to Jesus Christ, and while he was talking to us, the Holy Spirit was there in the church. You could feel it-it was like a...

  warmth. When Phil was walking away from the altar after the Mass, he broke down and began to cry, and you could feel the Spirit descending."

  Carr's eyes were glazing as he relived it. Lucas stepped away, spooked.

  "I got a call from my nun friend," Lucas said. Carr.

  wrenched himself back to the present. "She checked out R some Church sources. They say Bergen's straight. Never had any sexual interest in men. That's not a hundred percent, of course."

  Carr said, "Which leaves us the question of Bob Dell."

  "We've got to talk to Bergen again. You can do it today or wait until I get back."

  "We'll have to wait," Carr said. "After this morning, Phil's way beyond me."

  "I'll try to get back tonight," Lucas said. "But I might not. If I don't, could you put somebody with Weather?"

  "Yeah. I'll have Gene go on over," Carr said.

  Weather declared John Mueller dead under suspiM.

  , clous circumstances and ordered the body shipped to IM, a forensic pathologist in Milwaukee. Lucas told her he was leaving, explained, and said he would try to get back.

  "That's a twelve-hour round trip," she said. "Take it easy.

  "Gene'll take me into town. Could you catch a ride with Shelly?"

  "Sure." They were standing next to Climpt's truck, a few feet from Climpt and Carr. When he turned to get in, she caught him and kissed him. "But hurry back."

  On the way back, Climpt said, "You ever thought about having kids?"

  "I've got one. A daughter," Lucas said. And then remembered Weather's story about Climpt's daughter.

  Climpt nodded, said, "Lucky man. I had a daughter, but she was killed in an accident."

  "Weather told me about it," Lucas said.

  Climpt glanced at him and grinned. He could have made a Marlboro commercial, Lucas thought. "Everybody feels sorry for me. Sort of wears on you after a while, thirty years," Climpt said.

  "Yeah.

  "Anyway, what I was gonna say... I'm thinking I might kill this asshole for what he did to that LaCourt girl and now the Mueller kid.

  If we get him, and we get him in a place where we can do it, just sort of turn your head." His voice was mild, careful.

  "I don't know," Lucas said, looking out the window.

  "You don't have to do it-just don't stop me," Climpt said.

  "Won't bring your daughter back, Gene."

  "I know that," Climpt rasped. "Jesus Christ, Davenport."

  "Sorry.

  After a long silence, listening to the snow tires rumble over the rough roadway, Climpt said, "I just can't deal with people that kill kids.

  Can't even read about it in the newspaper or listen to it on TV.

  Killing a kid is the worst thing you can do. The absolute fuckin' worst."

  The drive to Milwaukee was long and complicated, a web of country roads and two-lane highways into Green Bay, and then the quick trip south along the lake on 1-43. Domeier had given him a sequence of exits, and he got the right off-ramp the first time. The doughnut place was halfway down a flat-roofed shopping center that appeared to be in permanent recession. Lucas parked and walked inside.

  The Milwaukee cop was a squat, red-faced man wearing a long wool coat and a longshoreman's watch cap. He sat at the counter, dunking a doughnut in a cup of coffee, charming an equally squat waitress who talked with a grin past a lipstick-smeared cigarette. When Lucas walked in she snatched the cigarette from her mouth and dropped her hand below counter level. Domeier looked over his shoulder, squinted, and said, "You gotta be DavenporC , "Yeah. You're telepathic?"

  A "You look like you been colder'n a well-digger's ass," Domeier said.

  "And I hear it's been colder'n a well-digger's, ass up there."

  "Got that right," Lucas said. They shook hands and Lucas scanned the menu above the counter. "Gimme two vanilla, one with coconut and one with peanuts, and a large coffee black," he said, dropping onto a stool next to Domeier.

  The coffee shop made him feel like a metropolitan cop again.

  The waitress went off to get the coffee, the cigarette back in her mouth. "It's not so cold down here?" Lucas asked Domeier, picking up the conversation.

  "Oh, it's cold, six or eight below, but nothing like what YOU got," Domeier said.

  They talked while Lucas ate the d
oughnuts, feeling each other out.